 Any opposed? That two passes unanimously with council member Brown absent. At this time, we'll go ahead and adjourn to our courtyard conference room where the council will go into our closed session. Two minutes. What's that? That took two minutes. Two minutes. Oh, nice. Yeah, I'm fast. Saving money on the TV. The 19 meeting of the Santa Cruz City Council. I'd like to ask our clerk to please call the roll. Thank you, Mayor. Council member is Cron. Here. Lever. Here. Myers. Here. Brown. Here. Matthews is absent. Vice Mayor Cummings. Here. And Mayor Watkins. Here. And if our clerk could please lead us through the Pledge of Allegiance. So now is the opportunity for us to have some introductions of new city employees. And so I'd like to invite up Laura Schmidt from IT to introduce her new employee. Thank you, Mayor and Council. Laura Schmidt with information technology. I am very pleased to introduce Daniel Wilson. He is our new IT programmer analyst one. He comes to us with quite a diverse background from pastry chef to photographer to network security database management and now application programming. He's a graduate graduate of CSUMB and he was actually there when Josh Smith Smith our other programmer analyst was at school at CSUMB and they saw each other and they're like, oh, I know you. So they were in the same major program over at CSUMB. Daniel came to our area over 20 years ago and he takes full advantage of Santa Cruz's gifts from the beaches to the mountains. He explores arts, music, hiking and cooking from locally sourced ingredients. He enjoys sharing quality time and his handcrafted foods with his friends, wife and two sons. He has a passion for helping improve our community and knows he can make an impact here through his city work. Please welcome Daniel. Welcome Daniel. And then we have our next is Janice is going to introduce our new library employee. Good afternoon. My name is Janice O'Driscoll. A particular pleasure for me to introduce Susan Nielsen to you because she's actually coming home by taking up new duties at Santa Cruz Public Library. She started with us before she got her library degree in 1997. And then while she was working for us, she got her degree and moved to the Watsonville Public Library where she built a very successful children's services program. We were able to lure her back with an opportunity in adult services. Susan is going to take on a myriad number of duties. She's going to work in outreach with people experiencing homelessness and one of the things she's going to be involved in there. We are consolidating our work. We have office space for social workers. We have many staff who can do smart path assessments. And we're going to put them all in one place at the downtown branch and give office space and make meeting room space. And Susan's going to be involved with that. She's also going to be working with county corrections offices at Roundtree. We have a program, a humanities program there where incarcerated people have discussion groups around literature. It's called People and Stories. Susan is going to start participating in that. And if that's not enough, she is in the ground level of developing a program which will combine Latinx artists, Felicia Rice from Moving Parts Press, Cal Humanities probably, and storytellers to create a brand new program that you'll see in 2020. So please join me in welcoming Susan Nielsen back home. Welcome back. Thank you for coming back, Susan. Welcome back. Okay. So I'll now invite up our Chief Andy Mills to introduce his new employee. Well, good afternoon, Mayor and Council Members. I am pleased to introduce these two ladies who are, have been now become full-time employees of the Ranger program. And first is Agnes Zimmerman. And a little bit about her. She started actually with us in 2018, but then became a full-time just recently. Her career began in Park and Rex as a youth trail crew supervisor. A couple of fun facts. She was born in Germany. Do you speak German? How do you say yes in German? Yeah. Okay. And then moved to Oregon at the age of two. She now holds a dual citizenship in both Germany and the United States. Graduated from Oregon State with the BS in Recreational Resource Management with an option in law enforcement. And her free time, she volunteers at the Pinnacle National Park as a preventative search and rescue ranger and likes to hike, climb, and surf. I'll bet she can just scale those walls easily. And next is Kelly Gates. Kelly started in November 2018. And then we just recently made her a full-time employee as well. She was born in Bonnie Dune and raised in Santa Cruz County County. She started her career in public safety in 2012 as an EMT with hope that someday becoming a police officer. And she's obviously well in her way. Should she so choose to do that? She also worked as a fire inspector for Cal Fire and as an EMT at the SAP Sports Arena meeting various musicians and athletes. So what can you tell us about Elton John? Awesome. Okay. Her husband, Sean, is also a senior ranger with the police department. And so they get to work together a lot. And frequently you'll see them walking downtown dealing with many of the issues they have. They have two children, three goats, four cats, two bearded dragons, a Labrador retriever, and a recently adopted spoiled mini pig who is now the comfort pig to the police department. And yes, we get this symbolism there. So anyway, thank you so much. Thank you so much. Welcome to you both. Welcome. And last, we have Parks and Rec Director Tony Elliott. Is it Tony Elliott who will be introducing his new employee? It says Ted Elliott. Ted? Tony. Tony. There he is. It says Ted, but I know it's Tony. But we have a new person coming from Parks and Rec to be introduced. Yes? Don't blame them. Oh, okay. No problem. No problem. Okay, we'll hopefully meet him next time then. All right, there we go. Well, we'll go ahead and wrap it up on that one then. So at this point, we have a few presentations. The first is Ted Donnelly, and he will be receiving his 30-year service pen. And we have Mark Deddle coming up. Good afternoon, Mayor and Council. It's my pleasure. This is one of the great events that I get to do is recognize employees that have a significant amount of service. And I'd like to recognize Ted and Donnelly for 30 years of service. Ted grew up in West Covina. He started with the city of Santa Cruz as an enforcement officer in May 8th, 1989. He was promoted to parking service supervisor in the enforcement division on April 26th in 99. And during that time, he spent two years overseeing the attendant parking program. He stepped up to work out of class when called on to fill in for the superintendent. And during Ted's career, he's enforced on foot by bicycle and in a scooter. He rides his own scooter to work or bites to work every day. And it's very unusual for you. This is an unusual event. He's wearing pants. Usually he wears shorts if you see Ted around. Fancy socks? Yes, he's got his fancy socks on. We're good. Outside of work, Ted is a devoted father. He absolutely adores his daughters. He's very active in their lives. In fact, he was just telling me one of his daughters just got a job as a teacher down south and he's very excited about that. He was a soccer dad and often chaperoned on field trips and even took his daughters to Justin Bieber concerts. He's a member of the Soquel Elementary School Board for several years and hope to provide the best education opportunities for his family and nearby. Ted also loves music. The Beatles are his favorite band. Although he's a poor singer, I'm told he has killer dance moves. And I don't know if he's going to break out into a dance, but including the lawn mower and the sprinkler. So if you want to see that afterwards, I'm sure he'll give a show. Ted is a snappy dance dresser, as you can see. He loves multi-colored socks. His shorts with typical uniform. And I can always count on Ted representing the Public Works Department very well at the annual City holiday events. Whether it's wardrobe contests, ugly sweater, Hawaiian shirt, best holiday spirit. Ted's in there. Ted is very active and he spent many years as a marathon runner. He ran the wharf to wharf numerous times. He serves paddle boards and does yoga. But he always cares about his staff and that's the main thing I want to recognize him for. He's worried about their safety and that they provide in an opportune way. He takes care of them. He gets their resources. It's a difficult job. Parking enforcement, not always easy, but he's there behind him. And I want to recognize him for that. So I'm very pleased to present Ted his 30-year service pin. And please join me in congratulating Ted on this great honor. Glorious afternoon, Council Members and Mayor Watkins. Thanks for letting me be here to say, yeah, 30 years really goes by fast. You know, I remember the first day of my job 30 years ago. In fact, you know, I was thinking the whole Cheech and Chong thing. You know, I woke up, I got out of bed and I, well actually that's Beatles, but I actually had hair, the comb too, you know, back then. But I do remember, boy, I remember my initial interview was driving up Highway 9 to this magical, enchanted land called the Corp Yard. I walked into this maze and it was a maze at the time before it was remodeled. And I go in this room and in there was Marlon Grandlin who had retired last year. And you remember how he dressed? He had a red leather jacket on, Mary Carleton who became Mary Moss, and Sam Gob, who some of you may remember. And it was a great conversation and they actually hired me 30 years ago. 30 years, like I said, does go very, very fast. And I thinking back on it and then Mark has really summed a lot up for me and what I've done and been able to do. But what I am so grateful for, oh yeah, my crew too. They're an awesome crew here. And is that I had a career for 30 years that I could watch my children grow. I was totally always there to embarrass them, coaching, volunteering. And that is something I am so grateful that I've been able to do. I had a dad that worked a lot and he tried to participate in my programs. But on the other hand, you know, it was just, it's great. And yes, I do have, my daughters are older now. They've been around here as babies. Like Mark said, my oldest one is going to be teaching down in El Segundo and living in Redondo. I'll be taking time off to go down there. My second one is decided to take a gap year from school and she's in Australia for a year, so I had to go visit her. And that was a lot of fun to go there. And I'd like to acknowledge my wife, Lisa, back there texting right now. And she, yeah. But it's been, it's been a great, it's been a great ride. And I always have to say something up here. I said this five years ago. There's, I have great memories of being here. And then there's been sad ones with the two officers, Butch Baker and Elizabeth Butler when they went down. Now Butch and I, one winner, when he was working downtown Santa Cruz, we had a bet who could wear the shorts the longest, all through winter. And it was a cold winter and he'd walk his beaten shorts and I did my beaten shorts. I won. And then there was the earthquake when I first started to and going to work and being part of the whole emergency team. And it was just, it was just, it was an experience. I can't say it was a great experience, but it was experienced. I could ramble on it for about 30 years. That's a whole other thing. I'm not going to take your time because I know you have a big agenda. But thanks for having me. Right. Well, thank you so much, Ted. And congratulations for your 30 years. And thank you for serving our city for that long. And it's heartening to hear you found that life work balance along the way. So congratulations. So at this point, we'll move on to our next presentation. And we have our executive director, Yonica Strauss from Bikes Santa Cruz County. And I think I said your name correctly this year. Yes, you did. Ready. And this little clicker. Oh, it's not up yet. All right. Well, good afternoon, Mayor Watkins and council members. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to present about open street Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz last year, which occurred on Sunday, October 14, 2018. So bike Santa Cruz County has been organizing open streets events since 2016. And since then we've organized three events in Santa Cruz and two events in Watsonville with one more event in Watsonville happening this Sunday, June 2. Here with me today is Eric Guerri. He is our events and membership coordinator. And he was the one who organized last year's events. So today I'm here to report back on our successes and to answer any questions that you might have. So the question is what is open streets for those of you who have not attended. Open streets events temporarily transform roadways into open spaces for people to walk, bike, skate and play in a safe and festive environment. Automobile traffic is temporarily diverted in cooperation with local law enforcement and affected residents and businesses. Open streets events began in Bogota, Colombia, where still to this day from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. every single Sunday, 76 miles of streets are closed to traffic. For the SICLIVIA, a program the Bogota, Colombia government has run since 1974. Some 1.7 million people or 25% of the city's population turns out for this event. And surveys has found that nearly half of the event attendees stay for three hours or more. The SICLIVIA is the largest, most frequent mass recreation event in the world. And this event is what inspired the Open Streets Santa Cruz County events. So why do cities want Open Streets in their communities? Open Streets events are about reclaiming public space. Cities are typically designed and engineered to move cars, as shown in the photo on the left. In 1999, the Dutch government created a new community space near the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam by replacing four lanes of traffic with a park called Museum Plain. This free and non-commercial event, Open Streets, temporarily returns public space to the people. Replacing vehicle traffic with people improves community health, mobility and livability while reducing CO2 emissions and traffic. Providing a safe place without cars encourages people of all ages to practice new skills and connect with the natural environment. Open Streets events partner with local agencies and community organizations who provide information booths with resources for leading sustainable, active and healthy lives. The mission of Open Streets events is to foster individual and community health through creative use of public space. The purpose of Open Streets events is to promote physical activity and health, promote a culture of bicycling and walking, and increase safety and access to the roadway for users of all ages, abilities and modes. Open Streets also gives youth unique experiences that include volunteer service learning opportunities, access to social services and nonprofit resources, and connection to new activities that spark learning. Thanks to Ecology Action's Bike Smart Bike Rodeo, they provided a bike rodeo, as you can see in this picture, for children to practice safe riding skills. And at the Open Streets Santa Cruz event in 2018, they served 153 kids. Metro brought one of their new buses where they led tours, led kids sit in the driver's seat, help people practice loading and unloading their bicycles on the bike racks, and Metro is able to reach 200 people at this event. Other bike organizations include Project Bike Trip, which is like high school auto shop for bikes with the goal of preparing students for bike industry jobs. Bike Santa Cruz County's youth programs, including Erna Bike and Bike Club, were there also providing activities such as this bike blender. And those two programs receive Santa Cruz Measure D funding. So a little bit of the data. Crowd counting at events such as this, which is free, and attendees can enter at multiple places along the route. It can be pretty difficult, but we were able to use aerial photos to estimate more than 10,000 people attended this event. 38 organizations, local businesses, and musicians participated showcasing Santa Cruz County's cultural and environmental vitality, including Santa Cruz Sanderos Expedition Academy of Santa Cruz and World Dance. Throughout the day, 35 volunteers helped make the event possible, totaling $1,500 of in-kind labor. Through an in-person survey at the event and a post-event survey sent via email, we received more than 150 responses. While the number of responses we received is below our 500 response target, our data from the 2017 event was very similar. And this year we're putting in some new systems that will hopefully increase that number, including doing an iPad survey and paper surveys. So this survey data concluded that 54% of attendees traveled to the event by alternative transportation, like bike, foot, or bus. 51% said their favorite part was having a safe place to walk, bike, wheelchair, etc. in the street. 61% traveled less than three miles to the event. And 99% spent more than an hour at the event. Lastly, 32% reported open streets has led to long-term changes in their cycling and walking habits. And while there are many contributing factors to this data, we can conclude that Open Street Santa Cruz got residents living within three miles of West Cliff outside and exercising for more than an hour, thereby contributing to long-term behavior change in their transportation habits. The feedback we receive about Open Streets Santa Cruz events is overwhelmingly positive, and over and over again we hear residents asking us to do more events more often. One resident said of Open Streets, the best event in Santa Cruz, no other event brings our community together like Open Streets. This is exactly the type of thing that brings our town together, and I believe has many positive side effects as well. Santa Cruz has been slowly losing the cohesiveness over the last 20 years and events like this really helps bring Santa Cruz back to its glory, bringing out all of its positives in a glowing, organic way. With the city's contribution of $15,000 to this event, a quick calculation that's $1.50 per attendee. So I'd like to conclude by thanking our volunteers who make it all happen. This takes a lot of manpower, and I'd also like to thank you, Mayor Watkins and the council, for supporting this event and continuing to see the value and we hope to continue to work with you to bring this event to Santa Cruz. Thank you. Thank you. We'll take any questions if you have any. Any questions from council members at this time? Thank you for the history too about Bogota, and I think it's a wonderful event. I think the $15,000 question is, why does it cost so much? Could you say a little bit more about the expenses? Yeah, so we have about $10,000 that goes just to materials, and that includes renting the barricades and having someone put up all the no parking signs, portable toilets, which is part of the permit. We have to rent equipment like canopies and tables and things like that. We rent radios, which is a way for our staff to be in communication. We have to, part of the permit is also the resident notification process. So we send out a letter to all of the residents 30 days in advance, and then we post door hangers 72 hours in advance. So all of the materials that that requires. I could go on and on specifically about materials. And then we have about $15,000 in staffing costs. And so that's not just the day of the event, but that's the coordination leading up to the event. And that includes Eric's staff time. That includes our graphic designer, our volunteer coordinator, some of my staff time. And we've actually been over the years when we inherited the event, the budget that we were given was $45,000. And so we were able to really reduce that significantly by use of our volunteers. Yeah. Thank you. And other things. Thanks. Thank you. All right. Other questions at Council Member Glover? Thanks. Could you just outline some of the other revenue sources that you're, like, who else is supporting it? What kind of sponsorships do you have? What have your sponsors been like? So we also receive money from the Regional Transportation Commission. And for this specific event, we'll be getting about $6,000 from them. It was a grant application that spanned two years for four events. So that'll be completing this year. In terms of sponsorships, we do have a sponsorship level model where organizations and businesses can set up a table and provide their outreach. We have a nonprofit level, a local business level, a larger business level. And we really work hard to make sure that it's accessible for all organizations. So we even have a free participation level where if they want to come and they can't pay the sponsorship, then they can provide volunteers at the barricade or if they have an activity. I was meeting more other sponsors for fiscal contributions. Like, I know you're coming to the city and then also from the RTC, but like, are there any, you know, like sometimes, say, a bank or something would sponsor? Do you have any sponsorships like that? Yeah, so the Santa Cruz County Office of Education has given money in the past. Kaiser Permanente has given money. I remember for this year. Those have not been secured yet for this year. At this point, the way that our events really event programs work out is that we have our main focus on open streets Watsonville and then we start planning the Open Street Santa Cruz event after that. So, like I said, our next event is this Sunday. So after that, we'll go out and secure those funds. Thank you. Okay, thank you so much for being here, presenting and for those who haven't been to Open Streets, it's a really wonderful experience. So thank you to your staff and the volunteers to make it happen. Okay. So at this time, we'll go ahead and move on to, oh, actually, a few presiding officer announcements that I have. So, and then we'll move on to our regular meeting. So today's meeting is being broadcast live on Community Television Channel 25 and is streaming on our city's website at cityofsanacruz.com. We have Lynn Dutton and he is our technician today for both this afternoon and evening sessions and I want to thank you, Lynn, for your work for being here with us today. All of us, all city council members can be emailed at citycouncil at cityofsanacruz.com. If you'd like to communicate with us about any agenda item, we'd like to receive your email by Monday at 5pm and that's before our council meeting. This provides us with an opportunity to review your email and to include it in the rest of our agenda packet. Please bear in mind that all items of correspondence with the city and city council do constitute public records and are generally subject to disclosure upon request by any member of the public. Accordingly, if you have sensitive or private information that you do not wish to be made public, you should not include that information in your correspondence. Our rules of decorum are on the window ledge to my left and it's my job as the mayor to keep our meeting running without disruption. And we ask that you respect your fellow citizens when you're inside and outside of our city council chambers. I'd like to ask if there are any council members who have statements of disqualification today. Council member Kern? The city attorney is checking on one for me concerning the mid pen project on Jesse Street. Okay, so we'll go ahead and maybe return to this item once we receive clarification from our city attorney. Council member Meyers. I might have one as well to attorney Kandadi. I'm on the board of directors for the Natural History Museum and I know that's specifically called out as a budget item for possible removal. So I'm not sure how I do that. We've analyzed that question specifically and determined that you do not have a disqualifying conflict of interest on that item. Thank you. Okay. So we're just pending clarity on one potential conflict for council member Kern. At this time we'll return with clarification. Okay. All right, I would like to ask our city clerk if there are any additions or deletions today. There are none. Okay. The brief announcement about oral communications. Oral communications is an opportunity for members of the community to speak to us on items that are not on the agenda. And oral communications will occur at or around 7pm this evening. I'll go ahead and ask our city attorney to please report out on our closed session. Good afternoon, Mayor Watkins, members of the City Council. This afternoon's closed session convened at 1.30pm in the courtyard conference room. Prior to the closed session, the following items of real property negotiations were referred to closed session. The addresses are as follows. 1520 K1 Pacific Avenue. That pertains to a lease agreement with Segurata, Imbaya doing business at Red Sea Eritrean Foods. 1520 K2 Pacific Avenue. Negotiations with Sunny Cavill doing business as opulence. There was also a conference with legal counsel with regard to liability claims, the claim of Craig Carlton Draman. That item is also on your consent calendar for council action this afternoon. It was one item of pending litigation, the matter of hatch pomerance versus city of Santa Cruz at all. There was a third real property negotiation item concerning the property owned by the city, commonly referred to as Sky Park in the city of Scotts Valley. Negotiating parties are the city and Scotts Valley Town Greenland LLC. Negotiations pertaining to the potential sale of that property. Lastly, there was a public employee performance evaluation of yours truly. There was no reportable action. Thank you, Tony. And we have a brief announcement from our city manager, but before we do, I was just going to give a quick shout out to my brother, Justin. Happy birthday. My older wiser brother. Some are up in Oakland, hopefully. Checking this out. Okay, thank you. I just wanted to take a brief moment to acknowledge, as everybody knows, our assistant city manager will be leaving us, Tina Schall. So I wanted her to come up just for a few minutes and just want to, again, take some time to acknowledge her work with the city. As you know, she's leaving us to become the city manager of Scotts Valley, so she won't be very far. I'm sure we'd be working with her. But it is a bittersweet, for me in particular, having Tina move on to great opportunity with an adjacent city to improve her career. She'll be a great city manager and Scotts Valley's very lucky to have her on the one hand. On the other hand, it will be a tremendous loss for the city. She's been a tremendous contributor to the city, has really led many of the city's major initiatives and efforts over the years. Really dedicated professional, made a lot of contributions internally to the community. Work with a lot of council members over the years and she'll be really missed. And again, just want to take the opportunity, just really thank you for all your dedication and commitment you've had to the city of Santa Cruz and to wish you luck. And also note that tomorrow is actually her goodbye, and that's when we're actually doing the roasting. So no roasting today, I guess. That's what I heard. But again, just wanted to thank her publicly and on behalf of myself, the department heads and the employees of the city for your tremendous work with our city. May I say a few words? Of course you may. So I am surprised to be standing here right now is dutifully in a meeting working on transition planning. So everything would be handed off really well when I leave. But I just want to say thank you so much, Martine. It's been a tremendous 14 years here. I can't believe it's been that long. And so standing here just a couple of days to go does have the surreal quality to it. But it's an amazing organization, the resilience of the employees, the professionalism. It's just unparalleled. It's such a strong organization and I'm so proud to come to work every day and be able to laugh and work on tough issues and work with the community. It's just been incredible. So I will miss the city so dearly. I'll be just a few miles up the road, which will be great. But thank you all so much, Mayor Watkins, council members as well. And thanks again. Thank you, Martine. Well, it's definitely bittersweet. I just too want to express our appreciation, Tina. It's been a real privilege to work alongside you for these past several years. I know you've been just held the utmost professionalism commitment and love of our city and have really shepherd our community and a lot of major projects over these years. So it doesn't go unnoticed. We wish you the absolute best in Scotts Valley. We know you'll thrive in that seat as the number one in charge. So good luck to you and we'll see you soon. You are just a couple of miles up, so you might be seeing us there. All right. Thank you, Martine. I'm glad you're able to make that happen. Okay. So now we'll just have a few minutes for us to provide our council an opportunity to report out on any external boards, some committees, joint powers authority meetings. And so if you have a few words in regards to some of the activities you've been up to over the past several months, we'll go ahead and hear those at this time. We will start to my left if that's appropriate. Okay, Council Member Brown. So I have a couple of reports. So first is the Area Agency on Aging Seniors Council has recently updated its senior survey. This is for seniors aged 60 and over. It's a pretty extensive survey which can be done online. Just mentioning it here to highlight that it is available and we're really interested in getting as many people to fill it out as possible. It doesn't take long, although it is extensive. We this year have added some questions related to challenges facing seniors around housing. And so I think that the results will give us a pretty, assuming we can get a good cross-section of participants some additional information about our housing needs in the community. So please look at that. You can go to the seniorscouncil.org and encourage people who are over 60 and over to fill out that needs assessment. So I'm also on the Regional Transportation Commission and at our last meeting we had a public hearing on unmet paratransit needs which I'll highlight here because I have some good news. Some of the unmet paratransit needs that we've kind of continued to see year after year were moved from high priority to medium priority status. And that was because some additional funding through Measure D and other sources made it possible for us to expand paratransit services, lift line, most notably. And so, and you'll see, I believe it's on our consent agenda for today. That's part of the city of Santa Cruz as well, a pass through agreement with community bridges for lift line services. And we also reviewed the Measure D's five-year projects. We also looked at, for those who are interested, initiating our 2045 Regional Transportation Plan. So watch that process. You can come to our next meeting to talk about the Measure D program projects funding and stay tuned for more on how we'll meet our transit needs into the next decades. And I have a quick announcement or a quick update on the library subcommittee that I serve on with council member Myers and vice mayor Cummings. We met, just the three of us had initial meeting to start to talk about work plan and calendaring so we can make sure that we have time for the substantial number of meetings that I think we'll need to have in order to get through our process. Not much to report, thus far we will be meeting, having our first meeting with support staff and library staff to flesh out that work plan. And so we'll have a more substantial update for you at the next time we do this. And then that, so our next, our first meeting will be May 30th with staff. And then we'll report out and give you all members of the public some additional information about how you can be in touch with us. And well, you know how you can be in touch with us via our council email and phone numbers, but other ways to participate in the process. Thanks. Thank you. Council member Matthews. Several of the committees that I serve on have items on the agenda today, so I'm not going to go into those. The Measure U implementation working group, which I think now has a new name called Task Force on University Growth, does have an item as part of the budget to develop a lobbying program that would work towards ensuring that the university limits growth and provides for mitigation of all impacts before any growth occurs. That's an ongoing process. The Metro is, the report has been good, also going into its budget adoption process. Finally, after several years, beginning to see some positive trends, we had the report recently on replacement of buses, looking for improving facilities, building some reserves, adding technology in contract negotiations. The main thing, of course, we're looking forward to now is some serious talks about the metro station downtown, among other things. Mid County Groundwater Agency is concerned with developing under state mandate a sustainability plan for the Mid County Aquifer. It's a combination of several entities, as well as private well owners. And there's a citizens advisory group that has been developing with a great deal of in-depth research, a sustainability plan that needs to be adopted by the end of this year. So we had a joint meeting with the citizens advisory group and the actual agency representatives. And that draft should be out for a serious outreach, public engagement review before final adoption in the fall. So more on that. And we'll certainly advise you with copies of that. I think that's the main things Chris can report on the Long Range Development Community Advisory Group, similar to the other. That's enough. All right. Thank you. Vice Mayor Cummings. Great. So the Homeless 2x2 Committee is actually going to be meeting this Thursday, so there's nothing to report on that. The Association of Monterey Bay Area Governments, the City of Santa Cruz was unable to have a representative attend to the fact that there was an overlap with our special city council meeting on May 8th, which was our budget hearings. On the local agency formation commission, we reviewed our budget for this year. And there was also two service sphere reviews for county service areas three, which is ATTAS and Seascape. And also for service sphere area 57, which is Woods Cove, both of those will be coming back because there was a request for more information. So those will be on the June 5th agenda. We adopted a resolution declaring the election results for the selection of Rachel Lather as special district commissioner on LAFCO. And there were numerous recognitions for commissioners whose seats were being vacated. That includes Lowell Hearst, two terms, City of Watsonville. Tom LeHue, who's a special district representative, served four years on LAFCO. Donna Lin for seven years of service, and there's recognition of Patrick McCormick for 39 years of service as the executive officer on LAFCO. And that's all I have to report. Great. Thank you very much. Okay, I'll just briefly go through and I'll say one announcement sort of update is the Health and All Policies Subcommittee will be having and is excited to bring a study session on June 4th. I believe that will start at 6.30 PM, and there will be a study session before the council and the community on that topic. The City Schools City Committee is interested in meeting on a more regular basis, looking at partnership and policy. Also looking at advisement around the children's fund and we'll be continuing to meet to sort of flesh that out. Our city select committee met and one of the topics that we discussed regionally was economic development. I'm really looking at some of the cities that don't have economic development coordinators or directors in their organization and how do we regionally have that conversation. So that was sort of the topic there. As Vice Mayor Cummings mentioned, we'll be having a two by two meeting later this week. And then just briefly, the Criminal Justice Council met and the topic of the presentation was really around the history of girls and gangs in our county. And it was a really fascinating presentation and part of what might be coming from the Criminal Justice Council is a presentation or some sort of summit around. Really trying to do earlier intervention for some of our vulnerable youth including some of the girls and their role in the gang kind of history and lifestyle. So that will be forthcoming and I'll announce any updates as it comes about. Okay, Council Member Myers. Let's see, I'm going to, just in the interest of time, I think Council Member Matthews covered the Metro. So I'll go ahead and we did have our first public safety committee last week. It was a closed session and we received the police auditor report and I know my fellow members might add on to that but that was our main topic in the closed session. And then I attended the Cal Working Group this month as well. Focus for that group is the water quality results coming from Heal the Bay which should be announced soon. And further looking at both the water quality data as well as additional actions that we can take to maintain quality water there at Cal Beach. Which is very popular during the summer of course. We've been working very closely with county environmental health on that and save the waves and working through the data to be ready to respond to the Heal the Bay report in terms of the progress that we've made. That's it. Thank you. Council Member Clever. Thank you. Yeah, so this was on May 21, 2019, we had our first meeting of the public safety committee. It was also to review the police department professional standards unit and investigations which included complaints. It was a good meeting. We identified the roles that will each play on the committee as well. So I am the chairperson for the committee. Council Member Crone is the vice chair and then also including Council Member Myers. Something wrong with my, it was good. Keep hearing it cut out. So yeah, since it was a closed session meeting, we're still compiling the report and should have something out to the public. Probably in the next week or so. Something that's noteworthy is that we are going to be meeting ideally more frequently than previous iterations of the public safety committee in general. Our next meeting is scheduled for June the 17th at 5.30pm and will be an open session for the community to participate and share their perspectives. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member Crone. Yeah, I mean that covers it for the public safety. I just, I do want to say that there was very, what I consider really good news on body cameras and that they seem to be having a very positive effect on collecting data. And that, I'm looking forward to further data collection and reviewing that or hearing about the reviews of that. The other committee I sit on is the community advisory group. And I would say it's a group of about 22 people. I share that with Council Member Matthews with two appointments on there and lots of other, some elected folks and other officials and neighborhood advocates. And the most positive comment I could say about the meeting that we just had last week was that the university did recommit to housing all 10,000 of its new students if it comes to that. I guess the bad news would be that city voters sent the university a no growth message in Measure U. And we sort of went round and round during the hour and a half meeting concerning what the university would commit to, which is very little. And we had asked them, as Council Member Matthews said before, that we need to mitigate all impacts before any growth occurs. And this is the sticking point, I think, between right now where we're at with university and community relationship, we gave our input on to a, we had one. It was a principles of the discussion. The university put theirs out, we put ours out, and we word smithed a lot. So the university's going to come back to us with another version to see if they accept any of our changes. And a lot of it had to do with the C word commit. Would you commit to not growing before the resources appear? And in fact, some resources have to appear before that anyway, just to mitigate some of the growth that we're experiencing as a result of the university. So our next meeting is June 17th, thank you. Great, great, great. Is there any updates from our city manager in terms of work outside of, or any of the commitments that you're involved in? The only agency that met the JPA was the 911 Center JPA where we adopted the budget for the coming fiscal year. The budget includes continuing existing level of services. It's increased largely because of the same reasons that most public agencies budgets increase to accommodate increased cost primarily for employee cost and capital improvements, that sort of thing. And in addition, discuss the project for replacing the records management system for the cities and the county. So all the cities and the county now are working on replacing a records management system, which is something that I know that we've been very interested in in order to be able to facilitate the collection and analysis of data, because our current system is very cumbersome, it's very difficult to run reports and get good information. So with respect to that project, an RFP was released, they're recommending a vendor, and hopefully that project will get initiated in the coming year, so those are probably the two items of noteworthy reporting. Great, well thank the council and our city manager for the work that you do outside of our council and meetings representing our city and reporting your activities back to us and our community. So at this time I have just a brief announcement, I want to let the community know and members of the public know that a public hearing item for 2019, number 21 in our agenda, 1920 action plan for the city's housing and community development program and amendment to the 2015-2016 action plans will be heard at time certain at 4 PM. I just want to acknowledge the prior time that item came before us. I think there was about, I want to say maybe three hours or so, where members of the community waited for their item to come before us. So we really want to go ahead and give you a time certain this meeting to allow that process to take place. So at this time we'll go ahead and move on to our consent agenda. And so first consent agenda is we don't generally have public comment for, but we could pull items and then have the public comment for items not pulled. Item number three is our advisory participation. Yeah, no, we don't normally. Okay, we don't have public comment on this item. So if you're interested in letting, you're always welcome to email the council. Okay, yeah, then I'll go ahead and look to our city attorney, city attorney Kandadi. Public is allowed to speak on any item of business before the council, before the council deliberates or takes action on it. These are individual council member updates that don't contemplate any council deliberation or actions. So public comment is not required for that portion of the agenda. Okay, so public comment is not required since we're not taking any action, this is just a report out. But if you're interested in communicating with the council, you're welcome to email us. Okay, so we're going to go ahead and close item number three at this time and we're going to move on to our consent agenda. And so first step on consent and those are items four through 18 on our agenda. And those will be acted on in one motion unless an item is pulled by a council member for further discussion. Are there any council members who are interested in pulling any items? Council member Meyers, Glover, Vice Mayor Cummings? I'm going to pull item eight, Glover? Five. Okay, Vice Mayor? Seven and 18. Any others? Council member Crone? Yes, just had it right here. I have a comment on number 15, but I don't want to pull it. Okay, okay, great. Okay, council member Matthews? I'll have a comment on 14. Okay. I'll have a comment on six. Okay, hang on, just to say, okay, comment on number 15, comment on number 14. Vice Mayor Cummings? Six. Comment on number six and. Comment on six. And comment on six as well. Okay, right, okay, let's get right there then. Okay, so now we have items five, seven, eight, and 18 pulled. We have comments for items six, 14, and 15, excuse me. 15 pulled? 15 was not pulled, there will be a comment on 15. Okay, so five, seven, eight, and 18 are going to be pulled. Comment on six, 14, and 15. Does that capture, okay? All right, so if there is any, let's see. So now we'll go ahead and see if there's any member of the community who would like to address the council on any item related to our consent agenda, excluding item five, item seven, item eight, and item 18. Are there any members of the community who would like to address us on any other items of consent? Please, and you'll have up to two minutes. Thank you. My name is Sharon Papo. I'm Executive Director of the Diversity Center, our local LGBT community center. And I just want to share my deep gratitude for Mayor Watkins, Vice Mayor Cummings, and Council Member Donna Myers for bringing forth number six, a display of LGBTQ pride flag and transgender flag at City Hall, both for pride and beyond. This morning, I want to share that I was, I spent part of my morning with a young person who was hugely distraught in their coming out as being transgender. And feeling like they're going to get greatly rejected and lose all their friends if anyone knows who they really are. And then the rest of my morning was spent supporting some elders in our community who are experiencing some really horrendous discrimination. So these are just two examples today. And I want to let you know that while our community is under attack by the federal government to see our local city council being so proud and affirming and strong with this message, it is truly healing and it means a lot. So I just want to say thank you, deep gratitude from our whole community. And our hearts are going to be soaring when we see our flags flying high. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for being here. Okay. Next, okay. I just wanted to talk, as Gareth Phillips, I did also want to talk briefly, very briefly, about item number six and that there was mention in the correspondence about permanency of having permanent LGBTQ and transgender flags flying over City Hall. And I don't believe that there should be any flags permanently flying over City Hall that don't represent all the people and instead represent just a special interest. In fact, a very tiny sliver of a special interest. Otherwise celebrating, you know, anniversaries and everything is great. And I just, as you probably know, I always speak against special interests that want, you know, more for them or less for other people. And it's not respectable to the people who just represent a special interest by flying their flag. I mean, you could fly anybody's flag. You could fly the homeless flag. I mean, whatever. It's sort of not appropriate on a permanent basis. But I believe I saw that in the correspondence. Next. All right. Are there any other members of the community who would like to address us on our consent agenda items? Excluding five, seven, eight, and 18. Seeing none, we'll go ahead and return to Council for comments and then action and deliberation. Council Member Brown? So comments before, yeah, okay. So I'll let my colleagues comment. Okay. We'll go ahead and Council Member Cron. Just to clarify, is there a time period for how long the flag is going to be? There was, I think, the month of June during the Pride Parade and Pride Month. And then exploration of permanency. Okay, there's an exploration. Exploration, mm-hm. Okay, and then since you have the floor, Council Member Cron, do you want to speak to any of the other items on consent that you wanted to speak to before we move the consent agenda items? I think you mentioned item 15. Yeah, just a follow-up on that. Will he or anybody else have an opportunity, should we do explore for the permanent? So come back to the Council just so folks know that they'll have another opportunity. That's right. Thanks. Just wanted to talk a little bit about item 15, the Bay and King protected turn lane since it was on our agenda. It is, as I suspected, traffic is already backing up to turn left there. And so some people can't go straight, because people are waiting to go left and they can't funnel through that intersection at Bay and King. And what I also noticed is people are turning off earlier as well and going through the side streets to avoid the left-hand turn at Bay and King if they want to go left onto King. So I just want to give a heads up on that issue as we hopefully continue to monitor that intersection. Personally, I wouldn't mind bringing back the no left-hand turn, or not no left-hand turn, but left-hand turn the arrow. Or I know some communities have a blinking yellow that you can go through. It's a caution, and then maybe it goes to red. But just a different configuration, because I think we're going to have problems with that in the future. Was there another item that you wanted to speak to on consent at this time, or is that capture them all? No other comments, no. Okay, Council Member Myers and then Vice Mayor Cummings. I just wanted to thank the mayor and the vice mayor for sponsoring the LGBTQ flag on the transgendered flag item. It is tradition in the month of June to fly these flags, and I don't know that they've ever been flown at City Hall, actually. So I'm just looking over at Cynthia because she's been here a long time. But it means a lot to our community, especially right now, and recognition of who we are, and also just recognition of the continued battle to maintain our rights and keep our community safe. So thanks for doing that. And I'll just echo those comments and also give sort of some appreciation and acknowledgement. I'm not sure, hopefully I'm not stealing the thunder of Vice Mayor Cummings, but we were at a presentation at a fifth grade class at Westlake Elementary. And had an opportunity to hear from the students, and they shared some of their interests and position papers. And one of them was on LGBTQ students, and there was actually an op-ed by our superintendent in this past newspaper regarding safety for our students. And we had a mock council meeting, and the Vice Mayor made a motion for us to pursue the rainbow flag as an option to ensure our community feels safe, and all members of all genders of our community feel safe in acknowledging our commitment to their safety and welcoming and well-being. And as a result, it stirred this conversation. So just really giving kind of acknowledgement to the fifth graders at Westlake too. Okay, Vice Mayor Cummings, did I steal it? Yeah, sorry. Yeah, I do want to thank the Karen Randstrom and Julie Eggdall for inviting us. And the fifth graders were inviting us to visit them and for making this recommendation. Because I think that it's important that we're also listening to the youth of our community and are able to address some of their needs, especially since they don't get a vote at this time. But we were able to help their vote be expressed through the motion and putting this item on our agenda. And so, I'm just letting the youth of our community know that we are hearing them as well. And then I think there was one more comment for item number 14, I can't quite recall. That was me. Was that you, Councilor Mellon? Yeah, and that's an item that approves the installation of a memorial bench at Sergeant Derby Park, subject to the support of Sergeant Derby's family. But it's memorializing a skateboarder for his contributions in his life. And the model he set, and we have obviously a strong tradition of memorial benches. But also a number of them in our parks that are uniquely one of a kind artistic. And this one's in the shape of a skateboard. It's really nice and it'll be a great site-specific addition to that park. Absolutely, thank you for pointing that out. Okay, I think that wraps up everybody who was interested in commenting on consent. So we will go ahead and see if there's action for our consent agenda, excluding item 5, 7, 8, and 18. So moved. Okay, second. I think, okay, so Council Member Cron, motion seconded by Council Member Myers. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay, that passes unanimously. So the first item pulled is item number five on our consent agenda. And I'm not quite sure who pulled the council member go over. Thank you, it's just a small point is I was looking at the minutes that were provided to council members. And then I was looking at the minutes that are listed online for the public. And I noticed that under item 28, there's a discrepancy between the language that's in our minutes and language that's in the public's minutes. So I just wanted to get a clarity as to why that is. Do you want to point out the discrepancy or do you- Item 28 online for the public, it says to- Let me just double check this really quick, 28. Yeah, it just has a single paragraph about the motion carried to put on hold the decision to proceed with the downtown library project and to convene a council subcommittee composed of council member Cummings, Myers, and Brown to investigate alternatives and so on. But in the minutes provided to council, there is an in-depth breakdown of the original motion as well as the friendly amendments as well as the yeas and the nays. So I was just curious as to why there was that difference. Because what's posted in the public side before the minutes are approved is just the action, which is the end result, not the breakdown. And then once these are approved, they go online? It's a summary, it's an action summary, yeah. And so then, but once these are approved, then this- We'll replace that. Wonderful, thank you. That's it. So any member of the community who would like to address us on item number five of our consent agenda? Okay, you'll have up to two minutes. I thank you, Jean Brocklebank. Process and procedure is really important to me. And so, in talking about the minutes of May 14 meeting, and there was some confusion. There was confusion about what I said, there was confusion about what Justin Cummings said, because he referred to two amendments that were brought up by a member of the public when he made his motion with the additions. And I was that member of the public. And so those didn't get incorporated precisely the way I brought them up. That's the problem. I like solutions. In this case, the clerk was not, if you remember back to May 14, the clerk was not instructed to read back the motion before it was voted on. The presiding officer did not, say, ask the clerk to read back the altered motion, because it was slightly different than that which it was in the agenda packet, and that which all council members had before them. And so to keep that from happening, I think that the presiding officer before there is a vote should always ask the clerk or the person who's taking it to read back the vote. Because in this case, since it was not ever read back, none of you really knew what you were voting on. And the public did not know what you were voting on, verbatim, the wording. And words have meaning, and this is why I think it's important. And also with regard to the report again about this subcommittee, because that was the topic of this motion, we had an understanding that they were going to come back. And we could know more than just May 30th, the date, the time, and if the public was going to be able to observe the proceedings. And we don't know that yet. Thank you. Okay, all right. So that closes public comment on item number five of our consent agenda. Council member Glover. Motion to adopt the minutes from May 14th. I have a couple of questions. Okay, we have a motion by council member Glover, and council member Cron. Could we get a, is there anything that says that somebody has to read back a motion? I'm just looking at our thing and said that any council member with the exception of the presiding officer can make a regular motion. A regular motion is debatable, but I don't see anything about having to read it back or anything. No, there's no requirement to do so. You know, I can think of a handful of matters that came before the council recently where there was extensive discussion after the initial motion is framed and some amendments are accepted. And I think under those circumstances, Ms. Brocklebank made a good suggestion, but that's not a requirement. Thank you. One other question for the maker of the motion, Vice Mayor Cummings. I'm just looking at the friendly amendment that was made, and I thought there was a time certain. But the first friendly amendment, the subcommittee will bring back the process. I was, correct me if I'm wrong, or I was assuming maybe this meeting we would get that. Is there a time when the process for the subcommittee so we can answer the public's questions about what meetings the public will be involved in? I'm going to go ahead and interject just because we have the item before us agendizes the council meeting minutes as opposed to the content of the actual conversation and or report outs in terms of Brown Act. I'm looking to our city attorney to advise on that before we go into discussion on this. I mean, now is the opportunity for the council to review the minutes and make any corrections that are necessary, but as I read the minutes, they're pretty consistent with what I recall was the action of the council at the time. So perhaps the question is this consistent with what you recall as well, potentially, Vice Mayor? Okay, all right. Okay, so we have a motion by Council Member Glover. I'll second that motion. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay, that passes. I will abstain because I was not at the agenda. Okay, so that passes with Council Member Meyers. I'm going to say no on accepting the minutes. Okay, so we have a no. Okay, so all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? And one abstention. So we have Council Member Matthews abstaining as she was disqualified participating in that item, specifically. I wasn't asked to opine on that, but I would have said that Council Member Matthews is qualified to vote on the minutes which are, which is a ministerial action affirming that this is the direction that the council gave, but. Even though I wasn't present for that? In general, that is, this is the minutes for the entire meeting, right? Just for that agenda item. And if I may, she previously have said, with the exception of agenda item, whatever the minutes item was. If I could then change my vote to aye with the exception of item number five. Item number 28. On which I specifically, of 28 of the meeting minutes. Yeah. Okay, so I think if I accurately capture it, we have a no. Council Member Cron, eyes from Council Member Brown, Matthews with the exception of 28, Vice Mayor Cummings, Meyers and myself. Okay, so we'll go ahead and move on to item number seven and our consent agenda and I believe Vice Mayor Cummings. So I had a question on whether or not we might need to table this item just due to the fact that when I looked, I heard from some folks in the community that this item actually didn't pass at the state level. And so, and I looked it up and it says on April 9th that in the assembly, this item didn't pass. So I'm wondering if it's worth, do we need to vote on this at this time or as it says that it didn't pass and was referred to the committee on public safety. So I was wondering if we may want to table this until this item comes back to the assembly. Council Member Matthews, do you have any input? You know, that's fine, I was under the impression it had been continued, but yeah, I'm fine to table it, it's not urgent, yeah. So we'll go ahead and, do you want to go ahead and make a motion to table the item? A motion that we table, I move that we table item number seven. Okay, so motion by Council Member Matthews, seconded by Vice Mayor Cummings to table item number seven on our consent agenda. I believe since we're not taking action at this time, we don't necessarily have public comment on this item. Am I correct, City Attorney Condati? If it's a motion to table, then that's correct. Okay, so when we return, we can receive public comment. I would like to just say if it's legal without opening public comment, table this specific item understanding that the issue of local control is still an important one to us. Okay, so maybe we can make that note in the minutes. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay, that passes unanimously. We'll go ahead and try to get one more item in before our four o'clock time is certain and that's item number eight of our consent agenda. And I believe, Council Member Myers, that was you who pulled that item. Yes, I just had a couple of additions and maybe a couple of questions. I'm just looking at the appropriation on March 12th, that we approved appropriations of 30,000 for the time limited tenant legal services provided by the grantee. With 15,000 available upon execution of the contract, and then the extra 15,000 contingent on the updated scope of work. And I just wanted to confirm, I don't know if someone's here from tenant, okay. I just wanted to confirm that the 5-8-2019 is the updated scope of work. Is that correct? We'll go ahead and actually ask before we, we'll have public comment, and we'll have that, maybe if our city staff is available to answer that question, that'd be probably proper process. Sure, Casey Heemard City Manager's Office. And yes, the scope of work dated May 18th is the most recent scope of work that we received from Tenant Sanctuary. From May, the May 8th one. The May 8th, yes, I'm sorry. Okay, great. And so we'll be using our sort of a standard contract, grant contract for this, correct? Sure, we'll be using the same contract that we would use with community programs, organizations. When we initially had a contract last year that unfortunately was not able to move forward because of some challenges on their side, that was the same particular standard contract that we used then. Okay, great. I'll have some changes in emotion. Okay, we'll do that after we have public comment. Okay, any other questions or clarity at this time? Okay, we'll go ahead and see if there's any member of the community who would like to address us on this item, and you'll have up to two minutes. So I'm going to display that I sent her. My name's Eric Rodberg, and I do support Tenants' Rights. I think they should be educated and be able to assert their rights for legitimate grievances against unscrupulous landlords. I volunteered for CRLA, might be the only person on either side of the end of the debate that can say that. You can check with Gretchen or my supervising attorney in Astasia, Torres-Gill. I think that Tenants' Sanctuary is the wrong group to give this money to. They've already done deceptive practices. When they came for you in March, they said they needed the extra money for direct attorney services. Now the new revised proposal is eliminating those services. They said they were going to have their meetings at Senior Legal, which is a regular office setting appropriately. Now they're having their meetings at Subrose Cafe, which is an anarchist cafe that not everyone's going to feel comfortable going to. They also said that their meetings, their tenant trainings were open to everyone. Yet they physically barred someone from going to one of their meetings. And I can tell you, as a landlord, I am qualified to do, it wasn't me, but you can ask Gretchen or in Astasia how effective I was helping them assert their rights. So it's really not appropriate for you to be publicly funding a group that's doing these untoward things. Finally, as everyone knows, the leaders of Tenants' Sanctuary are the same folks who are the leaders of Measure M. And it's really not appropriate for you guys, especially the council members who were basically elected in coalition with the Yes on M campaign to be giving money to your direct political supporters. There are plenty of great groups out there that can do a great job that are more neutral politically. I think you should be spending your money on those groups and I would be happy to volunteer or thank you. Thank you very much. And this image was displayed on some Facebook page. Okay, next speaker. Okay, we'll go ahead and ask that you keep your comments to yourself during the meeting and allow folks to come and speak on their own behalf without getting questioned on their way out, okay? Go ahead, you have up to two minutes. Hi, I just want to thank the council members and apologize for how long it took us to get to the project scope. We were just really trying to flesh out the legal clinic and working with our partners in CRLA. Great to Enriga Hart who is a steering committee member and also the director at CRLA. We really do aim to correlate our services and not overlap them. And yes, so far we have been operating since March on a volunteer kind of basis. We've served about 20 people so far and we believe that our space at Subrosa is actually poses no hindrance. It's actually not at Subrosa. It's next door to Subrosa and the hub for sustainable transportation, 703 Pacific Avenue. And just to address this comment that I've been hearing a while about barring somebody from the public event. While we did advertise it publicly, it was a training for counselors. We advertised that for people that we intend to train on tenants rights and take on as a representative of our organization. And based on this particular individual's prior record in newspapers, speaking about tenants, we felt that there would be a conflict of interest. And we did try to communicate this to them a few days prior. So if you have any questions for me, I'm happy to answer them. I'm in the audience and we just thank you for considering this. We'll go ahead and have maybe questions. It's a question later, I can take it. Okay, go ahead. We have it up to two minutes. Okay, I don't know if this is too late for this, but this is what I think. I oppose giving money to tenants legal services as it's another example of favoring awful, narrow, special interests at odds with the public's interest. One look at the five directors of Tenants Sanctuary, Tenant Legal Services, and we see arguably the five most radical supporters of rent control, self-described tenant advocates, and otherwise special interest advocates in the city. As usual, they have their rent control measure ammaged and in mind, not the people's. Everything you could ever want to know about tenants rights can be found online or at the library. They intend to especially address the needs of illegal aliens to receive public benefit legal aid at the expense of the people against the people. The FBI's 2018 annual report and sourcebook of federal sentencing statistics says 42.7% of federal sentenced crimes were committed by the seven-cent of the population that are noncitizens. I will hand in page 14 of the 225 page FBI report for your consideration. It goes on to say that one-third were immigration crimes, including human smuggling, but the other two-thirds were very serious offenses like murder, rape, drug smuggling, drug dealing, and money laundering. Besides that, too many are here for free stuff and to send money out of the country to take jobs and housing away from the American poor. They are not special and deserving of special free legal counsel. And the radicals in charge of tenant legal services aren't likely to provide the same for instance to landlords. You and they need to get over the idea anyone is to blame for high rents except the federal reserves, insane inflation policies, and the federal government's suffragettes, inflationary spending, and regulations. Landlords are just as trapped in the housing retail chain inflationary assets spiral as tenants. No housing will be the result if affordable housing cannot be built. Thanks. Thank you very much. Okay, next speaker. Good afternoon. So once again, I'm here before you to reconsider this award to tenant sanctuary, which unfortunately has the following troubling optics associated with it. First of all, unlike CRLA, senior legal services, Project Sentinel, Echo Housing, which are respected, mature, legal aid organizations with a long track record of success, tenant sanctuary, again, is staffed with biased tenant activists associated with many of the ugly activities that occurred during the Measure M campaign. Number two, the counselors have no legal training in landlord tenant law except for a couple of hours of training that the untrained, non-legal leaders were providing in these training sessions that I was unceremoniously locked out from. When I tried to attend one of these sessions to kind of see exactly what they are, the scope of their training and what they're telling them. I've been in the landlord for 30 years, and I'm still not sure whether landlords have to provide screen doors or windows, or screens on their windows. And imagine a bunch of 20-somethings or whatever that have two hours of training. How can they be effective in terms of landlord tenant mediation? Number three, again, the tenant sanctuary office is in a self-described anarchist collective where Robert Norris holds court every Wednesday. Not to knock Robert, but it kind of puts out the wrong image. And it kind of sends a message of political activism as opposed to actual landlord tenant mediation. Four, in this era of a $3 million plus budget deficit that's looming, we need to be extra careful in allocating our precious dollars. $30,000 for a new organization. Thank you. Let me just say, San Leandro does it for $24,000. Okay, your time is up. Thank you very much. Okay, all right, you'll be our last speaker, and you'll have up to two minutes. Good afternoon, I'm Scott Graham. And to clarify, the former speakers keeps on talking about the Anarchist Cafe when the woman that spoke earlier said that they hold it in the same building, but in the hub for sustainable transportation's office, not in the Anarchist Cafe. So I think that needs to be clarified and understood. I don't see why there should be any reason to not support this group and their mission of helping tenants with greedy landlords. There's a real problem here in this town with skyrocketing rents, and that just continues month after month. And people are being displaced just so the landlords can raise the rents. Now that there's this cap on rents increases that you folks passed, landlords are evicting people so that they can raise the rents even higher than 10%. And that needs to stop, and I hope that this group can help stop that with your funding, thank you. Thank you. Okay, we'll go ahead and close public comment at this time. We are now approaching four o'clock, and four o'clock is time certain for our item number 21. I'll go ahead and see if there's any additional questions briefly amongst the council. We'll conclude this item at 4.05, and then we'll go ahead and move on to item number 21. So maybe for the next five minutes we'll deliberate if we're not able to accomplish completion of this item. We'll go ahead and continue until after item number 21. Council Member Brown, Council Member Matthews after. Yeah, I would move that we accept the revised scope of work for tenant legal services and authorize staff to execute any and all agreements in a form approved by the city attorney. Second. Okay, we have a motion by Council Member Brown. Seconded, I think I heard Vice Mayor Cummings first. Further discussion, Council Member Matthews. I actually have a number of issues that occurred to me. I'll just go down them, and then we can find the answers. It's not clear who the lead contact person is for this. There's an advisory group, and there's a fiscal agent, but who is the chair, the director, the whatever. That's not clear. So I think that should be specified. Someone will have to sign the contract. I did say when this came up previously that I thought it was important that the advisory group include a representative who had experience in property management. I suggested someone in non-profit property management wouldn't necessarily have to be that. And I also think looking over the scope of services that it should the advisory group and the services offered by the tenant services should include mediation explicitly, both someone experienced in mediation on the advisory group and including a mediation service in the list of community partners to whom they refer. That's a standard part of tenant services in most communities. I understand that there is interest in getting additional funding. That the tenant services group, legal services is seeking additional funding to serve other individuals that are not city residents. So I think it would be important to have distinction in the reporting given to us that the stats reflect both how many city residents are served and how many non-city, to the extent that non-city residents are added, and additional funding sources. So what is the total agency budget in addition to our contribution? And that's standard for our non-profit community service grants. I do think it would be important. This is a pilot project in a brand new organization, which at this point is receiving funding exclusively from the city of Santa Cruz. So I think it'd be important to have a report back at six months. I do think also it's important that the stats, and we have the intake form here, but I think it's important in terms of effectiveness that we have statistics report on the outcomes or the results of the interactions. That that be part of the impact of the services that are offered. I did notice some discrepancies on the financial, on the budget that was submitted. I mentioned those to our staff. So I think any contract should have a corrected financial statement. How many months of services, the numbers just didn't add up exactly. I do think the services and meetings should be open to the public without exclusion. To the extent that there are workshops, I noticed that that's a big part of the services to be offered, our workshops, etc. And those should be broadly available to the public. And I think that's it. So I think it's pretty clear that we have some more discussing on this item. This is item number eight on our consent agenda. We're going to go ahead and pause this item at this time. We have a pending motion by Council Member Brown, second by Vice Mayor Cummings. And I believe, Council Member Brown, did you have an announcement? I just want to make one comment. In order to get some of the questions answered, we have a representative here who has to leave. She has to leave. She has to go to work because she's doing this on a volunteer basis. So those questions won't get answered today. And I'm going to ask that my motion be considered and voted upon whether or not we get those answers. So if I'm hearing your request, is that if there's any additional questions for the member of Tenant Sinks right here today, that now would be the ideal time. Okay, are there any specific questions that we want to, do you have very specific questions for that? I just ran through a whole bunch of them and I had hoped that those would be friendly amendments. And I was prepared to ask the person and was told I should wait. And I understand you have a time certain. I'm not comfortable at this point without these questions being answered. Okay, why don't we go ahead and see if we can get the few questions answered in the next five minutes? And then I don't want to move away from the time certain too much further. So we'll go ahead and see if our representative from Tenant Sinks should come forward. And if you could maybe just briefly cover your questions, Council Member Matthews. And were there other additional questions of Tenant Sinks right at this time? Okay, and if we can't cover those, I apologize if you have to get going, but we'll go ahead and close the item for continuing. Okay, Council Member Matthews, did you have specific questions at this time? Well, the first was a question. The others I should think, many if not all of those would be friendly amendments, but I'll leave that to you. Who is the lead contact person, the president, the director? Signs the contract for this. We are planning on electing those at the next meeting. A lot of us were just dedicated to scoping out the project itself. But I believe myself or Zav Hirschfield, as well as Bruce Van Allen, are primary contacts at this moment. When upon signing of the contract, we will have an elected chair, vice chair, secretary, treasurer and all that. But that's not known at this time. It's not known at this time. Would you consider these friendly amendments? I'll just ask you, that statistics indicate both the number of people served to our city residents and non-city residents? Yes. And that you distinguish in your total budget the funds that come from the city and total from other sources? Yes. I think these are frankly not exotic. That the financial form that's budget submitted be cleaned up. That the services and meetings that are advertised for the public be open without exclusion? Yes. That the advisory council include representatives with expertise in property management and mediation? Yes, we are going to look into it. We have a few contacts that we're close to that we're planning on acting on. I think those are really important. And that the, I think they're called partner agencies. The agencies to which you refer also include an acknowledged mediation service? Yes, we have those. That you report back in six months and that the statistics include the outcomes as well as the contacts? Yes. Okay, thank you. You're welcome. Okay, quick question. Okay, council member, I've attended leaders. Okay, quick question, go ahead. And the council reminds. So the main thing that strikes me as kind of problematic is the statement that all meetings will be open to anyone without bar. I noticed that before there was that conversation about the counselors that were being trained. And then you're requesting to someone stay at that meeting. But especially what I'm very concerned about was a community member that just came up and used the term illegal aliens and then created a litany of facts from his unsighted piece of paper criminalizing and vilifying undocumented people in our community. And I would imagine it would probably be a little uncomfortable for tenants that are undocumented to come to a meeting with someone that has that personality and or perspective. So I would ask my colleagues or since you're here now, do you think that it's possible to have a comprehensive conversation with people to feel safe and comfortable if they're in a shared space with people using terms like illegal alien and stuff like that? I personally try to would want to avoid that. The only reason why we felt comfortable barring that person from the event was because there was prior record of this person publicly making those kinds of statements and knowing that our primary constituency, our tenants, many of who are undocumented, we just didn't feel like it would be a good match. But say if we were having a public educational workshop on tenants' rights generally around the community, we would be open to that. This was just a counselor training, people who we planned to have on board regularly. And then the follow up to that, especially since they're serving undocumented people just with regards to the statistics, who's living where and all that, I would encourage us to make sure that that data is sensitive to the situations of people that may be obtaining the services from the tenant sanctuary. I think we have a couple final questions for you and then we're going to go ahead and pause the item. Council Member Meyers? And then just- Two quick- Sorry, just two quick questions. Would you guys be able to put out a report in six months, sort of an update report? It'll show up in your contract, I think standard language, but just wanted to make sure there's resources for that. And then some kind of a final report at the end of the contract period. Yeah, that is one of our goals. And then just finally following a little bit up on data because this is such an important issue in our community. Would you be able to provide that data in some kind of form, both hard copy and your database or copy of that for our staff? Yes, of course. Great, thank you. Final question, Council Member Brown, did you have a final question? If you could refresh our memory about the way in which this particular organization came to be the proposed contractor for these services for the city. It's been a long time coming and if you could just remind us how that happened. As far as I remember, I am not part of the steering committee itself. I am just the hired program coordinator. I know this has been a project since the beginning of early 2018 or late 2017. Way before the Measure M campaign, people in the steering committee were involved but we also have freelance software engineers on the steering committee. We have the director of CRLA and we were collaborating with CRLA and senior legal services because all these organizations acknowledged that there was just a big gap in services for tenants with the slash budget for legal aid in Santa Cruz County over the past few decades. All the legal aid agencies that deal with tenant issues or many of the bigger ones have helped craft this project with the help of people who are trained as tenant counselors. I myself have three to four years in background in tenant counseling. And as over the last year, we've been really trying to put it all together in terms of our fiscal sponsorship, what tenants' rights we're trying to deal with all tenants' rights statewide. But also trying to hone it locally and keep our program as relevant as it can be for our tenants. So, our story has yet to be done. Okay, thank you. Thank you for being here. Thank you for staying and answering questions. I'm going to go ahead and stop the item at this time. We're going to go ahead and pause item number eight on our consent agenda. I apologize for moving beyond our time certain item. We're going to go ahead and move on at this time to item number 21, which is on our general business agenda portion of the meeting. And the order will be for us to have a staff overview and presentation. We'll go ahead and then ask if there's any member of the community who'd like to address the council on this item and we'll return for action and deliberation. And so we have our economic development team here and go ahead and kick it up. We have input from city attorney Kandani. Yes, at the outset of the meeting, council member Krohn asked about a potential conflict of interest with respect to this item in that the first resolution that the council's asked to consider is an amendment to the 2015-16 action plan to cancel the Jesse Street project and therefore allow the $263,700 in home funding to be reallocated. And because that pertains to a project that's in proximity to real property owned by the council member, my recommendation is that council member Krohn recuse himself from that portion of the discussion. So what I would request is that the council consider the resolution after the other two resolutions and that council member Krohn recuse himself at this time. I believe the council meeting video is being shown in the courtyard conference room so that he can fully follow the discussion and then come out when that third resolution is acted upon. Okay, so if I am ensuring that I'm hearing you correctly, you're suggesting that council member Krohn recuse himself at this time to our courtyard conference room while we have a discussion and presentation on this item. When we return for action, he will then return, but he will do so after we're adopting or taking action on the first recommendation, which is resolution number one, amending the 2015-16 action plans. Is that correct? Yes. Okay, so we'll go ahead and ask for council member Krohn to recuse himself. We'll go ahead and take action on the first resolution in his absence and then go ahead and invite him back out for further two. Yeah, so I got it actually backwards in my presentation, but consider adopting this resolution first. Okay, great. Okay, thank you very much. Okay, please. Good afternoon, Mayor, members of the council. Bonnie Lipscomb, Economic Development Director. And with me today is Tiffany Lake, who's our principal management analyst in our housing division. Tiffany is going to give the presentation today. I briefly just wanted to mention this is our second hearing for the approval of the action plan. After this hearing, we have a mandatory 15-day waiting period where it is publicly noticed. We receive any additional comments. We'll respond to them and then we include that with a recommendation from you today to HUD for the final allocations, which will be included into our fiscal year 20 budget. Then we'll use that in July to award to the recipients and the recipients as well as the grant agreements. So in our last hearing that we had, you made preliminary recommendations. There has been what has changed since the last meeting is that we did get the final budget amounts allocations from HUD. And we're happy to say we are receiving 60,000 more in programmatic income that you can add to some of the subrecipient categories today. You did make some preliminary recommendations that if we did receive more money, you recommended that those be divided between the CDBG code enforcement and that's the admin division and then as well as under the central park under the project division. All the other recommendations unless you change them today are as they were presented and directed from you at the last public hearing. There are some other budgetary impacts, which is why we felt this was important to come before your later budget discussion later this evening. Specifically around the code enforcement, which is a staffing position in the beach flats lower ocean neighborhood. So there are impacts and our director of planning and community development Lee Butler is here to answer any specific questions you have about that today. If you make some changes or have any recommendations for changed funding around that category. And with that I'll turn it over to Tiffany Lake. Okay, so we've done this a couple of times and so now we're in the second public hearing. Today we're asking for final recommendations now that we have the final budget numbers and also because we have the mandatory 15 day review period. So we need to put those final recommendations in a public notice before we can submit the final action plan to HUD that's due June 21st. So today we're hoping to get an allocation for the additional CDBG funding, which is approximately 60,000. And we also hope to finalize the action plan budget and approve the related resolutions. So kind of a graphic of the funding we've received over the years of both CDBG and home funding. So this is the actual numbers, so this is higher than what had been our conservative estimate. So for CDBG we have 571,000 and for home 400,000. So that's a little bit more than we had estimated previously. So with the extra money available to allocate, we can hopefully give more to the programs that have received less funding. So for that 571,563,000 of it is the actual grant and 8,000 is estimated program income. That's people repaying loans that were made to them prior. So in the last public hearing some programs had a decrease in funding and some had an increase. So Central Park and Code Enforcement both had decreases and the Pogonup Farm Kitchen and Nueva Vista had increases and knowing that we have the additional 60,000 available. We had been given the sort of preliminary instruction to divide it between the two programs that had had the decreases. So that'd be Central Park and Code Enforcement. And just a sort of a history of city funding for Nueva Vista over the years. I think there had been some confusion between funds that had come from the county and the city. So this graphic shows the history of funding since fiscal year 2012. And with the 100,000 from CDBG, this is actually matching the highest we've ever funded them before, rather than a decrease. Okay, so of that 571,020% of it is mandated by HUD for administration. And we have lowered the rehab administration to 8,500. So that leaves 448,000 approximately available for programming. So a summary to remind ourselves of what was recommended in the last public hearing. Nueva Vista was at 100,000, the teen center at 35,000, and CRLA at 19,500, so that was 154,000. Central Park was reduced a little bit to 55,000. The Boys and Girls Club was at 40,000 and the Pogonup Farm Kitchen was raised to 100,000 in the last public hearing. So we have the question, assuming that all other things remain the same, of how to allocate the additional $60,000 for code enforcement in Central Park, if that's what you choose to do. So one option is to fully fund the code enforcement at the requested amount. So that would give them 95,000 and Central Park would be at 59,000. And another option would be to roughly divide the additional funding evenly between the two programs. So that would be code enforcement at 70,000 and Central Park at 84,000. So these are just two possible options. You can allocate the funds in whichever way you'd like. For home funding, which isn't so scarce, we also had additional funds over what we had estimated, 360,000 for the grant and 40,000 in program income. So that means that we'll have, after awarding 100,000 to security deposit program and 54,000 to Jesse Street, we'll have still 200,000 available for programming for the prior year. And this might be a good point to clarify about the Jesse Street being canceled. That just is a timing issue. So when we award grants, home grants, they have to be spent and allocated in a certain number of years. And we're canceling from more than four years ago, and it just times out. It doesn't stop them from applying again. Jesse Street still plans to move forward and still has the possibility of being funded. And they're the only CHODO, which is a community housing development organization in Santa Cruz that was interested in applying. So they're still planning to move forward and can apply in the future. So those funds that are rolling over, it doesn't mean we've decided not to fund them. But just that HUD regulations time out how quickly we have to spend those funds. So again, we're at the public hearing. So we need final recommendations so we can put a public notice in the paper. We have to have that published by June 3rd to hit our deadline roughly so that we can get the action plan to HUD by June 21st. And approximately in July, funding will become available once we've executed all the contracts with the recipients. That's it. Thank you for that summary. Any questions for the staff at this time? Councilor Matthews? A couple. So on the Jesse Street project, do we not grant that but just bank those funds for a future CHODO project? Is that how it works? Yes. They just go into a reserve. Yeah, they're just being set aside for them. We can't use that set aside for anything else. And if we don't allocate it to a community housing development organization, we'll lose that funding. So we bank it for a future CHODO? Yes. And then here it shows 54,000 for Jesse Street. Yes. That's the 15% of the grant for the year. That's what the set aside is. So that's what gets banked. That's what 15% of every grant year. So in the last public hearing, it was based on our estimate. So the numbers are slightly different now. Then I do have another question. We all learned late last week that there had been a skeet shooting range in Pogunip. And I know probably a lot of us have meetings set up with the homeless garden project people. And Parks is probably trying to figure out what that means, et cetera. Does that affect the kitchen at the, and I see Tony coming up. Maybe he can give me that. That's my question. This is kind of breaking news and to what extent does that affect that project? Yeah, Tony Elliott, Parks Recreation, I just ran up here a matter of breath. No, it does not. That project really will still continue to move forward. We're working with homeless garden project to figure out what the next step should be. But this does not impact the CDBG funds. That's a short answer to my question, thank you. However, it may impact the timing of the project, correct? That could be, we don't know at this point. We're kind of going through our due diligence to take those steps. But at this point, again, I don't think it affects it, it could impact timing. But again, the more information we can bring back at a future date. So there is a little bit of a timing issue, like similar to how we had to cancel the Jesse Street project. We need to spend the home funds usually within two years of granting it. So we'd want to make sure they could still finish construction within two years. Okay, but it's not one year and- It's not one year, hopefully we have an answer. Yeah, we're awarding it for a year, but really we have more than that for them to be able to use it. It could also roll over. Yes. Okay, thank you. Please, Mary Cummings. Could you provide a little bit of clarity when you say that these funds can, we can bank them and they can roll over? What's the time frame at which point the funds would- So they're, it's normally two years to spend it, but HUD has temporarily suspended that two year deadline. Because they've had a number of places have had trouble using the funds by that timeline. So they've temporarily suspended it until 2021, and we'll know then if they change the timing. But what it means is that we are awarding it to Jesse Street, but they have to start incurring costs with normally within two years. But temporarily there's no deadline for them right now for those Chodo set aside funds. Additional questions? I just have a brief question. By restoring some of the funding for the code enforcement program, does that secure the position that was, I think potentially vulnerable by eliminating that funding? It would. So the first option, which was actually the staff recommendation, is that you fully fund the code enforcement at 95,000. And that would keep that extra level of service over baseline. And that's what the CDBG funding was providing in the beach flats in lower ocean neighborhood. Okay, any other questions from council members at this time? Vice Mayor Cummings. If the code enforcement funding was kept at the level that was at from