 Good morning everyone. Welcome to the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors meeting of February 27, 2024. I'd like to ask the clerk to please call the roll. Sure. Supervisor Koenig? Here. Friend? Here. Hernandez? Here. McPherson? Here. And Cummings? Here. I'd like to ask if there's any member of the board who would like to dedicate today's moment of silence. Can't hear none. I'd like to dedicate the moment of silence to a student who sadly was murdered by her boyfriend this past weekend at Seabright Beach. I just want to have our hearts bow to her family and friends. And would like to dedicate the moment of silence to that individual whose name has not been released publicly. Vice Chair Hernandez, could you lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance? Lead the legions to the flag of the United States of America. And to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you so much. I'd like to ask CAO Palacios if there's been any late additions to the agenda or deletions? Yes, Chair Cummings and members of the board. First, I'd like to announce that Chair Cummings is appearing remotely today under the just caused exemption due to illness. And he is there is no one else in his location. He is there alone. Having announced that on the consent agenda, there's just one addition on item 21. There's additional materials. There's a new attachment, a letter of Mark Bingham, and that's inserted on package page 149. That includes corrections. Thank you. Are there any board members that would like to remove an item from the consent to the regular agenda? And I'll just go down the line since I'm not there in person. Supervisor Koenig? No, thank you. Supervisor Friend? No, Mr. Chair, thank you. Supervisor Hernandez? No. Thank you. McPherson? No. No, okay. With that, we will go ahead and open up public comment. This is an opportunity for members of the public or oral communications, my mistake. This is an opportunity for members of the public to comment on anything that's not on the agenda or they may comment, make comments on items that are on the agenda, just noting that if you make a comment on items that are on the agenda, the regular or consent, that you may not make a comment on those items when they come forward later on in the presentation. And so with that, the first speaker can step up to the podium. Hi, my name is Isabella Bonner. I want to thank the Board of Supervisors for presenting Black Surf Santa Cruz and myself with the proclamation today. It's really a great honor and the work that we've been doing wouldn't be possible without the support of all of you. So I'm going to read just a little excerpt from the proclamation. Black Surf Santa Cruz is a California nonprofit founded in 2020 and incorporated in 2022 with a mission to promote physical, spiritual, and communal healing through surfing, recreation, education, and wellness. The county helped us work with, I worked with Manu and Justin to help shift the local surf school nonprofit application process and actually creating a separate nonprofit track so that organizations like Black Surf and organizations aiming to cut access barriers to our ocean and natural resources really helping to give us the space to do so. So thank you so much for this honor today. Thank you, Bella. And I just want to acknowledge, you know, I met Ms. Bonner back in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd. And she's been very proactive at trying to make Santa Cruz a very just, inclusive, and diverse community where everyone feels welcome and really thought fitting given that it's Black History Month that we acknowledge and honor the work that she's been doing around making surfing in particular much more open and inclusive space in Santa Cruz community. So just wanted to thank you for all your hard work and then wanted to see if there's any other supervisors who want to make comments at this time. Yes, Chair. I'll add a few comments. I mostly just congratulating Bella on all her hard work. You know, I can't imagine a better response to or wait to embody the Black Lives Matter Movement here in Santa Cruz than bringing more people of color to experience and enjoy our surfing community here. And of course, I think you ran head on into, you know, here in Santa Cruz, we often think, oh, we don't have issues with race and exclusion. We're very inclusive. But the reality is that we do still have work to do. And of course, you have run into some of that head on. And I think ultimately some of the program changes we've made to give you your own a nonprofit surf school license will ultimately helps just officialize your presence and honor all the good work that you're doing. But also make sure that the entire community recognizes that our waves are a place for everyone. Thank you. Thank you. And our supervisors, hearing none, we'll invite the next speaker to the podium. Good morning. My name is Penny Ellis, and I'm the Santa Cruz lead for bill AB 626, which is item number 29 on your meeting agenda for today. And I'm here today to bring you up to date on where we're currently stand on implementing AB 626. To date, 13 counties have opted in, which includes neighboring Santa Clara County and Monterey County. Last September with the unanimous vote in support of Zach Brand and Bruce McPherson's offices, the board directed environmental health to look into drafting an ordinance for a two year pilot program and return before or by January 12th with their report. Environmental health needed a little more time for that. And the date was pushed back to today, which is five months later. I'm here today to stress the importance of our county government proceeding in a timely and efficient manner in order to stay on track for receiving state approved grant funding. Part of this multi-million dollar funding is your mark specifically to assist the Department of Environmental Health offices with operational costs needed to get the bill up and running. And furthermore, we're committed to partnering with our department of environmental health in offering the technical and financial support needed to draft an ordinance. Now is the time to take action to get the funding and technical support that our DEH needs to implement this bill. The focus of AB 626 has always been to empower people who want to cook and sell meals to our community with a safe and affordable legal path to entry. So when you come to item 29 on today's agenda, I encourage you to take seriously your role in leading our county government towards an efficient timeline that honors all the hard work and dedication of the numerous citizens, local businesses, and organizations that continue to support this important bill. Thank you. Thank you. Hi, my name is Anne Thrift. I live in Boulder Creek in a cell dead zone, and this is about AT&T. I'm a semi-retired technology reporter specialized in electronics and telecom. After 40 years of listening to hype like AT&T's been giving us, I can tell you they're trying to deceive us with carefully chosen words in a misleading map. They claim no copper landline customer will be left without phone service. Obviously, that won't be true if they abandoned their carry of last resort obligation, especially because there's no designated other carrier that is forced to guarantee us home phone service. Right now, that only means copper landlines. There are no better technologies, no reliable alternatives in rural and mountains California, especially during our frequent power outages. AT&T's map shows who they won't abandon now in purple and who they say have reliable alternatives in blue. But many landline customers like me in blue don't have any alternatives. So why is the map wrong and where's their data? Just because you can sell me a service at my home doesn't mean it will work there. In addition, all other communication technologies depend on PG&E's power. That's how AT&T got color in the first place, based on reliable copper lines. AT&T wants us to think copper landlines are outdated dying dinosaur tech. Really? Then why is high speed VDSL broadband steadily increasing in Europe over copper lines? Technologies do not evolve, but companies do make business decisions. And AT&T wants us to co-sign theirs. Their problem getting parts and service workers is not our problem. That's their cost of doing business. With their deep pockets, they can afford to build their own parts and train their own techs, instead of paying way too many big salaried executives and PR firms to give us yet more deceptive patronizing speeches. Thank you for your time. Good morning. I'm Alice Nandruz. I'm the Valley Women's Club president at the moment. I'm here to express our concern about AT&T proposed hard-buyer landlines being removed and also our internet issues. The Valley Women's Club has about 500 members who are all living in the rural area of the San Lorenzo Valley. We're a strong and resilient lot, as you know, go out with our own saws and hammers, etc. But we need to be just supported by the infrastructure and by you, the county. Our concerns are mostly for the students and our elderly. The day that is day and age, the students have to have internet, not need it. They have to have it. But absolutely, no internet access is available during these storms and children are out there trying to learn. And of course, we have to have the home learning, the research, the development, and of course, the curiosity for the children to be on the internet. Our seniors need to have a way to get help. No matter what the circumstances are, whether it's fire, floods, they need to be able to reach somebody. That's what our hard lines are for. We have one. It just went up 30% yesterday when I got the bill. I'm shocked. I'm concerned about the hardwires that can actually bring the DSL and they're trying to take those out. And I'm concerned about the emergency system, whether it will still work if we don't have hardwires up there and better cell service. We need more cell service. There are areas where there actually is a total blank in the area, like in Ben Lomond. So we appreciate your support of keeping them in. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning. My name is Kristen Sandel. I'm a resident of Ben Lomond and also a Valley Women's Club member. And as a 30 year resident of the San Lorenzo Valley, I'm very much opposed to any ending of landline service, which is a critical safety net for many of us. Cell service in the mountains is unreliable even when the power is on. We don't have broadband or fiber optic. And even if we did in a power outage, natural disaster or extreme weather event, landlines are often our only way to call for help in an emergency. The landline functions when nothing else works. My neighbors know that they can use my landline when their cell phones don't work. So a landline can literally be a lifesaver for a whole neighborhood, not just one household. And we aren't even in a particularly isolated area. We are 20 minutes from downtown and we still face huge power and connectivity issues. So I want to say thank you for contacting the CPC to oppose this. And please continue to represent your constituents on this issue. Thank you. Thank you very much. Hello, my name is Mary Magana Yalla and I'm the Samitas program coordinator here at Ventures. I am here today to spread awareness of the Samitas program, which invests in Santa Cruz County babies educational future by automatically opening a college savings account. Eligible babies born after January 1st, 2021 to Santa Cruz County residents receive an initial deposit of up to $50 at the time of birth. As the baby grows, they receive additional deposits based on health and educational milestones. Our goals are to increase childhood development, build expectations for higher education and build dedicated savings and healthy lifelong financial habits. To date, Samitas has opened over 7,000 accounts, which has been possible with the help of our many partners. More than half of our participants are from the Pajaro Valley. 60% of the population we serve is Latin and 36% are white. More than half of the families we serve have received an equalizer deposit to their baby's account of an additional $25 at the time of birth because they have Medi-Cal or their self-reported income is below $70,000. Samitas wouldn't have been possible without the generosity of our many partners. We would like to thank all of our partners for investing in our Santa Cruz County children. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Thank you for the work you do in our community. Good morning, Board of Supervisors. Thank you for your service. My name is Shalot Cabanes, and I love Santa Cruz. First, I'm here just to represent myself. Every day, I want to say thank you to Bruce McPherson and Zach Friend for your many years of service. We all have battles that we struggle through every day that other people don't know about. Those with us who struggle with behavioral health, mental health issues, there's an added component. I have to say in public settings that I've been in, Zach Friend has often come up to me, greeted me and instructed and given me words of encouragement, and from one human being to another. Thank you very much for that. I appreciate it. The other reason I'm here is I have the privilege of serving as the chairperson for the Mental Health Advisory Board. And as you've seen in your packet, we've been pretty prolific in turning things in. One thing we've done is the data notebook. It's turned that into the state. We also have a letter to recommend the resolution to support the property tax appropriation report reform. Also, recommendation for the Behavioral Health Crisis response and a recommendation to post Proposition 1, which would take a lot of funding away from behavioral health, even though its intent is really good. It also takes away future control of that funding from us voters and brings it up to the state level. So we strongly support that, strongly oppose that. Finally, we'll be turning in the buy-in report soon and make an appointment to do any kind of reporting or answering any kind of questions you have. Again, guys, thank you so much for your service. I love Santa Cruz. Thank you. Hello, I'm Laura Chatham and I'm on the Mental Health Advisory Board. And I just came to read the letter out loud to oppose Proposition 1. So this says to Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors, the Mental Health Advisory Board of Santa Cruz County strongly recommends that Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors oppose Proposition 1 as it reduces funding for existing behavioral health services and crisis response. Proposition 1 diverts one third of the existing funds funding from the Voter Approved Mental Health Services Act. Funding allows many kinds of services to compete with mental health care for the remaining money and puts the state in charge of local behavioral health programs and decisions. The results will be devastating at the local level. Current Mental Health Services Act programs are a lifeline for underserved communities and people without insurance. Many of these services will be cut due to Proposition 1 if it passes. Again, the Mental Health Advisory Board of Santa Cruz County strongly recommends that Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors oppose Proposition 1 as it reduces funding for existing behavioral health services and crisis response. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning, esteemed members of the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors. I am Martin, an apprentice with the Sheet Metal Workers Local 104 representing GOH Wilson. I join my fellow apprentices in urging your support for a project labor agreement with a million dollar threshold. PLAs are essential for promoting stability for wages and crucial benefits like health care and retirement plans. By endorsing this agreement, you are investing in the growth and prosperity of both our community and the skilled workers of Sheet Metal Local 104. Thank you. Greetings, honorable members of the Board of Supervisors. I, Sebastian, as an apprentice affiliated with the Sheet Metal Local 104 employed by Air Tech Service, which we do a lot of work around here, not almost all of it, strongly advocate for your support in establishing a project labor agreement with a million dollar threshold in Santa Cruz. PLAs not only foster collaboration between contractors and labor, but also provide vital benefits such as health care, retirement plans, and much more to workers. Your endorsement will undoubtedly contribute to the success of our local projects and the well-being of our skilled workforce. Thank you. Good morning. Hey, guys doing respected members of the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors. My name is Jaime Baquera. I'm an instructor at Sheet Metal Workers Local 104, JATC, where we train the next generation of skilled workers. I stand before you in support of implementing a project labor agreement with a million dollar threshold in our county. As educators, we strive to equip the apprentices with the highest skill and dedication. A PLA not only ensures a fair compensation and benefits for our apprentices, including health care, retirement plans, but also play a crucial role in fostering a collaborative and stable working environment. This agreement not only benefits our skilled workforce, but contributes to the success of local projects. Your support for a PLA will resonate beyond the job sites, positively impacting education and training we provide at Sheet Metal Workers JATC. It reinforces the value of skilled labor and promotes a sustainable future for both workers and the projects in our community. Thank you for considering the importance of a project labor agreement and looking forward to witnessing a positive impact it can have on Sheet Metal Workers Local 104 apprentices, their future employers, and the broader Santa Cruz County community. Thank you. Good morning. Thank you for letting us speak. I'm also an apprentice with 104. Jaime is one of our instructors. We encourage you to help try to get us a PLA. It helps me as an apprentice, being a single father, helping my son go to school, play sports, stay in the community. Thank you to Jaime for helping us learn the skills of the trade, having pride in our work, being able to take my son out here and say, I built that. I built that. It feels good when your son can say, oh, my dad built that, or my uncle built that. Something they can see, something that they can be proud of. It's okay to work with your hands. It's okay to be out there, help the community flourish, help it benefit. We build schools, hospitals, local police stations, and I'm very thankful to be able to do that for the area and where I live, being able to, like they say, keep money here for me and my son. Thank you for your time. Good morning. Dear members of the Board of Supervisors, I am Jose Mencia, a proud apprentice with the Sheet Metal Workers Local 104, working out valves, plumbing, and heating. I appeal to you for your support in implementing a project labor agreement with a million dollar threshold in Santa Cruz County. PLAs bring stability to projects ensuring timely completion and cost effectiveness. Additionally, they guarantee fair compensation and essential benefits for workers such as myself. Your endorsement of a PLA will strengthen both our local projects and the skilled workforce within our community. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning. I am addressing today not only the Board, whom I thank for your support regarding the AT&T issue. I have lived in Santa Cruz since 1972 and I survived the 89 earthquake. AT&T might not be aware that, hey, this is earthquake country. We're talking not only Santa Cruz County, but California. So I hope to survive the big one, which is supposedly coming. Scientists have said this year is early as this year. For the 89 earthquake, I was in Soquel and our landline held up. We were able to contact relatives, friends, housemates to see how they were doing, to see if the bridge collapsed, what roads were open. This is most definitely landlines, our lifelines. So I appeal to you to consider not what money AT&T is going to be acquiring as a result of this, but to look at the big picture. Also, I might say that personally, I cannot be around, oops, I cannot be around electromagnetic frequency that comes from the cell phone. It's very debilitating to me, to my health, to my mind. So there it is. If the corporation has a conscience, they should use it. Thank you. Thank you. Morning. I'm Judy Rosella Myers and I live in an incorporated Santa Cruz County. I want to thank you all for all your service and all you guys do to represent your constituents all over the county. And please do not take the side of the corporation in terms of the landline situation. It is important to know, I also was here during the 89 quake and again, the landline was the savior. There was no other way to get ahold of people or for people to get ahold of us. And I know people who have cell coverage who right now, this very day in different parts of their house, AT&T does not provide good enough coverage. And this is an area that is highly populated in Pleasure Point. So it's not consistent to have cell coverage from AT&T. And AT&T, it's a conflict of interest. They are in the cell phone business and trying to push off high tech, not technology because they don't want to pay the service people, you know, who are trained, just like the sheet workers who actually provide a major service for our community. So those are the guys who hold it all together. So please, please help us maintain the self, the landline coverage that we need for all of our community, not just the mountains. I mean, we're not getting coverage even within our areas that are supposed to be covered. So please thank you, represent us all, not AT&T. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning, members of the board. My name is Alejandra Garcia. I serve as a new government affairs manager for Comcast. I will oversee in my role the support of broadband issues and efforts for both Santa Cruz and Monterey County. I'm here today to express Comcast dedication and partnering with the county and advancing broadband infrastructure and connectivity for the residents of Santa Cruz County. With Comcast extensive experience and telecommunication and our commitment to innovation, we are eager to work alongside the county to ensure that all residents have access to reliable and high speed broadband services. For over a decade, Comcast has been focused on closing the digital divide. Most recently with our Lyft Zone partners, community bridges in Santa Cruz County. I eagerly anticipate collaborating closely with the county board and other stakeholders to improve broadband access and connectivity along the region. Should you, your team, or the residents of Santa Cruz County require any assistance from Comcast, please don't hesitate to contact us. I look forward to working together. Thank you. Hi there. Good morning. My name is Kathy Ashramoff. I'm a resident of Bonny Dune. Bonny Dune is about 45 minutes from Silicon Valley, but you wouldn't know it. Thank you. Bonny Dune is about 45 minutes from Silicon Valley, but you wouldn't know it by the fact that we don't have cell phone service and that Comcast regularly goes out when the power goes out. I'm really glad to hear the prior speaker commit to better Comcast service in Santa Cruz. Perhaps they would like to become the carrier of last resort for the county if AT&T is backing out. Needless to say, I'm here to talk about AT&T. Landline is essential for public safety in Bonny Dune. Multiple prior speakers have said so, so I won't repeat that. Relieving AT&T of their carrier of last resort obligation would create another hole in the infrastructure safety net that myself and Bonny Dune and my family and my neighbors rely upon. I don't have to tell you all about what happened, especially Supervisor McPherson in the 2020 Lightning fires. Landline was a lifeline afterwards for weeks and weeks and weeks. Sorry. I want to thank the Board of Supervisors for your writing a letter to the CPC advocating for this action to be advocating that AT&T maintain their carrier of last resort. They claim that their fellow obligations limit their ability to compete, which I find hilarious. What they aren't talking about is the fact that for decades they benefited as a monopoly from taking on that obligation and they didn't have any competition at all during that period. If they can't compete today, maybe they should work on better serving their customers, not whining to regulators about an obligation that benefited them for decades. Please listen to the AT&T speaker today with the skepticism that they deserve. Thank you. Good morning. My name is Barry Porter. I live on Thayer Road in Bonny Dune and I also oppose AT&T's move to get out of the landline business. But on a different subject, Supervisors may be aware of a new effort in Watsonville to limit aircraft operations at the Watsonville Airport. The city's motivation is to reduce or eliminate runway safety zones to facilitate land development near the airport. This effort will reduce the safety of the airport and its utility by closing or drastically reducing access to critical runway and also encourages conflicting development that will inevitably increase pressure to close the airport. Although the airport is within the city of Watsonville owned by it, it's a vital asset to the region and the county especially. Watsonville City Council plans to vote on proposals to close or significantly shorten the crosswind runway at a meeting on March 26. The Watsonville Pilots Association supports a compromise that exists of shortening the runway by approximately 870 feet. This resolves FAA line of sight issues that have been raised and it opens up additional land for development in Watsonville. But shortening the runway beyond this or closing it altogether would have a negative impact on the airport safety, county emergency services and the $67 million worth of revenue that is brought in through the airport each year. It's the only public airport and it's important to the city and the county as an operational hub in instances such as the Loma Prieta earthquake, CCU fire, recent flooding is incredibly important. Watsonville's need to accommodate new housing is also very important but a compromise should be made to create the housing and protect and preserve the areas only operating airport. Consequently, we hope that the county would participate in future city discussions and represents the region's need to protect the Watsonville airport. Thanks very much for your time. Good morning. My name is Martin Garcia and I am with the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades. We have many members who reside in this county so I urge your support for the adoption of a project labor agreement with a million dollar threshold. PLA is not only ensure fur wages but also provide comprehensive benefits including healthcare and retirement plans to workers by endorsing this agreement. You are contributing to the prosperity of our local projects and the skilled workforce that builds and shapes our community. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning. I'm Daniel Ferreiro. I'm an apprentice at Geo Wilson as you just supported PLA at a million dollars with a five-year term. This PLA will help me personally with my future hours in this county. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning. My name is Philip Trump and I'm here to talk about AT&T. I currently have a landline with a DSL. I get reliable phone service when powers out. I get 2.4 megabits per second internet service and use a wireless router and use a generator when my power is out and I get it all. I can use cordless telephone system and have service where I select in my home. My wife and I do not have to lug a phone around from room to room nor buy two expensive ones. If AT&T wants to drop the landline, we should at that minimum get 99 point plus reliability phone service that accommodates cordless telephone technology and I don't need two phones for my wife and I. Okay. Frankly, the internet should provide a minimum of 20 megabits per second and a wireless router for distribution. AT&T has 580,000 people involved in this situation. It's an opportunity for them to improve what they have which they haven't and they can make more money off this and they can throwing it out. Thank you. Thank you very much. Good morning. My name is John Lars. I'm here for the same AT&T issue. I'm asking the counties to take up this case on behalf of this class of people. I am a farmer in Mr. Freen's district down San Andreas Road. I have about 800 employees that work there on the farm. We have two DSL nodes on copper, remote rural areas. We have an HR office. We have work in compensation cases. We have health insurance claims, various data passing between these nodes over to our other node and also in Aptos at Seascape Village where we do have Comcast. However, Comcast wants a quarter million dollars, for example, to get K. Holcomb's connection up there off of up above the freeway. To get my connection, Comcast probably cost me another 150, 200,000 to get the cable. We're talking a quarter mile run which is nothing for a farmer. I'm asking you to take the case up for the class. The telco in transigence is historically known. That's why they have to have PUC in their offices overseeing what they do. PUC is not taking the call. The letter, AT&T letter, notice the intent, gives me a number to call PUC. PUC's answering machine tells me to call PG&E's standard number to get an hour and a half to get service for ordinary service for AT&T. It's a serious problem. Rural internet is very important and it's not there yet. This is a big issue for me. They're charging me a thousand dollars a month for a single copper line to one of these nodes that we connect by wireless Wi-Fi for three miles to get to the other node where we do not have DSL. We have nothing. That's where our hiring office is and that's what we've been doing business. We have copper there, landline. We can talk on the phone. Thank you so much, sir. Good morning. My name is Joe Alba. I'm a retired sheet metal worker with a local 104. I'm also a part-time instructor. I started in the sheet metal back in 1982 when I graduated Watsonville High School. And by supporting the PLL, that's what I'm here for, you will also provide these younger boys, boys, men, because these men that have come up prior to me to have a good career and, more importantly, look forward to a nice retirement like I am enjoying right now. So by supporting the PLL, you will also ensure work for them and by them working, they're supporting my retirement and hopefully keeping this whole system going where we can provide good living wages, especially in this area that we know is so expensive and which has allowed me to live still in the area because of the work and the pensions that I received. So I urge your support for the project labor agreement. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning. My name is Billy Butler. I'm an iron worker at a local 377. Been an iron worker for 19 years. I'm a part-time instructor for the past five. I'm from Santa Cruz County, so I grew up in the beach flats. And since I've joined the union, it's helped me get a house, a truck, my own family to go home to every day. The furthest I've worked was out of state, but I've never had a job, PLA wise, home wise, where I can say, hey, take my kid and show her all my kids and say, hey, I built that. I got to go to the Golden Gate and beyond. So it would be nice to have something here and to bring back to our community because I have a big research outreach. So we reach out to, on my days off, I go to the schools and go talk to any of the kids to help and join the union, kids that are invested and want to learn about union. So I'm just here to show support for the PLA. Thank you very much. Morning. My name is Becky Steinbruner. I arrived late. I have a question. Did you pull Consent Agenda Item 21? No. All right. Thank you. Then I will speak on that now. Item Consent Agenda Item 21 is the Next Generation County Radio project that will cost perhaps $49 million. I was hoping you would pull that so there could be better discussion publicly that the taxpayers are going to be asked to fund that unfunded federal mandate. But I have a lot of questions. Is it really going to improve service during emergency emergencies and disasters for emergency response workers in the rural areas? I am troubled that it will completely eliminate the citizen's ability to use scanners. Those are important for people to be able to listen to during disasters because they can hear what is going on and information is critical. So I hope that you will take a look at doing that and answer my emails that I have sent. Item Number 42 listed in the agenda, but Item 41 in the book outside, is the Aptos Village Area Traffic Adaptive System. Almost a half a million dollars in adapting and coordinating the traffic lights through Aptos Village from State Park to Trout Gulch. That was also supposed to have been done when Swenson built the Phase 1 of the Aptos Village project. And now I see Phase 2 coming in and it is going to get even more congested. That's part of why I'm late this morning. I ask that you hold the developer accountable to paying for this system, that the Aptos Village project traffic is bringing about in part. And I urge voters to vote no on K. You have to learn to be on a budget just like we do. Thank you. Thank you very much. My name is Jonathan Whitworth. Can you hear me? I know that I've leaned back. Maybe you can't. But I have a handout here that I'm here. I live in Bonnie Dune area. And I have a handout that I would like to provide. And it's a document that I got from the public advocates, which is an independent division of the CPUC. I'm here to talk about AT&T item. And it is their handout in terms of what the problems are. And then the public advocates are very, very concerned about AT&T's application. And you'll be able to see the highlights on that document, which is a document provided not only by the public advocates, but it was filed in the proceeding that AT&T has filed along with Tern, which you're probably familiar with, the utility reform network organization. There's also the Center for Accessible Technology that is filing this. The rural county representatives of California is filing this, which is 40 counties. Santa Cruz County is not a member of that, neither is Santa Clara or Santa Mateo. But I'm wondering if your board could find a way to piggyback on the rural county's filing. And also the Tahoe Energy Ratepayers Organization. I'll just say that I personally have on a number of occasions been in the situation where I didn't have any way to reach emergency services when the power goes out and if AT&T is out. But most of the time, AT&T survives, as you've heard, and that has been the lifesaver. So to me personally, it's very important that AT&T continue to be an emergency provider. Thank you. Thank you very much. Hello, my name is Patricia Dameron. I live on the north coast between Western Drive and Davenport. And during the 2020 fires, the Comcast equipment that gives me Wi-Fi melted, and there was a roadblock at Highway 1 in Western Drive, so I couldn't go to town because I've tried to come back. I wouldn't be able to go through the roadblock and take care of my animals and help out my elderly neighbors as I was doing during the fires. So for about seven days in August 2020, I had no way to communicate or get emergency services except my AT&T landline, which worked great. So I know there are a lot of people in that same boat, and I really urge the supervisors to go to bat for our community to AT&T to keep the service for us for emergency. Thank you. Good morning. My name is James Ewing Whitman. I looked around. I was really hoping that Sheriff Hart was in the room to be much more candid about the things I would like public commentary about and public involvement. On the regular agenda, the AT&T items coming up, so the 10 people that spoke on it, I hope they stick around to listen to what was said. I don't know why anybody, if they do their own research, would pledge allegiance to the corporate pirate flags of the United States or California or the pedophile flag. People should do their own research. Although I can thank all of you men for many things, but there's another side to that coin. This document in my hand about city and county managers, they control the city council members and the boards of supervisors. You men, the supervisors were elected. Neither the Civilization Obliteration Assistant, Mr. Carlos Palacios or Jason Heath were elected, but they are controlling this board. And so there's a lot of issues going on that aren't really being spoken about, and I would be much more candid if Mr. Hart was here. Thank you. Well, good morning. I'm not here to talk about phones or anything else, so I'm glad to be here. Hi, my name is Tony Brooke, and I'm here as the representative for our United Veterans Council of Santa Cruz County. And I'm in support of Item 31, which is our consent agenda item about the Veterans Building Lease in Watsonville, the city of Watsonville. Our council met and gave 100% support of this proposal. I want to thank each of the board members who worked with us on making this happen. UVC represents approximately 9,500 veterans or dependents and families. In our county, through over two dozen veteran organizations and nonprofit service providers, each of those members have a vote and a voice. The proposed lease marks a mile post, not the finish line, in a ten-year journey to develop and offer better services to our veterans in the South County, especially in Watsonville. Traditionally an underserved and often neglected population or South County residents have a long and compelling history of military service. The United States dating before the Civil War. I'll cut right to the chase here in the interest of time and just say I'd like to thank Supervisor Felipe Hernandez and his staff, awesome folks, for making this come together. Thank you very much. In particular, I'd like to take note of Rebecca Hurley from our county parks department. Because without Rebecca, who kept us on task and on track, we probably would still be sitting in a meeting room somewhere with carpal tunnel butt. So she's the consummate professional, she's able to navigate the rocks and shoals and keep us on time. And she did this with respect, patience and incredible sense of duty. Thank you all for your service. Thank you. Yes. My name is Martin Levy. I'm a resident downtown on River Street, a condo near the Gateway Plaza. And I'm going to address the AT&T issue just with some extra information. This is not only a rural issue, but it also affects a lot more places. AT&T presently is in the street outside us with their fiber option. The fiber option is mentioned in the large package for this meeting. And yet, we cannot order that service. We're downtown. We are not rural. It is just not available. We also, by the way, can't even order AT&T DSL over copper. At the moment, that has been withdrawn by AT&T. I provide this just as background information. So this is a downtown location, not a rural location. Interestingly enough, we have other fiber, local fiber providers, but they've stopped 60 feet beforehand and want a large amount of money to move. This is something you should keep into account when you hear about other providers. We have Concast. We're downtown. That's fine, but that's a zero, it has zero competition. Finally, yes, we have Starlink. If you have a good space to look up at the sky, downtown, that's not really an option for most people, obviously. It works for me because I'm on the top floor. I can see the sky. That's it. But I just want you to understand that that's not only an issue, really. In fact, actually, downtown at the moment, AT&T has essentially at best one bar in our area, which is ironically where the AT&T sales office is at the Gateway Plaza. Don't worry, T-Mobile has zero and Verizon isn't much better. So this is not only a rural issue. Keep all these issues into account, please. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you so much. Hello, I'm Catherine Zooker. I live in Bonnyton also. I live at the bottom of the mountain with hundreds and hundreds of redwoods on top of me. We've relied on AT&T for our entire residency there. It has served us in the CZU fires and other times. Just recently, though, it was down for nine days on my particular driveway. It is not cheap, but the other alternatives are also many, many, many of thousands and thousands of dollars in investments. If they work at all, I live with my husband. When the power is down, that is the only way. And the power is down often, as you all know. That is the only way we have ever been able to keep in touch, to have 911 services, to call Bonnyton Fire Department. It is absolutely essential. And it's also essential that AT&T stop gouging us and telling us that, oh, you can't be eligible for U-verse, so you're basically SOL. And we're not going to support these lines. I spend about an hour and a half per month on the phone on hold with AT&T for various issues. And each time I get a different answer, each time I get a run around and each bill is higher and higher. So this is an issue that is so important to our rural communities. And he just mentioned the downtown community. And it's just time for big corporations like AT&T just to stop squeezing us and to think about public safety for our communities. Thank you. Thank you very much. Good morning. Thank you for being here for us. I'm Barbara Dimitri and I live in Bonnyton also. And I agree with what everyone has already said about the lines in Bonnyton. I've lived there for 47 years, raised three children, and my AT&T line has been completely my lifeline on so many occasions. I can't tell you when the power is down, my AT&T line has always worked. We're having less and less luck with it being in good shape, but it's still working. And I am here today because my AT&T line worked during the fires in Bonnyton. I received the reverse call at night. I was sound asleep, awakened, telling me to get out of there. I drove out of my dead end one way road just in time as the wall of fire came up in front of me. So I am here today to say we cannot be without our landlines. Thank you. Thank you. Hello, my name is Teresa Bond. I am a trustee for the Los Gatos Saratoga Union High School District, which has a large quantity of students that live in the mountains that attend it. I live in the Fifth District of unincorporated county on the summit in the mountains. Today is the 11th consecutive day. It started on February 16th, the frontier internet outage. Our school district was on winter break last week and our families got the special experience of having a digital detox. This week, our students are back in class and they are utilizing our libraries to access their assignments and turn in their homework. This is the way we regularly live. We also experienced power outages last week. We were out probably six days. At this point, we have quite a log. It is important to point out that it appears over the last two years AT&T deprioritized maintenance on our landlines resulting in poor reception and months of outage. This is new. In previous years, we experienced exceptional service. If a company with the cofers of AT&T wants to abandon the expense of maintaining landlines for rural areas, it is ludicrous that to anticipate that some smaller company with much lower revenues would be able to take on this work. Rural customers need landline service in the event of climate emergencies, health emergencies. We have a toddler who wears a backpack for chemo on our road and she absolutely needs to be able to have emergency services and personal safety domestic violence that occurs during power outages. We need our landlines. Thank you. Thank you so much. Good morning. My name is David Schwartz. I'm a candidate for supervisor or district two. Just a few things that I'd like to mention this morning. I really like the fact that this is a full house today and it's great that our community has an opportunity to speak to the board. I would suggest that the board consider having their meetings at different times as well to maybe have more public comment, maybe even having it at a different location. If we do have a South County area, we could probably utilize that at certain times. But think about possibly nine o'clock meetings, sometimes maybe six o'clock meetings, other times, and let's keep this commentary going. The other thing that I'd like to mention is I am in agreement with the PLA, but the one that you have on your agenda is too cumbersome, too difficult to deal with, and it's going to have unintended consequences, I believe. I think the idea was to make the process simpler, but I believe the way this is written, it's not going to do that. So in support of that, we need to look at simplifying it and making it a document that people can work with and it gives us the benefits that we desire. Without doing that, I don't think it's going to be really a big help. I love driving in today. It was a challenge to get across the county in an hour. There's so much going on. I like to see that. It's nice that we're doing some work on roads and things and we need to keep at it. I'm a little concerned about the financials of the county and I read through them this morning and I thought it was interesting that even though we're ahead of the curve on the expenditures that it has no fiscal impact, I think it does have some impact, not much, but so. Thank you. Good morning. My name is Jamie Prophet. I live in Bonny Doon as well. Oh, sorry. Thank you very much for your service and I wanted to say that we take care of my mother-in-law who's 93 and we had an emergency about a little more than a month ago where we had to call 911 and thankfully there was a great response. Everything worked out. She's doing fine, giving me trouble, but I want to say that the AT&T is a huge concern. We live in the Redwoods like other people here and do whatever you can to please have them keep service. Otherwise, we get cell service maybe one, two days a week if we're lucky and that's just the way it is. I appreciate your help on this and thank you very much. Thank you. Hello. My name is G. Murray and I just want to reiterate what's been said and thank the board for sticking up for us. Landlines save lives. Thank you very much. Thank you. And before the next speaker, is there any other member of the public who's there in person who would like to speak to us? If so, I'd like to just ask your lineup. Otherwise, if you're the last person who's speaking to us in person, we'll then transfer to people who are online. I just have a quick question. Will there be an opportunity to speak when the AT&T issue is up again? So if you've already spoken, you won't get a second chance to speak, but if you're going to wait to hear from AT&T and you haven't spoken yet, you will have a chance to speak after AT&T gives their presentation. And so seeing no other individuals in person, I'd like to see if there's any members of the public who are online who would like to speak to us during oral communications. Yes, Chair, we have speakers. Caller, user one, your microphone is now available. Marilyn Garrett. Since Santa Cruz County imposed lockdowns and COVID shots on our population, the resulting negative consequences ought to be widely publicized and halt any future injections. I have before me the publication Wise Traditions Winter of 2023 titled COVID Jabs. The bad news about COVID shots just keeps accumulating. In the UK, the Office of National Statistics published an update on deaths by vaccination status in England, which revealed that the vaccinated population accounted for 95% of the COVID-19 deaths during the 12 months from June 2022 through May 2023. 