the last meeting, would there be the potential for other funds to be used to backfill the rest of those? There would, and I'd ask Lee Butler, the planning director to come up. But as I understand it, it would be the funding source that they would have available would be from another fund that would have different requirements. So it may change the level of service. Hi, Mayor and council, Lee Butler, the planning director. And yes, Bonnie's correct. We would be looking, as I mentioned in the last meeting, our top priority is making sure that the people that we have can continue to work for us. And we would be looking at how we could fund that. And it may be from another division such that the level of services in code enforcement would be reduced. And we would potentially be looking to have an individual assist, for example, with building division activities. So that funding would shift from building to the code enforcement. And code enforcement would have a resulting reduction. And that would be in the proactive work that we do through the beach flats in lower ocean neighborhoods. So in summary, if I'm hearing you, it's suggesting that that position would sort of change their kind of scope of work to accommodate additional duties outside of the original funded position. Is that correct, because of the funding sources? That's correct, that's what we'd be looking at doing. Otherwise, if he wanted to maintain the same level of service, then it would have to be borne by the general fund. That's correct. This would be borne by the general fund and it would just, because it's not coming from CDBG, we would be likely not filling one of our positions in the building division and using that funding to support our current staffers and make sure that they still have a job. Okay, additional questions, Councilman Romain? Well, question and observation. If you could give us an idea of the workload of your code enforcers, my impression is that there's quite a backlog on demands for their service. Is that correct? There absolutely is. And we've got hundreds of active code enforcement cases that we have three inspectors that are in our code enforcement division of the code enforcement. We've got two housing inspectors and three code enforcement inspectors. And those three are working on, I'm going from memory here, but I believe we have over 600 active cases right now. A question about some of those cases, are those generally brought to the planning department by tenants or like how do these cases actually manifest? Sure, that's a great question. In most instances, it is a reactive process, meaning that someone files a complaint. What this funding allows us to do is it does allow us to have proactive tenant protections in the beach flats and lower ocean. And so when we're talking about the level of protection for tenants, having that proactive approach in those areas provides an extra layer for those low income tenants because it isn't necessarily driven by a complaint process. And so the landlords could think, all right, well, it's my tenant that's making the complaint here, and therefore I've got a problem with them, even though the complaining party isn't disclosed. We actually do that proactive enforcement. And so it may not even be the tenant that is complaining. We may recognize that there's a stairway to a second story that is in disrepair. And so we can proactively go out there and address that, whereas in other instances, we aren't actually out there looking proactively for issues. We're reacting to complaints that come in. So that's what this money allows us to do is to do that proactive enforcement, as well as some of the things like the twice a year cleanups in both beach flats and lower ocean neighborhoods. Follow up to that. How often do these proactive approaches result in tenants actually being evicted from their houses due to those houses coming off line? We have very few houses that come off line. The numbers, again, I don't have the numbers in front of me right now, but I believe we have had less than 20 since we, through both the rental inspection and the code enforcement program, and again, going from memory, but less than 20 since we began the Unpermitted Dwelling Unit Legalization Program in early 2017. And that's actually a higher number than we've had over the course of the last decade or so, in part because some of those had multiple units. We had a five-unit project where there was illegal work and there was a gas leak, and it was very substandard work, and those tenants had to vacate for obvious life safety issues. But our primary goal is always to keep people in the units, even if the units are not legal. We aim to keep people in those units, and the queue of Unpermitted Dwelling Units that come from our efforts is quite long. We've got about 460, and there are about 135 that are in the process of that legalization right now. And so we take every effort that we make, every effort that we can to keep people in the units and to over the course of time to get those units legalized so that they can remain on the market in perpetuity. Thank you for the clarification. Any additional questions for staff at this time? Okay, seeing none, thank you. We'll go ahead and see if there's any members of the community who would like to address the council on this item. This is item number 21 on our agenda, and if you are interested, please light up to my left, and you'll have up to two minutes. Rae Kansino, CEO of Community Bridges, thank you so much for tabling this discussion. I have to go to Watsonville now to speak on another item. Just wanted to thank the majority of the council that helped support Emotion to keep restoration for Nuevo Vista. We're really excited to work with the city to make sure that we do the 2020 census, and make sure that we look at the targeted low income and hard to count folks that will hopefully bring in future dollars for the city in the next go around for CDBG and other types of funding. We're also looking forward to kind of continuing our own vigilance as well as making sure renters and people in our community are using the staff resources of the general fund and also general services to make sure that we're reporting illegal or subpar or in combatable units in our community. I think it's an undisclosed issue, and we always look to partner to try to be the conduit to try to help alleviate some of those concerns you raised, council member Cummings. So thank you so much for the majority of the council that was able to support that, and we look forward to working with you and kind of building that community resource center where people can come to every single day. So thank you. Afternoon City Council, my name is Edgar Landeros, the program manager for Nuevo Vista Community Resources. And I'm here with Iida Maflores, who's just going to read something really quick and Spanish. And then. Buenas tardes. Mi nombre es Iida Maflores. Vivo por, he vivido por 18, 20 años en Beach Flash. Y gracias a estos meeting que he venido, vivo en los apartanos de Nuevo Vista. Se lo importante que es el centro comunitario que tenga las puertas abiertas para nosotros, porque en el verano, nosotros las madres podemos dejar así a nuestros hijos para las tareas y para que los lleven a paseos en el verano. Yo soy una de las personas que me he beneficiado con el centro comunitario, porque por los programas que han traído, donde nos han ido la policía, he venido a los servicios que hacen aquí de la policía, las clases que llevan para saber si sus hijos andan en drogas. Todas esas cosas que me han ayudado a formar a mi hijo. Muchas gracias y espero que las puertas sigan abiertas para el centro comunitario. So just a brief synopsis, Iida Maflores has been a resident with Nuevo Vista for about 20 years. She's benefited from the services such as the restructuring and building of the apartments. Also herself as a mother, single mother, she has as well benefited. And through the services, core services of the center, she's able to bring her son and raise her child. So thank you once again for listening and hopefully we can partner up and do great things over the years. Thank you. I just want to add for the translation that those services include help with homework after school and drug prevention programs. Good afternoon, I'm Gretchen Regenhardt, I'm with California Rural Legal Assistance. I'm here to thank you for the recommendation and hopefully it will come true to fund our services here. We've recently reopened our Santa Cruz office and some of you joined us at our open house, thank you. And we are already planning a community know your rights presentation in partnership with Nuevo Vista, which will focus on tenants' rights and immigration, and also on substandard housing and how to get repairs in your unit. So thank you again for your support. Hi there, I'm Paul Goldberg from the Homeless Garden Project. I wanted to thank you all for your support of our project. And just to reiterate what Parks Director Elliott shared is we are ready to move forward with this project as soon as we get the green light. We do appreciate and to meet the HUD guidelines, we are fully prepared to do so. This 100,000 represents less than 3% of our overall project, yet it's a huge investment in support and hopefully a positive direction to helping individuals experiencing homelessness take a step forward to getting housing and employment. So thank you so much for support and we will be inviting the whole community to help us come over the top and we invite you all as individuals to join that effort and to meet our full goal. So thank you so much. Hey, I'm Kate Achilles and I live within the Central Park neighborhood. So I just want to thank you for considering that area and putting some money towards that park. I'm here representing families with children in the area. We've brought a couple of our kids here who have been squirming in the front row, I apologize for that. But I just want to advocate on their behalf. They use the park, they love the park, they love the features that are there. And I know that there's one thing in particular that could definitely use some funding and there are drainage issues and it floods quite a bit, especially in the winter when there's a lot of rain. And then there are other features that the kids love that are already there, including the merry ground. And they'd love to see other improvements as well. But it's a small park and I think that it is well utilized by the families that are there. So I just want to make sure it's on everyone's radar. I feel like sometimes it could be overlooked, but we appreciate the maintenance that goes into it. People are keeping it well up kept and we just as the families that live there really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. I'm Mary Chapman and I'm also from the Central Park neighborhood area. Just wanted to come in again to say thank you for putting this on the radar. And again our kids use it all the time and we're having more and more. We've lived there since 2003 and we've seen a major shift in that neighborhood. Our families coming in, finally getting able to be out and using that park where there were times where I wouldn't send my kids to that park. So it's really nice I think just having some funding towards it would be great to just kind of keep that momentum going of really creating a more family friendly atmosphere in that neighborhood. So thank you. Thank you. Hello, my name is Andrea Tuleo, Boys and Girls Clubs of Santa Cruz County. And I'm here to thank the council members for supporting a new safety feature down at our Boys and Girls Club downtown club house where we're serving about 160 kids a day and up to 200 kids a day in the summer. And keeping our kids safe and letting their parents, knowing that they're safe, is just essential to a healthy community. So thank you again, we really appreciate your support. Thank you. Good afternoon, Scott Graham. I'd like to see the 60,000 that came up all go to Central Park. That park has been underfunded for years. One of the things I see that it really needs is more trees. It's, you know, Central Park in New York City is like a premier park in the nation. And so if we have a Central Park, maybe we should try to make it into a premier park also. The other thing is on this HUD funding for housing, I hope the language is for low income, very low income and totally broke people to receive housing under this funding. Because a lot of times they say it's for low income but it's actually for people that are making up to $100,000 a year. And to me that's not fair for the people that are actually broke or nearly broke. So if you could make sure the language is for low income and very low income people that would be really great. Is there any additional members of the community who would like to address this on this item? If you see none, we'll go ahead and return to council for action and deliberation. Just to get a little bit of clarity before we do so to ensure that we're allowing for the process to have Councilmember Cronen be engaged at a certain point. The three items on our agenda report have different resolutions attached. And so the first resolution is amending the 15-16 action plans and directing staff to submit those documents to HUD. And is that's the specific action that Councilmember Cronen should not be weighing in on? Is that correct? That's right, that's the one that specifically references Jesse Street. Okay, do we want to go ahead and see if any council members want to go ahead and move that? Councilmember Meyers and then Vice Mayor Cummings and then Councilmember Meyers. I'll go ahead and move to adopt resolution one amending the 2015-16 action plans and directing staff to submit the documents to HUD. Okay, I'll go ahead and second that motion. Vice Mayor Cummings? I'm sorry, Councilmember Matthews. The action plan includes option one, is that? Do you want to specify the action plan? Can you actually flip up this? Thank you. So there are a lot of question marks there. Okay, so this is the one that was on the agenda. But this first resolution doesn't cover any of these funding items. It's just the HUD funding. Just the, do you want to cover exactly what this first resolution does cover? Yeah, so it's- Okay, it's page two of what we have here. Got it, okay. The first one is just amending the old action plan to remove the Jesse Street, the previous funding for Jesse Street. So we need to take that action from the 15-16 program here. Okay, and then we'll move on to this part of the discussion, which we can then have. Okay, so we have a motion by Councilmember Meyers. I'm seconded by myself. Any further discussion? Seeing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay, that passes unanimously with Councilmember Crone abstaining, I suppose. Requeues. Requeues at this time. So we'll go ahead and give Councilmember Crone a moment to rejoin our conversation for the rest of our deliberations at this time. Council, I think it would also be appropriate if Councilmember Crone has questions at this time that he'd be allowed to ask those questions before you move on to action on the other two items. Okay, we'll go ahead and yield the floor to you, Councilmember Crone. If you have any questions to be asked at this time, given that you were absent at the original time of the presentation. Question for, I guess, our planning director to talk about code enforcement. Just wondering, I just have, my experience in the community is homeowners and renters both don't think we're doing a very good job of code enforcement. And I heard you say there were 135 properties that are currently being abated, is that correct? So I've got some of the actual statistics here and I had a chance to look those up. But yes, that is not being abated. Those are 135 that are roughly that are in the process of legalization. And I can tell you, if I zoom in on this, at this point we have legalized 18, there were 15 that were removed through the program. And the remainder, we've got 12 of them with permits issued, 27 with plans submitted and the others are in various stages of plans due or consultations. Just think for a moment, could you imagine what if we took a code enforcer position and made it into a place that tenants could go to? And that they actually had a place to go? I mean, until the previous item that we just approved that would give $30,000 to folks who are going to be counseling tenants who have issues and questions. I'm interested also in seeing the city extend itself out in that direction as well. Do you think have we ever had a program like that? Do you think that would work within planning and code enforcement where we'd have an office of somebody that tenants could actually go to? I don't know what you might call it, we might differ on the name, but it doesn't matter. I just would like to see a place where tenants could go. I call that our code enforcement division right now and our rental inspection division. I think that's exactly what happens. I mean, when you look at some of the pictures and some of the things that our team brings to me on a regular basis for the types of conditions that some of our tenants are being forced to live in. And the presentation that I provided to the council a couple of months ago provided some of that testimony of folks who are living without hot water, who are living without heat and who through the efforts of our dedicated staff are given the same set of standards, the same set of living standards that everyone else is provided regardless of the income or regardless of the rent payment. And that's what our team is out there doing, making sure that if there are unsafe structural conditions, if there's mold that's present, if they don't have heat, if they don't have hot water, that the landlords are being held to account and that they are providing those base level standards. Why would we need a group that comes forward then that we just awarded $30,000 to get tenants assistance? I believe, and that's something that you all can speak to, but I believe that's focused in large part on the eviction process. And our team is focused on the living standards for the individuals and the habitability of those structures. And so there is certainly, it's benefiting the same groups, but when you ask are there, should there be some place for the tenants to come to, I say yes, right now the tenants come to us and they do so on a regular basis. And we go out and we provide that service to make sure that they do have safe living environments. Well, we're going to have to agree to disagree on this one. I work with students at the university and regularly ask them if they have an issue, which they do, they have lots of issues. They have no idea where to go as far as they're not including, I guess, there's no one who is independent. I guess you'd say who might keep their anonymity and they're fearing being put out during the process of when a unit gets fixed up. So disagree on this one, I guess, because I just have had so many more experiences. I've knocked on over a thousand doors in the past two elections in Santa Cruz and that's not what I hear. I hear more fear of code enforcement and more fear of being evicted and just letting stuff go, letting the water keep dripping, not fixing the heat. Because people don't know, because of the housing crisis that we're living in, people are scared and won't speak up. Thank you, Mayor. Okay. Council Member Brown. Just a really quick follow-up question that I was trying to formulate earlier, but thank you for giving me the floor once again. In terms of the units that, in terms of the code enforcement process, when, so you suggested that there have been successful outcomes where people are not put out of their homes, do you do any tracking on when cases are closed? Like, is there any ongoing communication with the landlord or the tenants to see if the conditions remain, you know, fixed? Or is there any kind of ongoing engagement after the resolution of whatever the enforcement issue is? Sure. I would say that is, and that would be an exception rather than the rule. Typically, you know, there isn't hot water at a residence and we ensure that they get a permit for a new hot water heater and we go out, verify that that is functioning. The permits are inspected and we are removed from the process at that point. There are some instances where through visual inspections and certainly through the proactive work, that's more of a possibility. But in most instances outside of the focus areas, the lower ocean and the beach flats, there is not that proactive work. Once we have established that, you know, the stairway is fixed, the heat is fixed, the hot water is back on, the mold has been eliminated, then we don't go back and do that additional follow-up. If I may, I would want to clarify a couple of the questions because I've got the specific numbers. So far this, excuse me, between July 1st of last year and the end of February, we closed nearly 500 cases and opened over 400 cases in our Code Compliance Division. And it's 16 orders to vacate between April 2017 and the present. 13 of those were either already vacant or owner occupied or the tenant was relocated to the same house or somewhere on the same property. There were three where there was relocation that needed to occur. Six years prior to that, there were 12 orders to vacate. So total 28 notices to vacate in over seven years, so less than three a year. We really, like I said, we really aimed to not do evictions and we do have some of those tenant protections in place. So that's a great benefit that we provide, but we don't want to go there if we can help it. We want to keep people in their units. And I think the numbers speak to that in terms of how few and only when it's really severe life safety issues that we have to take that step. All right. Thank you for the clarification and the information. Appreciate that. So now it's the time for council to take action on the remaining resolutions. Council member Cron, Meyers, Matthews. And just to orient us to the Excel spreadsheet. My understanding is option number one is what was, was that not what we originally, that was the original one. Is that correct? No. Option, well, the original one, but prior to the first presented to you at the very first meeting is this one. Option one is taking the additional 60,000 and putting it towards code enforcement. Option two is splitting it evenly between the two. Option one is taking the additional 60,000 and putting it towards code enforcement. That's it. Option two is splitting it evenly between the two. And then option three is. Anything else we may do? Yeah. For you to determine. Okay. So council member Cron, Meyers and then Matthews. Thank you, Mayor. I wanted to make a motion and take our economic development director up run resolution number three, authorizing city manager to execute a program project contracts loan agreements and related loan documents with community development, block grant and home investment, sub recipients contractors connection with the consolidated plan proposed in the 2019-20 action plan. And the revisions I would make is that the additional $60,000 goes as follows. The CRLA gets up to 20,000 that they initially asked for. The Nueva Vista would get 112,500. The Central Park renovation would get 34,500 bringing it up to what the suggestion is in one of our other recommendations. And the homeless garden project would get an additional 12,500, which they requested 125 and getting them up to 112,500. That would be for the total of $60,000. Okay, so there's a motion by council member Cron. Is there a second in for that motion? Can I just confirm that that includes the other resolution also? Two more that are waiting. Yeah, just to clarify, I believe council member Cron mentioned the third resolution. It's the second one that sets the program amounts and the third one authorizes us to move forward on the contracts and agreements. Okay, so essentially what you're speaking to is the second resolution, which would then lead to- Okay, I understood the resolution three was that one, but yeah. So it would be for clarification on the second resolution is the motion to make these modifications to the funding by council member Cron. Is there a second for that motion? Just so that we can have conversation around second it. Okay, seconded by council member Glover. Question by R.C.D. Clerk. So does that not include the third resolution? I think third resolution will come after we vote on our second resolution because it's sort of the action component. Yeah, we're going to go ahead and take a step by step. How's that? Okay, so we have a motion by council member Cron, seconded by council member Glover. Looks like we maybe need to capture some of the funding modifications. Yeah, could you give those figures again? The CRLA would go to $20,000, with 500 additional dollars or the $60,000. The Nueva Vista would get $12,500 more. The Central Park renovation would get $34,500 more. $34,500 more, you said? Yeah, from our original from the last time we did this. And the homeless garden project would get $12,500 more. Thank you. Council member Myers and then council member Matthews. I think I'm just going to skip my question. Council member Matthews. I don't support this. I prefer to see option one. I feel strongly that the code enforcement serves the health and welfare of the community. Even option one does provide some additional money to the Central Park project. When we looked at these numbers previously, we see that the overall budget for the Central Park renovation is over $200,000. And our staff did describe to us that this ballpark amount would help with the drainage issues. And I believe if Park staff is here, some additional improvements. I mean, just say no if I'm wrong. In general, the overall park renovation, which is very much deserved, is a bigger ticket item. This is an important step and we can add to it. A few thousand dollars more or less is not going to achieve the longer term goal. I think we're getting lots. To be one of our parks. Okay, so you're- Yeah, I don't mean the details. But just experience tells me that the kind of work that code enforcement does is in response to issues raised by tenants. And the item that we will come back to, the referral of people with substandard living conditions for livable conditions would go to our code enforcement. Volunteer advocates can do one thing to advocate. It's the code enforcement officers that go out and have a working knowledge of building codes, health and safety codes, and can enforce those. And I can think of many, many cases over the years where cases have been brought to code enforcement by neighbors concerned about substandard houses, houses with real significant public safety and health and safety problems. So I really strongly prefer option one, and so I'll be voting against the motion on the floor. Councilmember Glover and then Councilmember Brown. Just a question for Director Butler. So with regards to code enforcement, you have the 95, you got the 70, you got the 364. What do you need to operate at the bare minimum to make sure that codes are being enforced? So the 95,000 is actually separate from making sure that the codes are enforced. That is proactive work out in beach flats and lower ocean, and that's what it directly goes to. So the implication of not funding that at the $95,000 amount would mean that we spend less time in those areas and that we're providing fewer services in those two concentrated areas. And by proactively, I know that you had mentioned before that sometimes it's not even the tenant or the landlord, the contact so you're just doing it to be proactive. That's correct. So as we're out there, we may notice things and we are spending more time out there, whether it's through the cleanup efforts or whether it's through our concentrated efforts in those focus areas. And just our presence out there, we identify certain things and it can seek to improve the living situation, the aesthetics of the community, whether it's excessive trash and garbage buildup that we would identify and be proactive about in that area that we wouldn't necessarily, we would wait for a complaint in another area to act upon. So we're actively seeking to improve those areas and to work with the landlords to not only improve the safety and health, but also the aesthetics of those areas. The reason why I was asking is because I share in the experience that Council Member Krohn has mentioned of when I speak with people about code enforcement, it's more of a fear-based response than a appreciation-based response. And I think there's either, whether it's a misconception or a real-life experience where they have had a unit restricted, taken off the market or removed because of code issues and lost affordable housing. So it's just a concern that I also have, but I want to make sure that we have safe housing for people and to be as proactive as possible in addressing those issues. So the reason I seconded the motion was so that we could have this conversation. Okay, Council Member Brown, Council Member Meyers, then Vice Mayor Cummings. Well, yeah, I will just echo that comment. And again, this is, I think, for a broader, a longer term, broader conversation about the role of the Rental Inspection Program, which I think we've talked about holding at a later date related to code enforcement and what happened, this position of units and what happens with tenants. But for today, I guess I have a question for Council Member Crone. I understand the rationale for adding funding in on some of these programs with Nueva Vista. And I don't want to say that I'm not supportive of funding Nueva Vista. Obviously I am, but that is above what they've asked for. And that would be $12,500 above what we have given them in the past. So I'm just wondering if you could explain your rationale for that. It is more than what we've given them in the past, but it is not more than what they asked for. They did ask for $125,000. But we do have a chart that shows the historical amounts. And so if you did award them $112,500, that would be, I believe, $12,500 more. Thank you for that. Also on page 21.5, the Pogonip Farm Capital Campaign also asked for $150,000. And we're just, you know, $112,500 is a good chunk, but not up to exactly what they asked for. Okay. All right. Okay. Council Member Meyers and then Vice Mayor Cummings. Yeah, I appreciate all the work that everybody's done to try to figure this out. I'm glad that we were able to receive additional funds. I feel strongly as well, and I would regret having to be a no vote on this. I do feel like the code enforcement is an important part of what can be offered to the community. That oftentimes is very much affected by substandard living and inadequate conditions in their homes. I'm curious, I guess, Director Butler, if do you do outreach with the university as well? Is there a conduit to helping students understand how to do reporting with regards to any rentals they have downtown? There is an annual outreach event that we do at UCSC. And we have a fair number of contacts with students, and I might actually be able to get you that specific number, but there are quite a few students who attend there. More on an anecdotal basis, I would say that our building official, who I believe has been here about eight or so years, said that he gets far fewer complaints from parents of students than he did at his early parts of the career here, because the standards in many of our housing units have increased. Now, do we have a lot of work to do? Absolutely. And I think that our code enforcement and rental program efforts do a good job at improving that on an annual basis. But there's still a lot of work to do, and we do that proactive outreach at one of the early housing events every year with UCSC. And I will look to see if I can get that specific number for you as far as how many people attend that. Thank you. Yeah, I mean, I think that we have a lot of students who live in those areas, and I think students as well as long-term residents. And I put in an awkward position because I by no means don't want to honor the ability to provide many of our very important organizations on this list with additional funds. But I do believe that code enforcement is very important for those neighborhoods. So as it stands, I won't be supporting the motion. I'll just interject briefly and then I'll go ahead and move it to Vice Mayor Cummings. I just want to remind and sort of orient the council and the community, we get millions of dollars in requests with very limited money. And it's very difficult every year having been on community programs committee to sort of whittle it down because there's so many worthy causes that deserve funding. So with that, and given the tough choices that we have to make, but to move us along, I'll just kind of express my kind of opinion on that. Is that, you know, one of the things that I didn't feel comfortable with last time is to remove the code enforcement component, especially since it's a preventative approach to ensuring that people are living in habitable conditions. But felt comfortable with the funding coming back if we had additional funding to restore some of that. Kind of honoring that between option one and option two. You know, I would be comfortable with either and supportive of option two. But given option three and some of the moving around of the funding there, I too wouldn't be able to support it even though there's a lot of really wonderful programs that are deserving. So I'll go ahead and have Vice Mayor Cummings and then Council Member Matthews back to Council Member Crum. Can I ask Lee another question? Planning director. So I was just kind of curious because there are shortfalls with the option number two. And there's shortfalls with option number three as well. And just trying to understand how that might affect scope of work. Additionally, I think that one of the concerns that many of the other council members have is just that code enforcement has been one of the factors that's led to some people being kicked out of their homes. And I'm wondering if there might be a potential for a refinement of a deeper look at what the scope of work is and refinement around that. Just to ensure that their objective is not to close, to remove housing and kick people out of their homes. But to actually, you know, try to overcome some of the obstacles they're having with safety. And that is absolutely the objective. And just to speak to that directly, I think I've got some stats here that address how many of the units in the legalization program. Most of those have come through the rental inspection and not through the proactive code enforcement. I imagine some of them have been through the proactive. And I saw those stats here a second ago, but they're not coming. I think it was 300 of the 460 or so units have been identified as part of that rental inspection service. And the other 160 have come through people filing complaints on things. I don't have the specific numbers in terms of how many unpermitted dwelling units are identified through our proactive work. When we identify those, we do add them to the queue. And at some point we seek to work with that property owner to legalize the unit. But certainly it is, as I mentioned before, always our primary objective is keeping people in the homes and then making sure that they're up to health and safety standards. Do you have additional questions? Yeah, well, I just had a comment that I was going to make, which is that I've had some students who've worked for me in the past who have lived in homes that have had lots of mold issues. And I actually directed them to code enforcement. And so I feel like if we reduce the funding too much that when we have people who are in these situations, they might not actually be able to get the safety and services that they need. So I'd be more comfortable with making a substitute motion that we adopt option number two, which I feel that from the initial recommendations, we've provided a lot more funding towards other programs. And we've seen some reductions, but I feel that if we think about equity across these programs, we've done a good job of bringing up some funding. And I think that we can also have further conversations around code enforcement. Okay, so we have a substitute motion by Vice Mayor Cummings to adopt option two. I'll go ahead and second that motion. We'll go ahead at this time and vote on the substitute motion and whether or not to accept the substitute motion, correct? Substitute motion is by Vice Mayor Cummings to adopt option number two, which is now being titled substitute motion. And seconded by myself. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? That passes unanimously. So then that's the motion that passes. Now you may vote on the motion. Okay, so now we'll go ahead and vote to adopt option number two, substitute motion on the floor. Councillor McCrown. Yeah, I just want to say I think doing outreach to the students is a good thing. I appreciate that. And the cleanup efforts are also good. There was another colleague used to sit up here with me back in 2000, 2001 who always said, unpermitted does not necessarily mean unsafe. And I agreed with them and I lived in a lower ocean neighborhood for over 12 years. And that's the folks I came in contact with when I lived there and since then as well, we're not being helped in the way that we heard the planning director say that we go out and help people. I think we have to figure this out and I think we have to have more public meetings and, you know, let people know what options are available to them through code enforcement because I don't think that's happening right now. So I just look forward to a process where we plug in with the neighborhood and almost get some direction from them and say, you know, how can code enforcement help the neighborhood and not put people out of their places and in fear? With respect to what Vice Mayor Cummings said, I think how much are we leaving the code enforcement if my motion prevailed? It was a 36,000. So, I mean, 36,000 to do cleanups and, you know, mold and have people, I think that's, you know, enough until we see a kind of change where people are saying, you know, hip hip array for code enforcement because I don't find renders doing that very often. Well, I've never heard it. So anyway, thank you. Okay. So we'll go ahead now and vote on our substitute motion and that was made by Vice Mayor Cummings. So I can invite myself all those in favor of the substitute motion. Please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay, that passes unanimously. And do you need an additional motion to adopt resolution three? Yes. Sort of directing us to move forward on the contracts. Okay. Okay, so can we get a motion to adopt resolution? I'll go ahead and move the item, the resolution three. Okay. Motion by Council Member Myers, seconded by Vice Mayor Cummings. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That too passes unanimously. Thank you very much. So we'll go ahead and return back to our consent agenda item number eight. I believe we left it with a motion, if I can recall, by Council Member Brown, seconded by Council Member, I mean a motion by Council Member Brown, seconded by Vice Mayor Cummings. And we had heard public testimony and at this time there was a series of requests to have friendly amendments by Council Member Matthews. Did you capture those requests or would you like those to be repeated? I could, and I can either read them for clarification or you can repeat them, however you want to. Let me go back to the page to go ahead and have Council Member Matthews read. Do you want to go ahead? I have one as well. Okay. So why don't we have our city clerk go ahead and make sure they capture what you. Yeah, that's because I think that's going to come. That's been suggested. So it's slightly abbreviated to type quick stats indicating both numbers of people service that are residents and not. All right. Total budget from city and other sources. The cleanup of the budget. Services and meetings advertised would be open without exclusion. Advisory Council includes representatives from property management and mediation. Partner agencies also include an acknowledged mediation service. A report back in six months, including the outcome. And one for Council Member Meyer is what the final report back at the end of the contract period. Did that capture the additions? Were those accepted by. So there's just a little bit. My recollection is that the. Council Member Matthews, if you have them, I'll let you go ahead, but my understanding was the. So the request for reporting was in two areas. One that reporting differentiate between city and other residents who are served. City and other people served. City residents and other people served. And that the statistics. The reporting provide information on outcomes. No outcomes results outcomes results and that a full budget be provided with other funding sources. So there were kind of three areas there. So it was two related to reporting and then one budget with other funding sources. Okay. Okay. So just wanted to clarify that and that the media though. So and the advisory group should include someone in nonprofit property management mediation was to be provided as a. Resource for referral not on the board. Well, I said on the advisory council. You did what you wanted mediation service on the. Someone with experience in. Mediation. That's fine. Okay. So that was accepted by the. Okay. Maker of the wishes accepted by the seconder of the motion. I just had a question with regards to that just given the fact that they have a limited funding. The costs of a mediator, I don't think have been included in this. So would requiring them to have a mediator. So that's on the advisory board. That's just their advisory council. Okay. I mean, I understood the advisory council to be advisory, not the people doing the work. So you're right. So it wasn't mediation services to be included in the contract. It's just to have. That area of expertise is represented on the advisory council and also on the community resources to which they refer. The one other point was also that everyone is welcome from the public. However, if someone is disruptive that they can be removed. I said services and meetings advertised to the public are open. Yeah. Okay. I just want to make one more comment and probably the people in the room who were previously who made comments are no longer in the room. But I just want to say for the record, in case any of you all are wondering this. We did actually issue our cross-trip proposals and extensively did extensive outreach to potential providers of these services. And this was the only application we received. So this was not like some special soul source contract patronage for our friends. This was actually a response to an RFP. Thank you for the clarification. Okay. And just for before we move on to additional comments in action. I'm just specifying who is the lead contact for the program. Okay. Excuse me. The other item that I mentioned was to specify who is the lead contact for the program. Yeah, and I think that was forthcoming. So were those friendly amendments were adopted by the making of the motion in the second day of the motion. They capture council member Myers's addition. Is that correct? Okay. So further deliberation before we go to a vote. Council member Brown. Yeah, thank you. Council member Brown. I don't know if I heard anything with regards to acknowledging the sensitivity of the data, the confidentiality of the data, the protection of those that may be undocumented, and then also the reporting and how that's associated. So just because the language is everyone's reporting and we're collecting all the data, but there's no specifications on sensitivity of data or confidentiality. Sure. If we could just, and that's actually in, so apologies for not addressing that. They have given me information and I believe it's covered in their scope of work about maintenance of confidentiality, but yeah. So it's already there, but it just, if we could just kind of affirm that reporting will maintain confidentiality, client confidentiality under all circumstances. Thank you. This is where things get tricky and I guess they would advertise it to specific portions of the community because of the statement. It's open to all members of the community. But I know from my conversations with people that are from vulnerable communities, having people that would openly be aggravators towards them, even if it's verbally makes the space uncomfortable to be able to share openly and honestly. So I'm not sure how that can be remedied within these motions or whether that's something that the group needs to work in their own policies. But just want to make sure that we are creating a safe and welcoming space for people to come and share their experiences of tenant issues instead of it being a free for all where anyone can come and listen in. Council Member Brown and then Council Member Matthews. Just responding to that, I think those are kind of operating ground rules that the program can establish just as the Mayor says at the beginning of our meeting. These are our operating principles and those are established and that's the expectation for the meeting. But even the volunteer organizer who spoke to us, I don't know her name, said, yeah, if we just do a general workshop on tenant rights, we expect that's open to the public. So that's all I meant by that statement. If you're doing a general program open to the public, it's open to the public. Okay, all right, we have a motion in a second. Any for the discussion? Yeah, I would just add, I am comfortable leaving it to the organization to determine their process for allowing members of the public to engage in trainings. That would assume that they are there to be trained rather than to interfere with it. And I'll assume that they will have a system for dealing with that that's appropriate. If we get any reports that something is happening otherwise, then we can address it at that time. All right, all those in favor please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That passes unanimously. So we'll go ahead and move on to item number 18 of our consent agenda. Final item on consent. I don't recall who polled item number 18. Okay, vice mayor Cummings. I just had a question with regards to the fact that the facility was re-roofed and the solar panels were removed for the processes of fixing the roof. And then subsequently it turns out that we can't put the solar panels back on. We have to purchase completely new solar panels because they don't meet fire code. And I was just really curious as to why that is the case. My copper public works operations manager. It has to do mostly with changes in the building code and the fire code. The panels that go on the roof cannot have a lower fire rating than the roofing material. And the new roofing material is class A and the panels are class C. Another weakness or failure of the existing system was an inverter. It's several thousand dollars to replace it, but it also got caught in a code situation where a quick disconnect had to be put in a certain number of feet of the panels, which increased the cost dramatically. So it just got to be uneconomic and illegal to replace the existing panels. A follow-up question. Are