94% of those deaths were among either the triple or quadruple vaccinated population. While the unvaccinated accounted for the lowest number of COVID deaths in every single month, exposenews.com November 19, 2023. And it's not just COVID that is carrying off the vaccinated. Physicians are describing a surge in aggressive rapid onset cancers following the rollout of the shots in December 2020, especially lymphoma, even in young people, epoch times, August 15, 2023. Cardiovascular deaths in the US and UK are up. Also, vigilantevox.substack, August 2023. And disability rates in the UK have almost doubled. Most alarming of all is the damage inflicted on military members forced to take the COVID Jabs. I know I'm out of time here. You can check this out further westinaprize.org. Thank you. Thank you. Well, our user too, your microphone is now available. Hi. Good morning. Thank you, Council, for your letter to AT&T, supporting our landline availability. I also live in town. I live in the unincorporated area, but it's definitely in not the rural part of our county. And we do not have the fiber optic alternative here. It is not available. And I want to keep my landline. I value my landline for safety reasons, and for other reasons, I cannot use a cell phone. And I also don't think people should be forced to use cell phones, especially not after the... Can you hear me? I don't know if I'm... I heard all of them there, but anyway. Not after the United States Court of Appeals in the DC Circuit published its decision on August 13, 2021, that the FCC failed to consider the evidence regarding the adverse health effects of wireless technology all the way back to the FCC's 1996 radio frequency emission guidelines that were supposed to be protecting the public health all this time and do not. So that court determined that the FCC has to go back and redo all of their guidelines. And because that court was presented with 10,000 pages, actually 11,000 pages of evidence of harm to people and biological systems from wireless technology. So wireless technology is not the answer in this county. Fiber optics might be, but they're a long ways away from getting that. And fiber optics also go out during a power outage, so they would not address those concerns. I'm puzzled by AT&T is simply having somebody else take over if they don't want to deal with it anymore. Why don't they have a century link takeover there? Thank you. Thank you so much for your comments. We appreciate them. Jeffrey and Stacey, your microphone is now available. Thank you very much. I'm Jeff. Good morning, everyone. I'm Jeffrey Arlt. I'm the secretary of the mental health advisory board. And I'd like to speak to the written correspondence listing section three, item BB, which is the letter of recommendation to clarify that this is a letter of recommendation that the county included a line item in the three-year budget forecast to allocate 70 million dollars for a behavioral health crisis response center that's commensurate with the needs of our client population. It's appropriated this time as we are in a budget review period. The crisis response center would provide a continuum of services that includes a walk-in clinic, 23-hour secure observation, and residential crisis services for both adults and children. There'd be a state of art psychiatric specialty ER, including the capacity for rapid police drop-off. We do not currently have a facility that is a crisis response center in Santa Cruz County. Unfortunately, we have to use our jail, which houses about 100 inmates that are in need of mental health crisis services. We are also currently launching crisis response teams, which will need this type of a crisis response center. The letter also includes architectural drawings for your reference. So again, thank you for considering our recommendation that the county include a three-year budget forecast item for 70 million dollars for behavioral health crisis response center. Thank you for your service and your support. Thank you so much. Tim, your microphone's now available. Thank you so much, Board of Supervisors, for letting me speak today. My name is Tim Delaney, and I live up on the summit. I am highly supportive of all the folks that have spoken before you regarding this situation with AT&T and landlines. I look at things from a national security perspective. Whether it's cell, landmines, sat, or radio, you need all of these things in your community. I want to remind everyone on the other side of the world there are a whole bunch of wars and extreme sex violence being meted out on these people, whether it be Ukraine, Syria, Israel, or Darfur. So that stuff may come our way. And so looking at Santa Cruz County here, these corporations here, they're playing games with you, all of you, and doing things that are detrimental to your communication abilities. That's unacceptable. Okay. And mind you all, Elon Musk, he's like a Benedict Arnold out there. It's like, what's up? Whose side are you on? So you probably all heard about Taiwan and him being not very supportive of our US military in Taiwan with his Starling system and so on. As far as I'm concerned, the federal government ought to just yank the whole thing from him and take it over. Okay. So that's that angle on measure one. Okay. That's junk. Don't vote for that. Measure K. That's kind of cool. Okay. All bucks need to come to Santa Cruz County. Don't feel bad about looting the tourists who are Silicon Valley. I'm okay with paying a little extra money at the grocery store. If I know money is coming to Santa Cruz County, and that helps all of you, that's awesome. Okay. So those are my comments for you all. Thank you so much. And you have a fine day. Thank you very much. Justin, your microphone is now available. Good morning, County supervisors. My name is Justin White. I'm the CEO of K&B Landscaping here at Watsonville. And today I'm actually reaching out in regards to the PLA that's on the agenda. We have over 130 employees that work here at K&B Landscaping, and we understand PLA is at a deep level. City of Watsonville passed one a few years back, and I have spent tens of thousands of dollars with lawyers and other individuals trying to develop a way that K&B Landscaping can work on projects with a PLA. However, the only way we're able to work on those projects is if we join the union. So PLAs are very simple. While also being very complicated, the simple part of them, which is in the staff report, and I'll just read it, you know, PLAs can adversely affect local contractor participation because of the requirement to utilize union labor and pay into union benefit trust funds. Now, if you're a union company, this is very easy. It's business as usual. If you're a non-union company, you have to go about unionizing your workforce, which is a giant decision for a small business owner. And I consider ourselves a small to medium size business, and we've invested a lot of money into training. We've looked at the unions multiple times because we want to work in the city that we're headquartered here in Watsonville. However, there is no land state union. So there is only a labor union. Passing a PLA would default, eliminate K&B Landscaping and other non-union contractors from bidding on jobs in the county. We know this because the city of Watsonville. So today I urge you to do the research, read the staff report, side with small businesses of county of Santa Cruz, and do not vote to put an appeal. Thank you. Eric, your microphone is now available. Good morning. Thank you. Can you hear me okay? Yes, we can. Thank you. Just really quick, I want to point out my name is Eric Christian. I'm the Executive Director of the Coalition for Fair Employment and Construction. We're a statewide organization that was formed 25 years ago by union and non-union construction firms to oppose discriminatory PLAs. Every union worker who was spoken today, their contractors can already bid on every project that go on the county. So nothing changes for them. Under a PLA, all the non-union construction firms and workers and apprentices are implicitly and explicitly excluded from being able to work under your projects. What problems exist that require this divisive and discriminatory PLA? The workforce in California just released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics is 86% union-free. Why would you seek to force those non-union workers to paint union pension plans, which you do under a PLA, that you'll never invest in? This is wage theft. Is the board supportive of wage theft? Have you surveyed local contractors to find out what their views are on PLAs and whether you'll lose them as a bidder or not? Have you researched how poorly the city of Santa Barbara's PLA has gone on the one project they've placed it on? City of Watsonville. The same thing. It's been a disaster for them. They're not getting the bidders that they did on non-PLA projects. They explicitly discriminate against non-union apprenticeship programs. Young men and women looking to have a future in the trades who happen to be in non-union state-approved apprenticeship programs. PLAs explicitly exclude them. Why would you consider such a thing? Do you have a provision in your PLA like the Southwestern Community College down in San Diego that says if you don't get three bidders and or it's 10% over the budget, the winning bid, you send it back out to bid without a PLA? That protects you. Why would you not have a real apples to apples comparison and have a project bid with and without a project labor agreement so you can see for yourself what they do? We're going through a record inflationary period. This will only make it worse by making it more difficult for local workers and contractors to bid. Please vote no. Thank you. Thank you very much. Katrina, your microphone is now available. I'm born as supervisors and members of the community. Hello. My name is Katrina Christensen and I work at K&D Landscaping. A local company based here in Watsonville has provided landscaping services since 1986. We employ over 130 people in the majority of our workers in Santa Cruz County. At K&D, my role is to provide support to our teams in the office in the field. We're a non-unique company and we are able, not able to work on projects that have a PLA requirement for all labor-owned jobs that really need to be unionized. There's currently a PLA in Watsonville City and unfortunately we have been able to watch out-of-town landscape contractors that comes far away as Arizona to work in a city that we grew up in as a company and are located since 1986. The advocates of the PLA will argue that companies like K&D can still work on PLA projects, but let me tell you, we have worked hard to figure out a path in Watsonville and to this day are still unable to compete on bids or projects with a PLA. I'm asking you to look at the local businesses such as K&D Landscaping which are non-union and ask yourself if you would want to ban companies like us from working in your county and working on your projects. Tennis would like to read something from the staff report that jumps out to us. PLAs could adversely affect local contractor participation because the requirement to utilize union labor and pay into union benefit trust funds for worker wages. Smaller contractors currently make up a large portion of the workforces and Cruz County. These smaller contractors may not have the skill or resources to comply with the terms of the PLAs and there's a risk that these agreements could adversely discourage those smaller local contractors from submitting bids or participating in the subcontractors. PLAs can favor larger non-local contractors undermining the county's goal to support local businesses and develop a local labor particularly to hire requirements that are not well defined included in the PLA. I want to add that K&D has the resources and we do perform many federal and state prevailing wage projects and have a full time compliance manager. It's not a matter of resources. It's a matter of fact that our team is non-union and for that reason we are not allowed to work on these PLA projects unless they join a union. I encourage you to vote now. Thank you so much. Caller 0193 your microphone is now available. Good morning this is Angela Tess not Colleen on behalf of Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Cruz County and I would like to express my gratitude to the entire Board of Supervisors and to Director Reed of the Office of Response Recovery and Resilience for Consent Agenda Item Number 25 to approve a two-year standby contract with CDOs like Second Harvest Food Bank in order to support county emergency operations during major disaster events. As we saw last winter the multiple atmospheric river events our counties at risk from the impacts of climate change are not going to face anytime soon. Second Harvest Food Bank was one of the first organizations with boots on the ground to assist our community by delivering fresh water warm meals to our evacuation sites helping to fill sandbags and this will no doubt occur again. We'd like to really thank OR3 for the proactive work during these sunny blue sky times in order to engage and coordinate in preparation with CDOs like us so that we are ready for actions when disaster strikes again. Thanks again. Thank you so much. Rex, your microphone is now available. Hi, good morning. Can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you. Great, good morning Supervisors. My name is Rex Hyam with Western Electrical Contractors Association and I was also banana slug. Wiga represents electoral contractors throughout the state of California developing today's and tomorrow's workforce. We educate apprentices with our state and federally approved apprenticeship program and I'm here to speak against a discriminatory and costly project labor agreement. PLAs discriminate against our state approved apprentices and they're told they're not welcome to work on projects even if they are residents of the county. Apart from that explicit discrimination PLAs also prohibit non-signatory contractors from using their own employees on jobs even if they are constituents. If local hires an issue of interest in there are many measures of a PLA that prevent tax dollars from going back to the constituents in the county. Due to that and non-signatory contractors not being able to use their own workforce it discourages a segment of local contractors from bidding on projects at all under a PLA and we all know that when bids go down costs go up and taxpayer dollars don't go as far as they should. At a time when everyone's experiencing trying to stretch their dollars as far as they can I don't believe the county is at a luxury to have a different mindset of being smart with their constituents tax dollars. Watsonville and their PLA bid results as living proof of the disregard for being responsible with constituents in their dollars. And a last reminder I do want to say that wages on public works jobs are set by the law with prevailing wage so all workers on public works jobs will be paying the same wages and getting the same benefits and for those reasons I'm here to urge you to reject a discriminatory project labor agreement allow access for all apprentices on your project and for all contractors to bid and allow all of your constituents to reap the benefits of not signing on to a project labor agreement. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Sarah your microphone is now available. Thank you. Hi um good morning my name is Sarah Aminoff I'm a teacher in the San Francisco Bay area please oppose AT&T's ask for relief as carry of last resort. We need our landlines to withstand fires earthquakes. Landlines don't require power unlike VoIP it is not progress to rip out the highest quality network and replace with one prone to drop calls. I was just in Ukiah and was amazed at hearing all these people who had who only relied on their landline you know and that cellular service was greatly inferior. Also landlines provide access and emergency and include location specific data VoIP does not. Closing the digital divide should be through all existing infrastructure including DSL on copper lines and fiber optics. Santa Cruz needs to also protect from fires and more cell towers can be a fire risk. Three fires in California have been started um in part by telecommunications equipment failures civil rattle woesley and Malibu Canyon. Landlines do not carry the same health risk as cell phones which emit RF microwave radiation and the World Health Organization says may cause cancer and is associated with brain tumors. Furthermore cell towers and cell phones are an unsafe substitute for landlines due to cybersecurity reasons. Digital data over VoIP and cell phones is hackable from anywhere while transmissions of a wire can only be intercepted by direct physical access. Thank you. Lauren your microphone is now available. Good morning my name is Lauren Wolfer and I am speaking today in favor of item 29 on consent in my role as outreach and advocacy director for Cook Alliance a nonprofit committed to legitimizing the sale of home cooked food. Our organization has actively supported permitted MECO chefs across the state the majority of whom are women and people of color with education and resources and we have seen the success firsthand. We have worked with counties and public health on implementation of MECO programs and have collected data and tracked progress. A two year case study of the legal legal MECOs in Riverside County conducted in 2021 found that there were zero food safety complaints in 98.5 percent code enforcement compliance. The San Diego Health Department has been closely monitoring their MECO program which began as a pilot and was recently made permanent and has reported that thus far there haven't been any major risk factor violations observed no reports of foodborne illness and no reports of community impact complaints. There are a number of individuals who are already operating illegally in the shadows on social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram and a formal MECO program will not only help them but it will also protect public health by creating clear tailored regulations and training. Our organization hopes to work with your health department and local nonprofits to provide education outreach resources and support with the goal of helping to build new local businesses and cultivating the community. Thank you for the opportunity just to speak today. Thank you so much. Rabia, your microphone is now available. Sorry I was muted. Thank you. Hello, I'm Rabia Barkins from Scotts Valley and I oppose ATT wanting to drop the landlines. The impact of public safety without landlines cannot be overstated. Rural areas are at risk but not just rural residents. In the city of Scotts Valley power has gone out multiple times for days at a time over the past few years and the VoIP internet phones did not work since they are dependent on modem electric outlets. PG&E service is not stable during storms, earthquakes and fires. Just this month my internet phone was not working for a whole day and a half during a storm. Fortunately we have a landline. Also cell towers did not work in the past during a storm. Our cell service was not available for days at a time. I do not want to depend on a wireless internet only for communication. In the city of Scotts Valley I live in a senior community where many are dependent on their landline phones and have a senior neighbor with landline for emergencies. Seniors, anyone living alone, the disabled as well as others need access to a landline. By the way anyone can become disabled at any time. Canceling and not maintaining old and new installations is unsafe for the public. A corporation should not be solely allowed to make this decision that affects the public regarding safety and health for the rest of our lives. Do not trust their excuses. I hope the Santa Cruz board can make a right decision to protect the public in Santa Cruz County. This is not a choice, it's a necessity, especially in a county that has possible fires, earthquakes and floods. Thank you for your support. Thank you. Caller 7780, your microphone is now available. Hello, can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you. Yes, this is Craig Shatterton from District 2. I would like to speak on Item 8, the broadband plan. I would ask that the supervisors defer approval and ask CTC to update the plan. I submitted a letter with more information, but I'd like to go through a couple of points and concerns. I believe that the plan understates the unserved numbers of people in Santa Cruz County by probably a factor of two. The plan refers to the ACS census survey, but does not mention the fact that over 8% of the responses that survey claim they are using satellite internet, which does not qualify as broadband. So their numbers that they cited in the report of like 4% are probably understated by at least a factor of two. Secondly, the fixed wireless option that they offer in terms of infrastructure, if that were implemented along with the AT&T request to remove colors means that over a thousand residents in Santa Cruz County would not have broadband or telephone service. They'd be totally cut off with both those capabilities, which is I think unfair. One of the alternatives, there is no alternative for cable. And we heard earlier today that Comcast is very interested in working with the county to expand service. But the plan that they put forward in the options they include does not include cable despite the fact that cable covers maybe 60 to 70% of the county. It would be much more cost effective than fiber, which is what they were mentioning in the plan. So that needs to be added. There's no mention of the AT&T colors issue or the PGN outages, which both affect broadband. These are not disjoint issues. Another issue is the fact that PGN is going to be rolling out underground cabling. That should be incorporated with broadband rollout as well. We paid $500,000 for this plan. We really should get a robust plan that actually meets all of our future needs. And in his current state is not ready to do that. Thank you. Susan, your microphone is now available. My name is Susan Sims. I am a woman owned certified small business and I have done and I am qualified to do public work projects. And I am non-union. I am here to say no to a PLA and would not bid a project with a PLA on it. My workers have been with me for over 15 years now. They received competitive pay and benefits and could leave and join a union if they chose to, but they do not. As approximately 80% of all workers choose every day to work for non-union contractors. Santa Cruz County has very few union contractors because it cannot support them with continuous public work projects. All PLAs have requirements that are harmful to non-union contractors. There is a core workforce requirement in all PLAs that allow non-union contractors to only have a couple of their own workers or is in the failed Watsonville PLA none of their own workers. Union shops are allowed to have all their workers. This is an unfair advantage and discriminates against non-union contractors based on their not having affiliation with a union. No contractor or any business owner would bid a job without their own trained workers. A contractor's workers are what make them qualified to bid. Without their workers their safety and successful completion of the jobs are at risk because they do not know the skills or challenges of the workers the unions are sending to them. If you remove the core workforce requirement from the PLA the unions would no longer support it because it is the only reason they want to PLA. It is to discourage non-union contractors from bidding. Non-union contractors have been doing your work. They have built your city and they have been paying the prevailing wages and benefits that are required by law. Do not abandon your local contractors who have been doing your work successfully without a PLA. Do no harm and say no to a PLA. Thank you. Josie your microphone is now available. Hi can you hear me okay? Yes we can hear you. Hi my name is Josie Roberto and I'm the chairperson for the Substance Use Disorder Commission and I would like to speak to the item on the consent agenda for sunsetting our commission and I just wanted to thank the board thank the CAO and staff for and HSA for putting out this together and our commission would also like to you know just express our gratitude for our service and we'd also like to just offer our support our continued support for the new commission hopefully to be called the behavioral health advisory board in the future and we would also like the board to consider expanding the seats and the reason for that is you know I personally have spent the last three and a half years listening to all the said providers in the county and I feel like we've just started to open up and identify all the real issues this county has to providing the best services. I know there's some wonderful people on the mental health advisory board but I also feel that there's four of us commissioners that would also like to continue our service on this new board and we have a lot of insight and connections and knowledge that we can bring forth so I hope that you can consider that in the future I am speaking with CAO staff about that so be looking forward to talking more about that in the next coming months I hope you all have a beautiful day and I appreciate your time and your energy I'm making this salt work take care. Thank you so much and thank you for your service I just wanted to check real quick just given time to see how many more people any more speakers we have online. That is all the speakers chair. Perfect timing. All right well what's that we will bring it back to the board for action deliberation comments on consent and I'll start with well actually I'll see if there's anything that staff wanted to respond to in terms of the comments that were made by members of the public. No comments chair. Okay with that I'll go to Supervisor Friend the CPMA talents questions on the good sense agenda. Yes thank you Mr. Chair I'll be brief. Item 21 appreciation for all the work of our local law enforcement fire and other providers in regards to this the release for proposal for the next-gen radio system. One of the things that we definitely learned and I mean here we are having a pretty significant conversation on one of these upcoming items about communication challenges is one of the lessons learned from some of the natural disasters was pretty significant public safety communications challenges and this is in response to that this is a will be really one of the largest investments in public safety communications has been in this county's history. It has the full support of all the local fire chiefs police chiefs and all the local cities so it's a pretty significant upgrade in investment that's being proposed so I hope that we get a very robust response from providers in order to have a really quality network but this is showing that when a disaster occurs the county still is doing reviews to ensure that we can improve upon our responses moving forward. Appreciation for the parks department on the Willbrook items items 32 and 33 these are just closeout items but if you haven't had an opportunity to go down and see the remarkable improvements to that park and honor Sergeant Damon Gutswiler I'd recommend that you go do it it's pretty it's pretty powerful and the last on item 41 the Aptos signal project this is mainly paid for by a Monterey Barrier Resources District Grant but this will significantly improve not just traffic flow but also CO2 emission issues for cars that are idling through that area so this has been a long work on projects so appreciation to Steve Wiesner in particular in public works for his help on them thank you Mr. Chair. Thank you Supervisor Hernandez. You had no comments Mr. Chair. Thank you Supervisor McPherson. Thank you Mr. Chair. A couple items on the consent agenda. Number 25 the emergency contracts with the community-based organizations I want to thank the Office of Response Recovery and Resilience for bringing these contracts to the board. I'm glad we are formalizing these relationships for our response agencies to provide critical services during some natural disasters that we've had these two-year contracts acknowledge the high value of our CBOs and what they bring to the community members in difficult times and the resources they add to the county's efforts during emergencies and dedicating these funds is especially important at this time as we just found out to illustrate how important these are. The county could lose we just learned from the Federal Emergency Management Agency we could lose an additional 11 million dollars in project room key reimbursements related to the COVID sheltering due to a retroactive decision by the Federal Emergency Management Agency so our budget situation just gets worse through no fault of our own we had funds pledged in this instance and it looks like we're not going to get them as well as I think it's 300 million nationwide but we're going to try to do this with the best we can with what we have come our budget discussions. Item number 29 the micro enterprise home kitchen pilot that was mentioned by one of our speakers I really appreciate the progress on this on establishing a well-regulated home cooking program and I want to thank Supervisor friend for partnering with me to bring this policy initiative forward to the county developing this pilot program has been a long road but it represents yet another wave our county is working to support a wider and more diverse participation in our local economy a person's ability to sell and serve home cook products can help to supplement income for family members and I want to thank all of the local home cooks including Penny Ellis and my fifth district who have advocated for this project and also Olga Uniga and other members of the environmental health staff who have worked to develop this program despite many resource constraints constraints that it's had I look forward to reviewing this proposed ordinance when it comes back in September on item number 30 the CalFresh employment training this has also been mentioned I want to thank all of our county departments and nonprofit partners for their participation establishing these contracts for the benefit of the community members who are making strides toward a city housing employment these contracts through the CFET are not only designed to reduce barriers to housing and homelessness but also improve the health and safety of the community overall through a cleanup litter program on our streets and waterways I'm especially grateful that we are supporting a pilot expansion and the downtown streets team into downtown Boulder Creek which lacks formal street cleaning services along State Highway 9 thank you for the Human Services Director Randy Morris and his team for working with health services on this and CDI to bring this arrangement to the board for consideration and thank you to the Boulder Creek Business Association for advocating to bring a downtown streets team in to their community it's going to be well received and it's going to be a very big benefit in the issue of environmental protection and just to clean up cleaning up the area along Highway 9 especially thank you Mr. Chair thank you Supervisor Koenigke thank you chair few items first on item 16 approving funding for one full-time equivalent of Fraser position in the assessor recorder's office I know this sounds maybe a little dry but when you're facing the budget challenges that we are as a county this is an appraiser is one of the few positions that can actually help us generate revenue by assessing or reviewing the assessment for property taxes and helping to bring those up to speed after the sale of a property or the construction of new property and then ultimately bring that revenue into the county so that we can then turn around and deliver the services that everyone wants so excited to see this I also think that we need to make a new GIS tech and another appraiser a priority in the 24-25 budget for example GIS techs are critical in ensuring that we process new maps creating new APNs again as part of this process for both transfers and getting new construction moving ready On item 22 adopting a resolution in support of the convention of the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women or CEDAW this resolution really reaffirms our county's commitment to the UN treaty that combats gender discrimination and it also directs the women's commission to identify departmental data that can be used in tracking our progress towards these goals our county's done a great job of making data more available and transparent to the public and all organizations working to further these goals and I think there's really an opportunity here to see where we need disaggregated data that can show us how we're actually meeting the goals we've outlined and committing ourselves to the CEDAW convention I also want to just say thank you for item 25 the standby contracts with community-based organizations this will definitely help us be more prepared when the next winter storms come around or any disaster ultimately having all the organizations in our community know their roles and know that there's going to be some compensation if they fulfill those roles it's critical and finally on items 27 and 28 the behavioral health bridge housing and then also accepting a grant for the Children's Crisis Stabilization Center just really excited to see these two projects move forward and they will be really a leap forward for behavioral health in our community but thank you to everyone working on those that's it thanks thank you okay so just a few comments on consent on item number 13 consistent with previous votes and we're registering a no vote on that item largely due to the fact that as I've expressed previously I have some concerns with us eliminating the Human Services Commission item number 21 this is a really big step again with the next gen county-wide radio system I do think that when this comes back to us later in the year then maybe we consider having a presentation just so the community really understands how important it is we're making these investments in our public safety radio systems item number 222 related to the resolution and support of the convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women I feel similar to Supervisor Koenig and you know anything we can do in our community to support the elimination of discrimination against women and all people is something that really aligns with the values of our community so very supportive of that also item number 25 just really want to appreciate the work that our CBOs do second harvest food bank community bridges and community action board have really been critical partners with the county when we've had to deal with times of disaster especially within the last few years dealing with COVID the failure of the Pomper River levee and many other disasters that have hit our counties so just want to express appreciation for those groups and appreciate the funding that we're going to put towards them and then my last comment is on item number 27 I'd like to ask that we consider that the construction on that project to be done under a project labor agreement and we're going to be talking more about that later on this afternoon but just so people understand this is the demolition of a building to then build 34 tiny homes and it would serve as a low barrier navigation center and the budget for that is around five million dollars in terms of construction and you know that's it really does seem like a project that we could use as an example for how these things can work and if we don't want to have a PLA with that project we can always revisit that but I think you know using that as an example of how we can consider moving forward would be good so I'd like to include that in the motion if it's at all possible but with that uh that concludes all my comments and so I'll turn it back to the board to see if there's a motion on the consent agenda I'll make a motion to move consent agenda and I do have a quick comment I just wanted to thank the parks Rebecca and Stony Brooks local veteran here uh to ensuring that vets have access to and services as well to the veterans hall so thank you so the motion by the man is to have a second chair if I just a just a comment I'm sympathetic to the your thoughts on item 27 but given that this is particularly for the non-infrastructure program elements I think maybe it makes more sense if we consider something uh to your the effect of your suggestions when we actually discuss item nine okay I'm out of all that so what was the motion so the consent was moved by supervisor Hernandez and then we need a second on the the consent okay I'll second okay so we have a motion by supervisor Hernandez seconded by supervisor Koenig to move the consent agenda I'd like to ask the clerk to please call roll call vote supervisor Koenig hi friend hi Hernandez McPherson hi and Cummings hi that passes unanimously okay with that we're going to be moving on to our regular agenda and the first item on our regular agenda today is consider a presentation on AT&T's position regarding this obligation as a current care of last resort for Santa Cruz County and its application for colder leave as outlined in the memorandum chair Cummings and so with that I'd like to invite up the representatives from AT&T who are joining us today and I believe that you can yeah you can sit um yeah on the other side of the podium and before we begin I'd just like to make a couple quick introductory comments um when I was uh first game on the board last year my office began really reaching out to um residents to understand what the communication issues were and tried really hard to get in touch with representatives from the different telecommunication companies um it took us a while it took us about nine months but we were finally able to get in touch with AT&T um who I will say uh was really helpful with us being able to reinstall uh landline service up in White House Canyon which people had lost after the fires um and then we had a lot of just we continued to have discussions around the various technologies that AT&T provided including some of their um the small cell tower facilities among other things but one thing that we had discussed at that time also was landline service and to our knowledge at that point was that AT&T did not provide landline service and when we heard about the colder relief which I want to thank members of the public who brought that to our attention as well um it became apparent that um as as the cold provider AT&T is required to provide residents who want some form of landline with a landline they're responsible for maintaining quality of service um and providing maintenance in a timely manner and ensuring that the service is affordable and so after hearing that um and after the feedback that we all received I thought it was fitting that we at least have an opportunity to hear more from AT&T and so that we can get some clarity around um what their responsibilities are um in terms of providing provision of these services um what options are available to people and what the impacts will be if they remove themselves for being the carrier blast resort and so with that I will turn it over to AT&T staff or representatives so they can provide us with the presentation today. Good morning President Cummings and members of the board my name is Teddy Rojas and I am the Vice President of External Affairs for AT&T California. I want to thank you for giving me this opportunity to talk with you today about this important topic the carrier blast resort or a colder application that's pending before the PUC. We're here today to present our perspective but we're we're really here today to address your questions and hear from members of the community and I want to uh before I jump into these comments I want to make sure that the um the community understands we're doing some of these meetings we have a community meeting tomorrow in Felton so we can get out and answer questions that if people weren't here or weren't able to join us today um and we also have one coming up in Watsonville as well so um we're happy to come and meet and answer any questions about this application and appreciate the opportunity again to be here today. I want to um also thank the the members who are here from Bonnie Dune and from Davenport Betty and I when we lost our cell antenna at the cement factory in Bonnie Dune in Davenport we we we spent a lot of time in the area and and I know that the wireless coverage is not very good there um in fact I didn't have a lot of coverage down the coast and it wasn't until I could get on the wi-fi at the restaurant most times when we went down there that we we had coverage at all and so we understand um how difficult communications are in certain regions of our territory and throughout these public participation hearings I've been at four so far that the PUC is hosted there's two days of them but four meetings uh two o'clock and six o'clock and I've heard a lot of fear and a lot of um anger about what AT&T is doing or what it's not doing and really appreciate again the time to be here today to clear up the misconceptions that I think the notices that were sent out um letting people know that there were public participation hearings it was not our uh it was not our preference it was not the language that we had hoped that we could be sending out to our customers uh but that was the language that was settled on um and so those messages went out and obviously ever since then they have created a lot of confusion about what's going on with this application so I'll go ahead and jump into that today um and um again I'm I'm happy to take any questions um and um either after or during if there's something that comes up so the California Public Utilities Commission designated Pacific Bell which is now AT&T as the carrier of last resort nearly 30 years ago with this designation comes the obligation to provide basic telephone service to anybody in our territory who wants it and at this time at the time Pacific Bell was the only provider installing copper based landline phone service within our territory so it made sense back then and we fast forward almost 30 years there are over uh there's dozens over 100 telecommunications companies providing services in the state of California and we know that that there are a lot of people who have left this network over the years we used to have um we used to have between 12 and 15 million customers on the network and today our residential portion is about 490,000 customers statewide in our service territory and because this is a regulated utility there are the the cost the cost that customers pay is uh the way that it's the way that it's calculated is it's a terror product and so if I live in a more rural city it's easier and cheaper for AT&T to deploy a line but if I live in a rural part of California and I am 30 miles from the closest telephone pole somebody has to pay for that line and so we all pay into a fund that helps to subsidize the cost to bring that service out to somebody who lives very far away so with millions of people paying into that fund there are the rates are are pretty steady but as that number drops the cost to bring that service out is borne by those people who are left on the network so those 490,000 people are going to bear the cost to to to bring those um services out to more rural communities and that that remains that that portion of that regulated service but we know that customers are are are voting with their feet they're leaving AT&T basic service behind overwhelmingly in favor of advanced technologies like fiber and wireless and where they're available and I get it when it's not available or it's not you know in Bonny Dune or it's not in Davenport there's no other option than your landline AT&T's Kohler application relief doesn't pertain to that this is not a one and done approval it is a very targeted approach so the CPUC will determine whether or not there are alternatives available to members in certain communities within our service territory and will determine if they should allow Kohler relief in that region or not and you've heard today there is no other alternative that cellular service is not reliable and you cannot rely on it in emergencies and fires um so those landlines aren't going away and we're likely not going to get Kohler relief in those areas we won't get Kohler relief in those areas where there are no alternatives and so if I could go back before those notices went out and I could put that in the letter I absolutely would do that to help I would do a few other things to help clarify what what it is and what how this proceeding works so if anybody is in a region where there are no alternatives available and I will make a comment that the maps that we have submitted for have been taken off of the CPUC website it is not AT&T's data we do not have access to competitor's data so we had to rely on the CPUC website maps so those maps are what we have based this on in April this proceeding will will move forward and there will be evidentiary proceedings that open at the PUC and all of these questions about whether or not the maps are accurate or whether or not there's viable alternatives all of that is going to come out in that proceeding and so eight so the commission will take our opposition they will take comments from the community they will take all of the input that they have received and they will review it they will research it and they will render a decision so this is a multi-year process this is not going to happen tomorrow nobody is having their landlines shut down we are not turning off service there's a lot of there is a lot of information out there and I will share with you that in Santa Cruz County I know this is a question that some of you have asked we have about 12,000 copper landlines in Santa Cruz County and when I listened to when I've been in Ucaia I've been in Clovis I've been at many community meetings and I've talked to many members of the public I also rolled out fiber AT&T fiber in Comchi last week which was super exciting and I know that the communities that are relying on landline deserve better and I know that you know that and I know that the state of California knows that because they are dedicating over eight billion dollars to helping to bridge the digital divide just as the Comcast woman said this morning it takes everybody it's going to be us Cruz IO Comcast it's every provider in this state to work in collaboration with the county to figure out how we bridge the digital divide because our copper network is going away someday it's absolutely going away there's 7% of our customer population left on that network and to maintain that network across the state of California for every dollar we put in a copper network we are not investing in advanced technologies of the future you're talking about E911 services right those aren't running over copper anymore those are running over fiber all of our advanced technologies our first responders our first net network those are running over advanced services they're not running over copper copper is not what we're putting in the state of California over eight billion dollars to bring fiber to communities or wireless depending on what makes sense so it's a hybrid but it's working in collaboration with all of the carriers with communities identifying where those needs are so that we can make sure that people are not left with only copper at the end of the day they deserve better than that so I'm going to I'm going to leave you you know sort of with this and I and I'm I'm happy to take your questions we know that again this is a this is a very long drawn out process and it will take months years for it to for it to work its way out the CPUC is not the only regulatory agency that will have input into how this works there's also the FCC and so we have to make sure that whatever product whatever service our customers end up with at the end of the day is at least as good as copper and so that whole process is again going to be worked out at the FCC but I want to I want to leave you with this if I can AT&T it is our business to connect people these are our customers that we are hearing from and again we spent we spent several months just hearing what you heard today and we have to do better we absolutely have to do better and we have great opportunity with all of this federal funding to do better we value our customers and we greatly appreciate their loyalty and we will leave no one behind in this transition they are our customers and you know as I as I began moments ago rules adopted 30 years ago that require AT&T to offer services throughout our service territory for a technology that has come to the end of its lifecycle is not is not good enough anymore so we're going to be working in a prudent measured and thoughtful very transparent way to ensure that our customers have have access to the most advanced reliable technologies available they deserve it thank you for your time thank you very much I guess at this point in time I'll open up to the board to see if there's any members of the board have questions thank you mr chair and thank you for being here I think that excuse the pun that you acknowledge that the communication has been less than perfect and so I I'm glad you're looking forward I want to begin by thanking all of our community members who are here today and contact the county and the CPUC to express their thoughts and also to remind everybody that I'm looking forward to a community meeting tomorrow in Felton at the Felton Community Center at 530 on highway nine so please if you weren't here today please be here be there tomorrow as I mentioned the comments morning our board action two weeks ago to oppose the AT&T's application and reliable foreign service specifically the copper lines it really represents as you've said a life-saving tool for our residents and we've had seven national disasters as you've heard about seven years which really complicates things for especially people in the mountain areas and I can understand the challenges that AT&T has with and other telecom companies as well but we really sitting here on the board we can't make our real residents pay the price for this innovation when the alternatives to landlines have not yet proven to be resilient during these major events that we have experienced there's just a lack of confidence that this will be done I mean I don't know what the roadmap is personally exactly you've explained it this is a two or three year process I think as I've heard but I just I'm not I don't feel self-assured for the residents in my fifth district especially the Santa Rosa Valley that they're going to have