there any facilities where we can actually take these older panels and maybe install them currently because of the fact that the building materials that were previously used maybe are in similar areas of code? Yes. We actually got some interest from UCSC and from Cabrera College and the panels are currently being used in their technology programs and are being used to educate students. That was all the questions I had. Okay, great. Any additional questions? Council Member Cron? Just a really happy thing it seems to me that on page 18, the second page of the staff report, it says the installed system reduced the PG&E electric bill from 10,000 per month to approximately $20 per month. That's not a typo, right? That is not a typo. And that's relating to the Bay Street reservoir system. Right. Just seeing that kind of activity, because is there any reason why we don't just go put solar panels on every city-owned roof as a model for the rest of Santa Cruz and then tell them what you can save in your PG&E bill? Yeah, I mean, we have another project ready to put in front of you, depending on your reception of this project, to put solar panels out at the DeMail Lane landfill. And that hopefully will be on your agenda the 11th of June. Other projects kind of depend on some more advanced engineering to support the panels than these two projects would. And so they're a little more complicated and it take a while to get it going. For the record, I would just say global warming is happening and the faster we can go in directions such as solar and other ways of mitigating our carbon footprint is a wonderful thing. I think Council shares that, but they can speak for themselves. Great. Thank you for being here. Any member of the community who would like to address us on item number 18 of our consent agenda? Okay. Seeing none, we'll go ahead and return back for action and deliberation. Motion to move the item. I'm happy to move this and just in reference to the comments just made. I believe it's sometimes we get grants or some funding for us to own the solar installation ourselves and that's great because then we get 100% of the benefits. This is a partnership in which the solar is being a very expensive systems being installed on someone else's dime. So we get cheaper. It's still a savings to us and it's an immediate savings. So there's two ways to achieve this. Either we own it or we benefit from someone else's. That's correct. In any case, full steam ahead. So. Okay. Move the motion. Motion by Council Member Matthews. I'll go ahead and maybe say it was a second by Council Member Crohn since it was almost a tie for motion making. Okay. All those in favor please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay. That passes unanimously. So we are kind of jumping around today. I'm going to go ahead and reorient us. We're on to our consent public hearing items number 19 and 20 of our agenda. Are there any council members who wish to pull either 19 or 20 in our consent public hearing packet? Any comments at this time? Is there any member of the community who would like to either have one of those items removed or to speak to any of those items? Okay. Seeing none, we'll go ahead and come back for action and deliberation. Motion on the floor. Move. Okay. Motion by Vice Mayor Cummings, seconded by Council Member Matthews. Any further discussion? All those in favor please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That passes unanimously. Okay. We'll go ahead and then skip item number 21 since we already heard that item. I know we've had some of our downtown partners patiently waiting in the back here on item number 22. This is our general business item of the Downtown Association, Parking and Business Improvement Area Assessments for fiscal year 2020. And we'll go ahead and welcome up our AD department here to introduce the item. Good afternoon. Rebecca Unite Business Liaison for the Economic Development Department. So every year we bring the business improvement assessment back for renewal. I submit an annual plan to the City Council and the DTA Board approved this plan last week at their meeting. And City's just the fiscal agent for this assessment. So I'll hand it off to Chip, Executive Director for the DTA and he'll take it. Thank you, Rebecca. Good afternoon, Council Member Watkins. Sorry, excuse me, Mayor Watkins, Council Members. I am Chip. I'm the Executive Director of the Downtown Association. Happy to be here today to present our work plan for fiscal year 2020. We have always many exciting projects we do. We do quite a bit of marketing of the downtown of the district. In general, we organize many events throughout the year. And in the interest of time, I'm going to jump ahead. One of the projects we launched this year was a really great collaboration with the Downtown Management Corporation whose work plan is the next item on your agenda. But sort of as a segue to that, I'll introduce, I believe we have a video presentation that was prepared for us by TM Communications that we had to kind of let the community know about this project. This is a project we launched this year in October. It's funded by an assessment of property owners managed from the Downtown Management Corporation and the Downtown Association administers the program. So with that, do we have the video? Is that okay? I would have brought popcorn because, you know, I love movies and popcorn. So it's a very short video and it'll explain a little bit about the Ambassador Program that we launched Downtown this year. And then I'm completely available to answer any questions about our work plan or any questions about Downtown. Besides enough, I love Santa Cruz. I love Pacific Avenue. How are you guys? I wanted to stay engaged with the citizens, be really a part of the Santa Cruz community. So that's why I'm an ambassador. The creation of the Ambassador Program stemmed from a variety of reasons and sources, mainly from the businesses and our board, our Downtown Management Corporation. And it was integrated into our work plan for the Downtown Association to add hospitality and friendly faces. Public space. It's different. I start mine just as some businesses are opening, which is perfect. I get to go through and kind of feel like I'm getting the stage set. I absolutely love engaging with everyone on the street, whether or not it's people experiencing homelessness, business owners, visitors are wonderful because they come here to experience Santa Cruz and I feel like as an ambassador, we get to just up that experience. Right over here, a big farmers market. Downtown ambassadors bring a level of energy that is comforting and strengthens the community around here. Who do I talk to about this? And they really are someone who connects the dots. I talk to them about issues on the street, if there's trash or if there's someone who's causing any trouble. They're just a phone call away and I have called them about resources that I wasn't quite sure of and they helped direct me to the appropriate people to talk to for whatever situation. There's a very positive body language implied as far as how the ambassadors go about their business. There's an awesome group of people walking down the street. Thursday are more than happy to connect anybody to a downtown Ranger or a downtown police officer for any enforcement issues. Anything that we should have on our radar yet? Launched a community app called C-Click-Fix. It's a new line of communication that we needed because a lot of times you have issues and you don't know how to address them. I love the app. You see it, you open the app, you click it and then bada bing bada boom. And then within a couple days it's usually fixed. A downtown ambassador along your way to people. And I also like to like hand out flowers and just make sure that like people who are not from Santa Cruz are having a really wonderful experience just coming here and visiting. They're out there solving problems for us and for everybody in downtown. Having them here is really good for the future of Santa Cruz. So again we launched that program in October of last year with the Downtown Management Corporation. And we've already learned quite a bit and we continue to kind of make adjustments and tweak the program. One of the great benefits of the program we've found is we're really having the continent presence of the ambassadors downtown has really helped us identify gaps in service with things like sidewalk cleaning, homeless outreach and other services. So working with the city on those programs and looking at we've got a number of resources and how do we use the resources that we have more efficiently. So we're already really learning a lot about downtown management and just having that presence every day has been really helpful. So that's one of our new programs on top of all the marketing and events that we do. So I'm completely available to answer any questions you might have about any of it. And I know again that program is funded by the Downtown Management Corporation which is the next item on your agenda. But I'm happy to answer questions about the Downtown Association Work Plan or anything else. Thank you Chip. Thank you for the presentation and the wonderful video. I was just somewhere the other day and hearing the compliments of the downtown ambassadors. So it's really wonderful to hear that they're thriving in our downtown. I think we had a question here from Council Member Myers. If I saw correctly, another from Vice Mayor Cummings. I just said a quick question on the improvement area in the resolution. It's described Chip. And so I guess my question came from a constituent in terms of the services extending across the entire area. So including Cedar, for example, and North and just maybe you could just comment a little bit about that, about whether this is really just Pacific Avenue or if that if the entire area gets serviced. Sure. The Downtown Association is funded by a business assessment which covers a larger footprint which does go from Front Street to Cedar to North Pacific up by Lens Art and to Laurel Street at Saturn Cafe essentially. That's the footprint. That district is the business improvement district. Most of those funds are for the Downtown Association, the marketing, the events, the directory, the many things that do serve the general business community, our business directory, all the businesses in that footprint are included. The Downtown Management Corporation is funded through a smaller footprint and it's funded by property owners, which is just Pacific Avenue and side streets one block off between water and Laurel. So it's a smaller footprint. That's what funds the Ambassador Program. It also funds Uncle Poop, which is a great and much needed contractor downtown. So that's a smaller footprint. So unfortunately, at this time, those services, we can't extend outside of that district. Thank you for the clarification. With a question, if I would help Vice Mayor Cummings. Do you have a question? I just had a quick question about the app. It seemed pretty cool. And I was just kind of wondering how that got developed timeline. If you could just speak to that and how it came about. Sure. Yeah. Well, when we launched, when we were looking at launching the Ambassador Program, we understood we would need a communication system. So we did a bit of research. I was familiar with the C-Click FIC app. It's a third party proprietary app that a number of other districts and some of my colleagues I've seen have used it effectively. The challenge for us. Well, one of the things that we're trying to be very sensitive to is a lot of the things that people are reporting on the app. We don't control. So we were very cautious initially not to overwhelm the city's parking department who does the sidewalk cleaning with hundreds of requests. So we've launched it kind of slowly. They've been extraordinarily responsive working with Kathy and the city parking district who manages and that whole department has been great. So we launched the app kind of as a way for businesses how we print out a list every year of here's who you call for everything. And some of them posted by the register, many lose it. So we really wanted to have a one stop whatever you need we'll call. If you have an issue and you need a homeless service provider, a homeless outreach worker to come visit. Or if you need, you have a spill, we can help connect you with the right people. So the app was one of many ways of communication. We're trying to make it simpler for everybody, businesses, residents, visitors in the district to be able to help us with the downtown management. Make sure it's well maintained. Does that answer you? So yeah, we launched this in concurrent with launching the ambassador program. And it's grown in terms of number of users. It's available for anyone to download. You can click fix. There's also a link on our website at downtownsantacruz.com. If you don't have a smartphone, you can also fill out a request on the website as well. And you can always just call the ambassadors. Thanks. Yeah, it's great. Thanks. Any additional questions? Okay. Just kudos. I really liked the film and it was really well done. I would love to see other places, other people react to it who don't live in Santa Cruz and just like wonder what they think. What is this place? You know, because I thought that it was, of course, it was a good quality of film too. It was done, but just the way it moved around and stuff was great. Thank you. I have to give a shout out to TM Communications who put that together. And the project manager was our former marketing director, Kim Luke, on that. So she kind of knew our messaging a little bit. So it was a great collaboration. I appreciate that council member. Thank you. Mr. Aren't any additional questions? Okay, questions? Softball. So downtown association is funded by an assessment district on businesses, DMC, next item funded by an assessment on property owners. Both of those are subject to protests. How many have you received? None. Yay. And I will just inform council members, there was a time back in the day when there was a whole lot of controversy and people, you remember this, I'm sure. Before my times. Anyway, I think that's really proof of the value that both the businesses and the property owners see in these two programs. They are funded by assessments, zero protests. Good for you. Thank you. I appreciate that. The number of our programs, they're very, though it's funded by business and the property community, they're really public facing community benefit programs. Our information kiosk is a fantastic resource that the business community provides, but it's a great resource in the community. The holiday parade, you know, all of the events and promotions we do are very public benefits. And I feel like the business community understands that the value of that to them as businesses of having a vibrant and healthy downtown that people love. Just going to add to council member Matthews comment. I remember it because I had the litigation. We have somebody who remembers that. And those aren't any questions, we'll go ahead and maybe see if there are any members of the community who wants to address us on this item. Certain additional questions before we do that. One last question, Vice Mayor Cummings. I had one last question for you Chip. I know in the past that there's been like Santa Cruz Music Week, and I was just wondering if that's included in one of the downtown associations events or if that's something completely separate. You know, the Santa Cruz Music Festival is produced by a private group that we work very closely with promotion. You know, we do a number of events through the year, kind of smaller events. And there are several events like the Santa Cruz Music Festival, the Cabrillo Festival, Dance Week, Santa Cruz, and a number of other programs that we work with to help promote and advertise. And that's not one of our events, but we work with them on promotion. I know they've changed the dates a couple of times. Scheduling festivals are very tricky in terms of all the other festivals that happen. I think they're doing it this October, but I'm not positive. Thanks. Another question, a quick observation. There's a ton of stuff that happens downtown that's not produced by DTA, but is promoted basically by DTA. So I encourage everyone who's not already on their email list to get on it. And then you get all these events that are coming up, maybe prides on there for this coming weekend. And the circus that's happening across downtownsantacruz.com, and you can sign up there and we will tell you everything fun happening in our downtown. Stuff to do every day. Okay, any member of the community that wants to address the council, please come forward and you'll have up to two minutes. Well, I notice out here it says parking and business improvement area assessments. And most of the parking downtown is no longer free. There's no two-hour lots. There's a few of them, I guess, south of Cathcart. But the rest of them are not. They're all pay lots. And so I don't understand this parking assessment. Why is there this assessment if the city's already collecting money for these parking lots? How can the Downtown Association also charge businesses for parking that is not free? It seems like double dipping to me. And like I said, I think it's only south of Cathcart where there are two-hour parking lots. And some of those are taken up whenever there's a Santa Cruz Warriors game. Those are taken off the market because the Santa Cruz Warriors have first dibs on those parking lots. Thank you. Thank you. Any additional members of the community who would like to address the council on this item? Seeing none, we'll go ahead and return back for action deliberation. Council Member Myers. I'd like to go ahead and move the motion. Okay, I'll go ahead and second that. So we have a motion by Council Member Myers seconded by myself. Any further discussion? Yeah, I just wanted to ask because I saw Chip stepping forward if you could clarify or try to answer the question. Certainly. The parking and business improvement is the California State Code is called the parking improvement districts. The association does not assess businesses for parking. Many downtown districts business improvement districts do get revenue from the parking district. We do not. The city public works, the parking district does assess the district, but the downtown association doesn't. We're funded by the businesses and then by our revenue from events and sponsorship. But we don't generate or derive any income from parking. Thank you for making that clarification. Okay. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. And those that pass unanimously. So item number 23 is next on our agenda. Very similar in topic. We'll go ahead and have Rebecca introduce the item. Hello again. So the cooperative retail management assessment as it's already been mentioned is our property based assessment in the downtown. Similar process to the DTA assessment are the assessments overseen by the downtown management corporation, which has represent three business representatives, three property owner representatives to council members. Donna Myers and Cynthia Matthews and our economic development director as the chief financial officer. The work plan this year is largely the same. But this year we will be transitioning to funding the ambassadors for the entire year. We launched that program last year and DMC contributed for the last six months of the fiscal year. So it'll be the full funding this next year. But the downtown Rangers will still be in the downtown area as they're under the police department. And then another addition to the work plan is installing five pet waste bag dispensers in the district to try to target some of our hotspots downtown. See if that has an effect. So those are sort of the biggest changes. I'll be happy to answer any questions. From council members at this time. Seeing none, we'll go ahead and see if there's any members of the community who would like to address us on this item. Okay. Seeing none, we'll go ahead and return back for action and deliberation. Councillor Mathews and then- I'm happy to move the item before us. So we have a motion by Councillor Mathews, seconded by Vice Mayor Cummings. Any further conversation, deliberation, comment? I just want to comment. Others have heard me say this before maybe, but I've sat on the DMC board for a long time. And it's a really high functioning board and they evolve and that's part of the pleasure. The nature of the host program has morphed over the years and the administration of it has morphed over the years. But overall, the business community has been very appreciative of the effort to have eyes and ears and a welcoming face. And people seem very pleased with the current iteration of it. So it's good to see a government assisted program that actually is capable of change and evolution and deliver a good product. Definitely. Okay. I just have a quick comment. I just want to say agreed. And thank you for the extensive work plan that you provided, which has some additional information. I just recommend for anybody who's watching, who's interested in seeing what this assessment, what's funded through this program, you can go and look in the attachments to this item. Actually it was item 22, but we're on 23 now. I'm happy to support both. Just to see kind of the breadth of what is, and Chip talked about some of those, but other things that the Downtown Association does. And thank you. Absolutely. Thank you, Chip. Thank you for being here and thank you for your work for our downtown. Okay. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That too passes unanimously. So we have one more item before we go ahead and break for our evening session. And that's our item number 24, Council, Cannabis Ordnance Amendment. Excuse me, the tax rates. So we have Marcus here to introduce the item. The City Council asked us to bring back the ordinance amendment to reduce and align some of our cannabis rates to the County of Santa Cruz. So that's what we have before you today. We have a red line version of the ordinance that's in the packet and a very brief staff report. We have two slides just as a recap. Our revenues for next year were forecasted at $1.90 million in cannabis and includes expansion of the market and some additional, in fact, retail-based expanding. With this action, we're projecting about a $200,000 annualized loss from aligning our rates to the County. Essentially, our retail rate goes from eight to seven. Cultivation and manufacturing from eight to five. Testing and distribution, we would remain the same at one and two. And those would not follow the County rates. That's my presentation. We've talked a lot about this, but we received very clear direction on what to return back with. Okay. So I know we have to discuss this. Okay. And thank you for returning with the item. Is there questions from the Council at this time for Marcus? Council, we're current. What would you say Marcus, 1% tax equals? For retail? Yeah. Well, what are we missing out on? If we tax 5%, 6%, you said 200,000. I noticed in a couple of things I've received. Yes. Does that mean each percentage point is worth $100,000? It's the combination of retail going from eight to seven. Manufacturing cultivation from eight to five. So that's where your impact is. The bulk of it is in the retail right now. And if we went to something like three on retail, how much would that represent? Probably expect that to triple. It would close to triple. We're looking at $600,000, maybe $700,000 loss. Thank you. Any additional questions from Marcus at this time? Okay. Is there any member of the community who would like to address us on this item? This is item number 24 on our agenda. Step forward and you'll have up to two minutes. Good afternoon. I'm Jim Coffes. Thank you all for your service. Every time I come to one of these meetings, I appreciate more of the spirit that it takes to have to study and deal with all the various issues that you do. And I appreciate it. So thanks. Just a couple of questions. We appreciate the fact that you are aligning your rates with the county at this time. We would ask you to consider making that an effective date of July 1 rather than August 1. It seems like it would be a greater benefit to those who you're trying to help with this move. And it would also align with your fiscal year so that the reporting we would have, we'd be able to see real numbers compared to the previous reporting periods. The other thing I would ask you is that you are agreeing to join with the other jurisdictions in the county to create a study group to try to align the rates throughout all the jurisdictions. And as I understand, that's happening now. So you may get a report back in sometime in September or early October. So having that effective date August 1, the chances are that you will be looking at another rate revision of some sort come September or October. All the more reason we think to make that rate effective as soon as possible. And then finally, we would hope that you would appreciate your position as the premier jurisdiction in the county in terms of number of licensed cannabis businesses. And that you would do your best to include those businesses in the discussion moving forward. Thank you. Thank you very much. Any additional members? Okay. You'll have up to two minutes. Good evening, Scott Graham. I thought they were going to reduce it to 7% here in the city for retail. And then the cultivation and manufacturing, that gets passed on to the retailers and to the buying public. So if you reduce that to 5% like the county, it would reduce the amount that would be then passed along, which would hopefully lower the prices and reduce the people going to the gray market to buy their weed instead of going to the retail shops. Because there is a big problem with people going to gray market to buy their weed because it's cheaper than going to the distributors. I understand through the testing, it has to be organic. It has to have no pesticide residue, which you don't know that if you go to the gray market. But making these things, lowering this 1% on retail and 3% on cultivation and manufacturing, I think would help a little bit with the retail side of things. And I'm not sure if there is any testing facilities here in town or not. But if there are, I think keeping those testing and distribution at 1% and 2% is a good idea. Thank you. All right. Any additional members of the community? Seeing none, we'll go ahead and return back for action and deliberation. I'll go ahead and move the recommendation before us. Okay. I'll go ahead and second that. So we have a motion by Council Member Matthews, seconded by myself for the discussion. Council Member Brown and then Vice Mayor Cummings. Just a quick follow-up question for clarification related to the effective date. Yes. If you could explain why August, not July 1st, which is the beginning of the fiscal year. Because the ordinance, the voters adopted and set up as an ordinance, the rates are spelled out in the ordinance, not a resolution. Therefore, it's first reading, second reading, and 30 days after the second reading, which puts us at mid-July before the new rates as soon as they could be effective. The next natural billing period is August 1st. Thank you for the clarification. Is that your question as well? No. Okay. Any further discussion? Okay. Seeing none, all those in favour, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That passes with Council Member Brown, Matthews, Vice Mayor Cummings, Glover, Meyers and myself in support, and Council Member Crumb voting against. Okay. So item number 25 is the last item on our agenda. And we'll go ahead and see if our city clerk has any additions or announcements. I don't have anything new. Then what's on the calendar now? Just one quick thing. We will have to reschedule the strategic planning session. So I think we're going to be doing some polling. Okay. I sent you guys an email. Okay. We'll do that. Okay. Great. Okay. Thank you. Okay. We'll go ahead and adjourn the meeting then until 7 p.m. when we convene. I'm sorry. 4, 6 o'clock. I know. Wow. Give an announcement. I ordered two. Okay. Thank you. I'm not here again. Okay. So we're going to go ahead and adjourn until 7 p.m. Meeting of the Santa Cruz City Council. I would like to ask our clerk to please call the roll. Thank you, Mayor. Council Member Cron. Present. Glover. Here. Myers. Here. Brown. Here. Matthews. Here. Vice Mayor Cummings. Here. And Mayor Watkins. Here. So we're about to begin our oral communications. I would like to ask if you're interested in speaking briefly before the council. If you could self-select and we'll have those who want to speak for just one minute. Feel free to come forward first so that we can get as many people within the 30 minutes of oral communication. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You're welcome. Best. Thanks of walking to me today and welcome to Blue Man focal within the 30 minutes of oral communications at which time we are able to conclude the one minute speakers. We'll go ahead and open it up. Two minutes. So anybody who is interested in self-selecting to just briefly make a point during oral communications, please feel free to do so you will be able to go first. And then we'll open it up for the two minutes. I also want to remind those that are here in the audience show respect to each other, to our fellow citizens who are interested in speaking before us to maintain decorum. If I observe a disruption or an inability for us to govern or an inability for anybody to come and speak before the council with fear of threat, then I will give you a warning. If it continues, I will ask you to leave the council chambers. So we'll go ahead and start with the one minute self-selected oral communication speakers first, and we have somebody here first. Go ahead. It's Keith McHenry, and it's completely hypocritical to be talking about decorum and all that when you and the staff and the city attorney knew full well that by shutting down Ross, you'd be forcing everyone into the streets. And here's a documentation of that. And it's your dishonesty and cruelty and lack of support for the right to free speech and the manipulation of the city council to make sure that a pro developer agenda that for your handlers or whoever you're working for would be the only option available. And so that's what we are seeing here sadly today. So I support the ability to have solutions in this community for things like tenants rights and for the homeless instead of the obstruction and this corruption and this dishonesty which is being led by Martine Watkins, but aided of course by our city attorney and our city manager. So it's a shameful person. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Your next speaker please. Good evening, Mayor and council members. Just like the state that today served to Bonnie Litscomb was the petition for recall for council members Glover and council members Crone. And we have the papers here. They are in registered mail. We are going through due process. So the recall has begun. Thank you. Okay, I'm going to go ahead and remind you all that now is a chance for every person to come and express themselves without disruption or intimidation. If there is continue intervention, then I will go ahead and give you a warning and then I will ask you to leave. And if that continues, I will ask you to leave. I also want to remind you to lower your sign so you're not obstructing the vision of the person behind you. Mr. McHenry, if you could please lower your sign. If there's one more deception, I will go ahead and ask you to leave. Okay, please feel free, you'll have up to one minute. Hi, I'm Carol and Irish. My family and I are over 40 year residents of Santa Cruz. Our 32 year old daughter was assaulted downtown in broad daylight. The assailant was sentenced today and will be free in a few months. And I am very concerned as a person who wants to remodel my home and live in Santa Cruz that this community has gone downhill and we need to change, make some changes to make it a safer community for everyone. And to respect these citizens' rights more than people who are breaking the law. Because they are allowing him to continue to go downtown where this happened. And it just feels very unfair and I need to have this community be more safe. Thank you, thank you. Next speaker, and these are the folks who are willing to speak for just one minute and want to self-select in that regard. Is there any additional members here who are here for oral communications that would like to have one minute? Okay, seeing none, we'll go ahead and move forward with the line to my left and we'll increase the time to two minutes. Go ahead. Hello, council. My name is Elise Kasby. First of all, I would like to say that in these chambers, I never did give a Nazi salute. I was outside and that is a gesture to try to warn people about fascism. In my belief and opinion, which is researched and studied, this country has been trending towards serious fascism since the year 2000 when the media, such as Fox News and CNN and others, decided who would be president for the rest of us. And that opinion is held by excellent media analysts. Four years after that, I led a voting rights movement in San Diego. And I just want to say that researching and studying this has been extremely important to me and I would never use that symbol lightly. I do want to say that the context I was using that in was about the 30-minute timeline. A little history on that. A couple months ago, just after the new year, some of our council members changed the public speaking time, what we're doing right now, from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. They did this because they wanted to make sure that working people could come here at 7 o'clock. It went to vote and very quickly at the end, Mayor Watkins tacked on to it that we'll only have 30 minutes. We're going to limit that to 30 minutes. For a long time before this, and I have been observing council for six years, it was not limited. And my goal today is to ask you all to reconsider that idea. Public comment is the only time when people from the public can come in and address the council in public, that is, with full transparency about any issue that they might care about. Shutting down free speech is one of the most prevalent indicators of fascism. It's happening all over the state right now. This issue is before many city councils, and I would ask you to think about it. One more thing, it's extremely important to address climate change that we have democracy and free speech. Thank you very much. All right, our next speaker, if you have a sign, please do lower it so that the people behind you aren't. Mr. McHenry, I'm going to go ahead and ask you one more time to lower your sign so that people behind you aren't. Everybody see? No, they can't. So if you don't want to lower it, I'll go ahead and ask you to leave. Next time I see it above that level, I will ask you to leave, okay? So we'll go ahead and have our next speaker. If the signs are raised, Mr. McHenry, any further than that, I will ask you to leave. Just wanted to make sure we're clear on that. Okay, go ahead, you'll have up to two minutes. Okay, I have some signs that I'd like everyone to see. My name's Alicia Kool, I'm the president of the Santa Cruz Homeless Union. We become aware of postings on Facebook page titled Santa Cruz Looks Like Shit, encouraging acts of violence against homeless persons and those living in RVs. A person named Cynthia Rittnor reported on a note placed on a parked RV that warned the occupants, they better move along, signed Harry the Flame. In response to a photograph of a parked RV posted by a Mr. Ryan Harris, a person named J.M. Gaston wrote, three plus dudes and a Louisville sluggers wanted. A Mr. Mike Rogers posted gasoline and a match work well together. Jennifer Garcia urges people to falsely report that homeless persons are armed. Writing, didn't you see them with a weapon? Hint, hint, tell the police. However, amazingly, instead of investigating these acts of criminal solicitation of violence, Chief of Police Andy Mills has actually joined this hate website, where his name and photograph appear right alongside of those posting advice to commit murder, arson, vandalism, and criminal assault. Chief Mills should be immediately terminated. He should be protecting all residents, not leading a lynch mob. In the meantime, our union will be taking the matter up with the Santa Cruz District Attorney and the State Police. And I would like for you to view that he's also friends with Mr. John Green. And I'm advising everybody please do not involve yourself in any acts of vigilanteism. The homeless are very much on the defensive right now. They are also armed and ready to protect themselves. So I advise against any acts of violence or vigilanteism. Have you gotten to see all of them? Thank you. Thank you. Our next speaker, please. Hello, I'm Nate Alex, Kennedy at gmail.com, 346-9888. The first thing I got to address here is the new 5G technology. It is really scary. To start out, it is supposed to be really, really fast, so fast that it comes close to computer hard drive access speeds. And not only that, it is extremely deadly. There was a 5G tower that was turned on as a flock of birds were flying overhead and the whole flock died and came raining down. And what we need to do, we need to do as a city is to ban 5G in Santa Cruz, hopefully Santa Cruz County, and try to get as many other cities and counties as we can in the state to follow us and maybe get more around in other states to do the same. This is really important. 5G is deadly. No, 5G. All right, on the next subject, now marijuana is legal and the catch is it is not legal to use in public. So everybody's supposed to be using it on private property in their own home, but a lot of people, myself included, are in housing situations where smoking is banned, which includes everything. You can't do it at your own home. So you go out to a park or something and the rangers come up and give you a ticket. Yeah, it happened to me so far, but I think the best solution to this, what I want to do is I would love to start a pot bar, a pot pub where people can go in and smoke and it would be the main part of the business. And one of the things is we'd need cannabis licenses to allow it to be used. Now, I would love to see you guys help in actually being able to get at least one pop pub started in the city. Thank you. Okay, our next speaker here. Nicholas Whitehead. Whereas the city council has seriously failed to achieve cohesion, but has instead allowed itself to form into inflexible political factions. Whereas these factions at best form temporary allegiances between individual council persons for matters of experience, status, or personal advancement. Whereas this pattern of responding to pressure groups of electoral supporters does not serve the broader interests of our community. And finally, whereas the citizens of Santa Cruz would prefer a more holistic social political atmosphere, I, Nicholas Whitehead, 50-year resident of Santa Cruz County, call upon all previously elected officials of this city to all the county to form a council of elders who can instruct our current city council on diplomacy, best practices, and goodwill to the restoration of harmony in our beloved city. All right, our next speaker. My name is Frances Payne. I have a speech impediment. I cannot talk fast. The last time I was here, I was not able to say everything I wanted to say, because the alarm clock or whatever you have went off. So I need to speak and say what I need to say this time. And I hope that you all would be patient enough to let me finish. A few months ago, when I was walking down Front Street, I had a bunch of groceries in my hand. It was a crack in the sidewalk, and I fell. I landed on my knees, and I was bleeding, and all my groceries fell all over the sidewalk. About eight people walked by, and I assumed they were residents. There were a couple of men in suits. There were some couples that walked by, and not one person said to me, do you need any help? Can we help you with your groceries? They all walked by. As I got up and I was trying to brush the dirt off, there was a person across the street that had a sign, could you help me please? He got up and came across the street, and he helped me with my groceries. He did not have a home. So I want to say that since I've been here in Santa Cruz, I am so shocked at the insensitivity of some of its people who reside here. I find the meeting here is very cold, demeaning, and it doesn't do this. It doesn't give me my right of speech to talk as long as I need to talk. I feel humiliated facing you and talking to you. I'd rather turn here and talk to these people because I have more in common with them. And I know that they are compassionate, some of them are, because they're here to speak about the people who do not have homes. So that's all I have to say. Thank you. Next speaker. Hi, good evening, city council members. My name is Lisa Berkowitz, and I'm the program director for Wheels on Wheels, a program of community bridges. I'd like to thank city council member Sandy Brown for her outstanding support of seniors in our community. Her request to include $12,000 in the city's budget to support the rent for the senior dining program at Loud Nelson is critically important. Meals on Wheels is desperately trying to close a funding gap of over $60,000 for this fiscal year. And we know we'll be facing similar challenges next year. We're asking the council to support council member Brown's request. Having services available with no caps on attendance or without a waiting list for seniors when they are most in need is essential. Several of the city council members, Mayor Watkins and Cynthia Matthews and Chris Crone and Sandy Brown have all been visited the dining center at Loud Nelson. And they've talked with and listened to the seniors and they know how important the program is to the lives of the seniors attending Loud Nelson. Our recent demographics review showed that 47% of the seniors were serving at Loud Nelson or homeless, and 64% are living at or below the poverty level. For all of the seniors who attend three hours a day, Monday through Friday, the dining site has become a home, a place for three hours a day to get a nutritious meal, to visit with peers and friends, and to be safe. And for the homeless seniors to be a place to be warm and dry in the winter time. So I brought along some cards, thank you, cards and plates. Everybody's got them, okay, wonderful, you guys are ahead of me, that's good. And your time is up, thank you, thank you. Okay, our next speaker. Hi, my name is Freda Orrell and I work with Meals on Wheels and specifically at the Loud Nelson site. And I often greet the clients as they come in or as they're leaving the center. And what I normally like to say is, how are you doing today? Which of course, as you can well imagine, can open up a can of worms. So I'm kind of learning to have some other opening greeting. But in support of Lisa and Sandy Brown's suggestion to add this $12,000, I would like to say that I personally get an enormous amount of satisfaction doing this work. And I get a lot of positive feedback from the clients. Coming in, happy to see us, the doors are open, and really tickled when they leave to have had a really good meal. So anything we can do to help support the continuation and kind of fill that gap that our budget has right now, I'd like to say I encourage that tremendously. And I've worked in the community for numbers of years doing community work. And I feel really fortunate to work in an organization like this, and I thank you for supporting us. Thank you very much. I'll just remind those that are in the audience here today, this is an item. This is oral communications, a time for items that are not on today's agenda. We actually have a budget item coming this evening, and so any input regarding that item will go ahead and allow public comment to take place then. So any items that were not on today's agenda, you're welcome to come forward and speak to, and you'll have up to two minutes. My name's Curtis Relaford. I'm an ordinary man trying to do the right thing out here in Santa Cruz and make a different. I've been full driving that truck and making music around here and getting ten tickets on top of promoting peace, love and compassion around the city. I've been getting a lot of complaints. Nigga go back to Africa, nigga this, nigga that, we're not allowed here, you can't park here. I wasn't even thinking about coming down here today, but that police start telling me about, reminding me about what I had just got through doing. I just finished three years of community service working that off. All I'm doing is trying to make a different. Like the ladies say, daughters walking down the street and getting hit on and all of this. I'm making a different, giving them food, clothes, building material and talking to them and taking them to NA at AA. I am not a common person like you are, and I'm not trying to fit in like that. Black people, this black person is having a hard time in a liberal city. What I'm seeing and what's going on with Drew, this guy who just got up here owed me money on a motorcycle and called me, nigga this because he ain't even finished paying me. You guys, take a look at it, step out of yourself, your control, your power. You got to have love behind your power and your love is taking time to talk to people like me. The poise of the poor is the ones who getting spit on, dogged on. Nigga go back to Africa. In this United States, it's all over the United States. Nigga, you can't be here. You can't drive no truck like that around here. Did you hear me? Thank you. My name is Susan Cavallieri. I want to let you know that the New York Times reported this afternoon that there have been 11 stray days of tornadoes in the United States and that we are approaching uncharted territory. We are experiencing a climate emergency. The city council approved a climate emergency resolution in September of 2018. Buildings which burn natural gas contribute significantly to greenhouse gas emissions in Santa Cruz. So it is important to change building codes to electrify all new buildings. The mayor of San Jose has joined with three other California mayors to work on zero emissions buildings by installing electric heat pumps, electric hot water heaters, and induction stoves. In Berkeley, an ordinance has been proposed to phase out gas infrastructure when issuing permits for new buildings. Electrification of buildings decreases greenhouse gas emissions. It costs less to build because gas lines and hookups are not needed and protects health by decreasing indoor pollution. An EPA study indicated that, and I quote, most homes with gas stoves exceed the standard of safe air, and that's quote. Please follow the lead of other cities, protect health, decrease greenhouse gas emissions by electrifying buildings. We need to reach zero net emissions by 2025. Thank you. If I could ask you to please lower your sign, no higher than your shoulders in the front. Thank you very much. Members of the community and city council, it would be nice if Chief Mills actually restored race to the police department's