communication and three years from now the plan of attack has not been really specified to to really satisfy me at this point and I know you're getting there and there's a lot of differences and issues that you have to face but one question you explain somewhat the you know how this map was drawn up and it needs to be redrawn I believe about who your proposed service maps were developed in there's a amount of concern there's a great amount of concern in the community that they don't actually accurately represent the proposed coverage because right here this is Bonnie doing in the area and the north coast but it seems like it's not a crisis situation in the Santa Rosa Valley but I don't believe that right and so I don't know how these maps and there's a new one going to be drawn and what's or how's that process going to go yeah so so we've heard uh in other in other forums that you know I I show blue on the map but I have no coverage on you know Jones and Flint road right like at the cross section like I don't have any coverage there or as I'm driving down 128 you show coverage it's blue but it it's actually not I don't have coverage so all of that is going to be worked out but I but I want to make sure that I that I touch on you said you know whether or not there's going to be new service in three years I want to reiterate that if there is no alternative provider if it's purple or if throughout these evidentiary proceedings it shows that maybe the purple needs to be drawn down more right or we need to alter those right now this is just off of the cpuc website this is the data that was taken off the cpuc website it is the only competitive data that we have access to and so we use that but throughout this proceeding they will determine whether or not the blue accurately reflects the coverage or the providers that are available so that gets all worked out through the next few months during the proceeding we're not going to be doing anything to anybody's landlines in the regions that have no alternatives so we're not shutting anybody's line off we're not taking anybody's landline away if there are no alternative providers from if we can't provide it or a competitor of ours cannot provide it then everybody's everything is status quo for that region thank you supervisor McPherson thank you mr chair for the opportunity to ask a couple additional questions express some thoughts and I appreciate both of you actually a whole group of you for coming and taking the time to be here and all the residents have already spoken you had mentioned that this constitutes 7% of the customer base I think it constitutes 100% of their feeling of a lifeline service and it seems as though the numbers thrown around to show a diminishing return but if you're a customer and you're talking about you need to do better and people aren't being heard I think what they're what their hearing is it's a technology that doesn't make us any money anymore and therefore we're not going to invest in it and therefore their needs aren't as important as the higher grossing needs and by the way this is coming from I would submit probably a member of the board of supervisors has been the most vocal on improving broadband access improving modern tech technological opportunities the community but I think that there are two truths that should be recognized one that a technology can be becoming obsolete and that we don't have a viable alternative yet to replace that technology and that would be helpful to hear AT&T proactively say that right I mean I hear the first part with the numbers and the costs and that people deserve better but they're not being presented with better right I mean I think people feel a lot more confident if they saw you invest in in technologies that would ensure that they were already back I mean this to me this application should come forward when there is a viable alternative not before there's a bible otherwise what you're saying and this is the the difficult and I mean it's like when the government says just trust us I mean I mean right you're in the same boat here that you're not right I mean you can't it isn't just an understanding there needs to be an action right I mean I believe you understand and are hearing these people and I've worked with Betty on a lot of things I really I mean she's enormously empathetic and very responsive but there's a difference between understanding and action and we haven't seen the action part I think the action should proceed what you're doing and I think that that's why we had to as a board express a finite position because you're expressing a finite position there wasn't a room for a level of compromise or discussion that shouldn't we shouldn't be in that they shouldn't be in this community this situation none of us should be in this situation you put us in this situation I mean this is your action this isn't us driving this action I mean you said this is a quote all this is going to get worked out on whether there's an alternative I understand during the evidentiary part right but what does that mean I mean when you've got somebody who views it you had residents you have an individual sitting right in front of me here said that she wouldn't be alive but for having this service during the fires that's that threshold yeah right is higher than all of this is going to be worked out so that's where I think that the timing of this is problematic right for what's coming forward I recognize that this was supposed to be a question to you and this has been more of a statement I apologize about that I do have a question though in regards to this if it isn't really making money and it's a dying technology and it is determined that a lot of these areas there's no viable alternative what's AT&T's plan to at least invest in the maintenance and upgrade of that service because you're basically telling me right that there's no point I mean you're literally asking the CPUC to say you don't have to do this anymore so there clearly isn't an ethos within the company to want to invest in the service so for those that have no other viable alternative in that intervening time what is your not just commitment but what is your actual action that you'll take to ensure that those lines are maintained upgraded etc until the viable alternative is presented so we remain the carrier of last resort in that situation so we have service quality standards that are put forth by the PUC that we have to deliver on every year so there there there is that that sort of you know other side of the coin if you would so along with that carrier of last resort obligation that we would maintain in areas where there are all no alternatives and you know if that's the case in in Davenport and that's the case in Bonnie Dune and Ben Loman like they're going to keep those landlines until and unless there is a provider that comes in at some point I don't know when that day is it might be the state of California it might be somebody who receives federal funding it might be us it might be another provider but until and unless that day happens we remain the carrier of last resort and we have an obligation to maintain and service those lines okay I'll leave with this that the regulatory authorities that are doing the evidentiary hearing and particularly the CPC but in some respects more importantly the SCC for the last 25 years have worked to remove local control and local voice from the decision process functionally I mean the regulatory authorities be it with a PG and E or be it with you know even something that I'm completely for like broadband deployment these are no longer within local control and I think one of part of what you're hearing I know that there would be disagreement I mean you can you can you can you can disagree with me on that because I hear from Betty all the time takes forever in the perpetuating process but I mean let me tell you something let me tell you something though more and more local control has been removed from permitting processes in the last 30 years then has been given to local governments I think we can agree on that and I didn't ask for that you asked for that meaning it's the carriers it's the ISPs that have success it's those that are regulated that have successfully worked with the regulators the CPC and the FCC at different times to take away local control so what I would like to point out is I think the reason that you had a room full of folks is because I don't think that they feel that that voice is going to be heard at a regulatory side and they know that they can still run into me at the grocery store and say what they want to say but we really don't have much capability in this other than amplifying their voice it still goes in there's still another decision-making authority that I think people are really nervous about and as part of your consideration in your community outreach which again probably should have happened before the letter went out right before the decision was made that's when people trust you when you say it'll get worked out or transparency was another word you use that that's a word that's important before you you submit the action not after right and there isn't a lot of faith in the regulatory agencies to amplify that I think it's something just to recognize I appreciate you taking the time yeah now understand your point thank you mr chair thank you supervisor friend supervisor Hernandez or kona give you all a chance to comment yes you know I live in the area where the map is blue and I still get emails from constituents so I kind of want to echo some of their concerns right a lot of them say that the landline is really their only option even though they're on casserly green valley hazel del and adjacent to a zac friends district and so I want to make sure that we do address you know those concerns and we do have you know the community meetings are happening and I want to make sure we have them before the 24th of March that we can do that and answer some of their you know questions that they might have there but yeah I think that's pretty much you know even though it's in the blue we're if there is no um one of the questions I got is that if there's no access to anything else but landlines will they also still be part of the party they'll still get landline service if there's no other option for them no other option we remain the carrier of last resort with service quality requirements attached to that it's not just the red zone and the map that gets that it's also people in the blue zone that is correct so this this application before the puc is for our entire service territory okay and there are many areas in our service territory I live in san francisco I know that there's nine other providers that I can get my landline from um or my mom can't I don't have a landline but um and so it's a very different conversation than this conversation that we're having today and we recognize that and so does the puc and so this is a very targeted approach and it's not the application or not the cpuc will have the opportunity to to adjust where they believe kohler is still needed and where it's where we have met our our you know the the obligation to or we have we have shown that there is you know alternatives that are available so that is the standard and if we can't meet that or if they determine amongst themselves um then we're not going to be able to be relieved of our carrier obligations in that area of our service territory thank you supervisor konig yes thank you chair I'll start by equalling the primary concern I've heard which is that the blue areas are not really blue yeah right just because you can sell service in an area doesn't mean that people can actually access it and as was mentioned even in the heart of the urban area uh in pleasure point that people are still walking to their windows or outside in order to to get a tnt service to to work so I am concerned about how the dependability and uptime are measured when providing these services um but I want to go back to something you mentioned about costs going up I think if I were noted correctly there used to be 10 million landline customers and it's down to 490 thousand or so I'm residential residential sure I'm curious I mean how much is it continuing to decline I mean I can understand how you know with the generational shift people growing up on cell phones being more used to using their cell phone that and they do have service obviously yeah they're going to stop being landline customers I'll be honest I don't have a landline at my home appearance very much depend on theirs right um but are we still seeing that change happening right or are we pretty much steady now around the 490 thousand customers so we we absolutely are seeing the decline the numbers that we submitted to the PUC I believe we're on December 22 as of December 22 the new numbers the around 490 thousand for residential customers are the uh 2023 I don't know the exact number um but it's it but it's I want to say between business and residential we lost a couple hundred thousand customers between December 2022 and 2023 so those were the business combined with residential and then there's a proportionate share that gets divided amongst the two so we we know that um it's it's continuing to decline um but I also recognize that we're down to the numbers I likely don't have a lot of alternatives like again my mom's in that 490 thousand she's got you know she has other alternatives if she wants to keep her landline she may not there's also fax machines in that there's also elevators in that right so so that number continues to decline year over year at a at a pretty substantial clip and so again you know it's not just about us not wanting to invest in this network it's about making sure that when it you know it's like analog television nobody wanted to have to go out and buy these expensive flat screen TVs but digital television was coming and I don't mean to suggest that one is a lifeline and one is a you know an entertainment option but but the point is technology does come to an end of its life cycle and I think we have to be prudent and thoughtful about how we prepare for that transition right and um that's that's what that's what we're we're aiming for um is how do we do that we have received cola relief in our 20 other states we've already received cola relief we've left no one behind we've turned off nobody service and so it is a long process and it it doesn't it doesn't start the day we get the approval from the puc we still have 490 thousand customers that we need to make sure transition to advanced services again whether it's from us or a different competitor but we need to make sure that there's no drop for those customers because everybody needs communications everybody and especially if you're in a rural area where you're prone to fire floods earthquakes it's essential and we understand that glad to hear your commitment to that um I do have you mentioned the 20 other states where cola relief has already happened and of course that's in cases where there are alternatives to customers and I hear what you're saying is that as the total number of subscribers to landline services declines then the costs have to go up because it's shared over a smaller pool of people uh can you tell me any about anything about some of these the other companies that have offered landline service as an alternative in some of these other 20 states I mean my concern would be that people will have an alternative but that the price would go up it would make a pretty substantial jump even further because now as has been said you guys have benefited from uh really having um the protected service for decades and I mean I can't imagine that a new company coming in is going to have that same leg up um and so I mean the prices would probably make another substantial jump when someone transitioned to a different provider even if they could technically access the service um you know it might be prohibitively expensive do you have any data around yeah so I I think um you know competition is pretty powerful right so many many areas in our service territory where there is a competitor for example Comcast you can get a landline cheaper over their cable service than you can over our copper wires or a copper wire service so it's cheaper on that today our our um to get telephone over our um fiber service is cheaper than it is to have a landline service today it's a regulated product in those it's a tariff product so those um rates are determined by the PUC so there are many other competitors who are offering for any you know anyone who still wants to have a landline whether it's over VoIP whether it's over copper um instead of the copper line from AT&T and the actual cost of that service is regulated by the PUC as well ours is but not our competitors right right that's my concern all right well I mean I would echo super brother friend sentiment that if you are committed to transitioning to newer more effective technologies let's see them so we're we we have a very large customer base on fiber in Santa Cruz county already right right but we just want to make sure that they work in bonny dune as a lot of fire when the power is out in a ball of fire absolutely I agree so our our alternative product um that is being developed is uh we'll have to we'll have to go through regulatory review and it will be as the criteria so E911 identification backup batteries 72 hours of backup battery which is our requirement today under COLR it's our it's our requirement of the FCC under our COLR application today or our COLR designation today so just so you know I had some constituents that were without power for 40 days last winter so it's a it's a bigger challenge than 72 hours well thank you that that becomes a PG&E issue or an electric issue as well those are all my questions thank you chair thank you um well before we open up to the public I do have a few questions and comments um because I think one of the big reasons why I really wanted to have this today is just to um also highlight that there's been a lot of trust that's been lost between the community members and AT&T and and I will even say that you know again since I when I first was able to contact and connect with AT&T and one of the first questions I asked was well you know if somebody wants a new landline can they get one and the answer that I received was unless you lost your line in a disaster you cannot get a new landline and then we come to find out now that that's not the case and so I guess my question that I want to understand some clarity on is if someone in Bonny doing today wanted to get some form of landline given the COLR responsibility of AT&T can they get one and what could they get so our COLR obligation is alive and well today and anybody who wants a phone in our service territory can have a phone in our service territory I'm I'm not sure what like I wasn't part of those conversations I didn't speak to the person who was saying I can't get a phone but I'm happy to take those if you get any of those um but today you can get a landline phone copper wire in our service territory as part of our COLR designation thank you for the clarification on that um and then I guess you know another concern that's been raised by folks is should AT&T kind of you know move away from the infrastructure that they currently have in place what's going to be the plan for them to kind of clean up all the infrastructure because we have seen corporations for long periods of time you know they no longer are using their infrastructure they just leave it behind and then it's just you know either left to the residents clean up with local jurisdictions or it's challenging to get them to actually follow through on the cleanup and so for the you know for the many many miles of lines that you all have I mean what what will be the approach to having to you know remove this infrastructure from our communities right so just to just to clarify as as our customers move away from the copper network so to answer your question between December 22 and December 23 we had a decline of 240,000 landline customers so um there are many services that are going to continue to ride our our VoIP services our voice over internet protocol so we we have a lot of services that still do run over that copper network um so we are going to you know again this is going to take years and years and years it took 145 years to build this network it's going to take a long time to transition people from it onto onto advanced services so um where we are no you know much of that network's backhaul and that backbone will stay in place um but the copper lines the two wire two pair copper line out to out to people's homes and the technology um we can you know I I don't I don't know that uh we remove that uh I think it would depend on what services people have in our technicians um as they come to advance new services some still will ride over that copper some may not thanks and then I guess as it gets back to the you know if anyone wants a landline they can get a landline who's the best person and how can we put these people in contact with someone who will actually follow through because what I was hearing from folks in my district is that people would request and call and request landlines or even if it's you know maintenance issues they get put on hold or they get told by whoever the person is on that other line that we don't do that anymore and so I'm just wondering how can we make sure that if people want the landline like they can actually get it and if they need maintenance that people are going to come out and and maintain the service because that's I mean it's just the reality that we sit in um you know as representatives of this county is that um when we're hearing from folks um you know oftentimes it's it's hard for us to know where to go where to send them because they're already going through the standard uh protocols for trying to to reach you know service providers at AT&T and they struggle with that and so you know I think what I'm looking for here is like how can we build better confidence with the people who are in our community and the reliability of AT&T as a service provider um hi this is Betty Saxon um Supervisor Cummings or any of the others if you have constituents that are calling you or saying they cannot get a service then I am still here I will assist them in getting to the right department and ensuring that that they will get their service connected um before I turn this back over to you I want to thank you Supervisor McPherson for helping me get the community meeting set up in Fulton I mean Felton and I'm also working with Supervisor Hernandez's office but what I'd also like to do especially listening today is to open it up to the other districts that if you believe that you need a community meeting on color so that your constituents better understand this process then I'm here for you that's it thank you thank you that's very much appreciated okay um I have I also share some the same concerns brought by my colleagues but I feel like in the interest of time I want to open up to the public I will note that if you already spoke on this item we cannot speak again and just since I can't really see how many people in the room maybe a show of hands of how many folks are in the room will want to speak on this item if somebody from the board can maybe um maybe about 10 share okay well then we will move forward with two minutes for common and and we'll go ahead and start that now yeah hello my name is James Ewing Whitman thank you representatives of AT&T you know I lived in the rural areas in Santa Cruz from 1995 to 2013 over half that time where I lived I didn't get cell phone service but I did get a cell phone in 1998 and although I still don't have the vibrating from where I held my phone maybe for a couple years you know there's so many things that aren't being discussed and I can't thank you guys enough for all the one-liners you gave me guys are really quite practiced so um the safety concerns aren't really being addressed but probably what's more important to reach out to the community probably the funnest thing that was established when I was in the community was our once a month soup group where people on the road that I lived on and I was Oak Ridge Road we all met and got together so all the concerns about if there is a disaster and I expect this to be a monumental year um of natural disasters um people should get together and they should talk to each other you know uh I don't know and I'm trying to be nice here you guys really gave me a lot of good information to make bad jokes but um you know trusting the government and the government agencies after that workout for the Native Americans when uh they gave them small box blankets the safety concerns you know as far as what's going on with wireless the FCC in 1952 established a guidelines that was based on thermal heat based on 10 million and that's a distance per centimeter squared when in reality a reading of six affects bacteria and we're 70% bacteria the reason why I have 316 playlists on youtube under James Ewing all titled leo and youth is only people being thrown under the bus more than law enforcement or teachers and youth thank you thank you and again I would just like to reiterate if you spoke earlier this morning on this item um we're asking that you not speak again the second time we want to be mindful that we want to give everybody a chance to speak and so if you've already spoken to us on this item please um we appreciate your comments they're noted but we'd like to give other people the chance to speak hello my name is Colin Hannon I'm on the board of the Davenport North Coast Association which represents that area um I've got to say that that presentation did not make anything clearer or allay my concerns um I have a landline phone many of my neighbors do not when the fire happened in 2020 I was the one who could communicate with everyone for a long time the sky turned orange we didn't know what was going on I sent my family away to my parents house many miles away I got a call on my landline phone in the night and it said to leave so I went and told everybody and we left um what I haven't heard today is what about when the power is out you say um we will get service if they're in less or you won't drop us unless there's alternatives but none of the alternatives work when there's no power and everybody keeps skirting around that we don't really say but if we have power for 72 hours and we have service for that blink the time that doesn't work we our cell phones work for 72 hours until the batteries go out when the power goes out this was out for seven days we didn't have service at home during that time luckily it wasn't there was no life-threatening events although we did have to call 911 because there was a power line down um and we used our landline phone so my question for you is what is the all like if what is the the clarity on that on if the alternatives if there's no power so are you still obligated to provide us landline service if there's alternatives that don't work when the power is not on that's my question we'll make note of that question and we'll see if we can get an answer for it thank you hello and thank you um my name is tamro kelly i live in downtown boulder creek i'm the vice president of the boulder creek business association i have spent my entire life living in the mountains i've always relied on a landline for emergencies sometimes i've been the only landline in the neighborhood and everybody would run to my house to use the phone whenever the power would go out so i have a story for you i had a landline up until this past decade um i live in a historic neighborhood one block out of downtown boulder creek years back they had undergrounded the lines in our neighborhood to preserve the aesthetics um i purchased the house i have a landline i use dsl i start having descriptions on the line so i call it at&t for service and at&t tells me oh well you have to prove to us that the issue isn't within your own walls within your own wiring system so in order to get my service fixed i had to rewire my entire house which i did then i go back to at&t i say i still have disruption of service and they basically told me that they would not service the lines they weren't going to fix it and i said well i've proven to you that it's not on my side so the agreement was is that you have to maintain your side in order for me to have consistent service with that disruption they refused i called over and over again they were still a refusal so how many of us dropped our landlines because at&t refused service i'm just wondering there's been a serious decline in how many people have landlines how many people like myself couldn't afford to have both alternatives and had to cut their phone off which i did which i regret at this point and i want my landline back because half the time my phone doesn't work so thank you for your time thank you very much my name is rick my cloud i live in a post can you hear me all right i sure appreciate you coming out i think you must be in a terribly tough position but i do appreciate your effort i want to say first there's no cell service at our house to radiation uh uh we know we won't resolve that debate today but my housemate suffers acutely extremely from emf and cell tower radiation so her concern is that any new landline she wants a real landline she needs a real landline not one that just mimics a landline with a little bit of a wireless gap there's got to be a real landline uh all right it's just our power is going out all the time or there are a couple failures on that uh cell failure right when hg has tried to get out of the landline business all cell phones failed last week uh also a failure that did not make the news our landlines could not reach any rise in the cell phone for uh five days uh never figured out i called both a gt and rise in and neither one of them day after day after day i could find any information on a major failure uh so and then lastly uh oh so i won't make sure any landline whatever alternative future fiber whatever is free of radiation and immune power outages that's our must haps and lastly um who defines the viable alternative and it wouldn't be possible to get your phone number but we don't want to go through all that AT&T uh run around did you have a phone number you can offer us thank you very much thank you my name is Becky Steinbrunner um our family has one of the very few landlines left in our rural Santa Cruz mountains neighborhood in an area that is blue on your map and uh there is no alternative there is no cell phone service and i like it that way i also suffer from emf problems and it's very hard to be here but i'm here because this is important um i don't trust AT&T to say that we'll take care of it because AT&T has not maintained the landline cables over the years for the last 15 years there was a and this the PUC reported that in 2019 and said that AT&T and frontier had allowed through neglect that the the lines and service had deteriorated that report was kept confidential until 2020 when CPUC said you have to give a public report redacted of that and that was verified that AT&T has not maintained the lines we have paid for the service but we have not received the service our landline has become very noisy um when it rains and um when repairmen do come out we we have to wait usually a month after we call in with the problem for anyone to come out but they can't figure it out because the lines are in such bad shape there's no way they can isolate the problem so i want to um say that probably some of the reason people have dropped to the services because it is such poor service it is reliable service it's better than nothing but it's got to be maintained and i'm asking AT&T to maintain the service also a lot of people on fixed incomes have been forced to drop it i want to bring out that there has been a 17 page motion for dismissal of your application filed by the CPUC advocates office and nobody's talking about that that was discussed at the hukai meeting thank you thank you mr amber is there anyone in chambers who is not already spoken on this item that would like to speak at this time if so please step up to the podium okay saying none uh we'll go back to online to see if there's anyone who has not already spoken on this item that would like to speak who's joining us online today yes sir we have speakers caller user one your microphone is now available the main challenge is to the structural domination of the corporate state there has never been more corporate power in this case AT&T than in our society today um i i would like that phone number i just heard stated by the AT&T rep that anyone who wants a phone copper landline in our area they can she would facilitate it give out this number as rick mclean just requested give it out now i know people who have tried to get a copper landline and they were refused i'm calling you on my only phone my copper landline by the way item eight also has to do with AT&T making more profit cell phone microwave radiation makes me ill as do the multi sources of radiation emitting wi-fi antennas 5g pole and ocean and water laptops etc at the county government building having attended board meetings in person for over 20 years warning and providing documentation of cell towers smart meter radiation harm um which you have evidence you have studiously disregarded i am relegated to phoning into the meetings now i did go into the building briefly on february 2nd to deliver hand deliver five copies of a formal protest of AT&T the application to remove landlines filed by nina beady you each have copies of that the AT&T rep talks about um alternatives in the protest i submitted page five copper landline is the only appropriate voice and thank you miss carol caller uses 7780 your microphone is now available hello can you hear me yes we can hear you yes this is craig shatterton um thank you very much for the information it's useful uh but let's come back to the fact that the AT&T says that they're relying on the maps in the tpu c my main big question here is why is mobile service considered to be an option alternative given the fires earthquakes and power issues we have all the reliability issues on mobile why isn't the alternative restricted to say copper or fiber which are much more reliable and going to be much closer to the liability issues liability factors that we get today from our landlines so if the if AT&T were instead restricting their blue areas to those that have fiber or cable i suspect the the numbers of people that they would see as being already served would be much lower and much more representative of what's really available so i want to know why AT&T considers mobile to be an alternative all right and there are issues with fiber and copper meaning power reliability when it goes down but that's one issue secondly why isn't color separated from the issue of serviceability if AT&T wants out of service find another carrier that will provide color that would be a much more palatable options for residents now we know we at least have someone who's on the hook and guaranteeing they're going to provide service self powers can be taken down or moved or deprecated at any point in time by the carrier they upgrade service levels and they reduce the range and now all of a sudden you can't get service color is very important and it really should be separated from service availability thank you very much and your microphone is now available thank you so much um justin your comments were fabulous and uh i just want to remind AT&T and and justin all you need to do is smile and say oh what about that lead cable in lake tahoe that's poisoning the lake and your lawyers are all wrapped up in court and everything and everyone's pointing fingers at one another and arguing about the removal of the lead cable from lake tahoe and all that water goes downhill to Reno sparks and to the fallen farmers and to the naval base out in the middle of Fallon Nevada and the pyramid lake native american tribe so you know AT&T doesn't have any shred of a record of being responsible to the communities here you know for in california or nevada so um i think you should question them about that thank you very much thank you david your microphone is now available thank you um there was a lot of discussion about the end of a life cycle of technology with regards to landline communications well i'm an engineer and i work in technology and well that's true for a particular application it's very rare that a particular technology ever ceases to be useful for specific applications for example today floppy disks are still used on bowie 747s to update the um the flight control software i was also in a previous life a navy someritor our communication last resort was very low frequency radio it was a wire that we pulled behind the submarine it was how we got our nuclear launch codes that technology is hundreds of years old and the navy still uses it today and operates a station that transmits in dixon california as i sit here today living in the santa cruz mountains it's hard for me to see how landline phone communication in its robust reliability in a power outage will will be replaced with a modern alternative modern alternatives represent better performance under different circumstances such as being in an urban environment potentially but you know much of santa cruz county at santa cruz mountains weren't represented by that kind of topography so i urge the board of supervisors to consider those facts thank you very much yeah that was our last caller okay well then i'll bring it back to uh well first i'll thank uh all the members of the public for the comments on this item want to bring it back to AT&T i know there are a number of questions that were asked about considering the consideration of bubbles as alternatives and why that's the case what about when power is out and how certain alternatives don't work when the power is out and then the maintenance of the current landline services among other comments and questions that were made but maybe that's a good starting point i'm i'm sorry sir can you can you repeat the question sure um there were a number of questions that were brought up by members of the public um one was asking about why is AT&T considering mobile as an alternative um and then another individual mentioned that when powers out um some of these alternatives don't work and so what are some alternatives that might be able to function if the powers out and then it sounded like there was a question about maintenance of current landlines and what is AT&T going to commit to in terms of that okay i'm gonna i'm gonna take the first one and then i'm my my brain's a little full so i'll ask you for help when we get to the second and third one but happy to take the first one which is why do we believe that wireless technology or wireless um is and why we believe it is an alternative to um pot's telephone service right so plain old telephone service or pots so um there are um seven seven out of ten adults um living in households have cell phones have chosen cell phones over pot's telephone lines so uh a lot of our technology a lot of um our businesses our daily lives um telehealth service government services are run over wireless technology so there's apps for this there's apps for that so many people have chosen um again i don't have a landline i have a cell phone so many people have chosen that as an alternative and so um there's fixed wireless there's wireless there's cable there's void there's fiber so there's many different product alternatives and that just happens to be one of them but we also recognize that it's you know it's not ubiquitous right wireless coverage is not ubiquitous it is very difficult to build cell antennas in some communities you you've heard here today that some people don't want them and so we get opposition when we attempt to put cell antennas up to provide better coverage there are people who don't who don't want that um and so it becomes a challenge for us in many jurisdictions to be able to get through the permitting process to place cell antennas so in some areas it's an alternative and other areas it may not be thank you and then with regards to the member of the public who was speaking to how when the power's out um the one benefit of landlines is that they still function and whether or not AT&T is exploring any type well-turned can maintain that similar function for when the power's out yeah so um so we so there there is you know if i call it a myth if i call it misinformation uh there is this idea that your your landline is going to work forever whether we have one day of power outage or 24 days of power out our our landlines are powered by what we have in our central offices so we have backup batteries in our central offices we also if if you are VoIP if you're a VoIP customer we can also bring a generator to the box on the corner and power that box because there's batteries in that box that provide service to your home but this idea that there's going to be an infinite amount of power coming to your landline because every time you go to it you you know you've picked it up and there's there is a dial tone um there is backup power regulations for our central offices it's not infinite so if we had a very um significant power outage there may be a time where we don't have backup power our requirement is 72 hours of power for our landlines that is our requirement so there is this idea that it's always going to work in perpetuity it's been on the wall for 60 years and it's going to work um so there is um there is a um this belief that my my landline is always going to work um that you know it may have worked um but there are situations where it doesn't if you're in a fire and you're you're working to escape a fire your landline is going to be burned in a fire your copper wire is burned your telephone I mean you're not going to have a landline do you have a mobile phone it's mobile you take it with you that's an option right um so and I guess the last question that came up um that I made note of from members of the public was just around AT&T's commitment to maintenance of service because it sounds like some people even got rid of their land because of the quality of service and within the COLA one of the obligations is that AT&T is supposed to maintain uh high quality of service so how should we you know if people are having issues do we have a call or what's kind of the approach that AT&T is going to take as it relates to maintaining quality of service for these landlines that currently exist right so the the service quality standards are set by the PUC and we work hard we strive to meet those standards um and if somebody has a problem with their phone line um they can reach to AT&T and set up a technician to come out and service those lines um none of that is changing our COLA obligation like I said is is still current and the designation is still on AT&T to remain right now as carrier plus resort and I guess since we'll have you all's contacts as well we can reach out to you if people are struggling with getting somebody to come out and service the land lines yes yes well with that um I'd like to see are there any further comments from board members on this item because I know we still have two more items in that I'm on closed session no thank you chair I think we're good okay well I just like to thank um Ms. Rihas and Ms. Saxon for taking the time to come and speak to the community and address on these items I think it's people very much appreciate your willingness to be available and to speak to us on this item so thank you all for your time today thank you very much and thank you to the members of the public who who came today to share their their voices their perspective with us thank you so with that I'd like to just check in with the board to see if board members want to take a quick break um or if we should just continue to power through I think we just got to keep going because all the people have been waiting yeah I think we're okay with I mean it's tough I think we should just keep going there's been people been waiting this entire time so okay but that then we will move on to item number eight which is considered status report on the progress of Santa Cruz County broadband activities accept and file the broadband strategic master plan and direct the information services department to return honor before September 24 2024 with an update as outlined in the memorandum of the director of information services and with that I'll invite up Tammy Wagle director of ISD. Thank you chair and members of the board I'm Tammy Weigel I'm the director of ISD with me today is Alan Piszczanik he is the head of our business analyst's office and he also worked on this strategic plan with me so glad to introduce him today as well so just briefly go over the agenda today we'll do a brief introduction on broadband quick review of the last strategic plan which was presented to the board I will do an overview of the grant programs that have come up in the last couple years around broadband then we'll dive into the broadband strategic plan I'd like to do a little bit of an update on the affordable connectivity program and its impact in Santa Cruz County review some of our activities that we are going to be engaging in the next six months some of our long-term deliverables and then kind of do an update of where broadband stands today as far as projects in Santa Cruz County so I think everyone here knows the importance of broadband I think that just the importance of communication during emergency events has really been expressed this morning um really we depend upon it with the fires with um all the other events communication whether it's through a phone or whether it's through broadband is increasingly important um the importance of broadband really came about during COVID that's when we really saw a push for reliable broadband because we had students working remotely we had people working remotely and also too we've seen the need for social inclusion so there are traditionally groups that have been on the wrong side of the digital divide so such as lower income individuals rural communities as we see today as well as seniors so back in 2015 the county planning department worked with design nine and presented the first broadband plan to the board this plan was a rapid assessment of existing broadband and it really was focused more on economic development with the following strategies to look at public private partnerships the use of existing middle mile infrastructure to expand business access to a last mile and middle mile is what the last mile what we get broadband to residents and businesses so that is like the connectivity back to the internet and then also there was a suggestion to build out dark fiber in open access middle mile and at that time it was estimated across a 2.2 million so since then there has been considerable interest and activity around broadband at both the state and federal level there are several federal and state programs that support broadband expansion in california that we are seeing being used in santa cruz county the first one i'd like to go over is the california band services fund better known as passive this is managed by the cpuc and it's funded using surcharges on revenues by carriers it's a recurring grant and so so as you'll see later on in this presentation several of the carriers slash isps have taken advantage of this grant opportunity to expand broadband there is also the california middle mile broadband initiative this is going to be managed by the california department of technology and it's funded by sb 156 which was the big um broadband bill at the state this includes approximately 70 miles of fiber in santa cruz county along highways 1 17 and 9 i will note that highway 9 was not originally included in this plan and so one of the things we did at the county level is we did reach out to the cpuc and the cdt to have it included because we know of the broadband issues that are up in the san lorenzo valley there is also the local area technical assistant grant or aka lada which is also managed by the cpuc this was funded through sb 156 to support technical assessments and engineering and this is what we use to in order to pay for our broadband strategic plan so there was no cost to the county finally there's a federal funding account which is last mile fiber program that's in accordance with sb 156 as well and it's administered by the cpuc under this 10.3 million was allocated for providers to santa cruz county to put in grant applications for and the big one that is coming up is of course bead which is the broadband equity and deployment program um this was authorized under the federal ii j a to provide high-speed broadband to underserved non-served areas and in california this is going to be managed by the cpuc we did hear on friday at a meeting that jimmy panetta and mbep hosted that right now the state plan has gone back to the nta for first approval it will be coming back to california for objections and so there's going to be an opportunity for what the state has stated for the county of santa cruz for us to be able to question the maps and also the proposal so there is going to be an open opportunity for citizens governments and cities to be able to comment on that plan so our strategic broadband plan 2023 again we looked at the increased focus and we knew that we needed to update