record. So we could tell if there is the kind of concerns that what we heard Curtis Rutherford talk about. Also, of course, Loudon Nelson bathrooms are still closed. So those who are friends of the Loudon Nelson should be aware that it's no friend to homeless people in the broader community who need to use a bathroom. Last meeting, Mayor Watkins twice used police force to clear the chambers and then exclude the public from the subsequent meeting. For the last two meetings, Mayor Watkins has eliminated group representation times at oral communications here. At recent meetings, she fought expanded public comment. This left many without the chance to participate. They took the time to come here, they waited in line, they protested, she threatened arrest, dispersed the meeting twice, locks out the public. Instead of all this tumult and locking, we need an extension of public comment time that would have been shorter, more civil and more sensible. If there's still or has ever been a progressive majority here, will they announce their commitment, please, openly? It's not just a matter of Mayor Watkins' rude robotic interruptions cutting people off in mid-sentence. The public can't get items on the council agenda. Even elected council members have this problem. They're not in her good graces. Glover, in spite of having a council majority eager to discuss his items, found proposed items repeatedly absent from the agenda. And what are these items, why am I concerned about them? Well, they concern their vital missing policies. Survival shelter campgrounds, police targeting of homeless people for survival behavior, public unfriendly council practices. The results, the destruction of the Ross camp with no alternatives. A lawsuit against the city, homeless refugees city wide, a promised rent freeze and just eviction ordinance dumped, and landlords merrily raising their rents. My name is Shane Blanco, and I don't have two minutes worth of things to say, so I'll be fairly quick for you guys. Not long ago, the council decided to wisely start fighting climate change by raising some pricing for parking downtown and in other city areas, like incentivizing people to bike to spike, walk, go to work different ways, which is really awesome action. However, as a youth in Santa Cruz, I think that that action speaks more to us as we are going to be continuing that process forward, trying to keep our climate intact. And so when you apply for a job, in my experience, I've found that one of the first questions they ask you is do you have a car? Because cars equal reliability for employers. If we are to have a position on the city council to move forward with this climate change action, then we need to make sure that the youth, especially in the residents, have a way of being reliable and being good employees, moving forward, having a stronger metro system, having better mass transit, really competing with what we have so that we can be more reliable and continue this action forward. That's it, thank you. Good evening. My name is Javier Rodriguez and I'm here in behalf of the Day Workers Center. To be honest with you, I don't know if it's the right time for me to speak, but I'm going to do it anyway. And so I'm here to tell you and remind you of the importance that Day Workers Center has. Because we provide the last hope for people who doesn't have something to provide for their families and for their own. And we also serve the homeless community as well. And we know that we are that hope that people really, really need to have in the community. So in behalf of the Day Workers Center, I'm just asking you to keep supporting the Day Workers Center because otherwise there's my impact really, really in the people that really, really need that first step to our success. Because we're offering training, we're offering jobs, they can get a cash the same day if they're lacking enough to get a job. So in behalf of the Day Workers Center, I'm here to keep asking you to keep supporting the Day Workers Center. And please hire a worker, thank you. And before you get started, we're going to go ahead and close oral communications after the person in the maroon shirt. So you'll be our last speaker, go right ahead. Yes, good evening. My name is Sergio and I'm on the same boat as Javier and I'm just asking you to support the Day Workers Center. Because it really helps the people that it goes over 50 that sometimes it's hard to get a job. And that's why we're here for it too. Help our community. Thank you. Okay, so you and the person who's walking forward, you will be our last speaker. Come right ahead and you'll have up to two minutes. Are you trying, are you adding? Okay, you will be the last speaker then, go right ahead then. Cool, okay. So I feel a lot of tension in this room right now. Anybody else? Can I go ahead and pause your comments right quick? If I could ask the conversation on my left to please, if you could either take it outside or wait until after, so this person can have their time. Okay, go right ahead. This is a comment not necessarily for the city council. I just wanted to do a general PSA because I feel that looking down the road, there's not a lot of forward thinking. And unfortunately, it probably is because y'all are just dodging bullets every time you come in here. However, this is a world problem that happens at communities that refugees take up a lot of help. And I guess what I'm trying to say is the way we treat people now, as far as what could be established going forward for the refugees that we all may be becoming one day because of the inability to secure fresh water, to guarantee ourselves enough food, especially, I mean, levels of crime that are no doubt coming because of other people's ability to guarantee themselves food. I would just like for everyone to recognize and notice that leadership is something that can be given and that can be assented to. But in times of crisis, it's something that you just kind of do and you follow your gut with. So empowering those folks, I just want to say that, who both know how to live outside for long periods of time, which is one thing. And also are willing to help people who they won't get anything back from. This is not a profitable enterprise. Just think about who you can count on in the times of the most crisis. Because I think, I'm not scolding anyone, but I really think that those people who today are facing a lot of the stress of a falling society. Tomorrow will be the ones that you look to, to tell you what to do when you've lost your house. I'm Cynthia Berger with Santa Cruz Tenants Association. After the election of 2018 and the first or second meeting after that, Mayor Watkins, you said that the people had spoken because Measure M hadn't passed. And that was the context of your comment. And I felt at that time that was harsh because as far as my understanding of being very involved in the election and campaigns, the two people Drew and Justin who were elected, were elected largely because they support rent control. And I know that seems like an anomaly, but that's the fact. And I don't see any interest whatsoever in tenants. On the council as far as your law making. So I brought some ordinances and I'm going to try and speak with each one of you and explain how they will help and how uncontroversial they will be, but they will still help some people. And I hope you will consider passing them. They are a source of income for, you can't discriminate on the basis of section eight. There's a law for that. There's a law for the first in time who is eligible, who's chosen, and there's a law that says you can reuse your background or credit report. You don't have to pay $50 every time because people who have section eight, they have to apply 40 or 50 times so they really can't afford to provide a new report. So other cities do have these laws. There's a fourth law that I think you really should consider because I've heard people say they don't have enough data. And you can make a law that requires landlords to provide the city with three-day notices, notices to vacate, and rent raises. And that when you have all the data provided by the landlords. Okay, then I'll go ahead and close, we'll go ahead and close oral communications at this time. I want to also remind, if the person who's whistling could please stop, thank you very much. I also want to remind members of the community who are here, members of the community that may be watching at home. Oral communications is a time for a 30 minute allotment. This is not a rule that I made up. This is not a rule that is made up by the mayor. It's actually within our city council chamber, council handbook in our charter. And it allows for members of the community to address us during this time with items that are not on today's agenda. But this does not preclude any individual who is interested in reaching out to our council with ideas, information concerns at any other time, whether it by email, by voicemail, or otherwise. So I just want to remind the members of the community we are all open and eager to hear from you and welcome your input beyond just this allotted time during our council meeting agendas. We have a big item before us this evening. It's our budget items, so we're going to go ahead and move on to that evening item before us. And we'll go ahead and ask that we have our staff come forward and move forward with our proposed budget, and here we go. Thank you very much. Good afternoon, Mayor, Council members. Marcus Pimentel, your finance director. I'm here with Tracy Cole, our principal management analyst who's leading our budget with us. There's a whole crew behind us who's not here today. Marcus, before you maybe jump right in, we'll go ahead and let those who are not interested in staying for the 730 item or have any conversations that they want to have outside. They're welcome to exit the chambers at this time. If not, I'll ask you to keep your voices down as we move forward with the presentation for our 730 item. We'll go ahead and say, if you are interested in staying for the 730 item, welcome. And if you could, please keep your voices down while we have our presentation. If you're interested in having a conversation, you're welcome to step outside for that purpose. We'll go ahead and ask that our city staff return now for their presentation. Thank you. So Marcus Pimentel, your finance director, and I'm with Tracy Cole, our principal management analyst overseeing our budget. This is our second budget hearing. We had a very lengthy full day budget hearing on May 8th. During that hearing, you received a preview of potential solutions to balance our general fund. We got a feeling from you of which items you seem reasonably okay with, which items you had questions with, and which items you had very big concerns with. Out of that, we built today's session. We are focusing today on the solutions to balance our general fund. We currently have upwards of a 3.90 million dollar deficit in our general fund for next year. So tonight, we're going to focus on how we might solve that and bridge that gap so we're able to come back on June 11th with final solutions to fully fund next fiscal year for the general fund. That's our goal for tonight, is getting through the solutions. Included in the staff report are various documents. One is a 25 page report called the Finance Director's Overview. We'll be referring to a lot of those schedules in that document tonight. Containing that document are four groups of tables that have different bundles of solutions that we'll be discussing. Our job here is to provide an overview of that and then get right to discussion. So we have about 14 slides. We'll finish with looking for parks and rec director who might come in and help close out our presentation at the end. So our agenda tonight, as I mentioned, we've got essentially four groups of information of budget solutions for next year. Three with solutions. One to firm up the types of additions we're looking at to add to next year. Together, they'll point to a $3.9 million gap that we might have close to $3.2 million in aggregate solutions to review tonight. The first bucket we're going to start with is a $428,000 that represents items from our May 8th budget hearing. But generally speaking, council members had a lot of questions about and some concerns about. We recognize this is probably contentious. I'm not sure if that's the right word I want to use right now. It's the package that has the most potential for questions, comments, and considerations. So that one might take a little while to get through and that's a small size, but it's grouped with the risk factors of some bigger things. We then move into $1.1 million of new solutions that are similar to types of ideas you heard on May 8th. But some of them are a part two continuation or somewhere in that same vicinity. So on May 8th, again, we heard one camp of solutions at $428,000 that had some question marks and the rest seemed relatively okay. Again, I'll pause here for just context. I don't think anybody wants to do any of this. But we're trying to figure out the best of the worst that we can implement and move forward with and have the least impact on our community. Our third bucket, we wanted to affirm what is totaling about $2.27 million of various additions that would increase next year's budget. We want to go through that list and make sure we're all on the same page as far as what those max number is. And then we'll finish off with what we consider to be $1.76 million of what we're calling baseline, solutions that should be on the whole reasonable and ready to move forward with. Within the staff report, we did some rankings and assessments based on what we believe to be the impact to the community and what we gave that the heaviest weight, the impact to current operations, and then the impact to long-term operations and long-term sustainability. So we weighted all of our options based on community impact, current impact, and then long-term impact. Within the staff report, you'll see a green check mark meeting. Low impact, doesn't mean it's great, mind you. There might be green check marks that council members of the community has a concern with, but we just believe the impact to be modest. There are yellow question mark flags that indicate moderate. There might be some concerns, but on the whole might be okay. And there's a few Xs, red Xs that we recognize. There's one we're recommending that has a yellow and a red X that one we're not great about. And then there are some other red Xs in the staff report we are not reviewing tonight. Those are things we're not recommending. So if you want to detail about what we're not recommending, it's in the staff report. Did that make sense? Maybe? All right. So we're moving on to this graph we've seen before. We're looking at the entire city as a whole. We have $155.5 million in budgeted funds that are doing well. These are enterprise funds. And this part of the budget is doing fine. What we're focusing on tonight is our general fund budget. And that general fund budget, it's $107 million. 103.2 is fully funded. So we're looking at just the 3.9 deficit tonight to try to bridge most of that gap that we're missing. And as a recap of what our general fund is looking at for next year, when we forecast out, our current forecast for our publishing is out to 23, but when we go out to 25 and 26, we see a similar pattern. And the phrase came to us, and it's not a phrase we're proud of, and it's a phrase we want to turn around to be something else. But we have a decade of deficits. Starting a couple of years ago, eight of our ten years are going to be deficit position, looking forward. So we want to correct that. We want to turn that around because now's the time when we should be building up surpluses to build up for what's coming. Economic slowdown, higher climate action, climate instigated issues in our community. We need to be prepared for what we can predict is probable in the future. So now is the time to turn this around and now is the time to start making action, bridge those small gaps and start funding our capital improvement program and start building up capacity so we can be more responsive to community needs. So our general fund reserves will be gone by fiscal year 2022. Again, we've seen this before and if we do nothing, this is what is going to happen. The graph clearly illustrates this, what happens to our reserves. We have no funds for environmental emergencies. We have no funds for one-time urgent or opportunity uses. And this is, if we do nothing for the next couple of years, this is what our reserve is going to look like. Red is bad. So just recap, it's really that bottom bolt that we're talking about. We're going to another area where we have no general fund funding in our CFP program. Our CFP program is facilities, it's parks, it's maintaining and building new things. It's dealing with West Cliff Drive, it's dealing with storm drains, it's funding our fleet, fire fleet. A lot of this is just not able to move forward. We have our unfunded list grows every year. So that's one of our bigger concerns right now is we need to find a dependable funding source for the CFP in addition to balancing our operations going forward. Okay, so we all got our budget documents and proposed budget. It's been available online since the end of April. It includes the city manager's strategic message. We've got an improved budget in brief that is in there as well. We added a visual community profile that has been well received. And then we've also added new workload indicators for every single one of the departments that are in there. We've really improved the visual component of the book and try to make it more engaging for the reader. Shameless pug, speaking of more engaging, your finance director's overview. I don't like that it's got my job title on it, but that's what we started with and we're sticking to it for now. So this is the new supplement to the budget documents, the 25 pages provide some overall trend analysis. But more importantly, it lists out in detail all the different reductions and solutions, some revenue enhancements that we'll be reviewing in bundles here in a few minutes. So speaking of that, graphically, where we're at right now is we have three quadrants of solutions. And then that red quadrant of stuff we still have work to do on. On May 8th, we came together about $1.76 million. Again, what we believe to be baseline solutions based on council's general feedback. Again, we weren't taking motions, but generally speaking, there were a lot of items that didn't seem to have a lot of concern. Again, there is concern on everything. There's concern that we're doing this. But generally speaking, there is $1.76 million that we believe, stuff that we can move forward with and stuff eight months ago, we would have just built into the budget anyways. That yellow quadrant at $428,000, that's the items that we'll start jumping into in a few minutes. That's the area we recognize has the most concern. $1.1 million of new things, that green sliver that's again built based on the May 8 baseline. So based on council's feedback, we prioritize $1.1 million. We won't see any new police or fire considerations in there. You'll see a much reduced parks and rec solutions in there. In fact, a very modest amount of new parks and rec in there, compared to what the other departments put in. That still leaves us a little over half a million dollars of unresolved gap that we would have work to do on. And that's okay right now. It's a second budget hearing, not the last. So if we finish tonight that type of order of magnitude, it just means staff will come back on June 11th with some additional solutions to bridge that smaller gap. Our goal is to try to get to that red, really be so, and not have it grow too big. Keep it in that type of space. So with direction from the budget ad hoc committee that we met with earlier, they recommended treating each one of these bundles as solutions. The bundles of solutions as consent items. So we're looking at items one, two, three and four here. And then we'll be hoping to approving them in total except for the removed solutions. So as you find items that you want to remove, then we'll talk about them and link the discussions. So jumping into the big yellow, the $428,000, again, more itemized, more detail on this draft report. This is just a summary of it. This is an example of where we like to see these all treated as one motion and then have council members decide which items they want to pull out and other discuss and if there's some that we're relatively comfortable moving forward with, that batch can go forward and then we finalize what's left. So we can pause here and this is our first exercise, our first budget hearing exercise of the night. We could stop and make sure that there's questions, any comments? For example, after we get done with bundle one, we've got bundle two. This is the new stuff. Bundle three, these are the ads. Bundle four, baseline solutions. And then Parks and Rec has produced alternatives if some of their things don't go forward. These are the types of things they'd rather not do, but this is the next tier of stuff that we didn't include in the reductions. Marcus, if I can, I think what might be a nice path moving forward is if you want to go ahead and finish up your presentation, we go ahead and ask any questions of the council, then open it up to public comment, and then most likely return and get to work on some of these different bundles. We'll do. So examples in our bundle one, and these were reviewed and discussed generally speaking on May 8th. Our biggest one, and they're listed in order from top to bottom, our biggest one is first alarm. These are reductions, private security patrols around the city. By and large, there's a supplemental staff report and a supplemental attachment in the staff report. It talks about the effectiveness of first alarm with regards to its crime rate. And two of the three areas the police department have looked at, crime has gone up since the first alarm has been here, not down. The one area that police department feels very strongly that first alarm has the most bang for the buck is in prisoner watch and special events. They do a lot of good work there, and they really help with balancing law enforcement's time. So this would be reducing only some of those external patrols, and the prisoner watch would stay in place, and the special event coverage would stay in place. That's an example of one of the big items in this list. Other things, 4% community programs. Most of the departments are now at 8% or higher in reductions. The only recommended at level right now in the community programs is this 4%. We have not proposed or recommended anything higher. Other things in here includes $30,000 for public art, reduction to the street smarts campaign of $15,000. And some reductions across the board on various other areas, including council travel and training, and a few parks and recreation classes. These are examples of this bundle, and we recognize all things that might have a lot of different pain points or question marks that come up. Until number two, the new solutions. These come across as more programmatic, more operations-based, differing maintenance, modest reductions around the ends. I use an analogy, the fruit's gone, we picked that fruit, we're breaking the small branches. These are the small branches with a few of the bigger ones. But these are things that we could live with, generally speaking. Going from on the bottom, for example, there's raising fuel, internal charges, and raising fleet costs. Those are things we should do anyways, to let the cost of our fleet be reflected elsewhere. Going to the top, Parks and War facility revenue. The Parks and Recreation Department is looking at their war for some other facility rentals and believes there's some opportunities to increase revenue to generate about $150,000. RIT department has one of the few positions that we're recommending to fund for the full fiscal year. It's one of their IT network and system administrative positions. They still have other positions, but these are critical positions that support the city wide. When we looked at IT, they really don't have anywhere else to go. They're, anything else, they stop doing, it's really, really problematic. Including things like their help desk that we're still looking for alternatives other than closing down their help desk. Other examples in here include vegetation management. I'll call that one out, because it isn't reducing our ability to prepare for fires or create those buffers. It's really a way that we've got other funding sources to supplement that, so the general fund won't be paying that cost. HR would be reducing some, some recruitments and some investigative services. That's an example of something we might have to come back to council on. There are some times when we have to recruit and sometimes when we have to investigate. So that might be a place, instead of having authority beforehand, we come back to council, say, February 2020, and have that conversation about we need a budget adjustment. Those are the types of things that represent this new bundle, more operations impacts, modest on the community side. Under number three, these are the additions. So these can be grouped between things we would have built into the budget anyways, and things that have been requested for changes recently. For example, just a few hours ago, we resett the cannabis tax rates to a line to the county. We're projecting that to be about a 200,000 dollar loss. That one is no longer optional, we're moving forward with that. Labor costs and negotiations, as the city right now is currently in bargaining with any of its bargaining groups. We recognize the cost we had in the budget in our forecast was a little bit less than the actual cost where we're trending now. So it's about $600,000 that we should build in the budget anyways. There's no real decision point of should we reduce that number? That's built, that's baked in, we need to move forward with that. Those are examples of things we must move forward on. Other things, rental housing tax for us, $250,000, that's staff's best guess as to what we might need to support that committee, depending on what direction that goes. We recognize that number to go down and change quite a bit, but right now we have a placeholder for $250,000. That's one that could be discussed down the road and maybe that one comes down or stays in that same place. $40,000 for the census, the census is a big deal, it happens once every ten years. We need to be there and participate in that. CDBG, you guys already took action on that a few hours ago, so that one's already relatively in place. These are examples of this ad list that we really want to spend some time on. Certainly get the community's feedback and then ultimately counsel to affirm are these additions that we're looking at for next year? Well, it might come off this list. Anything that comes off this list are gap shrinks. Our baseline solutions, again, this is going back to May 4th. Generally speaking, the stuff that looked reasonable go forward with some of the things that we'd rather not do. But again, programmatically, these are the things that we feel we can live with. The planning department has two different tiers of consultant reductions. These are staff that help support operations. Because workload demand comes up, whether it's housing, building, or plan permits, reviews. They require supplemental assistance from time to time because their work demand peaks and their staffing level is static. So they rely on external support to help them move things along. This will be another example of something we might have to come back to counsel for budget adjustment later on if we realize we cut too deep. And we know we've had those conversations with our staff internally. They're already cautious and concerned about cutting this deep. But that's the place we're in right now. One that feels like a no-brainer, passing along a credit card convenience fee. We're not on the last city to be doing this, but most government agencies, most counties, most DMVs, if you're paying with your credit card online, there's going to be a convenience fee. We've been holding out on that because we want to encourage people to pay online. But we're at that point in time where that's over $200,000 in general fund revenue that we can stop losing. So that feels like one that we want to do and move forward on. And we've already started that with some things. For example, our transit occupancy tax payments, it's already got a fee that council approved a law that would include on that. First responder fee, that's something that our fire department wants to look at. This would be an example of something we'd come back to you on. We're not setting the fee tonight. We're not starting the fee tonight. It's just indicating yes, move forward, and then we'd schedule a presentation. Fire would present that back to you. So that's an example of something that, generally if there's a fee, we wouldn't take action on it tomorrow. Or June 12th, the day after adoption. It's just signaling to staff that we need to come back and discuss that. I think I'm missing here that we should facade improvements. That's an example of one where it's a great program. We've had a lot of interest in it and it's done some nice improvements. But we have some legal issues right now. A couple years ago, the state changed rules and regulations regarding how the cities can cooperate and support businesses, the grants. There's additional requirements that make that a lot more challenging. So we've seen the demand effectively go down on that. So while we like the program, and it's very beneficial, right now that's one that feels pretty safe. Because we just can't get through the barrier right now of some of the legal additional costs that are being triggered by that. These are examples of things that by and large might bore a lot of people. And by and large, we would have built into the budget anyways. But there are examples of things that are part of our baseline that all total about 1.76 million. What you're seeing on here are the top 15 or 16 or so, and there's more details in the staff report for the rest of the items. So our Parks and Rec Director has been working on, we've been having conversations about what types of alternatives might they do. And what types of things would have come to this list. Again, based on how council reacted to Parks and Rec during on May 8th, we did not really go back to them for more deeper reductions. These are the examples of things that would have come forward without your guidance or that we might still have to do if some of their recommended changes leave. We might have to substitute one parks item for one of these items. All right, for the record, Tony Elliott Parks and Recreation. Yeah, as Marcus mentioned, really this is kind of an additional source of funds tonight for the city council to look at in comparison to some of the items that council reviewed at the May 8th meeting. The May 8th meeting, we presented a number of items. Some were not so palatable based on feedback from the city council. So again, this is just kind of an extra set, if you will. For the council to sort of choose from Parks and Rec, if need be tonight. Again, as Marcus said at the top of the presentation, really all of this hurts, none of these are great. It's hard for us to recommend any of these specifically, but just some backups here for you tonight. What Marcus articulated in the different packages, a package I think one through three. Those items as it stands represents about 5% of the Parks and Recreation budget proposal for 2020. If council adopted all of these in addition to what is included in those other packages, that would represent about 8% total. So just for some context on the overall impact of the Parks and Rec budget. Wanted to take a quick opportunity if I could while I'm up here to just address golf. Golf was a big topic at the last meeting, so just wanted to touch on that really briefly. We had a chance to do some work with our operator at the golf course from the last meeting. And so just wanted to provide a couple of quick updates on that. Generally speaking, our operator and the department staff, we are all in support of raising rates, raising our fees at the golf course. So a couple of things very specifically on that. From that discussion, we are going to put into place variable rate pricing. What that means is on high demand weekends. For example, the US Open at Pebble Beach is coming up in a month or so. Memorial Day weekend, this past weekend. During those weekends where there's very high demand at the golf course, and a lot of people coming in from out of town, the variable rate pricing will allow us to increase our fees on those dates to charge more, especially to out of town folks coming in using the golf course. So in terms of a fee increase, that will allow us to sort of peak pricing, if you will, to capture some revenue on those high demand weekends. So we'll be putting that in place really within the next couple of weeks, as soon as we get that software in place to be able to implement that variable rate pricing. As we talked about at the last meeting, we have committed to bringing a business plan to the city council for the August meeting. So we are working on that really that I think our goal is shared for Parks and Recreation to operate the golf course with 100% cost recovery, sort of operate in the black, if you will, rather than having a subsidy. So that's our goal going into that, developing that business plan. So we'll bring that back to the council in August. The restaurant, a quick update on that, that will open this fall. We are targeting early April, or I'm sorry, early October rather, to open up the restaurant up at the golf course. So good news there. And then in terms of an overall rate increase at the golf course, we talked with our operator about that and intend to raise the overall rates at the golf course effective spring of 2020. So we would still be in a variable rate situation, but we'd sort of raise all boats, if you will, in those rates probably next April. And then have variable rate pricing on top of that. So just wanted to provide a little bit of update and context since that was a major talking point at the last meeting. That's it, I'll kick it back over to Marcus. Thank you. So that effectively in staff's presentation, we can stop for questions right now. See if there's anything that was unclear. If there's anything in the finance director's overview, we can clarify. Otherwise, we can then turn it over to public comment. Great. Thank you so much for your presentation and for your work in between the time we met before and now. Really great. I'll go ahead and see if there's any members of our council who want to ask questions. Council Member Matthews. Do we have these in that form somewhere or? Not this summer arrangement. Or is it, is it, it's not, this is a newer. You're talking about these, this current slide. This is a newer slide we just created today, so he's got a handout that's, this one's arranged in order by number, by value. That one's slightly in different order, but it's the same content. Okay. Did have a question. Do you have any vice mayor coming? There's a number of items in here and the budget related to homelessness. And I was wondering if, if we reduced what comes out of our general fund for these programs, if they could be supplemented by some of the heap and cash funds that are available. Tina could provide a bit more information on that. I think, I think that's to be determined to some extent because we are still working on some of the expenses related to the Ross camp. That's one, one determinant. And then also, there are some funds that are unallocated as well. And we have to go through the half process. And then there's the funding for next year. So that's, it certainly may be possible, but it's, it's, it's undetermined at this time. I don't know if you want to add more, Tina. Good afternoon, council members. And, and as Martin Bernal said, that's absolutely right. So the allocation for fiscal year 19 has pretty much been spent. There's an RFP process for that. There is a little bit of an allocated money. So we're in conversations now about how that might help increase sheltering. But most of the numbers you're seeing in here have to deal with the effects of homelessness, you know, dealing with cleanups and whatnot. And so it's unclear. Also, there were specific rules around how these funds can be spent. And one of the rules was that they had to be directly supporting individuals who are in homelessness currently. In addition, the funds had to support trying to get to a housing first model as well. So cleanups are an area where we will certainly talk with our partners at the homeless action partnership around getting reimbursement in support of this. But it's unclear at this time. So we wouldn't be able to say conclusively, yes, we have an alternative there with Keshen Heap, I think it's a very low likelihood. I was specifically asking because I saw that home and bound was being reduced by $25,000. And so it's just, that's most mainly why I was asking that. Sure, and for that one too, I can talk about, it looks like a larger reduction than it is in fact, because when we originally built this budget back in January, I had increased the allocation for homeward bounds. So we'd had $40,000, I had proposed $50,000. Because we far exceed our budgetary authority on that line item every year. There's more demand than our funds can meet. However, what is encouraging is that for a long time it was just the City of Santa Cruz funding this program. But the County of Santa Cruz under Supervisor Ryan Coonerty's leadership put $35,000 in their budget for this current fiscal year. And last I heard they had an RFP process out to find an administrator of those funds. So overall, there are more funds flowing into the system. So we're hoping that with the shared capacity and shared support will be better off, hope that helps. Other questions for staff at this time? Councilmember Cron. A quick one on the golf course, the utility fee. When we put that up where it recovers the water that we're at the $750,000, what would it have to be, the utility fee to really recover that money that we're using for water? On some quick math here. So far we've raised it $4, right, per round? Correct, with the exception of junior rounds. And I think there's one other, I believe it's junior rounds mainly. I think there's one other category, it's a $2 utility fee instead of the $4. It's about $15 per person per round to cover our $750,000 water fee. And if you did have variable rates, could you have variable rates for non-residents on the water fee? On the water fee. The utility fee. On the utility fee. That's a good question to add. I believe we could, I don't know why we couldn't. I don't see any reason why we could not. Thank you. Any additional questions for our staff at this time? Customers, may I just have one quick question? On the process, are we going to go through each bucket and kind of pull them out under consent? So these are just clarifying questions. Yeah, these are clarifying questions. Thank you. Okay, all right, seeing no additional questions at this time, I'll go ahead and open it up for members of the community who would like to address us on this item. If you're interested in speaking to the council on our budget item, please line up to my left. And I'll go ahead and see if, I get an idea of how many folks are interested in addressing us. Yeah, if you want to go ahead and line up to my left if you're able. And if anyone is interested in briefly addressing us, you're welcome to have one minute. If not, I don't see a huge line, so we can go ahead and jump right into two minutes. But I'll go ahead and open the option. Anybody interested in just quickly addressing us in one minute? Please, free. Well, Bob Campbell here. Just a question really about the community programs cut. Will you decide on a community programs budget? We'll have funds and then decide what you're doing with each of the community programs at a later session. Go ahead and pause the time. We're going to go ahead and we'll make note of your question. This is a time for us to just listen to hear from you and not respond at this time. But we will make note and go ahead and try to get that addressed. Thank you. Okay, thank you, Bob. Any other members of the community want to briefly address us in one minute? If not, we'll go ahead and start with the two minutes and we'll ask that you line up to my left and we'll go ahead and start with you. Thanks very much to you, Mayor Watkins, and to the council for the opportunity to speak. My name is John Hall, I'm a citizen of Santa Cruz. I know that the fiscal issues in the budget are terrifically important. But there's also other issues that are not in the general fund, but in the other funds that go into the budget. And I want to speak briefly about one of them. I want to commend you for unanimously, wonderful to see consensus on the City Council, supporting the idea of a subcommittee to look at the issue of whether the library would be included in a mixed use project on the present side of the farmer's market. And what I want to suggest to you is that you need to, having made that vote and having decided to hold in abeyance the decision about how you will proceed with the library and where, you need to have the budget document aligned with the city council's decisions that have already been made. Specifically, in the budget, in the capital improvement portion of it, CIP 154 and 150 are two items that are at odds with that decision. They're at odds because one of them places the location of the building a structure for the farmer's market at a location, one that doesn't exist and two that is different from the present location. And that means that you can't really have that in the budget and have it as keeping an equal playing field for the alternatives that you're considering about where to locate the library. The second one is even more important, CIP 150, where you're actually slated to allocate funds from Measure S and from affordable housing which are not necessarily slated for the library project. These things need to be corrected in the budget document. Thank you very much. Okay, our next speaker please. So hello, I'm Dana Bagshaw and I'm going to say pretty much the same things I said the last time I stood before you. But this time I'm back by the Santa Cruz Climate Action Network. We feel that you need to take a really hard look at the budget and cut those budget items that actually will, that will contribute to growing climate crisis. In other words, let's get rid of things that help support cars and traffic and carbon emissions. We have three suggestions that I saw in line items that I haven't seen in these displays today. One was the expansion of the Highway One and Highway Nine intersection. So by increasing that, you are inviting more cars in and you certainly will not improve the safety when cars are speeding in that area. The other one was to expand the bridge on Highway One from four lanes, I think, to seven lanes, which will only result in having seven lanes of backed up traffic and time. So it's just, it's a waste of money really because plus it's just encouraging more cars to be out there. We feel that cyclists are happy to go under the highway and not over it like at the other intersection. Another thing is parking garages. We think those need to be eliminated from the budget, not even considered, because that encourages more cars to come into town. And finally, something we've mentioned before, I think, is to electrify the vehicles that you are using in the city. Thank you very much. Okay, my name is Tonya Brito-Bersi. I'm a third year at UC Santa Cruz and I study environmental studies and community studies. I'm here today to implore the city council to take urgent action on climate change. The climate crisis is here and the people of Santa Cruz want logical and hasty climate action at the scale and urgency that the crisis demands. During the youth climate strike in March, students of UCSC, Santa Cruz High School and Mission Hill Middle School walked out of their classes to show their outrage towards the lack of political action towards climate change. All we want is a livable future. We need a budget that reflects our right to a livable future. And I know that the 2030 climate plan is sitting there with everything else on the budget, but this needs to be an urgent and ongoing conversation. We need a step-by-step plan that prioritizes the city's most vulnerable areas and populations, not just a random chart of potential implementation actions. With no continuity or prioritization, this is not enough, we need urgent action right now. Thank you. Good evening, Mayor Watkins and council members, nice to see you all again. My name is Yonika Strauss and I'm the director of Bike Santa Cruz County. And I'm here tonight to urge you along with more than half of the public correspondence for tonight's meeting to please support $15,000 for the Open Streets event. Open Streets is a beloved community event that seeks to transform the way we think about public space. For one day a year, the community gets to experience West Cliff Drive with no cars. Parents can feel confident letting their two-year-old scoot around without fear. And folks in wheelchairs can also freely wheel around without fear being hit by a motorist. Open Streets is a venue for our community to express themselves through dance, music, art and exercise. By creating a safe place for people to bike and walk without cars, our intention is to encourage folks to bike and walk for daily trips. In fact, more than a third of our survey respondents say Open Streets has led to long-term changes in their biking and walking habits. I would encourage you to consider that Open Streets is one tool in the climate change solution toolbox. And to effectively get people out of cars, we must provide venues that encourage them to do so. The impact of the funding reduction would be significant. We are a small team working on a lean budget. While the reduction doesn't seem like a lot, it would be a big impact and we would have to consider whether we could do the event. Please support the full $15,000 for the Open Streets. Thank you. Thank you. Good evening again. Thank you very much for the opportunity to address the City Council. My name is Lisa Berkowitz. I'm the program director of Meals on Wheels, a program of community bridges. I just wanted to finish up my message that I was trying to deliver previously. There is a wonderful card that was sent to actually Vice Mayor Justin Cummings. And I wanted to share with all of you the message from that senior. So what she said is I have attended many city councils and have decided to appeal to you. I've worked in Santa Cruz for over 40 years. Now I am 100% dependent on Meals on Wheels program for my one meal a day. I cannot cook for myself due to disability. Also the friendly staff and attendees are my only conversation and human contact for the whole day. I have no children or relatives left, so these people are my family. I think it's in the spirit of Mr. Loudon Nelson to keep this program alive. We support Sandy Brown's recommendation to include $12,000 in the budget to supplement the rent that Meals on Wheels Dining Center program pays at Loudon Nelson. Thank you so much for your past support and please urge the council to consider the recommendation. Thank you. Mayor and City Council, thank you for this opportunity to speak. I will briefly read a little from this letter which has been updated. It was originally sent about ten days ago. It's from our group which has 1,075 members. When the city of Santa Cruz passed a climate emergency resolution in November 2018, we hoped that city staff would respond with multiple measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Unfortunately, the proposed budget reflects largely business as usual. The council needs to direct policy on this matter. We need to move towards zero carbon as soon as possible. Many scientists say we have to do it by 2025, which is incredibly close. What is in the attachment to this is references to six cities, U.S. cities that are doing huge amounts already that have programs in place that should be analyzed and inspected. Certainly no new gasoline vehicles should be included in this budget, which were in the original budget. That's just plain crazy. We have to move towards a totally clean fleet, and we can only do that a step at a time. Also, the new climate action plan which is desperately needed was axed. So that's not acceptable. Here is the letter. Hello city councillors and mayor. My name is Indy Reed Shaw, and I'm a member of the Sunrise movement in the Santa Cruz chapter. So I'm representing young people who are worried about our future, and we see local government as well as national government as our hope for leading these efforts. We think that the 2020 budget should reflect with this as a climate emergency, and we don't want it to be aspirational, but we want it to be step by step, and climate change is going to affect all sectors that the budget is talking about. So we see climate changes. We need action at every part of the budget in addition to the climate section that was established. Climate change affects all of us, and I'm especially worried about the coastal communities, especially in beach flats that are at such low lying areas. And we hope that this budget really shows that what a coastal community in California can do for our future, so thank you. And thank you very much to what Tiffany Wise-West and you all are already doing. We just think we can step it up even more. Good evening council members, my name is Grant Black. I go to UCSC as well as member of the Sunrise movement. I appreciate the attention the budget to the long term risks that our coastal city faces. The challenges lie in our future are drastic and devastating. The risk of wildfires here in Santa Cruz are present, the coastal flooding is impending, and the health costs associated with the warming planet are, well, they're here. Just a few days ago, a report was released by the Uniconcerned Scientist stating that the Antarctic shelf is warming at a rate 25% faster than before. This means that sea levels will rise faster than we expected. Dr. King spoke of the fierce urgency of now. Well, here we are. I saw a proposed line item in the budget that was cut up here for the climate action plan. I urge you not to cut this line item, in fact, I urge you to embolden this. In doing so, your reputation as a progressive city will be salvaged, to some regard, as well as just take a stance that in the 21st century, climate change is an issue that needs direct action. There we go. So, I understand that you guys are convening not to solve the climate crisis, but you have convened to think about our futures. I'd like you to think about the youth and the future. I'd like you to think about the planet you want to leave behind, and the city you want to leave behind, as well as the reputation you want to leave behind. So, once again, I thank you for your attention to the long-term sustainability in the budget, as well as the opportunity to speak. Thank you very much. Hi, Susan Cavalieri again. I just want to mention two items which should not be cut. And as the climate action plan has been mentioned a couple of times, please, we are facing a climate emergency. We don't have time not to consider everything that can be done to save us. Also, the Janice Health Services, they should not be cut either. Thank you. Hi, my name is Elise Kasby, and I'm sorry to be hard-hitting, but there is no time anymore. We have been living in a progressively fascist society, and what I mean by that is, first of all, we live in a theocracy of money. Money is our religion in the society. But unfortunately, if you are a Native American person who has made their living through subsistence, fishing on the ice, up in the northern regions of this continent, you no longer have a way to earn your living. That ice is totally gone, and those people have been speaking up at UCSC. And I just want to say that I have been working on climate change issues since 1996. 