the plan so we engaged a colombia telecommunications corp ctc to update the plan with the following goals we wanted to look at the effective use of grant funding we wanted to understand the broadband brand gaps we wanted to create mid and long-term plans for broadband in santa cruz county we also wanted to look at some short-term goals to have some short-term wins to be able to increase broadband to residents businesses and anchor institutions and also too we wanted to identify potential broadband partners and the current assets and anchor institutions within our county so i sd and ctc did an extensive analysis of the state of broadband of starting in late 2022 through 2023 so the data sources included along with talking to the isp slash carriers themselves we did extensive interviews with city and county governments we did interviews with educational institutions including the county office of education ucsc cabrillo and the library we did interviews with business groups we also did a survey of non-profit and business users we conducted speed tests which were on our website with residents and businesses we also did phone interviews with residents regarding broadband access and availability and we oversampled in those areas where we knew that there are broadband issues and we also took the existing data from federal and state resources so here were the strategic plan findings and there's more detail in the actual plan itself but this is kind of a summary the county while it's largely served by 120 which is considered the federal acceptable level for broadband only the coastal region about 28 percent have access to fiber broadband a significant portion of the county is limited to a single provider and that's about 38 000 households 21 households within our county lack high speed internet as we've heard today service reliability in rural and mountain region is a key issue especially during storm and other events there is a high reliance in our county on cable broadband and we're looking at kind of what we're putting the level at for our eventual planned goal is to provide 100-100 to the majority of residences and businesses right now the low figure on this is estimated at 537 million for a full fiber deployment so our recommendations for the first six months is we to continue to expand broadband we want to actually start conducting financial and business assessments for the planned use of bead including partnerships being able to join in with other grant opportunities looking at existing fiber and how we can use that and other sources of possible revenue we do want to continue to work with our regional carriers to improve internet access using a facilitation model we have started to establish relationships with them making sure that their grant applications do align with our needs and requirements here in the county and we're also working with the Monterey Bay economic partnership and that to tackle affordability issue as a region with Monterey and San Benito County we also I want to mention that we work with mbep on some of the grant applications through CASF so we're really trying to tackle this as a region as well so longer term we really what we want to do is pursue a cost effective hybrid approach to providing 100-100 which utilizes a mix of traditional fiber optics wire technologies satellite connections especially in those areas as we know where geography makes fiber only expensive and longer to deploy there is no one single answer to providing broadband so we know that we have to work with a variety of providers as well as a variety of solutions we also want to continue the research the potential for building county open access fiber that we could lease to carriers so that they actually the county would kind of a build it and they'll come approach and so one of the things that we're looking with the safety project that's going down so-called avenue with cdi is we worked with department of public works to actually provide more fiber than it's actually needed for that project that will be able to be able to lease out for less mile fiber to providers so ongoing we're going to as we said we're going to continue to engage with city governments and educational anchor institutions for upgrades and ongoing needs and requirements we all have the same requirements and so we want to make sure that we're not doing redundant activities and so one of the the really positive things that's come out of this study is that we have built up some relationships with those organizations and so that we can work together to get fiber to residents businesses and institutions we do want to take measures to encourage competition for broadband services to improve offerings and cost we want to facilitate conversations across relevant county departments to encourage efficient deployment of broadband technologies within our community and then also working with mbep as i mentioned before we want to continue to support grant applications for extending broadband in santa cruz county so i'd like to do take a moment and talk about the affordable connectivity program um the affordable connectivity program acp was a government initiative through the sec that came out during covet that was designated to help lower the cost of broadband service for eligible households and this was a huge step in the right direction for eliminating the digital divide so right now that program is only funded until 20 april 2024 and basically the fcc ended enrollment as of february 8th 2024 there are two bipartisan congressional bills that are proposed to extend acp with seven billion dollars that's hr 61 29 and 35 65 in the senate but they obviously are not have not moved forward if we were to lose acp about 11 000 households would be impacted if it was not extended so this means they run the risk of losing broadband access the biggest impact in our county to this would be within the 9507 6 we're looking at between 6 and 7 000 households that are on currently on acp and we are working with the moderate bay economic partnership with the california cetf to review alternative options for residents if acp is not extended and these would again be encouraging the carriers to provide entry-level options for these households that still maintain the level of broadband so i'm happy to announce that we have some really positive things that are happening with broadband right now within our county the map you see here shows that our our carriers and isps have been really diligent about applying for cast of grants but as you can see the almost our entire county except for the urban areas is covered in this map so on february 15 cruise io was awarded 5.6 million two for their equal access access summit to the sea and this also includes focus on areas that are less than 25 three for broadband and that's in man san mateo santa cruz santa clara and monterey counties and we were very glad to see this move forward surf net for county fiber which is a project for 11.8 million would provide last mile fiber at bear creek syante and empire grade this is pending approval and the cpuc may want to move this into their ffa grant so under the federal funding account grants surf net has applied for three fiber projects in the county this is mainly in rural areas tolling about four million dollars and then at and t as they've mentioned has submitted five applications for projects in the county tolling over 34 million on coastal fiber buildouts and then arpa i'm very happy to announce the cruise io will complete the arpa funding project in the spring of 2024 with 19 sites now capable of serving over 7600 locations within our county and with that said that ends our presentation and we'll turn it over for questions great thank you very much for that presentation all right i'll see if there's any board members who have questions on this item uh supervisor konig no questions i'm just really excited to see some of the progress between uh well i guess we expect the middle mile to be rolled out by the end of 2026 right that's correct how much longer before isp's are actually being able to provide improved service well off of that middle mile i would say it's going to be what this real life protecting is right now i'm seeing is the end of 2026 so that would be sometime in 2027 though the cdt is reaching out right now to the carriers to ask where they want to have vaults put which would allow them to be able to pull fiber and other technologies off of that middle mile so they are making progress while we're not on the list right now if you look at the cpc they are starting to work and our county is only i think only five miles of it's going to actually be least fiber the rest is going to be built out okay great well i know people throughout our entire county are eager to see this improved service come uh become available and applaud the efforts and we're excited to see this move forward thank you thank you um thank you for the presentation um the original broadband master plan of seven or so years ago the most recent one and then the funding that ended up in order to cruise the overall items that i brought forward to the board and it's it's great to see this trajectory move forward uh this collection of state and federal funding and in particular the large infusion through feed really does constitute the largest potential expansion of high speed internet access to our community you know i worked in the very end of the clint administration in 2000 and we wrote a report about the digital divide then and it really was for rural communities mainly within the central part of the united states most of those areas have actually been lit up pretty well because of the topography and we have in our own community here some of the most acute issues of a digital divide that i would say anywhere before anywhere else in the state in particular in the rural areas of santa christ mountains and within parts of south county that are in some cases less than a mile off of where there's a current fiber hall my question for you the the 500 plus million dollars number is not a realistic attainment number so i mean we're not going to get there from state or federal funding and fiber to home isn't a realistic option and you had you had mentioned for a lot of these rural residents and this is part of the atg conversation today and you had mentioned that there needs to be a hybrid model which i agree with but so far the cpc and the funding focus has been on providing fiber exclusively and not providing some of these other technologies that would help the rural residents so how will we be able to apply that funding considering that there's local providers within the region both toronto or cruzio that have this capability now that could light up a large part of our community how are we going to be able to apply our funding meeting those requirements and still be able to meet the topography i think one of the things to remember about bead is and this actually came out from the nta a representative that was there on the friday meeting is that while it's fiber preferred it's not fiber specific so there will be opportunities during the opposition phase as well as when carriers be able to present their grants they will be able to present alternative technologies um we see that again that the toronto wireless solution does offer some great opportunities for our county especially in those areas where it's been hard to pull fiber or where point-to-point wireless has not been effective so that is one of the things that as a county we should probably watch with the opposition um phase to make sure that is understood that fiber for us is just not going to happen and it's highly expensive especially when you're talking about in areas where cal fire has said it's going to be a high fire area and that recommendation is to build it underground and that definitely adds to the cost rather than just running it on a pole okay i think that maybe as part of the direction today if you're comfortable with it recognizing that these master plan strategic plans are really 30 30 000 foot views would be that we should proactively be prepared to already submit those comments i mean at the end of the day we know it was submitted to federal government for review we know when it comes back to the state it's not going to meet the needs of our community uniquely it's great for santa claire county it's great for la county it's great for san Diego county it's not great for santa claire county and we because of the topography and the two-hour conversation we had preceding this it's the exact same issue i think that we need to be very proactive in that so if you need the additional direction great if you don't i think they're needing to be something comes back to the border we we have a very formal statement on behalf of the county of why it doesn't work and why we why we need to have the flexibility here because i mean i know that surf nets had applications they were unsuccessful for because although it may be not fiber exclusive the reality is it's weighted so heavily that way they weren't scored highly so this is playing out of you know mount madonna and other areas and that we kosher in our districts so i'll take your advice on on the best way that we can participate proactively and getting those comments in i think that's one of the ongoing conversations that we're having with the marae bay economic partnership is they are starting to build um ways that not only the government but also residents can be able to express the hey i don't have good internet fiber is not going to work for me but i do think that we should as a county come back and i agree say that this is not a workable plan we're not going to be able to use bid money except in areas where it's easy to deploy fiber so again one of the goals of this plan is and is to be able to make sure that when we get funding we get in those areas and unfortunately for the santa cruz county those are areas where sometimes putting fiber is not effective so i agree i think there really should be something back to the cpc saying that this is not a workable plan if we're going fiber exclusive okay to me that we should be agnostic on the solution because it's just about providing high speed internet access to folks and we shouldn't care about what the mechanism is and for some reason they've limited the mechanism i appreciate that this work is i know it's behind the scenes it could be really transformational though for the families that i mean they can't access telemedicine they can't upload things for school work they can't tell they can't tell a work they can't really meet any of the elements of modern society because right now they're in satellite or services that don't aren't providing any sort of value to them so i appreciate both of you your work on this thank you mr chair supervisor supervisor rinandez yes i just i just wanted to ask too if there's anything any way we can anything that we could do to support the um the affordable connectivity program there the eca the letter of support or anything that we could do i think that we should probably do that and have our partners like at ambip and the broadband consortium also probably do the same no i agree on that one and i know that there has been this is one of those issues where actually i think the carriers um county governments city governments are all on the same page we don't want to see a cp go away so yes i think that would be appropriate to have the board have a letter back to um to congress saying that this is a program that we feel is vital for a community community and we'll just if it goes away we'll widen that digital divide a supervisor with first yeah thank you miss weigel and your staff for for being here i like this presentation a lot better than the last one i mean it's super and supervisor friend said last time uh you should come to us when there's a viable alternative this is uh not an alternative this is the plan of attack and this is encouraging because it seems like a lot of people are on the same page and identifying what the needs are and how we're going to get there to meet the criteria and i think this expanding broadband services is really at the forefront of our equity work overall in sanatrix county it's going to be vitally important to everybody so they can communicate more um and i think this helps us um take advantage of state and federal funding although the state funding is getting more questionable it seems as the weeks go by uh but um i i want to thank really just specifically congressman jimmy panetta for hosting a broadband symposium in boulder creek recently in my district last friday uh with representatives of the california puc and the n i n t i a um there's a lot of to be done in the ground work and uh it's all inclusive and i really appreciate you're looking at all avenues of how we can get to the final answer as quickly as possible going to be a time it's going to take some time but i'm really encouraged with the work that you've been doing and i appreciate it very much it's going to mean a lot to this community thank you and i'll just share the comment to me by my colleagues i think this is a great you know step forward for our community that's been long in the making and as we continue to make progress and keep progress on this you know we can ensure that folks will have access to to internet in some of the more rural areas but definitely something we're gonna have to continue to advocate for over time so we can ensure that becomes a reality so with that i'm going to close out um questions from the board and i'm going to see if there's any members of the public who'd like to speak to us on this item if so please approach the podium and you will have two minutes thank you for this good report my name is abecky steinbrunner i would like to ask that um this plan also incorporate um fiber continued fiber on highway 152 to assist the santa cruz county fairgrounds the 14th daa to have improved broadband service it is a problem um that is our evacuation center for our county and last winter it was used by monterey county and when there are um evacuations there with a lot of people or large events they cannot handle they do not have sufficient broadband service to handle the demand um and it is something that the new ceo uh zeke frazier is looking into their board is meeting at 130 today um so i'll try to ask that he contact you but it is certainly something that we should do to add for our county's emergency response would also like to ask that um our county partners with any and all projects such as caltrans and pgne work happening um there's work on highway one going on there's pgne is is supposed to be undergrounding lines let's put the the broadband fiber in there with that and piggyback on that work i do see many many large cables of the fiber stored at the farm park area and i'm hoping that that is being used for the uh so cal to state park traffic improvements there um i wonder why the county did not everybody in the tower that had been planned and funded to go up in davinport this semex plant i saw the plans i uh talked with the um contractor that was supposed to be putting it in but it never happened and that was about five or six years ago thank you thank you very much if i just may really briefly one of the things i think is actually a misunderstanding there's fiber everywhere in the county actually there's fiber going straight by the fairgrounds this is privately held and it's up to that individual providers to whether or not they're going to do it anywhere you see a school you can basically assume that there's fiber already because they get a special rate um and the same on the digging you know part of that package that i anyway it was interesting because you opposed it seven years ago and i brought it forward but but we have a dig one ordinance in the county already so when these things are torn up by pg and any others it requires a contact to all these utility or all these providers to say but the difference here would be whether or not the county actually publicly puts our own stuff down which financially wasn't a viable option uh seven years ago but but it exists it's just a question of getting the providers to even provide just some services like the like the programs sorry chris go on james hackett cruzio internet uh i mainly wanted to just thank the county for working so hard on this issue we've heard a lot today about the telecommunications challenges in our region it's obviously a very real problem uh cruzio has partnered with the county and others for many years to work on addressing this as as has been said several times the solution here won't just be one provider or one solution technologically it's going to be multiple providers multiple solutions the hybrid approach of fiber and fixed wireless really is the only solution that's going to work in our county um it's important we continue to work with the cpuc and the nti a nti a to make sure that they know that and that they know that uh small providers need to be able to access these funds and the barriers to small providers accessing these funds need to be removed uh cruzio is really excited to be part of the solution we want to continue working with the county to make sure we can bring as much available funding into our county as we possibly can and continue to work on imaginative solutions for access and affordability so our whole community can have access to real broadband uh thanks again for taking this issue so seriously thank you good afternoon my name is carl guardino i'm vice president at toronto wireless uh to have full transparency it's also my honor to serve for 18 years on the california transportation commission of which i am chair and i only mentioned that because the governor's executive order of 2020 called for universal service of broadband 100 percent of unserved and underserved families and we are one of the five commissions and agencies in the state that he has tasked to make sure that happens so this partnership with you is both my day job and my citizen service but i'm here on behalf of toronto wireless today i want to start by commending tambi weigel and her team for doing an excellent job on this effort i know that you enjoyed the 156 pages of the of the columbia technology corporation plan as much as i did but if not i'll send you each a summary of those findings as well overall they nailed it please look at page 87 as well as where they talk about the technological advancements that supervisor friend referenced as well that show that a combination of technologies can meet the needs we can't forget the number one goal of the governor's executive order of jimmy panetta's work on the bipartisan infrastructure law was 100 universal service all unserved and underserved as the good folks at the nta have asked us to remind people the law is called internet for all it's not called internet for some we don't want to be picking winners and losers that's not equity as supervisor macpherson referenced for santa cruz county residents so three key points technology advances finances are finite and timely deployments matter thank you so much to anybody else in chambers who'd like to speak to us on this item seeing none is there any are there any members of the public on the on the internet who would like to speak to us on this item yes we do have one caller caller user three your microphone is now available i don't have a computer i don't want internet i don't want your broadband radiation broadband means radiation and you speak of closing the digital divide have you heard of digital dementia children who are in front of microwave radiation emitting wi-fi computers getting dementia connectivity people how about people having connectivity to food and housing and a healthy environment this is the opposite i recommend you read the document these birds and mankind destroying nature by electro smog i am struck by the contrast of the previous agenda item where landlines and people can give computer access over their landlines are reliable and work and they should be maintained and offered to everyone to this toxic technology i'm it's just so outrageous i strongly oppose measures like this which mandate additional toxic microwave radiation assault and takeover of our public buildings schools and public right of way with fire prone death towers by telecom corporation tyranny with no informed consent and in violation of our constitutional right to be safe in our person and property this is a distortion and misuse of what should be helping the public thank you i oppose that thank you um are there any it looks like there's another person in i'm jamers but i just wanted to check is there anyone else online we have no further speakers online chair and you'll be the last speaker on this item great good