2006, 2016, we're 22 years down the line. If anybody wants to talk to me of the fossil fuel companies and the deep fascism that we're living under, please do. But what I want to say is how this happens on the lower echelons of society, such as local jurisdictions as our own. One of the obfuscations that goes on is reports and presentations and analysis that absolutely obfuscate the issues. But I will talk to something very clearly. Ms. Tina Schull was quoted in the Sentinel as making over $200,000 for her main salary, and another $200,000 in other things that they weren't able to delineate. This is probably a typical salary in a city that's as expensive as this one to live in. But that is more than one of the budgets that you were just quoting up there. For all these services, okay, P&R, this is a part of the fascism that we're living under. If we do not start having, in other words, don't go through this, say, we need to be here in two years. That Arctic shelf that's melting is going to flood LA, flood the entire city of Santa Cruz, all of our food, the valleys where we produce our food, it's time to act now. Do it. Okay, next speaker. Good evening, council members. I am a Santa Cruz community member, and I am an urban designer by education. And I'm here to talk about Open Streets. Open Streets reframes urban space in a really beautiful setting here, and not many communities are doing this around the world, even. Santa Cruz has an opportunity to continue to be an example to other communities of how we can rethink our urban spaces to level the playing field. By Santa Cruz County does really great work for this event on a shoestring budget, and I want to echo what Yonah Castro said, that we need this event to keep going. It brings community members out and meets their neighbors, perhaps in a way that they've never done before. And it really transforms Santa Cruz into the livable, walkable, bikeable community that we want them, that we want it to be. Please help them with this budget item. Thank you. Good evening, Scott Graham. I noticed on one of the slides for the Parks and Rec, there was a reduction in the Arana Gulch restoration. And that's part of the mitigation for putting the Arana Gulch path in. So I'm not sure if you can really reduce that to a level where you're still keeping up with the mitigation for the path. The other thing is purchases of new vehicles for the city is probably unnecessary considering that if you've seen any of these programs on TV where the people take junk cars and turn them into perfectly brand new cars. Like the police cars, the Crown Victoria's, every major component of that car, the front end, the rear end, the motor, they can all be redone. And you can replace the motors with electric motors. You could turn those into electric vehicles instead of having them be gas indulging eight miles to the gallon vehicles. And as an electric vehicle, they would actually be faster. So I would have you consider not making purchases of new vehicles unless they were either alternative, fueled, or electric. And converting the existing fleet by restoring them to new conditions and then converting their motors to electric. Thank you. I just wanted to come back up here and acknowledge your work, City Council. I think your work is excellent, but what's going on with me is God is in my life. God is bringing me here. Before I was doing my thing with this non-profit, by the way, I got a non-profit 501C3. If you want to help me and throw some of that money I see up there, throw it my way. And you will see some changes in the city. And I know a guy who got a bunch of horses too. We could put a fence around Santa Cruz and allow everybody to come in and take a horse. And we don't need all of this. And I go to the Native Americans and I see how those folks live, y'all. We need to regroup, back up, and go take a look at them. Take a trip with me. God knows them folks know how to live together. They pick up here, chikers. They defend women. They defend men. They are one. And what I'm bringing up in here is just spirit from Louisiana. Holy spirit, they call it. And I'm praying for each and every one of you. And you know, I was looking at you when I came up here just to see how many people was present with me when I was talking. When the judge told me to come here, the judge sent me over here, number one, to get help because you are counselor. And counsel, I mean counsel. I haven't heard any counsel. I made an appointment with one of the people here. They was late. When somebody is late for an appointment and both to be professional, that means they don't want to hear it. I wrote a letter. I don't have no response from the letter. That means you're not important, Kurt. So go out there and do something with your life, the light that shine through you. And that is promote love, peace, compassion, empathy for all people. And that's what I'm doing to try to make a different with this 33 years of clean and sober. Thank you. Thank you. Let me go three more minutes, please. No, we're going to have to go ahead and close public comment. Is there any other member of the community who is interested in addressing us at this time? Okay, seeing them, we're going to go ahead and return back for counsel, action, and deliberation. We're going to go ahead and maybe take a three minute break and then we'll reconvene and get right to work with some of our stuff. We're taking a quick break with us. We'll go ahead and get to work at this point. All right. So we have it set up here. We're just sort of taking the bandaid off here quickly and going straight to some of the more difficult decisions here, so we're set up in that way. So Marcus, I'll go ahead and have you lead us through our first bundle. As mentioned earlier, what we're going to do is look at the series of recommendations. We're going to pull out those that we don't feel comfortable with at this time, and then we're going to go ahead and vote on those that we do feel comfortable with and then revisit the ones that we aren't necessarily prepared to make a decision on in that way at this moment. All right. So we'll go ahead and move forward with our first grouping. And we have a series of recommendations here. Marcus went through them originally. Maybe we can go ahead and see if there's any further input or questions at this time, and then go ahead and ask if there's any interest in moving some of the items forward. Council Member Glover and then Council Member Brown. Thank you. Since we're going about this, the consent agenda way, I wanted to pull A2, A5, A7, and A10. Okay. So A2 being 4% community programs reduction, A5 youth museum programs, A7 parks and recreation classes and A10 being the open streets reduction. Okay. Council Member Brown and then Council Member Myers. Yeah, I was, although I think Council Member Glover covered it. Wow. Council Member Myers. I wanted to pull. A10 was already pulled. Okay. Are there any additional items to be pulled or discussion around those that remain? Is there a coming? A4 and A3. Just take them one by one. All right. Okay. All right. So we have A2, A3, A4, A5, A7, A8, and A10 pulled. Remaining is A1, A6, and A9. Okay. Council Member Glover. I was going to make a motion to adopt those leftover that were not pulled. Okay. We have a motion by Council Member Glover. Second. Is there any further discussion or any input on behalf of our staff here on those items? No. All of those in favor? Okay. No, I do have a question. Council Member Matthews. And it's for the police chief and it has to do with the first alarm. And honestly, I don't expect a long explanation now. You've given your rationale for feeling that we don't get $230,000 bang for the buck here, but I think there's anxiety in the community and I would certainly like to know how we can respond more effectively to the public's perception of public safety, which is a lot of what this does and the reality of presence. So maybe another time we can meet, but I just wanted to vocalize that because that is a very genuine concern. I understand the rationale, but I also appreciate the concern. I don't have to answer it. Okay, good. Any additional questions or input on behalf of the items that are remaining A1, A6, and A9? We have a motion by Council Member Lever, seconded by Vice Mayor Cummings, if I recall. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Okay, those pass unanimously. Okay, let's go ahead and go right back to the top. We have A2, 4% community programs reduction. Council Member Lever, you are welcome to kick us off on that discussion if you'd like. Thank you. Marcus, would you mind just reminding us what percentage of the overall budget community programs makes up? Yeah, they're just under 1%. Just under 1% and just for the community to know what kind of things does community programs cover? In what way? So I mean there's services for the community, food programs, just those kinds of things. Okay, so I think that facing the budget cuts that we're facing, it is totally understandable that we need to make hard cuts. But I think that the community programs budget has been the victim of consistent cuts during budget crises for a long time and reducing and reducing and reducing. And this is the programs that support our underserved communities, our vulnerable communities. And I would encourage us to find alternative locations to find $47,000 than a 4% reduction in our community programs. Okay, Council Member Brown and then Vice Mayor Cummings. So I echo Council Member Glover's comments. There was a time when community programs was pretty close to 5% of the city's budget. And it has, that bucket of money has experienced significant cuts along much larger lines than some of our other discretionary budget considerations. So I'm not gonna, I can't support a reduction in the community programs budget. I also would add that these are based on flat funding, three-year flat funding for these programs. And we kind of made a deal with these programs that it is a three-year commitment for in most cases. So it's actually already, we're cutting them with flat funding. So I can't support any further cuts in that line. I'm just gonna express similar sentiments around wanting to preserve the community programs as best we can because these are programs that are really critical for serving a lot of our community members who have the most needs. So I just wanna agree with that. Quick clarifying question. My understanding is that these are the funding allotments through CORE and the city-county partnership. Is that accurate? Yes. Yeah, and so in terms of the sort of commitments and previous arrangements in that regard, is the county shifting any of their funding or would be the only one shifting our funding and our kind of our ongoing commitment for the joint funding between our city and a county for some of these programs? In terms of just general process, I guess would be. Thank you, Tina Scholl again. So the county has not taken up its budget hearings yet. That will happen in June. I've not looked at the proposed budget. I can look at it quickly, but I don't know if they are considering reductions at this time. Okay. I will see if I can find out for you right now and then I can answer. Yeah, I mean, I think if we're in alignment with our funding models, it might be worthwhile to have a conversation with them in that regard potentially. Okay, Council Member Myers. Yeah, I just want to also echo my interest in obviously providing as much as we can to our community nonprofits and so many of the folks on this list provide a lot of important programs for our community. I'm just wondering if there is other methods that we could help facilitate in terms of looking at this shortfall, including acting as a group and thinking creatively about how to potentially help some of these groups close the gap. So I would be interested in trying to retain as much as the funding is possible, but I would also like to challenge my fellow Council members to think creatively and see if we need to get on a phone bank or something and try to help some of these groups with our creative efforts and see if we can maybe close some of that gap ourselves with some outreach to our community. So, but I support in general the programs and I would like to see that number go down if possible. Council Member Mathews. I support all of these programs and have and am a firm believer in our safety net partners, but we are looking at about a $4 million shortfall that we have to correct and we have to give direction tonight and I do believe we got pages to go through, but basically in the ones that were thought to be easy, we pulled three quarters of them and I do feel at this time that everyone is going to have to share in the pain. When the community programs were at their high, it was at a time when the state economy was different, the city's economy was different and we are facing as all Council members no painfully well several years of deficits. I think we should make some reduction in this number. When we look at the chart, a 4% reduction in the non-profit allocations, the community programs doesn't put anybody out of business. So I would like to see some reduction there. Certainly we will all help various individual organizations as we can throughout the year, but we have to have something that we deliver for the beginning of our fiscal year. So I think I'm going to be not 100%, but as we go through this list, relatively ruthless because even if we do all of these, we've got more gap to fill. So I'm going to put that out there. So if I hear you correctly, what you're suggesting potentially is to maybe not go with the full 4% reduction, but looking at a 2% or something less then. 2% and spread it just across the board. Yeah. Okay. So do we want to go ahead and hold on to that at this time? Knowing that we're not maybe necessarily prepared to go one way or the other, I still would actually kind of like to better understand our partnership with the county in this regard. But if I could all of the, our allocations are independent, but also in the contracts that the community programs sign with us. And I think we even dealt with this on one this afternoon was in the event that the city finances change. These are subject to revision. That's in the contracts that are signed. Okay. Thank you for that. Okay. Should we go ahead and hold this one and revisit it? Sure. Okay. Let's move on. Next up is A4, or no, I'm sorry. Excuse me, A3 and Vice Mayor Coings. I just had a question for Tony Elliott. I was just curious about the number of teams that are generally hired on these trail crews during the summer. I travel back superintendent of parks. I can speak to that. The full funding for the summer youth trails program would have a set 10 to 12 teens participating. This last year we had eight participating in the program and the reductions proposed would bring us down to four. Also the intern component, if you'd like to hear on that. As far as the teen intern program, full funding would be 20 teen interns and this would bring us to 10. I'll say again here, these are great programs and there was a time not very long ago when we eliminated them completely and that was genuinely painful. So I think this is one more case. We'll keep them. It's an indication of our commitment. They're incredible opportunities, but there again I think we need to make the cut there. And perhaps if there's other opportunities to help kind of offset that funding in the coming months, we can look to those in terms of partnerships or grant funding such as that. Okay, other comments at this time? In regards to A3? I can make a motion to actually cut that program or cut low, take the staff recommendation of reducing 50% of the budget. Second. Okay, we have a motion by council member, a vice mayor coming seconded by council member Glover to move forward with the recommendation under A3. A4, is the public art reduction? So are we voting on these one at a time or indicating consensus and then? Maybe just indicate consensus. Does that seem appropriate? Well, I mean, we're looking for direction today. So as we've motioned already on the basket, we can signal the ones that we're comfortable with or doing one off. I think maybe do this as a one off. Let's do it. Okay, we'll go ahead and move the item. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? No. Passes with council member Crum voting against and the council member Brown, Matthews, vice mayor Cummings, myself, Glover and Meyers voting in support. Okay, A4, public art reduction, 30,000. Also me. Okay. I was just curious because it says here that it may be necessary to reduce the public art. Is there a, would there be supplemental funding or would there be other sources of funds that will be able to contribute to us maintaining some of this art? Good evening, council members. Bonnie Lipscomb, economic development director. The reduction that we propose for public art is because we have project carry forwards from the current year. So we feel like we can absorb this cut without actually having an impact to, hopefully without having an impact to our public art program. So this doesn't, there were some questions in looking at some of the earlier council questions that came to the finance department about the 30,000. And I just wanted to clarify that these are specific programs that we've funded in economic development that have current year funding that we'll be carrying forward. So there's no reduction to arts commission or arts council or any of the sub-recipient grants. This is really program funding that we're carrying forward for this year. So we feel comfortable, and we doubt they're not, but we feel comfortable eliminating that funding because we think we can carry for the funding for our graphic traffic and some of our other programs with the existing funds available. Thank you. For the clarification, Councilor McCrone. I would move this item just from given what she just said if there's a consensus up here. Okay, so we have a motion by Councilor McCrone, seconded by Vice Mayor Cummings. All those in favor please say aye. Okay, opposed? Right, so we'll go ahead and move right along that's now taking us to item A5, the Youth Museum Programs. And I believe Councilor McLever, was that one? Yes, thank you. I was just curious if you could just let us know a little bit about the youth programs in Pogonip and also more specifically the demographics of the youth that participate. All right, demographics. I'm sorry, I don't have that information. These are environmental education programs through the Museum of Natural History, Parks and Recreation gives a grant to the Museum each year via the budget for $20,000 for those programs. So these are school-age kids. One other thing I wanted to mention, nearly Lagoon we offer through the Museum, really they offer an environmental education program similar to this one. That one is not included in this. So this would only include the Pogonip environmental education program. But yeah, I'm sorry, I can get that information but don't have it tonight in terms of demographics. Yeah, I'd love to see that to make an informed decision on the program because if it's helping to get youth from the concrete jungle kind of area out into the woods or more access to nature than they normally would have, then that is great if it's someone that lives next to the woods and is just going with them out to the Pogonip, that's a little bit different. So I'd love to know who the program serves. And I think that I might make that suggestion just as a suggestion that we would encourage the Museum of Natural History to collect demographic data on the youth that are participating in their program. So when the funding comes around next time, we can make a holistic decision. Thank you. It sounds as though you have contracts with the Natural History Museum for a couple of outdoor education programs. And so this would basically represent a 50% cut in. You're. That's a good, I think this, I would say this is a 100% cut based on what- In the Pogonip. In the Pogonip, correct. But not affecting your contract with them for. Yeah, correct, correct. Gary Ugoon. That's correct, yep. And we have talked with the Museum about this as well. They are aware of this proposed reduction. And I can't speak for the Museum, but our hope and I think their hope and belief is that the program can continue at Pogonip without these funds. Again, I don't wanna speak for them, but I think there's a level of positivity and optimism that this program can continue without these funds. Councilor Cronin and Councilor Matthews. How many folks participate in this program, you know? I don't have that number off hand. Like 10, five, 50. It looks like if I could, I think Councilor Myers may be able to help with that. I just, I'm on the board, just full disclosure on the board of directors for the Natural History Museum. I would refer you to, there are annual reports, they're published online and they have much of the information that you're requesting. But how do we make a decision right now? If it affected 50 people, it's much different than affected five to make a decision on funding. I'll speak for the Museum, I guess, because I did ask them today. We, I believe are, we have already begun fundraising to replace this funding and so I think we are going to be okay without the funding for the show. I'll move the item in. Second. Okay, any for the discussion? I'm just gonna say as a lifetime member of the Museum, I appreciate the outreach that's been done. I know the Museum does a lot in other ways to get kids out. Thank you. Just to say that motion was made by Council Member Cronin, seconded by Council Member Flapper. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Passes unanimously. Okay. Item A7 is the Parks and Rec classes. And we have staff here if they wanna say more about it or if Council Member, I don't recall which Council Member may have pulled that one. Say A7. A7. Yeah. I'm sorry, I was looking at the Natural History Museum's annual report. The 11,000 number of scientific observations made by students in Nere Lagoon. So yeah, just another question very similar to the one that I asked previously about the classes. So do we know the demographics of the youth that take these classes? Any age, my friend. This is. Rachel Kaufman, Recreation Superintendent. These are our contracted classes in the Parks and Recreation Activity Guide for fall, winter, spring, and summer. I do not know the demographics, but it's all ages and we try to keep them affordable to the community. And do you know if the, thank you for that. And do you know if it would be a 6% across the board cut, would it be specific classes? Are we prioritizing different classes? That's a great question. It's 6% for that line item. And what this is, is this is the budget that we pay the class instructors. So we feel that with this reduction, we can continue with the current class offerings. But if we received more proposals or if our class enrollment increased, we would just have to look at how we could fund that and have to be more discretionary with what we offer. But we do feel with this reduction, we could continue with the current class offerings that we have and just have to evaluate it as the year goes with what's proposed. Thank you. That's very helpful. Thank you very much. Okay, so a motion on this item. I'll move the item. Okay, we have a motion by Council Member Glover, seconded by Council Member Matthews. All those in favor, please say aye. A post. That too passes. Okay, that moves us right along to item A-8, which is the homeless camp cleanup. And okay, we have Council Member Myers who pulled that one. Do you mind, Director? I just had a question on this and trying to see if, so I'm assuming it says reduction of 10% of the budget. So I'm assuming, do you actually have a budget, a called out budget of, in this case it would be $80,000 that we're using for these purposes in our parks and open spaces? Yes, correct. This is within our Parks and Recreation Ranger budget. And yeah, this again represents really just a portion of that overall budget. Okay. And do you spend that amount each year? Yes, indeed. I don't know where we're at. I can look at our spreadsheets here and see where we're at percentage year to date at this point, but yeah, we spend that 100%. Okay, and do you, and I know that, Martin, the City Manager's Office also has funding that potentially, is that also used? I'm just trying to figure out if there's any way to reduce this a little bit more and utilize some of the savings for open streets, frankly, I'm just trying to see if I can get them fully funded. He knows the line items and see what flexibility we have. Thank you, Martin, yes. So in the City Manager's budget, we have a few line items around homelessness. They're mostly around shelter. So we have a line item of about $171,000 for our share of the annual winter shelter that the HAP puts on. We have another $100,000 for additional shelter and then we have $50,000. This is in the proposed some of it's being reduced to help pay for shelter. So all of our funds have been thinking, knowing and trying to implement the homelessness coordinating committee recommendations from 2017, really focused on what can we do to help alleviate the suffering in shelter for our adult and sheltered homeless population. So we, that money, and there's a good question, like is that even adequate for the job? No, so I think that this is, but that is an area where Keshan Heap to your question, Vice Mayor Cummings, will absolutely be centered. So our hope is that could we somehow massage additional funding that could be released, the $650 million that's been proposed in the Governor's May revised budget, could that help with sheltering? And then we can have a little more flexibility with some of the funds that Council may appropriate. So I'd say things are very much in the air, but there isn't an easy solution. Council Member Mays? So there's more questions. I would be ready to make a motion on this one. Why don't you make the motion and we'll go in for discussion. So I'd like to make a motion to actually, let's see, I want to reduce this budget actually by 20%. So it becomes, so we would knock out 16,000 instead of the eight. And I would like to use that funding to basically make up the eight that's been taken out of Open Streets. And my reasoning because of this is there will be some availability. I hope for homeless funds to continue to come into the city. And so I'd like to see us be able to do that. And that's my motion. So we have a motion by Council Member Mayers. I'll go ahead and second that motion just to summarize the motion is essentially to use the savings from this item in hopes that we can get some relief from the state to go ahead and offset the proposed reduction around a 10, which is Open Streets. Is that adequately correct? Okay. Council Member Mouthings and then Vice Mayor Cummings. Sorry, Donna, I absolutely don't support this. We've already spent this year's budget by more than 30. This has been an exceptional year. Let's just acknowledge that. But this is an area where we have demand week in and week out throughout our city in our open spaces in our parks. And it really affects the ability of people throughout the city, whatever their outdoor activities are in the ability to safely enjoy our parks and open spaces, not to mention in particularly in the open spaces the environmental cost of these encampments. And I was hard pressed to accept 10% on this and just realizing that everyone has to bear a portion of the pain. I really do believe that as we're going to go through this budget. Hopefully we can do it somewhat more efficiently in the coming year. But anyway, I'm not going to support the motion for that reason. I think I'm not happy. I accept the 10% but not 20. Vice Mayor Cummings and then. I had a question with regards to the departmental budgets because my understanding is that that 16, I'm just curious, it seems like that 16,000 will be a part of the parks and rec budget. And what this is indicating is that the open streets budget is coming from city council. So is it, would it be appropriate for departments to be able to exchange money across between their budgets? It's all general fund, so yes. It's all general fund, okay. And if I could for clarification briefly, it's my understanding is that we had, if I heard maybe parks, a director Elliott has suggested that this was a proposed amount that is now just being reduced. Does that seem accurate or did I mishear that? There was a proposed amount that was actually higher and then you're reducing the proposed amount. Is that correct? This was the 8% reduction that you were already additionally increasing by 30,000 or did I, I'm sorry if I heard you wrong. Yes, the 8% represents a 10% reduction of the current budget. But the current budget, we will overspend that by $30,000 this fiscal year. Okay, thank you for that, I appreciate that. Okay, Council Member Meyers. I have a question for Marcus, if you wouldn't mind. What is the definition of risk reduction in terms of how funds can be used? So in other words, if there are potential, you know, public health issues or something in a park, do we have any way to utilize funds in a different manner? I know we've talked a little bit with vegetation management. Is there any way to look at that in a way that is preventative rather than committing basically a salary to, you know, having to maintain our parks on an open spaces? I'm just curious. I would answer in what we're working with, we're members of a joint risk pool that has many other city agencies in it. And we want to have a conversation with them about a grants program. Help us prevent things before they happen. Or we've been using risk funds, we don't have a lot of it. There's immediate things that are problematic and dangerous right now. Like we've had fences, some cliff work, some things that are proposed in immediate, serious harm. What we want to do is get to a more preventative approach with our entire risk pool. So it's a conversation we're having at a bigger level. I can't answer that specifically. Thank you, I was just curious. Maybe if I can make a suggestion, since we're already gonna come back to A2, maybe we go ahead and revisit A8 and A10 and keep moving along. And if we find other savings and some of the other bundles, we can revisit those. Does that seem okay with the council just to keep us moving? Okay, Council Member Cohen? Yeah, just before we got off this page, I heard three strong votes in favor of A2 and I would like to vote on that now unless my colleagues have a difference and they wanna wait. But I think that we should, in order not to freak out the people who are on this long list of community programs, they would probably sleep a little bit better at night if they knew we were going to not cut their programs. I would make that motion. Okay, we have a motion by Council Member Cohen. I'll just say that I would prefer to wait maybe and see if there are other savings that we can offset that as well as get a little bit more clarity in terms of the partnership, but it's up to the will of the council. Council Member Glover? Yeah, I think that was my understanding as well is that there is a shared perspective by many council members that the reduction to community programs needs to be avoided as much as possible, ideally 100% avoided. But in order to do that, we have to go through some of the other line items to identify some potential savings or revenue generation to be able to justify that not removing 47,000 from the budget. So I agree. I think it would probably be good for us to move ahead until we can identify, because I have some ideas always, we can generate some additional revenue. So. So we'll go ahead and maybe have that motion not move forward at this time and we'll come back to this later. No. Okay. All right. Next bundle. Did we vote on the other? Which motion are you talking about? We went ahead and we are going to go ahead and postpone A2, A8, and A10 and we're going to revisit those and keep moving. So Council Member Meyers motion as well as Council Member Crow. And Council Member Meyers motion as well. Forgive me. Yeah, we didn't vote on that. We'll go ahead and postpone that as well. So we'll go ahead and maybe, do we want to withdraw? Okay. Do you want to go ahead and withdraw your motion at this time and we'll revisit it when we come back to the discussion? Yeah. I'll just draw my motion on item A8, okay? All right. And then Council Member Cron, do you want to go ahead and withdraw your motion at this time as well? Yeah. I withdraw that motion. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member McLeod. Have we moved on to the B? We have not. Okay, so we'll go ahead and postpone those for further action at a future time and move on to our bundle number two, okay? So just visually, just as a point of reference, there are 25 other items that are in that last row of 314,000. So the details in the finance factors overview staff report, and I can pull up a supplementary schedule of all items itemized if that's helpful, whatever your pleasure is. If you've already got your notes. Working on these. Yes. If you've already got your notes and you've got your numbers already down, we're good with that. Okay. Thank you. Okay. All right. Council Member Glover and then Council Member Brown. Thank you. I would like to pull numbers B6, 12, 19, 20, 25, 27, and 32. So Council Member Glover covered all of mine, but B2. You want to run through those again? Okay. We have B2 pulled. We have B6 pulled. We have B12 pulled. We have B19 pulled. And you know what? Why don't we go ahead and stop at B12, because that's as far as this slide takes us, and then we'll go into B13 and beyond at the next line. Okay. So we'll go ahead and stop at B12 and revisit the other additional polls. So for this bundle, we have B2, B6, and B12 pulled. Is that correct? Yes. And then Council Member Brown, did you have a B2? A B2, yes. Okay, Vice Mayor Cummings? I said B3. B3. Okay. So that leaves, no, I lost them. Okay, so B2, B3, is it B6? I'm sorry, B6 and B12. Okay. Council Member Myers? Yeah. B7. And B7. Is that cover all of the poll proposals? Okay. We'll go ahead and see if we want to have a motion for the remainder. So we could do questions on the remainder. We could do questions on the remainder, no problem. Okay, so questions before we move forward with action. Council Member Matthews? On B1, 100,000 is a 50% cut in consultant support and any director here. Those are some big issues there. And I guess I want a feeling of how much of that is, you know, need to have or want to have or can live without. And just also to say, all of these reductions, it's not all or nothing. We can come up with some other numbers here too. So I just want to get additional comment from you on how critical that outside consultant support is for some of the big issues facing us this coming year. Sure, thank you, Council Member Matthews and Mayor and Council Members. I'm Lee Butler, the Planning Director. And the consultant support is absolutely critical to many of the things that we do. We actually have three tiers of cuts that are included in the proposals. In total, it would be $540,000 in cuts to put that in perspective. We've got about $740,000 budgeted this year for consultants and the 540 would bring us down to about 200,000. We have in the past couple of years spent and we're on track to spend, last year we spent about 600,000 and this year we're on track to probably come close to that. So you ask, how do we get to 600,000 with 200,000 in our budget? We would be looking at salary savings and we have some vacant positions and we would need to be using the savings from that. So this is a very challenging position for us, yet it is one that we can't support and it's better than the alternatives of cutting positions. This leaves us the flexibility if we have a great candidate that comes along that we can put them into that position and if we don't have that candidate that comes along, we can use those salary savings and put them into the consultants. Those salary savings coupled with the 200,000 that we have budgeted are gonna put us really close to what we would expect to spend and if we get a significant number of projects and we get the revenue to justify additional resources then we may be coming back to you with a budget adjustment and if the council chooses to pursue any significant advanced planning projects, whether that's something like an update to the Seabright Area Plan or Area Plans for the corridors, for example, anything that is a significant cost, any one of those plans could easily be 200,000 plus dollars each and we've only got $200,000 across building, current planning, advanced planning and code. So it's something that we can live with. It is gonna be very tight and hopefully we don't have to come back to you with an budget adjustment, but if we did, that would be with accompanying revenues. Okay, that was a sobering explanation, thank you. So it sounds like you're planning on making up the gap with positions that are vacant, salary savings. And those will remain open until filled. Is that how you're, because you're short planners, aren't you? We are recruiting right now for a planner. We've got another half planner position that we're short. We've got the most number of vacancies in our building division. I believe we have four vacancies right there. And between those vacancies, we will definitely spend more than $200,000 in consultant budget next year we do every year. Even with people on board, those consultants provide valuable services and helping train some of the, if we're bringing new folks on board, we can bring some of the experienced inspectors out to provide services. So just hiring someone doesn't mean that we automatically can cut those consultant services. But where we're at with this budget, we can support it and it is going to be challenging. Just appreciate taking time to answer that question. No, thank you for that. Do you have additional questions? This would be for the remaining item. Not for the only on the items that have already been put in. So we'll go ahead. Just to clarify, this is for the bundle from a B, I'm sorry, from B1 to B12, right? That's correct, yeah. So we're B1, B12, we've pulled B2, 3, 6, 7, and 12. And so the question was in regards to B1 at this time. Council Member Myers? And Council Member Matthews. I just had a question on B4. I saw some communications. Am I correct that there has been a source of funding identified for the vegetation management for the urban interface areas? The wording on that should have been cleaned up. That's really a partnership with the Fire Department, Parks and Rec and Risk Management. All three came together already in the prior year for that solution. So, yes, technically it's solved and the general fund can let that go. Okay, thank you for that clarification, because that was my question too. And I spoke with Parks and Fire today. So we just cross off that whole business there? Is that, or do we? We're still just noticing that that's no longer a general fund cost. That is a savings to the general fund. But we're maintaining- We just identified funds and a risk fund as well as the Parks and Fire Department budgets to make up the difference. I understand that there is no current line item for vegetation management for urban wildlife interface. Correct. But we'll end up saving the 75,000 from the general fund, but offset it through other revenue sources, basically. Critical thing to be doing. Okay. All right, we'll go ahead and see if there's a motion at this time for the remaining items. I'll move the remaining items from one through 12. We have a motion by Council Member Brown, seconded by Vice Mayor Cummings. Any further discussion? Okay, see none. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. That passes unanimously. Okay, we'll go ahead and return to B-2, and I don't remember who pulled this way. Council Member Brown, thank you. Well, I support the proposal here, which would be an offset by increasing revenues. I just want to ask that before we consider this, I'd like to hear more on the golf course. Sorry, Tony, but I appreciate that you have now been in discussion with the vendor and you're discussing ways to increase fees for peak hours, peak pricing. I'd like to know if we could get some kind of projection and maybe just hold off on this item. Well, I don't know if I want to hold off on this item because I support the increases, but I would like to see what increased revenues we might expect from the peak pricing before making a decision about how to handle golf course fees. I might want to add that in because it is a Parks and Rec item. Yeah, let's see. So on this item, the Wharf and Facility Revenue item, these new rates are already in place. This is already kind of set up. So these are lease agreements with our tenants at the Wharf and then also facility rental fees that are already in place. So this number is really just an update of our forecast going into the next fiscal year. And frankly, this is a relatively conservative number. The revenues could be more than $150,000, but this is an anticipated, I think, conservative estimate on revenues based on those facility rates, updated rates that we already have in place. So this is just essentially updating that revenue budget for fiscal year 20. On the golf course, I think we don't have a really solid number yet in terms of what the increased rates will even be necessarily, let alone how that might affect the 50,000 rounds that we currently have each year. But I think really what we intend to do with the business plan that we bring back in August is really try to break that down on kind of a forecast of what are those numbers and kind of run a essentially a price elasticity sort of effort, I guess if you will, to best forecast what or how that might impact the rounds at the golf course in the broader context within the market and compared to Boulder Creek and Pasatiempo and all these different places, what does that really look like? How do we fit into the golf market? So it's hard to say at this point what that increase will be and what that would do to affect the rounds. But yeah, we hope to bring that back in August. Okay. So thank you. I pulled it, does anybody else have anything to say about this? So I'll just move, yeah, I'll just move. I have a question, but. I would like to see it come back to because we're bringing back the utility rates. If you do like a $5 or $7, how much revenue does that generate for the course? So you're going to do some stuff in a couple of weeks, you said implementing new fees. I would love to see the $5 and $7, $5 local $7 non resident as utility fees. And what would that those fees generate? What does that look like for the budget? It sounds like this will be forthcoming and we look forward to learning that information. Well, I mean, I don't have the next budget hearing. I mean, by June 11th, no. My understanding if I could heard you quickly is that this sort of business model business plan is kind of under development and will likely come back to us in August. Is that, is that seem accurate in terms of expectation? I think the full detailed kind of most comprehensive snapshot is going to be coming back in August. For the June 11th meeting, we can certainly, as we've done, take some steps from the meeting tonight and do as much work as we can to bring back information for City Council to make the best decision you all can for June 10th. I appreciate that. I just want to acknowledge that our staff reports, we try to get those finished by Thursday this week for June 11th. So the timetables, June 11th sounds like a long ways away. That's May 28th, but it's right around the corner for us to get the staff reports all in. If it's available and you're able to do it, okay, if not, we understand. Thank you very much. Okay, but do we have a motion? We have a motion by Council Member Brown. If I, if I, to move forward with B2, is that correct? Okay, seconded by Council Member Matthews. For B2. For B2. Okay, all those in favor, please say aye. Any opposed? That passes unanimously. B3 is next. We have Laura here. And any questions I, was it you who pulled that one? Okay, Vice Mayor Cummings. I was just wondering what the potential could be to have this position go to halftime position rather than eliminate it. If that would actually help maintain some of the services and what the loss would be if we remove this position entirely. So I'll address the latter part of your question. The loss of the position, it was opportunistic as far as when Marcus asked us to come up with an additional scenario from our departments. So we had a resignation. So it was opportunistic in the sense that we did not have to affect an actual person that had the position. So it is, it's vacant as of about a week ago, two weeks ago. So what the person does, as outlined in the comments, it's a reduction in our infrastructure services area. And those are the folks that help mitigate risk, do the security, email scans, if the network is slow, they're the ones that troubleshoot it. If we have to coordinate pulling additional networking cabling in the annex for the remodel, these are the people that oversee it. If we have to repair cameras on the levy or implement access controls for the fire station, it's that group of people. Another project that would be coming up in fiscal year 20 would be the in-car video infrastructure in the police department fleet. So those are the types of things that this position affects. As far as going part-time, we have not recruited in the past for a partial position for information technology. We could try it, what I would project as potential issues is it's a very competitive marketplace for technology for this type of resource and it would probably have to be a really luck that we find somebody local in our community who only wants to work part-time for some reason and it could happen. We could try it, but I think that might be difficult. Okay, a quick follow-up question. So the proposal here is to eliminate funding for this position, but not actually eliminate the position. So we're talking about just delaying, hiring indefinitely, but for this budget year for sure. Our hope is that we would put it on hold in the system that does the positions for a year and then economically see what's going on in fiscal year 21 and go from there. Thank you. Okay, all right, okay. Given that information, are we ready to take action on this? I'll move this item. Second. Motion by Vice Mayor Cummings, seconded by Council Member Glover. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay, that passes as well. That brings us to B6. Wonderful, thank you. The golf course, Director Elliott. So this is a 4% reduction of the water budget. Have you had a chance to speak with Director Minard, thank you, with regards to the maximum that the, because it's my understanding that if the parks and recs, let's just say cut the water budget, then that would impact the rate payers of the community because of the offset enterprise fund. So have you had a chance to talk with the water department with regards to the maximum amount that could be cut from the parks and rec golf course water allocation without there being an impact on rate payers? No, I'm sorry, we've not. I would, maybe if it's possible, I know that Thursday turn in time, a gender report thing. But if you happen to have that conversation between now and then, or offline we could have the conversation, that would be fantastic to be able to at least bring with me to the next meeting on the 11th. To understand the benefits of that, because at 4% we're saving $60,000, which is pretty big. And just so the community knows, as Council Member Crohn mentioned before, we are spending $750,000 a year on watering the golf course. So I would love to see a way that we could brown it out. Thank you. City Manager Bernal? Yeah, I was just going to add with respect to the question or issue of the rates, I think it is true that with lower water use, that means fewer revenues into the water fund. And so what that would do in terms of the effect, and it wouldn't necessarily be immediately, but unless it was a major reduction right away, would be that the water department would have to look at raising rates overall. And so that's just that there's no way to have the water funds necessarily subsidize the general fund in terms of that impact. And my understanding is there was sort of a legal consideration there in terms of our ability to sort of, for lack of a better term manipulate kind of the funding in that regard, is that correct? There are some constraints on that and there are costs associated with the water treatment system and the water production facilities that are uniform costs that are the same regardless of the amount of water that's produced and sold. Those fixed costs are what would have to be offset somehow. Excuse me, just really quick just to respond to what the City Manager was saying. So just from what you were saying, it seems like an either or thing. And especially with what Council Member Cron had requested to come back with an analysis of increased utility fees and what that impact would be on the potential budget moving forward. If we look at those numbers paired with the reduction of the use of water from the general fund being paid from that and supplemented by the utility fees, that was what I was getting out of. What is the maximum that we can do so that we can maximize the amount of money not coming out of the general fund, but being supplemented by those $5 to $7 potential utility fees moving forward? I mean, just if I could just sort of to recap, my understanding is that is still sort of up in the air in terms of a definitive answer at this time, but it's definitely the direction and interest of our staff based on the council input. I mean, I think that there's questions pending, but we don't quite know exactly the details of that. Well, the only thing I would add is with respect to the brownout, I think that just really just has more to do with the impacts of the operations of the campaign. I think the staff would look at trying to brown out as much of the course that would not impact the operations and also that could have an impact on revenue. So it's really figuring out what's the maximum amount of water or the least amount of water that could be used. We're also looking at alternative water sources. Actually, that's another option which could completely offset that. And so, again, that would certainly reduce and or eliminate the subsidy for the golf course if we looked at those options. So they're looking at all of that. I think this is just an estimate of what they think they can do next year to start off that process and it might grow. Yeah, and I think just for some additional context. So during the last drought, we already cut a lot of our water usage overall. So there are existing areas of the golf course that we are already browning out in the budget. So this item here is 60,000, which would be in addition to what we've already done over the past few years. There's another line item in here that for 40,000. So they're kind of broken up, but it's really a $100,000 reduction in water that we're looking at. It's before the City Council this evening for consideration, so 100,000 total. The other piece that Martine referenced as well is we will soon be bringing an item to the City Council to install a well at the golf course, one of what we hope to be several potential wells on site so that we're not buying water, essentially that we can capture it on site and use that water. So that's about a one year payback that will come to the City Council very soon for that item as well. So just for some context, and the last thing I want to mention just to kind of again echo Martine's comments, really I think the idea of browning out the course or reducing costs, reducing budget and the idea of increasing fees, I think we're just trying to be very, very smart about how we do that. We don't want to brown out the course to reduce the experience, make it less of an experience and then increase rates on top of that. We will completely kill the business, if you will. So I think it's a balance of how do we be as smart as we can, considering resources, but keeping that high quality experience so that we can raise those rates and people will still come. And we know that you're working on that and we look forward to doing that. I know that it's more complex sometimes. Vice Mayor Cummings and then Councilor McMillan. I said one thing that might be interesting if we could receive information on is the comparison of how much water has been used by the golf course in previous years, compared to this year's. Just because this year's been so wet already, I would imagine that what the golf course has been spending on watering may be lower than what they've spent in previous years. So yeah, and this is kind of the double edged sword is that when it rains, we don't spend as much money on water, but we also don't have as many people playing golf. So the revenues that you see are much lower. So where I think we hope that we can head is some sort of water capture on site through wells or different options moving into the future. So when it does rain, how do we capture it and use that for those dry times where we are having a lot of play and hopefully see those revenues and round increase. Wonderful. Councilor McCormick. Two questions. How will these wells affect the water table? When you do, if you do end up drawing drinking water from the golf course, will it come to council first? Yes, this will all come to city council first and yeah, I have Angela Gray speak to that. Hi, Angela Gray, analyst at the department. I've been working on the environmental component, kind of the pre-planning of this leading up to a point where we can bring it to council. And that actually up there, hydrogeologists did a full report and it's a confined layer actually up there. So it's not going to have the impact on the aquifer. That was one of the key components we obviously wouldn't be able to or interested in doing it if it was going to have any impact on the aquifer whatsoever. So we're essentially purchasing water. It's percolating down into a confined layer and then we would be able to reuse it essentially if you sort of picture that in your mind. What was the second part of your question? No, that was it. Okay. The other question I had was rounds of golf. I don't know if you know, if you can get back to us, 50,000 rounds. How many of those are unique rounds versus people second, third time? Yeah, we can follow up. Okay. Okay. Councilor Meyers? I was just going to move the item. I'll second it. Okay. Emotion by Councilor Meyers, seconded by Councilmember Matthews. All those in favor, please say aye. Any opposed? Okay, that passes unanimously. I confirm, B6. That's B6, correct. Okay, we're inching right along here. We're on to B7 and that's me. Okay, Councilor Meyers. I just have a question for staff if they're still here. I don't know. I guess my comment on this, it's got a yellow question mark, which I assume means caution. Yeah, I don't know. Question mark though. And I guess my main comment on this and then Bonnie, maybe you can comment on some of the possible things that aren't going to happen. Again, reducing the kinds of things that help our local businesses be successful is a little bit counterintuitive to me, especially when we're looking at our own tenant attraction and retention in our own facilities. I'm assuming that's what that refers to. And then just really trying to deploy resources for local businesses to compete and to be successful here for us. And that sales tax actually helps our budget tremendously. So I'm just curious, it looks like it's about a quarter of a cut. So I'm just curious if you can just give us a little more info on what that means. Yeah, and going through, I had some questions too that I think are similar. So I'll just add them on same vein. There are a lot of things wrapped up in that one paragraph there. So to my mind, it appears that the UCSC joint ventures haven't, my perception is haven't really played out as richly as we might have expected. But then is there SBDC in here? So I think it's Donna's question as well. For context. What's going, what's not? SBDC is in here, we are not proposing cutting SBDC. That contract is an annual contract between 35 and 40,000. So that one we would keep. We do have a couple of programs in there that are retail vacancy programs. One was a parking deficiency fee program. Now that that's being sunsetted out, we figure we can not continue that program. There's still an impact to businesses downtown, some of those. We had a program that council approved two years ago that we continued last year, which was offsetting up to 1500 for new, for retaining businesses downtown. And for businesses that instead of moving away were expanding downtown and relocating within the downtown, but they moved and had a greater parking deficiency fees. So it was to offset that and encourage them to stay downtown. We feel like with the 20% reduction, this next fiscal year for parking deficiency fees, that's more than what we were paying as an offset anyway. So we feel comfortable reducing that amount from the budget. We are basically reducing the amounts but not eliminating a couple of other business attraction retention programs. We're still planning on moving forward with our vacant storefront program. We're just proposing more modest funding for a lot of these. The UCSC initiatives, we still support the business plan. The student business plan competition, we support through Santa Cruz Works, the hackathon UCSC hacks and various programs like that. We're still proposing to help support those, just not as much as we were supporting them before. So it's sort of just similar to the process you're going for. We're sort of looking through this and can they absorb some reductions but still provide some funding that are positively impactful. So that's the process that we went through. Additionally, we have in this part of the bundle and we have more when we get to bundle four under facade improvement. But we have some of our signage program grants. So just funding fewer grants this year than we were hoping to do. And then additionally, we have some of our web tools, some of our program Zoom prospector. I'm not sure if any of you are familiar with some of the programs that are available as business outreach services. Some of those are hosting, providing those services. So reduction in the scope of those contracts for the year ahead. Looking to see what else is under here. I think that's the majority of them. Yeah, I'm prepared to move the item. But yeah, just again, hard to see local businesses not have support. But I'll move the item. Okay. Since we have a motion by Council Member Meyer, seconded by Council Member Matthews. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay, that two passes unanimously. And that was B7. So the last on this bundle is B12, and Council Member Glamour. Thank you. So yeah, this was interesting to see a 3% increase in the raise of fuel rates. Just wondering, is there a maximum that we can increase that? Or was that three just chosen because it was three? Hello. Mark Dettel, Director of Public Works. Last year we used 250,000 gallons of fuel combined, both general fund and utilities, about almost 100,000 of just general funds. So if you were to gain the $25,000 in general fund, you'd have to raise fuel price about $0.25 a gallon for the general fund. If you passed it over all funds, it'd be about $0.10 a gallon. But then you'd be limited on what you could use with the funds that were generated with the enterprises. So if you're looking at $25,000 increase for general fund use, it's $0.25 a gallon. And with that, do you see it having an impact on the amount of fuel used? Because our ultimate goal, I think, would be providing and encouraging more reserved fuel usage. Especially as we heard from our community members about the use of fuel and fossil fuels. The issue of climate change, and just as you just mentioned, the hundreds of thousands of gallons, how many thousand gallons? 250,000 gallons. 250,000 gallons of gasoline every year. Not gasoline and diesel combined. Gasoline and diesel, so fossil fuels. Right. I would love to see this at 6% if possible. I think, I don't know, it's going to have an impact on fuel usage. What will have more of an impact is replacing older vehicles in the fleet, getting them more fuel efficient, or going to electric and those type of things. So right now, employees don't have a choice on what vehicles they drive. They have a vehicle that's assigned to them. So it doesn't really, I don't think you're going to make that change in, it's not like a consumer who has to pay higher for gas will change to upgrade his car. I don't think you're going to see that directly. But I do appreciate what you did say is it may not change the cars that they're using right now, but it could push towards electrification. Yeah, I think that may be where the focus should be instead of, I think you're going to have more impact on that location. Thank you. Okay, thank you for the clarification. Council Member Mathews, so are you prepared to support this? We're just waiting to see if there was anyone else that had comments on it. I would love to see this higher than 3%, as we heard from our community members. We'd love to see an aggressive approach towards the use of fossil fuels and doing everything we can to divert the use of it. So, I'm gauging from Director Dettel's response from my 6%, I would be happy to move that we increase this to 4%. I just want to clarify, I think I understood Director Dettel to say that a higher fee would make it more difficult to acquire electric vehicles because it would increase the cost to the general fund. But I'm not sure, maybe he can clarify, I just want to make sure. Maybe if you want to speak to the potential of a 4%, or just make the case for three. Right, I mean, I think 3% raises $25,000, I mean, it's passed on to the users. So, it's not really a net savings because it's going to affect police's budget and parks budget and public works and so, it's not a net saving, it's just a distribution. And so, when people look at new vehicles, maybe they look at more fuel efficient vehicles, but that's more long term. So, it's an incentive, but it's not a direct change in behavior, I don't think. Right, I don't imagine that anything that we do immediately will have a direct game changing effect on everything. But what I am suggesting and what Director Dettel just pointed out is that while it won't impact anything right away, it will make departments start looking at their overall fuel usage and asking ourselves, hey, do we want to be driving as much, idling as much, or when the time comes for a new car to swap out, maybe we could look at electric and that would free up x amount of money in our department's budget. So, that's the logic behind it and I would encourage this body to take some rather forward thinking steps on the use of fossil fuels. Even if it's just a 1% increase above staff recommendations on fuel rates, it even says here a small increase. So, if they're considering this to be small, 1% more shouldn't be that much of an impact, plus we'll get more money, plus we'll hopefully change kind of behaviors. I'll second. Okay, so we have a motion by Council Member Glever, seconded by Vice Mayor Cummings. Council Member Matthews. This all just shows up in an increase in the general fund cost to the individual departments, correct? Yes. I'm not charging, I'm not saving anything, really. But not to enterprise funds too? Yeah, it'll ripple throughout. Yeah, that's where the relief comes from for the general fund then, right? Not directly, no. We still have to account for the revenues that come from the enterprise fund to make sure they're not being used for general fund purposes. So, they're segregated as they flow in, essentially. There's very marginal overhead rates. There might be some gain on the overhead rates, for example, as we charge things out. Marginal gain. Okay, okay, so, yeah, not a huge savings, but intention of sort of a deterrent if I can summarize, I think. Okay, I just have to ask again, because I see he had a check. Is this anything that drives you crazy, or is counter-intuitive, or what? I feel like I haven't got the whole picture here. So, maybe just speak to whether or not the 1%, how that- For the additional 1%. Yeah, I think so. I think it's a small number. It may, instead of 25 cents a gallon, it's going to be 30 cents a gallon difference. Again, the average, the worker's not going to see a difference. It's when you look at your budget at the end of the year. How much has our fuel cost gone up? What can we do to reduce that? Are we driving to those kind of things? It's just, it's putting the cost on the use of the, on the fuel. So anyway, it just passes the cost that way. There's a little, and any of that revenue could then be used to offset. Right now we have a carbon fund already, it's 10 cents a gallon. This would just go to help that, basically. Great, absolutely thank you. Okay, seems, okay, thank you for the clarification, it's phenomenal. Okay, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That passes also unanimously. Okay, so that covers our list here, and we'll move to the next bundle. We're on to B13. I've got dueling mice here, give me just a half second. Take your time. I don't have any water, so it's okay. You can get a grouping of them on this grid at once. So, visually you've got B13 through B26 arranged in order by value. Again, these correspond to what's in your staff report, in total there's I think down to B36 is our total list. Okay, so maybe we'll just stick to the ones that we can see. 13 to 26. 13 to 26, and my previous summary of polled ones is 1920, 25, 20. Okay, that's it for this group then. 19, 20, 25, is that correct? Okay. Vice Mayor Cummings? I just had a question, and maybe this is for Mark Dettel. And I just thought I'd ask this as a general one because the software B14, 16, and 17, it's the reduction in a lot of building repairs, remodeling, upgrades, and was just wanting to get a sense from you how this might impact, because I know a lot of our buildings. There's a lot of deferred maintenance with many of our buildings, and if this would actually contribute to increasing that deferred maintenance or? It definitely does. It slows down repairs. We're constantly repairing existing buildings, and this is just kind of a direct reduction of the budget. All they had in their facilities budget is basically a fixed number of, we use that throughout, spread it over our buildings based on requests for improvements or repairs, typically repairs at this point. So it will have a direct impact on what we can do. Mr. Matthews, I had the same reaction to that whole package. It wasn't clear to me how much they differentiated. One looks like is preventive. One is utilizing outside contractors for things we can't do in-house. And the third, it's just more repair and upgrades. Yeah, it's really just based on objects. There's different, our budget's broken down by different objects, it's either maintenance repairs, whether it's contract, that type of thing. If Mike can give you the specific details if you want questions. I mean, these all seem to me like false economies. Well, it's a delay. You're going to have an issue later, and then you're going to have to do a major repair. And here again, I would say we could, depending on what we're told here, make some cuts, not necessarily these. And I noticed one is a 14% decrease, one is the 31% decrease, another is 9% decrease. Just sort of shift the percentages. Or just illuminate us. Yeah, these cuts have impacts to specific buildings, and they have cuts city-wide. So specific buildings, for example, the Civic Auditorium, we've been trying to get the roof repaired there for years. That would, again, be deferred. There's spalling in the concrete walls it needs to be dealt with before it gets out of hand. There's HVAC repairs at the police department of fire sprinkler repairs. Roof repairs, again, at the city hall, exterior paint at the annex, parking lot maintenance, not even repairs, just maintenance. And then city-wide, you're looking at basically a reduction in engineering support for a wide variety of projects that requires engineering input from mechanical, electrical, civil, structural engineers to really do it right. And we have ADA modifications we need to do city-wide. We'd be in the position of having to do just the smallest of those that are required by law rather than a more comprehensive list to get us up to speed there. There's all kinds of between-the-crack supports that facilities maintenance does for projects executed by other departments. Things that are not by oversight but just don't show up in the contract for construction activities that somebody has to deal with, signage, striping, having the windows washed at the end of the job, those kinds of things that we always end up backfilling for other departments on. Those would be affected as well. Well, just clearly looking at these numbers, I don't know which category would come out of. $20,000 is not going to fix the roof on the Civic. I mean, that list you gave us was a great, big, long capital improvement list, wasn't it? Right, right. In the general activity, though, of building maintenance, there's several line items that we draw on for different ones of these tasks. Materials, contractors, professional design, that kind of thing. Things that are completely subcontracted out as well. And I guess where I'm trying to go with this, and I think maybe where you were too, is at what point is it just foolish to not be doing these things? Are we past that point already? Well, you know, quite honestly, I think I'd rather set those aside. And it gets to working conditions. I mean, my God, if the employee's in a place and HVAC doesn't work? Right. So we're talking just leaking? So we'll go ahead and maybe come back to be 14, 15, and 16. Okay. 14, 15, and 16, we're going to hold off defer. Okay, that brings us then to the remaining. So right now we have B19, 20, and 25 pulled. Any other additions, or are we prepared to move the remaining, which would be B17, 18, and then 21 to 24. I'm prepared to make a motion for that. I'll move the remaining items. We have a motion by vice-versa. I'll second. Seconded by. Again, they were which number? Sure. That would be B17, 18, B21, 22, 23, and 24. And we'll revisit B19, 20, and 25. Just checking on B13 and B26. Are you saying I didn't have a flag that those were pulled, those being included? Forgive me, yes. B13 and B26 are also included. That's right, thank you for that. So the only remaining ones that will be revisited are B14, 15, and 16 at a separate time. B19, 20, and 25. We'll go ahead and revisit after we make a motion on this package. Could I add 27 to that, to the liaison, the community liaison? We're not quite there yet, but we'll get there. Yeah, no, we're going to stop at 26 at this moment, yeah. Okay, so we have a motion by Vice Mayor Cummings, seconded by Council Member Myers. Okay, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Okay, any opposed? No, seeing none, we'll go ahead and go back to B19, and I believe that was pulled back. Yes, thank you. Okay, so we had a good meeting. The other day, Marcus, and we talked about the new small cell utility permits. And I was taking some quick notes, but one of the things that did make it in my notes was something that said policy change. And I was wondering if you could elaborate on what that could possibly mean. Also, is there a maximum that we can assess as a fee? I know that there was the conversation that we were waiting for an analysis from the public works department to figure out just how many analyst hours and stuff it took every time we got one of those permits. So, any- Right, what I would say is we can only charge what it costs us to process the permit. We can't build in a, you can't make money on the permit based. So, it's just a cost recovery item, and that's how that's going to be set. What it will allow us to do is recapture the costs that we are spending on those permits right now and focus that. So, those costs are being developed at this point. We think we can handle this $20,000 in that location. So, we think we can support this item. Okay, wonderful, then I'll move B19. Okay, I'll go ahead and second that. We have a motion by Glover, seconded by myself. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay, that passes also. Mr. Dettall. I can deal with the second for the next item. That's- Sure, thank you. B20. Smarking. We've actually renegotiated this contract with smarking and we can handle this item also. Okay, great, okay, okay. Given that information, do we want to have a motion? Move for approval. Second. Moved by Council Member Matthews, seconded by Vice Mayor Cummings. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That's okay. That was to me, mm-hm. So the remaining item is item 25. I had a question about this one as well. Yes, thank you. So, yeah, it was just a little distraught to see that we were thinking about eliminating our employee holiday luncheon. And after speaking with a couple people, especially one of the people that coordinates it, it seems to be an impactful event that means a lot to employees. And I think in a time when we really want to be making our employees feel as appreciated as possible, especially for all the hard work they're doing. I would like to not cut this from the budget and or ideally I've made an offer to Marcus to work to try and identify some potential ways we could supplement the funding or get some support from sponsors or something like that, even though they've already done some great work. So I just want to say that, I don't think we should cut the employee luncheon. Yeah, I concur with Council Member Glover. I've said this in our previous one-on-one meetings or two-on-two with two meetings. And the budget subcommittee, I think that this, I mean, this is just something that is really, I think, a wonderful thing to do in terms of playing morale. I mean, it's an opportunity for people to come together. It's a small line item in our budget for, I think, a significant amount of joy and camaraderie that it engenders. So I'm not, I'm not going to support eliminating the employee holiday luncheon. I would just add that I was too sort of struck that it was a full elimination. I was wondering if it could be that it sort of can be toned down in some regard or something like that as opposed to complete elimination. It's given the fact that it does really provide a wonderful opportunity for us to come together and celebrate the holidays and appreciate. And having this sort of participate, I know that it's really good for the culture. So I don't know if City Manager Bernal or- Marcus is the work. Marcus, I know Marcus. I think we can, to some extent. Thank you. So this line item was already pared down from what we spent last year. I think it was closer to $18,000. We've done a little bit more. So we already curtailed it with a $12,000 we put into your proposed budget. So if you think about you're hosting a luncheon for 500, 600 employees, you have meals. We're also trying to do a very green event. So we like to rent plates and have a service that washes them. Try to, we had actually fabric napkins last year as opposed to buying disposables. And that adds cost to it. So we were trying to square up all of these things. I will say we had an amazing volunteer team led by our very excellent finance director. And so we try to cut costs, but it just costs money. You're having a luncheon for hundreds and hundreds of employees. So for us, it was difficult to think about how do you reduce that and have a meaningful event. And then also, when we are going through these reductions, as you're seeing, this is very difficult. And there were no sacred cows. So we really looked in all corners of our budget as painful as it was. Thanks. So let me go ahead and put, kind of given the time, we'll go ahead and maybe put that one to the side as well and revisit that at a future time knowing that the council at this time is not very excited about ending the employee holiday luncheon. Okay, so we'll go ahead and maybe move on to the next bucket, which brings us to items 26, I'm sorry, 27 through 36. Just a note, 32 should not have made it to the list. That was a climate action item. That was our error on our side. Okay, thank you. So that's excluding item B32. Okay, and so Council Member Glover, and then was there one Council Member Crum that you had as well, if I, I'm sorry. That's right. B27, and I just want to follow up on the climate action. Does that mean you're not going to cut that one? Correct, yeah, that shouldn't have been there. Okay, so we're pulling B27. Is that the other, okay, any additional polls from this list? I just had a quick question on 31. Please, mm-hm. I was just wondering how often we receive an audit report, because this one's reduced in the contract with police order. But I was just curious as to when we receive updates on those audits and reports. Right, so the. 831. Yeah, the auditor does a annual report with the Public Safety Committee, but he does other work in terms of reviewing complaints, and he audits things on request, and he also does ride-alongs and that sort of thing. So with respect to this, it would be a reduction in just generally the number of hours that he can allocate. I don't think this would affect his ability to do the report on an annual basis, so that would be a priority, and that would be done. And also, certainly auditing any of the major incidents, you know, an officer involved shooting and all that, so that would still be doable. I think he'd just have to cut back on some of his more discretionary activities. When do these reports generally come out? It's once a year, the Public Safety Committee is just, for example, just completed the review. And then they sit down in a confidential session with the police department and the auditor review the complaints, and then they produce a public report, which they're working on and should be released shortly. Thank you. Just to supplement that, the one we just did, that was the first one in two years, so it wasn't just every year, it was two years. Thank you for the clarity, okay? So we have B-27 and B-32 polled for the remaining items. Do we want to go ahead and entertain a motion at this time? So moved. Yeah, I'll second. Okay, I'll second it since I said, okay, so it comes from a brown seconded by myself. All those in favor, please say aye. Okay, any opposed? Okay, we'll go ahead and return to item B-27, and maybe if you want to provide a little bit more context. I was curious about this item as well, in terms of the reduction of the liaison. If you have any questions. Thank you, I'm Eir Watkins, Council Members. So as you are aware, you have provided funding for this community liaison for a couple of budget cycles. We first tried to contract with a local organization to provide this work that didn't end up resulting in a good set of work that we wanted to go forward with. So we ended up actually hiring a temporary employee that's Peter Bichier. You've met him, we introduced him to Council before, and you've seen him at various meetings. And so currently we went, when Council first appropriated the money, a budget number was just based on what sounded like a good set of funding. There wasn't a concrete work plan underlying that or justifying that amount of money. So that was $40,000. And so what we have done is just merely backed out $40,000 in how many hours of work does that buy us. And that's about 20 hours per week as a maximum. Now the scope of work for the liaison, the purpose of it is to really help open the channels of communication between the city organization and for people in our community where English may not be their first language in particular, with a focus on the beach flats, but lower ocean, but also any parts of the city where someone needs help. So so far, and we do have a work plan with Peter that is based in three phases. The first is familiarity with the community, really getting out, they're getting to know people. And these are really one-on-one relationships. So spending time in the beach flats garden, walking around the beach flats area, the lower ocean area, going to meetings, getting known. And that relationship building does take some time. So we wanted to provide a nice long runway for that. So that's one side of it. The other side is familiarity with the city of Santa Cruz. So getting Peter in to meet with our departments, learn about our programs, learn about our services. So he can really help engender a two-way dialogue so that we can help share information out and talk about services we're providing and what are opportunities out there that may not be reaching these communities. And then also the other direction that we can hear a real valid communication channel to know what, where people have need and where we can be more supportive. And so the first phase was that orientation, the sort of building the community. And that is really ongoing. So Mr. Bichier has been out in the garden a lot. He's out there every week. He goes to a lot of meetings. He's been involved. He helped organize the La Posadas work last December and was very instrumental in making sure that got pulled off and working through our permitting process here. He helped navigate that whole thing, which I know is helpful. He's helped troubleshooting. He's been connected in with Parks and Recreation because, as you know, we do manage that garden there. So he's been very busy doing that. He's also tied in with departments to help with interpretation and translation. And that's been very helpful. So when we want to issue information in Spanish, he can look at our English and really translate it to a way where it's very understandable language because we tend to sometimes use complex words that don't translate well. So he's been really invaluable there. So he's in this orientation phase. And the next phase we hoped is to have more directed and more deliberate community meetings down there as well. And other opportunities. We haven't quite gotten there yet. We've been very busy in the city manager's office. We managed Peter out of our office. And so we haven't gotten there. So we have been delayed on our work program. So I know I'm providing a lot of context, but I'll let you know what our vision is for this. And then ultimately we would have, in the third phase, like a better, more grounded system of sharing information back and forth. Knowing that this is very iterative and we're learning as we go along and it's not something that you really can push. But so far he has been a really helpful resource. Now the proposed reduction for you, as I said just a moment ago, there were no sacred cows when we were looking at all corners of our budget. And so we put up some for this as well. And I'm knowing that there is not a very rigid work plan. There aren't very rigid timelines or deliverables. We feel that this would be tantamount to a reduction of maybe five hours per week. So going from a max of 15 to 20 hours a week. Now that assumes someone works every single week of the year, which is not happening. Mr. Bichier right now is actually, he's a researcher. He works at the university, so he has other work. And so right now he's on a work trip doing, I think, avian research in another country. So he's out of town for periods of time as well. So I felt comfortable that knowing that you have these periods where people just aren't available or work is less intense, that we could smooth this out and really be more deliberate with how we're allocating the work. So I felt that even though, again, it's very difficult to think about reducing something like this that is so needed, I think it can be very well managed in terms of just directing the work a little more carefully. And especially as we move into that second phase where we're going through the orientation and we move into more what is more a work plan and meetings and really more directed outreach and conversations between the city and the community. And hopefully it could be complimented by some of the investments and some of the other resources that we're providing in some of our more at-risk areas through community bridges, et cetera, potentially. Certainly, certainly. And he's working on some of the immigration work that I know some of your council members are involved in, too. That's great. OK, Councilor McCombs. Just a good question. Do you think there's any chance we're going to lose him because he's a rather unique, not rather, but he's a unique person to be in this position given his academic and sort of street smarts and where he fits in. Have you had that conversation? Is it? That's a great question. He and I have not had that direct conversation, although I will say something that makes him such a suitable fit for this. He's in it because he really believes in community building and he really believes that he can play an important role between connecting the city with his community. So for him and then also I think practically speaking, we may not even fully expend the full $40,000 anyway as I was saying that his own work takes him out of the country, out of town, working on other things. So I would have to go back. I haven't done a full reconciliation of his time cards this year. But I know that he's not reaching the maximum anyway. So I think like the practical reality of what we will actually pay him in a salary will not exceed that $40,000 anyway. And I took the markers. He included Megan in this group, too. But that's not part of this. No, I apologize for that misunderstanding. And it's possible that if for some reason we do want to or have some sort of community issue that arises to increase his hours and he's available to easily be adjusted. That's exactly what I was going to say. If the need increases, then we can always come back and do that. I know, for example, he's getting more involved in the immigration issues in Watsonville. It's a group that's down there working on those issues. So there's really no more work to do. There's also the census, if I could add, too. So we really need his assistance with the census and making sure we're reaching deep into the community for that work. Great. Thank you very much. Okay. Councillor Romain. My impression talking with him was that the flexibility is a real asset in terms of. And just a question. If he's working in Watsonville, is that part of our contract? No, we are part of the regional immigration efforts. There's sort of a group that mobilizes. And so we had representation and he's a perfect actual fit to be our representative. So that we're working with the regional efforts. Yeah, I got it. Okay. So given that information, would you want to go ahead and move the item? I'll move the item. Okay. I'll go ahead and second that. Council Member Meyers, seconded by myself. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? No. Okay. That passes with Council Member Crohn voting against. Which one? Item number 27. Is that needed liaison? I'm sorry, B-27. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. I apologize. I think we already heard clarity on B-32. So we don't need to revisit that item at this time. So we have remaining B-33 and through B-36. Is that correct? We voted on that. We already voted on that. So we're done with the Bs. We're done with the Bs. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for the referrals. Those are going to go ahead and, we're going to go ahead and postpone those. Yeah. Okay, Council Member Clifford. Thanks. I just had a question for clarity. So if we were to go through and find an additional $5,000 somewhere and be like, oh wow, we're like way over and here's $5,000. We could then, even though we just voted on that, go back and replenish those hours for the liaison. Okay. And or if he has increased need and services for our city and he's available, I think we can also just increase his hours that way as well. Okay. So yeah, there's a little bit of flexibility there. So we're on to the Cs. And my understanding is that's, is that the final grouping, Marcus? Or is there an additional grouping? And there were these. Okay. These are the ads. These are the ads. Okay. Did you have a question, Vice Mayor Cummings? I did have a question. With the reductions in these other sections, it's supposed to account for all the reductions that we're making are supposed to account for these ads in addition to normal costs, correct? Yep. Okay. Okay. So do we want to revisit any of these additions at this time, given that some of them may be offset by some of the other reductions, correct? Okay. Okay. Um, so are there any that we specifically are willing to let go of that we're not interested in pursuing at this time? Councilman Brown. Well, um, probably, but I'm just thinking that for the sake of getting through this, the next step, which is going to probably be a little more difficult, that we could maybe just leave all of these pending for final consideration at our June 11th meeting. Because I don't think any of the, anything that I would adjust right now is going to be a major change in the deficit. I want to just an adjustment that I think would potentially be, would be the placeholder for city council temporary assistant funding, which is a 775,000, uh, allocation that would add essentially positions. Although I, you know, I would appreciate the support. I think it's a nice to have, but not necessarily a must have. So if we're sort of figuring out the new formula, it would be my, um, preference to remove that, but I cannot make a motion. So page are you we're on seats, we're on, so that would be C10. Oh, got it. Page 12 of the staff report. Council Member Clever. Thank you. Um, I think I would, uh, follow the statement of Council Member Brown of, since we're, these are the proposed additions until we figure out exactly where we are with our other cuts and or revenue increase options. Seems kind of premature to remove anything from this list since these are the things that council members have requested. And I know I personally believe that a, a good conversation around probably on June 11th, a good conversation around the, uh, concept of council assistance, uh, would be good to have, uh, and it is, it is 10, 15 right now. We have a whole nother bundle to go through. So I would, uh, personally, I think the, I think the language would be, I would move to postpone discussing these items until the June 11th meeting. And a further, for further, and that's a motion for further, uh, discussion after we've had a chance to identify other potential solutions in the budget. Second. Motion by Council Member Glover, seconded by Vice Mayor Cummings, Council Member Matthews. Um, describe to me what that does to the process that pushes us awfully close to the end, doesn't it? My thought was we were trying to give you direction to bring a final budget for action. And we're doing some simultaneous tracking, um, that I could pull up a spreadsheet here in just about a minute or two to see how close we're getting and how we're moving. So maybe moving into the next list, we can then inform this list. That might be a smart way to go. Okay. We'll go ahead and then a stretch for heaven's sakes. Yes, we can. Why don't we take a two minute, we'll take a two minute stretch. We'll move forward and then we can come back and revisit some of the stuff. Yeah. No, absolutely. Okay. I wish you a little street. I know. Well, two minutes, like 10 minutes. Come on. Two minutes. Wish it was four minutes. Yeah. Oh, it was a, well, it was six minutes. Oh, okay. So we didn't actually pass it. Yeah, so these are all VP's at a future time. Sure, just for a point of reference, we just went through a million five of those first two bundles and there's a million four that came through. So 91% of the solutions have held up. So we're doing good. We're doing good. Go team. Little kudos. Thank you. Thank you for structuring it for us this way. So the next bundle to consider our baseline solutions, some of these will sound like, hey, didn't we just talk about that? And others will strike very familiar chords because we discussed them in detail on May 8th. This is exactly the same content of items we discussed May 8th. Now there's numbers. Now there's rankings. Now there's a little bit more information that goes with them. So these are very familiar items and by and large, some of these we've already talked about. For example, the very first one, substantial reduction to consultant fees is exactly the same description for two other tier reductions for the planning department. And they've talked about they're all painful. Marcus, do we want to go through the ones that we've already discussed this evening, remove those and then revisit the list? Does that feel appropriate since we've, I think we've covered some of these, right? Or are they additional elements that you'd like us to also confirm our positions on this time? The worst. These worst? I think like the only, there's only planning and community development or the only ones that are a similar type of reduction as before. You saw 270,000. Now you're seeing two other components, another 270 and another 170. Oh, this is additional. This is additional on top of. Got it. Sorry. I apologize. Okay. Okay. Thank you. I just have one in this bundle and that's D21. D21. Okay. And then I would move the rest of them. Okay. Vice Mayor Cummings and then Council Member Myers. I wanted to pull, I had a question on D6 and then I wanted to pull D8. So you're not pulling D6? No, I just had a question. I just had a question on that one. Okay. I don't know if that would be an appropriate time to ask that question. Maybe let's go. Yeah. I said a question. Fire chief. And this came up before and I just wanted to get a little bit more clarity on this. And acting this first responder fee, see that, you know, it would allow for billing of commercial medical insurance insurance providers. What happens if someone doesn't have insurance and they end up getting these services with that bill fall upon that person? Or would the city be able to help pick up the balance of those services? So the way it would work is that you would bill for the services within the realm of medical response. This would not be for rescuer for fire. But the city council as a whole could adopt a policy for how they collect and what they don't collect on. And generally speaking, most agencies that have enacted this have a fairly liberal collection policy where if people are unable to pay, then that's where it ends. And this is generally aimed at going after recovering fees for medical services within that health care continuum and having commercial insurance pay for those services. And they generally, it's accepted. And we're not the first agency to enact this. Thank you. And that's a perfect example of one that would have to come back to you. Tonight wouldn't set the rate. You're just indicating, yes, let's move forward and then staff would come back with a full report. Question for the Fire Chief. Has any public agency ever been sued over the cost recovery issue? I can't answer that. Not that I'm aware of. Again, this is something that up and down the state of California agencies have enacted this. It's becoming more standard. And what it is is the fire departments were enacted for fire protection. And over the last few decades, they've morphed into providing not just basic life support, but advanced life support, paramedic level services. And if you look at AMR, who's a for-profit private transport, they are billing for those services. The hospital is billing for those services. And because of what we're providing in the pre-hospital realm, this is why those fees are being enacted. And I was speaking of the practice, not just any individual case, but the- Not that I'm aware of. It's something I can absolutely look into to see if other agencies or communities have run afoul of that. But my understanding in the research that we've done is it's generally accepted. Thanks. Thank you for the clarification. I just have a quick question. For D3, this is I think the only item that we've received with input from city staff with an X. I don't know if somebody wants to share. I think it was set up. It fell on the wrong list. It was supposed to be in the new list, but that's planning department had three levels of consultant reductions. This is their third tier level. So you saw level two already. Level one, you saw in the eighth. This is their third tier. So this is the tier that they're not great about, but they recognize the alternatives are worse. That's why I had both the question mark and an X, because it's very close to that line. I'm not recommended. Thank you. Okay. So right now we have D8, D21, and Council Member Myers. I just wanted to pull D17. D17. Council Member, Vice Mayor Cummings. D30. I had a question on D4. Question on D4. Do you want to go ahead and ask a question at this time? Yeah, could you just explain this exactly how much we can raise these meter rates and what does 9.88 have to do with the 24%? It's just my math phobic. And I know this has something to do with the Coastal Commission too. Mark, Director of Public Works. We're limited to, we have authority to raise them up to 20, well, below 25%, anything above 25% or above has to go to the Coastal Commission for approval. And so you have direct authority to do that to raise them at 25%. And when it says 9.88% increase, like what is it now and what is it going up to? It's, I'll let Jim Burr. Good evening Council. The rates currently are $1.50 per hour for the first two hours, I believe. They then double the $3 an hour and they increase after the fourth hour by $6 an hour for a daily maximum of $45. Oh, and when you say daily maximum, is that 12 hours or how many hours is it daily 24? Well, it reaches, it goes up by $6 an hour all the way up to 45. I don't know how many hours that is. I can get back to you. That makes sense. Thank you. Any additional questions right now? We have D8, D17, D21 and 30 polled. Any additional questions? Councilor Mathis. There are so many places where I see repeats of what we saw in earlier buckets. And it's hard to get a grip on how ultra severe they're getting, but I'll just take this one. This is life and death, but D13. There's no further brownouts on the turf areas. 5% golf water budget. So that's a total of a 9% reduction. Is that what we're saying? Am I just, that's basic math there? That's how we're doing it? In total, that comes to $100,000. There's two components of that one you already saw. And this will bring into a total $100,000 in lower water usage. Again, I guess looking at the parks and rec guys. I'm under the impression that this is something that can still be done without absolutely killing the whole facility there. And that you're hoping that you'll get those wells on line to offset that. Am I, am I understanding this? Good evening. Council, Travis back superintendent of parks. Yes. So the water budget every year is set to allow us to water the course during a dry season. So this current year we had a wet season. We did not need to use a full budget. So really the $100,000 reduction is a gamble of sorts with the weather. If we have a wet season, we might notice no changes whatsoever. If it's a dry season, then we would have to reduce irrigation on the golf course at some point in the year and we would see additional brownouts beyond what's already there. And I have no particular allegiance to the golf course. It's just all these things that you let them go so long and then you got to start from scratch all over again. I just, if my understanding also if I could just in terms of, and this is not for this item, sorry. This is for D15, is that for the leadership Santa Cruz, that was something that individual departments, if they wanted to send folks to as opposed to it coming out of the HR department, was still available for the city. Is that correct? Yes. Okay, I hear, okay, I heard a yes. That's what I thought. I just wanted to confirm that's what I thought. The challenge though is that there would be no general fund savings if it was transferred to parks. Yeah. There would have to be some limitation on general fund attendees. Yeah, okay. But if it works out or something, they could potentially do that. And then it's Lisa coming forward. Are you coming forward? Did you have a different? Okay. Okay. Councillor McLaren? Thanks. I just like to make a motion to move the remaining items. Okay. Okay. So we have D817, I was going to pull, I was just, I'll pull D18 because I haven't talked, I wanted to understand that one. And D21 and D30 I've been pulled. D817, 18, 21, and 30. Okay. I'll second the motion. Motion by Councilmember Glover, seconded by Councilmember Cron on the remaining. Any further discussion on those items? Councilmember Masterson? Yes. They're horrible. Yeah, I know. They're horrible. Yeah. That's my discussion. I know. Here, here, I'll second that. Okay. So, do you have any specifics that you want to change or are you willing to move forward? All of you both. Seriously? Yeah. Okay. All those in favor? Please say aye. May I? I guess I did want to ask about the D3 which was hovering between yellow and the red X there. So we'll go, let's go ahead and pull that one. How about that? We'll go ahead and pull D3 also. So we remove that from the list. Okay. Is that? Okay. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Okay. That passes unanimously. As difficult as it is. Okay. We'll go back to D3. Lee's here. And I know you provided a little bit of context for that. Do you want to speak more to the impact here on this one, Lee? Sure. Good evening, Councilmembers and Mayor. Yes. When I was talking about the cuts earlier, I was really referring to all three tiers of the cuts here. And so that includes the two in this table. I think it was D1 and D3 as well as B1, I believe it was. So I was referring to all three of those. And yes, that is going to be very challenging for us. But in terms of meeting the overall citywide cut that's needed and the potential to come back if a budget adjustment is warranted with additional revenues. We can make that happen. And again, I'm harking back to your statement that if a major project comes through, it will be paying major fees, which will give us some more revenue to process that because that's part of my concern. We have some big projects coming online here. We absolutely do. And we want to realize. Yes, absolutely. And so we will support those projects. We will provide the services that our customers are paying for. And if we are getting unexpected large projects coming through or multiple large projects coming through and we need to supplement those services, you will be seeing us next year. And similarly, because that consultant services, I'm referring in this conversation, I'm referring a lot to our building division, but our current planning has similar challenges. We would be cutting funding there. And depending on the level of work that comes in and our current planning applications, we may need to either shift resources from advanced planning into current planning from the consultant services or from current planning into building if we get a lot of construction that's occurring. And if those funds are depleted and we don't have the salary savings, but we're getting the revenue, we would come back to the council and show that here are the projects that we've been getting. This is why we've got these three or four big projects. And here's the revenue. And we'd be looking for a budget adjustment. And similarly, if there's a long range planning request or direction, then we would identify the costs of that and let the council know if we want to pursue that, then here are the costs. Well, keep us posted. You absolutely will. So given that, are you interested in moving the item? Yeah, I'll go ahead and move it. Okay, I'll go ahead and second that. That's D3. Council member Matthew seconded by myself. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Nope. Okay. D8. That also counts member Matthews, I believe. That's the, I'm sorry, that was you. Yeah. Okay, vice mayor Cummings. Just wanted to ask, because I've been having conversations with members of the community that, and it's one to ask staff about the current status of the Wharf master plan and the EIR associated with that, because my understanding is that one of the things that's making us for applying for grant funding that would actually allow us to address some of these maintenance issues is the fact that we don't have an approved EIR and the master plan is kind of on hold currently. Correct. Is that, is that as it relates to the reduced facility maintenance materials? Yeah. I don't, Bonnie's here, but with respect to the EIR, I don't believe that this funding affects that. And we are, that was one of the projects that with the previous council was sort of when priorities were established was sort of put on hold to wait on that, on that to move forward. And so it's just a matter of completing the EIR to do that. We've also talked about potentially, because there are some projects that could move forward, maybe focusing on particular projects doing the environmental for particular projects that would, could proceed forward. And for Brown and the councilor Matthews. So I have, have also been in communication with members of the public who have talked about this and, and so I'm, I'm really nervous about the war. I just have to say this and the deferred maintenance that's happening there. I mean, we like, like we have some serious deterioration. And so I'm, I'd like to hear a little bit more about what this 67% of the designated budget for maintenance materials actually means in terms of work maintenance right now. And then I'm, I'm hoping that we could maybe just like some of the other items previously in the other buckets defer this to have a conversation when we're kind of at the end. Okay. So we'll go ahead and maybe defer this item for future conversation and consideration. I have some other questions of it. And I think I can get them answered offline and save us some time tonight if we can just. That was D8. D8 is very different. Thank you. We need a motion to. I don't think so. I don't think so. Come back. Okay. Perfect. We have spirit fingers over there. So we're good. Okay. So item D, D17. Yeah. And that was Councillor Myers. I just wanted just a quick question on this. Director Elliott, if you don't. This looks like it would, this looks like this. So this is D17, which is the reduced vegetation management. The description though talks quite a bit about trails and stormwater and other items. So I was just trying to kind of match up the solution with sort of, it looks like a broader scope. And I'm just curious if, if this is across all parks or open space areas. I mean, so is this 30,000 kind of just over across the whole system? Okay. If I may, Council Member Myers. The, the description does encompass a variety of natural resource management activities that we do across the open spaces. Some of the line items that are specifically targeted are Arana Gulch, which has been mentioned already, reducing invasive species management. Some of the consulting work we do with biologists across our open spaces, erosion prevention work in De La Viega wilderness, as well as trail work across the open spaces. Yeah. I guess my question, or my, just my observation or comment on it is similar to our buildings that we're sort of not going to take care of right now. Our open space lands are in really pretty bad shape. They've had a lot of deferred attention for probably 15 or 20 years now. So it's just disappointing to see that, that system and our system of trails and other things are being impacted. I just mostly wanted clarification. So I understand that I hope we can maybe pull a rabbit out of our hat because our areas are definitely degrading. I don't disagree. Okay. Dona, is that an interest to revisit this item at a future time? Okay. We'll go ahead and put that one aside too. So that's D17. Thank you. And D18, I think that was me. I was just curious a little bit more to better understand. I apologize if you already explained this at the last time what this means in terms of the impact for our community and our children. This is sports officials and summer camp temps. So as far as the sports officials, we'd be looking at reducing the number of officials for the fall softball league from two to one. And so this is something that we can still offer the leagues, but that it just be kind of a lower quality as far as the officials, but the leagues would still be able to run. This is the fall softball. These are popular programs, but we have that. And as far as the summer camp temps, this would be looking at a possible reduction in, we have a summer wrap up camp that is at the end of summer. So our summer camp programs run for the full summer. We have one week that allows parents to have coverage when the camp ends until when school starts. So we do have registrants in this program. So this could be tricky. So our thought at this time is to, you know, monitor the camps as we go along and the registrations and seeing if we can kind of offset with our temporaries as camps go along and try and keep that summer wrap up program and then look at maybe offsets coming around in the end of, you know, in June for next year to see if we can have that whole program. That makes sense. Yeah. Definitely. Thank you. As somebody who understands for working parents, it's really critical. And so it would be my interest if the will of the council is there to not, unless it makes sense to remove that week to not pursue that at this time because that could provide critical care for working families, essentially. And the other question I have that would affect this, and I agree with you on the summer rec programs and also teen jobs programs when it comes to the youth camp leaders, but in harking back to the trail crews and interns, is that something that your children's fund could help? Potentially we could explore that through the city schools. So I would suggest that. Okay. We'll go ahead and add that. That's a great suggestion. We'll go ahead and add that for our council discussion at the City Council Children's Fund. Okay. So we'll go ahead and pause on action on that one. The 18. Councillor Brown. I'm just going to make the comment here and perhaps pursue it offline, but it seems to me that with respect to the officials, that it might be possible through FOPAR or some way, like with the softball league to try to raise the funding, raise the money to have that additional official, and I'd be willing to volunteer some hours to help with that. So I'll just put it out there because I do think that there's probably some, if there's interest in maintaining the level of official officials, then people might be willing to step up. And again, I'd be happy to help as well. Great. Council Member Matthews. Procedurally then, we have to decide whether or not to make these cuts, but hope we can raise some revenue to, I think we'll just cut them. We'll go ahead and set them aside knowing that we're interested in looking at ways to offset them at this time. So set them aside maybe. With the other groupings that we're not addressing at this time. So we're not really pursuing them to be cut at this time, but we're giving further direction to explore ways to offset them. Okay. Okay. So then we're moving right along to D21. And then we recall. Oh, Council Member Glover. Yes, thank you. I was looking forward to this one because we're talking about revenue generation. And I think this is a fantastic opportunity for us to increase some revenue. So this is with the residential guest permit fees. There in the line item, it says an 8.9% increase would generate $23,000. Now in our finance conversation, Marcus, you'd let me know what that signified. I think it was a $1 increase. Five. I think that was coming from the public works. Well, either way, what is that? I guess a more straightforward question is, what is that 8.9% correlate to money-wise? Jim Burr Public Works. That was our first stab at it. And we went from 25 to 27. That was a $2 increase. Okay. And so what's the feasibility of a $10 increase? Our main goal is to raise revenue and get people to stop using vehicles. So there are about 10,000 residential permits across the city, pretty much every neighborhood you can imagine has some kind of program. You will affect all kinds of people, our residents. Not all of them are happy about having a parking permit program in their neighborhood, but feel that it's needed. That is annual charge though, $25. So if we went to $30, that's one thing. If you want to go to $35, that's, I don't know what to say about that. That's a political decision. Right. So you're saying if we went $5, we'd generate $50,000 more approximately. If we go $10, we'd generate $100,000 more. And this doesn't include the downtown parking passes, because that money doesn't go into the general fund, that goes into the parking fund, right? Correct. Okay. So yeah, I would love to see us have a conversation about increasing it more than $2, at least $5 to turn that from $23 into $50, which would then allow us to offset some of the other concerns that have been brought up by us up here, things that we don't want to cut. And could ideally start to encourage people to not have cars, which would be great as well. Matthews. I agree. I'd like to go for $5. Do that this year. A couple of years more of, I think, let's not do too big a jump all at once, but I will go ahead and move that. We actually increase that to a flat $5 increase for annual parking permit. Second. Okay. So that's a motion by Councilor Matthews, seconded by Vice Mayor Cummings. Okay. Any further discussion? Councilor Perron. Yeah, I brought this up before, and Vice Mayor Cummings reminded me also, what if we go another $5 for individuals who have more than one car? We can track that, can't we? Can we do $5 for each car? So if you have one car, you pay $30, two cars you pay $35, three cars you pay $40, then $45, up to $5, I guess. We probably could do that. We have a variety of households. A lot of times it's, you know, students. And the car registration isn't necessarily the person who's driving the car. And then there are some of our bigger permit holders are families. And so all the cars might be registered in mom's name or dad's name, but the kids are driving them. And so I'm not sure you're getting to where you want to get. And it would create a fair amount of work. No, I mean, we're getting to where we're trying to reduce car use, I guess. You know, that's the idea. And if we don't reduce car use, then we want cars to pay for the, you know, the issues that they create on the road. We could look at what sort of analysis that would take when we bring this back as an actual item. I appreciate that. Thanks a lot. Thank you. Councilor Matthews and then Vice-Mercan. My interest right now is in keeping it simple to administer and delivering. Avenue and not getting into a really punitive police state mentality right now. So. I just want to say that I appreciate you're the $5, but you said before and I wrote it down. We have to be ruthless, not only in cutting, but why can't we be ruthless in seeking new revenues too and more ruthiness? Okay. Vice-Mercanings. I'm just going to say that I support the comments that Councilmember Crone made about the tiering system and look forward to hopefully working with Public Works to see how we could maybe come up with something like a tiered form of parking permitting in the future. But as Councilmember Matthews said, I think for our purposes right now, just sticking with its first initial $5 increase is going to be a good first step at moving forward and looking at ways that we can see how we can look at permitting in the future. Just want to clarify, but you do support, he's going to get back to us with some information. Absolutely. Thanks. Do you have additional comments? No, I'm good. We have a motion by Councilmember Matthews, seconded by Vice-Mercanings. Any further discussion? Okay. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Okay, that passes unanimously. Last but not least, we have D-30 and was that? That was probably me. I'm sorry, that was you. Okay. Vice-Mercanings. I had a question for Parks and Rec around this issue because this item, because it's talking about reducing safety supplies and training. And I think that for me, that raises some pretty big red flags because people don't have the appropriate safety gear. And if they don't have the appropriate training, then there's a higher likelihood and probability that they might actually injure themselves. And that might come back on the city as a liability for not providing them adequate training and safety gear. So I was wanting to know if you could speak to that item. I just generally would agree, of course, that we want our employees to have the training and supplies they need to act safely. This was a recommendation from our supervisors as to a small reduction that they felt that they could accommodate and still achieve those ends. Great. Okay. Thank you. Okay. The discussion comes to an end. Not on that. Okay. This is a 7,000 reduction. Okay. Okay. Did we vote on all the other songs? We did. Could we want to go ahead and take a vote on D-30 and then revisit anything? There was one I just neglected to mention. Okay. Well, let's go ahead and wrap up D-30 if we're feeling comfortable at this time and then we can revisit any that you have. Okay. Okay. Motion by Council Member Glover. Is there a second? I'll go ahead and second that. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay. That passes unanimously. Council Member Matthews. It was D-26 which was eliminating preventive maintenance for the most uninterruptible power supplies. It would increase the risk from downtime for networks applications file shares due to power failures. You know, having your whole system go down. Just put a little chill in my heart there. So this one includes the smaller form factor UPSs across the city. It does not include the large one for the City Hall data center and the police data center nor the water treatment or wastewater treatment. So those are much bigger UPSs. Those would still be under preventive maintenance. These are smaller ones. Give me some examples. If there is a server within the server room in City Hall and it needs a specific backup. So right now we have a company that we contract with that goes throughout the city and looks all that on that on an annual basis. So we would be still getting alerts from the devices as they die and then we would have to get to them and replace them and that would have to be City Hall IT staff that would do it. With one less person. With one less person and then, yes. I don't know for 14,000 bucks. Let's go ahead and set it aside. I don't think you have to decide right now at this moment. Yeah. Which number was that? D26. I would honestly if you were going to look at money going back I would look at the help desk before this one. I trust your judgment. As far as service levels. 100%. Okay. Yeah. And we could probably work with finance to find a more amenable dollar amount instead of taking away the full I think $37,000 that's in the help desk right now. That was D14. So let's go ahead and move then this item and then go ahead and swap that out. I guess that has already been moved. I asked it to bring it back. So we'll go ahead and bring that one D14 back or D. And I'd just jump in for clarity. I mean we're cracking. You're talking, tracking our discussion. Yeah. Okay. Some of these changes are on the fringes. We can work with staff and come up with suitable alternatives. It's well within Martins administrative authority at this dollar amount that we're talking about. Okay. Gotcha. Thank you for that. That covers pretty much what we needed to tackle this evening. Am I missing anything? Or do we have any additional things we want to discuss? I know that we're approaching a later hour and we have a lot of our staff here tonight. I just want to be mindful of time. The bundles of first, is this the C section? Yes. Yeah, this is the part we've stayed away from. This is the additions. And if you bear with me for a half second, I'll give you an update on how close we are. Sure. And I mean, I'll just reiterate for the record that I won't be supporting now or later the addition of the 175,000 for city council staff members, but we don't have to address that tonight if that's not the interest of the council. Should we go through these kind of a quick thumbs up, thumbs down? Our current shortfall is $790,000 and $17. So we've made a lot of progress. Yeah. Let's still have some work to do. Okay. Do you have what you need for tonight to get us to June 11th or do you feel like you need further direction from the council at this time? If there's some clarity, we can get off of this list. Okay. Even if we're not ready to decide tonight, but if we can just go down and see if there's something that's obvious that we wouldn't do, that would be helpful. So I think I've made my statement of something that I feel pretty confident that I won't support at this time. Council Member Myers? Yeah, I would, I'm going to echo that. And I'm not in favor of that council assistance, especially with the budget, budget that were the things we're slashing in our budget. And I just had a comment about C9. There's all of these things obviously are interrelated. So I'm just kind of looking to see, I know we have a 20, 20 cave to support each and just kind of wondering maybe if there's some relationships there that might be reviewed and shave off 10 grand. I don't know if there's any cost savings there. And then also on that same item, I just wanted to note that the state is obviously moving forward pretty in a pretty significant way on homelessness. So if there's a way to look at our scope of work for how we want to handle the committee in that relationship so that we maybe are reflective of what the state might be doing. So probably not a lot of savings, but maybe there's something there. I think that is, and then C11, I was, I would not be in favor of putting that in this year's budget since we want to see how things go with that group. Okay. Do you want to go ahead and move that at this time? The list. Is there any other comment or could you go, I think you can go ahead and move it. I think if we can eliminate or any. One more time. Mine. Yeah. I was, wouldn't support the council assistance, which is C10. Just a request to relook at how we maybe approach C9 to see if there's any cost savings in some of those items. And then I would not support C11 for this coming fiscal year, but wait until we get the results. I'm only going by this. The numbers aren't matching up with what you're. Oh, sorry. So if I can, I think we have a motion by Council Member Meyers to revisit C9, which is the same as C11 on this list. Yeah. In regards to alignment and potential access to state dollars for homelessness, to revisit, to not support C10 on our list, which is the. C9 on that list. Which is C9 on this list. And then to also remove the placeholder for C12 on our list, which is C12 on this list, which is consistent. So for this list, it's C12 removal. It is C9 removal and potential savings for C11. And that was the motion. I'll go ahead and second that motion. Is it a motion? Yeah. Okay. Council Member Glover, Bisoner Cummings, and then Council Member Matthews. Yeah. I don't support that motion in the slightest. I think that we should continue and allow the staff to do their calculations based off of some of the parameters that we've set with additional revenue streams and fees and other kinds of things that we can levy to try to offset the remaining $700,000 balance that's left over. There are very important things that are associated in these additions. And I do think that a more robust and in-depth conversation about council assistance is warranted, especially because of the impact that that could have on the effectiveness and the overall approach that the council takes seeing as we are paid for half time, expected to work full time. And there's, in my opinion, almost no way for a council member to be able to give the type of attention necessary while working to support themselves here in Santa Cruz, unless they're independently wealthier property owners. So speaking as a renter and someone that has a very limited income and amount of time, having an additional body that's not city staff associated with being able to support our work could be game changing, especially in the sense that in order to get city staff to do work on the project that I'm interested in, it has to make it through the council before they can even start working on it, and that's taking their time away from the work they're already doing. So I feel like it's short-sighted and very close-minded to remove these things at this time without us doing a diligent look at the budget to figure out where we are and where we're going to land, so I wouldn't support that motion. Okay. I'll just go ahead and remind the council that our finance director asked for a little additional direction on the C items. That's where we're at. So this was a proposal, a motion made by council member Meyers to provide some direction if the majority of the council is not interested in that. We can go ahead and move in a different direction, but that's sort of where we're at in terms of orientation for where our decision-making is at this moment. Vice Mayor Cummings, council member Meyers, I'm Matthews, and then council member Brown. I think one of the things for myself that's confusing is trying to see the numbers on here and how they, because of the fact that they don't match up with the numbers that are on the screen that we also have in front of us, it's difficult me to see and understand which items we're actually discussing removing. And so for that reason, I find it very confusing to understand exactly what items we're talking about removing right now and would like some clarification. I'd also like to express though that it would be good, I think at this point in time we can make our own individual recommendations to staff rather than vote on this as a whole because it sounds like there's going to be a lot of inconsistencies and I do understand some of my other colleagues' concerns with wanting to see what or some things that can be brought back to us and then be able to see how we can offset these at another point in time while also respecting staff's need to have a little bit more clarification. Okay. So I'm prepared to move on the motion if the majority of council is not, we can go ahead and revisit this at a different time. I think that's sort of the sense that I'm getting. Council Member Meyers. Well, I forget how many items were in there, but I wasn't 100% on all of them, but some of them. So where to go with that, you know? So I don't know if you want to have a vote on that or... Sure. We can go ahead and take the motion. It doesn't mean that I wouldn't support some of the ones that you said. Should we just... Well, I think the motion is just to provide a little bit of a direction of things that we'd be willing to maybe let go of. And as you can see, Marcus was able to color code some of them. Could we take them one at a time? We're not really going through one at a time. Just anything I think that stood out at this time just kind of in the interest of time but could give a little bit more direction for staff as they move forward for bringing us something back on the 11th. So Council Member Meyers proposed, which I support, is not including the 175,000 to a higher council assistance as well as to look at if there's ways to streamline some of the strategic plan health and all policies and homeless advisory work, potentially drawing on some state funding that may be coming down in that regard. And then removing the 30,000 for the additional 30,000, which we already voted on to incorporate into this year's budget and determine that maybe at the mid-year time based on the report that we receive, if that covers the logic. I think that covers it for me. So those are sort of the three recommendations to provide staff at this time. And we could go with that or we cannot and revisit something else. Or if there's others that want to be moved forward, we can do that. Yeah. I have some others. Maybe you want to vote on this. Sure. We can go ahead and vote on this one now. Okay. So that's the motion by Council Member Meyers, seconded by myself. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? No. Okay. So that fails with Council Member Brown, Vice Mayor Cummings, Council Member Cron, and Council Member Glover voting against, and Council Member Mathews, myself, and Council Member Meyers voting in support. So that gives, we'll go back to the same full list without any further direction in terms of reductions at this time. Council Member Mathews. Just looking down these, it seems some of them are utterly unavoidable. Increased labor costs. Allowance for increase in general liability claims. Increased in city attorney budget for service request beyond historic levels, which seems likely the new anticipated support for the 2020 census. I think that's a collaborative assessment for us. So that seems like something we pretty much have to do. On the climate and energy action plan, it was my understanding that that did not need to be an add-on at this point. Am I understanding? I talked with Tiffany and I thought it was being supported by some enterprise funds so it didn't need an additional allocation. Am I understanding? This is the general funds portion of the, so there's, it's a composite for the whole city. This would be the general funds cost. Additional support. I misunderstood it talking to her, but we get some information. So if I, if I may, what I'm hearing is that since we already know that some of these are required in terms of us needing to move forward on at this time, we should go ahead and adopt. So we'll go ahead. Okay, so is there consensus amongst the council for those that we have outlined as required kind of costs that we've incurred at this time? We'll go ahead and adopt those. And we'll go ahead and have Marcus reflect those for our city clerk. Does that sound appropriate? Mm-hmm. Okay. Council Member Glover? I'd like to see what those are before we go to the vote. Sure. What we have is, so if you, in the agenda packet, item 12 of our packet, we have a series of increases to the budget that are stated under purpose for changes required, such as the allowance for increase in general liability claims for incurred, but not yet finalized claims, attorney budget for additional work, and the increase in labor costs across the city. Those are outlined by staff as required allocations. So just to clarify, on our packet, C-1, 2, 3, and 7? That's correct. And I would say, realistically, the census allocation. And C-5. That's C-5. Yeah. C-1, 2, 3, 5, and 7. I'll make that motion. Okay. Second. Motion by Glover, seconded by Meyers. Further discussion? Yes. I have a question about the attorney's fees. I wonder if anybody could just fill that in, and what does this mean, 300,000? Could be as high as 600,000. Do we want our city? The fees are driven by service requests, so there's a, but at a minimum, we need 300,000. We believe, ultimately, that the trends continue, might be 600,000. So there's a high credibility we'll have to come back during the year with more. Right now this would give us sufficient, but that makes any sense. So there's an exposure. It's all driven by requests from across the city council, what have you for legal analysis and support. Over the last year, we've been trending a lot higher than we have previously. Okay. I take it to closed session issues. Is that what you're trying to say? No, no, no. I don't understand. I mean, what are the issues that are incurring extra legal and are we... It's all across the board. There's no... Going to historic, like, are we just being sued more, or why is it costing more? There's just maybe a lot more scrutiny, a lot more questions, a lot more happening in the city. It's hard. There's not 81 particular items. There's a lot of items, whether it's contracts, staff, projects, water departments. There's just a lot of things happening in the city right now. We're a big agency doing a lot of things. So I can provide a bit of context. So currently the contract with the city attorney is in two pieces. One for general legal services, and that's about $750,000. And then we have a $300,000 contract as well for code enforcement and other public safety-related things. We've seen a consistent trend over the past year where we are overspending both of those budgets. And the way our contract is structured with ABC law is that we have a set, like a ceiling of hours that are built in to the base number. Then we pay an hourly rate for every hour after that. And month after month, we are spending far more than our budget allocates. We have started working with city attorney Tony Kandadi last year to track that, where carefully and find out what are the departments that are accruing the most costs. Because to your questions, we wanted to know can we control these costs? And excuse me, we find that largely they've been driven by council members. So council members are using a lot more legal services than traditionally has happened. So I think a lot of your individual queries work on policy, work on proposed ordinances. So my understanding is that the top category of use might be the council. And then, secondarily, if you think about the level of policy issues we've had, very, very complex. Like, for instance, dealing with the encampment had a lot of legal involvement. And so the bills there were much higher. There was just a lot going on with that in general. And then across the city as well. But those were the major categories. And so we've looked at the costs. We've tried to characterize them and see are there departments that are consuming more services? Can we control those? Do we want to look at outside legal services? And so it just comes down to that there's a lot more demand for legal services and that demand costs money. Vice-americ? One thing I notice is that open streets budget occurs both in the A kind of Pi section and in the C section. So I'm just wondering if it would be worth, if we eliminated one, because it seems like A10, if that elimination happens, it's made up for in the C-15. There was a request on May to add that to the reduction. There was a very proactive on May. So we're just recording that while staff are recommending this in the report. There's already been a suggestion to take that out. I'm just trying to think of how we can make this a little bit more consistent because it seems like if we're going to remove it and then add it back in at one point then we could, it was an addition add after the initial recommendation to remove it. So this is sort of the accumulation of all the addition adds that reflect that council kind of direction. But I think when we're starting to get to that place we're further refining it. But given sort of where we're at tonight and now knowing a little bit more clarity on the costs for the city attorney and just sort of the accurate assumption for costs that we're going to have in the upcoming year, are we prepared to move it to be required? Can I just add one point here? Sure. And that is the increased cost is exclusively due to increased demand for legal services. We haven't adjusted rates or fees since 2017 so we've held the line on that even though our costs have continued to increase with inflation and the need for more personnel to work on city matters but we have held the line on the actual rates that are charged for the legal services. Okay. Thank you for that. Okay. So we have sort of, if I recall where we're at, we're moving forward with the required at this time which is item C1, C2, C3, C5 which is essentially required at this point as well as C7 and all those in favor or in support of? I don't remember who made the motion. I don't remember. I think it was. Glover. Glover. Okay. Glover and Myers. Please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? No. Any noes? Okay. That passes unanimously. So we'll go ahead and maybe wrap it up there. Does that kind of get you in the right direction there, Marcus? Okay. Great. At this time we'll go ahead and adjourn the meeting. We want to thank all the staff for being here this evening and helping us get through this and hopefully we'll get to a good place by the end. Marcus, can you give us an idea of where we are now? Yeah, what's the running balance? Our gap still remains at 790,000. Okay. Plus the ads, right? That includes the ads. Okay. Should an ad come off that list? That includes the automatic ads that we did. Yes. But then we have a whole bunch of.