afternoon my name is gabriel moran and i'm with torana wireless at first i want to commend uh besweagle on her fantastic report and understanding that a mixture of technologies will be needed to close the digital divide in santa cruz county and it is an important lesson for the state of california more broadly in considering how it will make the most of its once in a generation of bead funds i would like to highlight um cruzio one of the internet service providers here in santa cruz county who recently won a five point six million dollar grant from the california public utilities commission to serve 759 families in the county uh and using that money to deploy open access middle mile fiber to a fixed wireless specifically next generation fixed wireless service um at a cost of roughly five thousand dollars per home and when you compare that with other cpuc grants that have gone to fiber providers that uh with uh per home costs of upwards of six figures north of 150 thousand dollars it is an important lesson uh and important to recognize that uh with finite finances you have to choose the appropriate tool in the technology toolbox to meet the moment enclose the digital divide for all thank you thank you very much all right seeing no further speakers on this item i'll bring this back to the board for action and mr chair i'd like to move the recommended actions with some additional direction if that's okay and that's to direct um isd to come back to the board with a a letter of support for acp um that we can send out to our delegation and also the last action item as a direct isd to return on number four september 24th i just want to amend that slightly to say that if if ntia comes back before then with comments it'd be nice to have you come back before then with the board being able to direct those comments then as well so we have a motion by the supervisor friend with some additional direction the second advice supervisor mcpherson um is there any further questions or comments from board members okay it's saying none i'll turn it over the clerk for a roll call vote on this item the provisor konig hi friend hi hernandez hi mcpherson hi and comings hi that passes unanimously i just want to thank our ist staff for all their hard work on this and uh and with that we'll continue moving on to our next this is going to be the final item on our open session item number nine on the regular agenda consider report discussing an application of santa cruz county code 2.31 public works projects declaration of non-responsibility in the county's current bidding process discussion of project labor agreements and recommendation for a three-year pilot program using project labor agreements for up to five to be determined capital projects and take related actions as outlined in the memorandum of the county administrative officer and uh you'll give me one sec um this item will be presented by elisa benson uh peter deadlifts principal analysts in daemon edlo director of capital projects i'm sorry if i screwed up your name thank you mr chair uh good afternoon members of the board as mentioned today before you you have myself elisa benson assistant county administrative officer peter deadlifts our principal administrative analysts within our office and daemon edlo who is our director of capital projects also want to just say we have a multi-disciplinary team that's been working on this since your direction on december 12 we have folks from gsd parks cdi our workforce development board and county council as everyone has um put our arms and brains around this concept and how to bring it back to you as quick context before i get into the table of contents for today's briefing on december 12 we had a board item that really had three different parts of direction one was requesting a report on non-responsibility issues and within our our county code structure for contractors either in selection or in delivery how we address challenges of non-responsibility basically poor performance and then how that might be improved so we'll be talking about that we also had some direction around coming back with concepts for projects for a three-year pl a test and we'll be speaking to that and the third part of the direction was for us to return in april with a proposed pl a agreement and associated policy recommendations so that was the original order and i'm going to speak a little bit first on the next slide we can figure out how to do this up one too far what we're going to cover today and as you'll notice on the cover page this is part one we absolutely will be back at the first meeting in april based on direction today with a fuller proposal so today we will be covering the existing policies and practices daemon's going to be talking about that an analysis of plas as they've played out locally and in other counties and sort of general takeaways from that and and those pla considerations and advantages and disadvantages peter was speaking to that and then finally we'll be speaking to staff recommendations and i'll be taking that forward around a three-year pilot and some parameters we'd like to put before you for consideration to guide us in what we would bring back as a fuller program in april so this is part one of a two-part staff briefing with that i'm going to hand it over to daemon okay thank you lisa uh good afternoon uh as lisa mentioned my name is daemon adlow i'm director of capital projects with community development and infrastructure i'll be discussing the county's current policies and procedures and how santa cruz county code 2.31 declaration of non-responsibility has been implemented implemented in the bidding process on construction projects here at the county the county of santa cruz's current bidding processes require a contractor to demonstrate that they are a responsible bidder prior to having their bid accepted for construction projects a responsible bidder is one who has demonstrated the attribute of trustworthiness as well as quality fitness capacity and experience to satisfactorily perform the public works contract a non-responsible bidder is one uh who the county has determined does not have one or more of those qualities when the county receives bids uh staff conducts a responsibility uh assessment and analyzes every bid received uh during that process staff will examine the contractors past public uh works excuse me past public works project performance both with the county and other public agencies in addition the staff will review and verify the contractor's current good standing with the state of california contractor's licensing board for a period of five years verify that the contract contractor is free of disciplinary proceedings and or current suspensions this analysis also ensures that prevailing wage and fair labor practices outline and state and county code have been adhered to on past projects currently the county has mechanisms in place to disqualify a bidder if they have been determined to be non-responsible next slide the county also has the ability to review the contract potential non-responsible findings during construction as well as after construction closeout if the contractor is found to be in violation of public contract code santa cruz um county code or the contract itself the county has the right to disqualify the contractor from bidding and future projects for minimum one year from the date of the finding and the maximum three years for subsequent findings for non-responsibility uh to date it has been rare for a contractor to be determined to be non-responsible once in contract current county processes have historically been successful during the bid review process and filtering out most contractors that have been determined to be a risk of performing poorly throughout reach with local government agencies it is it has understood that it is uncommon for a contractor to be found to be non-responsible on public project statewide but there still is a risk it is most common for public agencies including the county to utilize a design bid build approach for construction projects um that require the owner to accept the lowest bid the private sector owners are able to to utilize a negotiated bid approach but this method is typically not available to public entities county staff is continuing continually reviewing current bidding and contracting processes as well as exploring different available options in order to reduce project risks one way to mitigate this risk in the public sector is through an alternative project delivery methods such as design build construction manager at risk also known as cm at risk or cmar and job order contracting also known as jock two of which have been utilized are currently being utilized at the county each of these are a few examples of project delivery methods that typically utilize a two-step process first step being a pre-qualification base and then the second step being submitting bids this approach is an additional filter that helps ensure a responsible bidding pool inherently there are risks with every project delivery method and contractual agreement there are no there's no panacea or magic project delivery method with this in mind staff utilize the variety of tools depending on the individual project scope and complexity with that i'd like to hand it over to peter debtlifts the ceo's office will be assessing project labor agreements I'm here today to give you a brief overview of project labor agreements and outline a few of the pros and cons of implementing a pla to support capital projects as shown here plas are collective bargaining agreement between a contractor and building and construction trade labor organizations the county would enter into a pla when approving a contract for the construction of a capital improvement project during the bidding process bidders must agree to be bound by the terms of the pla to be considered responsive including prevailing wages and labor practices previously mentioned by damon the la's established the labor organization and signatory unions as a collective bargaining representative for all workers who perform work on the approved capital project generally plas require that most labor on the projects be performed by union members there are several potential benefits to plas they're using the construction industry to set standard terms and conditions of employment on the labor pool for projects subject to the agreement supporters share that they allow for expeditious resolutions to disputes helping to ensure that the project is delivered on time on budget and that safety standards are maintained this is done by ensuring train union labor is used on a project and that any disputes are resolved with binding arbitration in exchange laborers agree to not engage in strikes walkouts or work slowdowns certain provisions seek to provide benefits to the community such as improving training through apprenticeships recruiting members from disadvantaged communities into high paying jobs and construction and ensuring small businesses have the opportunity to participate there's also potential disadvantages of plas as damon mentioned before the county's existing processes are designed to ensure qualified bidders deliver projects but plas could overlay additional administrative activities to ensure compliance plas could also adversely affect local contract or participation because of the requirement to utilize union labor and to pay into union benefit trust funds from worker wages smaller contractors including minority and women owned businesses make up a large portion of the workforce in santa cruz county that may not be able to comply with the terms of the plas and discourage bidding on a proposed project finally plas have historically been used for larger projects with tighter deadlines as most of the county's projects tend to be small to mid size and value there is the risk that receiving no bids at all on capital projects at all on capital projects requiring a plas the board should weigh the potential benefits and drawbacks that might be achieved from adopting plas into the counting's county's bidding processes i'm going to turn it over to elisa benson to further discuss a potential pilot program along with recommended terms and parameters of using a plas thank you peter so i'll be reviewing the staff recommendation and i'm going to take so there's three slides so i'm going to be sort of describing our first our proposal uh proposed recommendation for a three year pilot some of the initial parameters of a program we would like your direction on policy objectives we would like your uh your direction on and then a sort of a quick overview of what pilot administration will look like i'm going to pause on each of these slides and in case there's any questions or additional discussion that y'all would like to have so the staff recommendation at this point is a three year pilot that would be comprised of five large capital projects that would be at the threshold of at least five million dollars each the pilot parameters in this case would be these would be uh the pilot would be for select non-emergency projects that vary across county departments including parks public works uh whether that's roads or sanitation as well as general government so we get some experience in each of those project delivery areas with a pla we would also recommend excluding projects that rely on FEMA funding as you know this is already a complicated enough venture for us at this point we want to try and keep that as clean as possible and then i want to highlight that as folks have said their husband experience locally with the city of watsonville having um no bids received in uh solicitations that had a pla requirements um and so we want we are not sure that will be a problem given the size of projects that we're recommending it's significantly higher than the watsonville threshold but it could be an issue based on the recent bidding environment that we have been in so we wanted to put that forward for your consideration another aspect of this is you'll see a recommended action around directing the cdi director to um go to the sanitation district with an invitation to participate in this pilot as well we do think that there are a number of sanitation district projects that would be good candidates for being a part of the pilot so that is part of the recommended actions we put before you today and then finally as i mentioned we will be coming back to the board on april ninth with a recommended project list for the three-year pilot as well as the pilot pla agreement for your consideration to really set us forward um should the board decide to go in that direction i'm going to pause and see if there's any questions around the overall concept we're putting forward and then there's some specific uh policy objectives who would like direction on as well i have a question but if it's too specific then i want to it's on the the rebid if there are no bids um what if you received one bid but it was 50 over our engineer's estimate so it was astronomically more expensive than what we had budgeted for which just seems like happens all the time by the way um so is that too specific and that'd be something you would want direction on i mean to me it strikes me that the goal here isn't just to if you don't get a bid the goal here is to also not dramatically increase the costs of construction because one of the commitments that's been made from those that are advocating for this is that this doesn't do that and so in order to adhere to that then i think that we should have a tenant in there that makes that a requirement otherwise it should be able to be bid without a PLA i think we were happy to take that direction and formulate a bit more specifically in the program moving forward we hadn't we heard some comments today around requiring three bids at a minimum so you're not just going with a single bid um but i think i'd want to take it back to our capital teams for how we would want to refine that payment is there anything you want to say about that or do you want to just wait till they yeah there's similar models that we studied that have that type of language in it that we definitely would want direction on that there's there's different options different parameters and exclusions okay i mean my guess is that the board's will is that this isn't to increase costs right i mean that's not we just received a pretty significant presentation just two weeks ago about the fact that we have a massive capital issue and so i think that well whatever you want on the direction on that should should happen um because i'm okay with one bit if it's within the estimate for a qualified bidder right it's not about getting three it's about it's about the number and then making it qualified i think yeah we had started with no bids but i think those conditions with that in mind are appropriate okay thank you and today when we get bids that are way out of line with our expected costs we always have to pause and determine whether we can actually do the project so i think that's that's helpful direction for us to incorporate into the into the pilot and mr delas had used the language in a previous slide that said small and medium-sized projects for the majority do we have a definition of what those are how do we define a smaller medium-sized project starting that over to damon yeah there's there is not a standard that we define but typically in discussions under a million dollars would be a smaller project and one to five would be a mid-medium project basically likely i think yeah we okay there's not a i understand i just wasn't sure the scope that we were industry standard i would say large is above 10 million okay thank you okay and i was gonna say are there any other board members who have any questions yes so um initially i thought this was a we're gonna come back at the at the later date with a master PLA but my question is what are the other county's thresholds on the PLA that you guys looked at both counties and cities they are all over the map summer at million summer at five so it really varies by jurisdiction there's not a set formula is is there any that are master PLAs that you guys looked at for counties that what's their threshold let's see i'm in there they've been all over the map right i some counties were as high as 10 million right so which county was that there was 10 million remainder off hand you know when some of them started high and then lowered them over time i think that's all san francisco san francisco sonoma i think did the same what was that amount originally up at 10 and then they reduced them over time to it varies right five million one million right so there's there isn't there isn't a standard they faced it in from 10 million down to one million over time okay um yeah um yeah thank thank you for that presentation and for the cooperative effort you've had with the other departments of parks and public works and personnel um i think PLAs per se uh can create some questions but i think you've really uh put some guardrails around getting this thing when my uh estimation might get out of hand but i think that there's really some proper guardrails and i appreciate the commitment here to work with uh for county residents as well to identify them as much as possible as well as uh those in the apprenticeship program so that it's going to be very beneficial to the workforce of sanacris county. Supervisor County, any questions? Is there more? There's we have we have at least one more substantive slide that i'd like to walk through if that's okay. Sure okay then this before we did have a question on this slide so i guess one piece of confusion i have is um it's a the the proposal is a three-year pilot but it's actually a proposal for five large projects because it seems like it could either go one of two ways one could be that it's a three-year pilot where projects that come up within this next three years could actually fall under PLA or the it seems like the board well i guess what we're looking for is do we just select five projects and then go with that are gonna occur within these next three years so i'm wondering if you can just clarify that because um is that it seems a little contradictory but maybe i'm missing something and then the other thing that i was going to ask is that uh given that this is a pilot i'm just curious why we're setting the project price amount at five million because it sounds like there is an opportunity for projects within that medium range zone to potentially qualify under this the one million to five and potentially over five so why i'm just curious why we're restricting ourselves at five million if this is kind of like the time when we can see you know how many projects of one million if you qualify under this or maybe at two or three you know rather than going so high up to five million and not saying how this could work at a lower price point sure i'm happy to clarify our recommendation we are recommending a three-year pilot with a select group of projects for which plas would apply so we would be testing this for a three-year period to a select group of projects not all projects that the county do in the next three years but a select group of projects in the next three years regarding the five million dollar threshold absolutely if you all want us to look at other project thresholds we're happy to bring forward that those alternatives from our perspective having at least five at at least five projects at five million each and in some of the projects we're anticipating bringing before you would be significantly more than five million would provide a solid approach to understand how to apply these in a variety of different delivery areas so we're we are open obviously it's the board's discretion and decision if you would like us to apply this in at projects less than five million with the other driver for us in this was conversations with the trades around wanting larger larger projects with significant amount of work hours over multiple years to support apprenticeship programs so that was part of our thinking in selecting larger projects with larger numbers of labor hours over time but of course this is the decision of the board if you all would like us to try a project at a million or to it to it a million we can do that as well or a mid-size project we can vary what we put in the pilot we're just looking for that that specificity as we come forward with a project list on April 9th so in this case a chair coming the five million is a threshold so some of them could be much larger they could be 10 million or 15 million projects we're just setting a threshold of five million not that they would all be five million our projects five million and our recommendation is a threshold some of them may come in at 10 million some may be even higher than that thank you okay should i move forward to the next okay the next one this is really around as we've heard the primary objective of PLAs is really to provide um high quality skilled labor in pursuit of high quality construction outcomes timely and economical projects but there's also opportunities within these structures to get at policy goals around workforce development and and the local economy so on this page we are have put forward uh two specific recommendations that we would want your direction on one is this idea of local hire and the way we are recommending we design that in the pilot program is that local hire is defined as from the Santa Cruz Monterey County or San Benito counties and and to do that with a tiered two tiered approach where the first priority is for residents worker residents of Santa Cruz County the second tier would be reference for worker residents of San Benito or Monterey County and then the third tier would be workers from outside of the tri-county area just to really drive home that policy goal of building a pipeline and workforce opportunities for folks here in our community the second recommendation is around the apprenticeship requirements that would be folded into the PLA and that is that 20 uh apprenticeship labor for the project and then really this is that goal around creating the pipeline for our local resident apprentices to do work here in their community so those are the two staff recommendations we would seek your approval of the third item here and you can see I put question marks there are other opportunities to have even more focused requirements around serving uh different groups different vulnerable groups in our in our community who have maybe not had the same access we don't have a specific recommendation on that today and we really wanted to see if that was something you would want us to pursue to bring forward as an opportunity in April or do we keep it a little more simplified at this point with the two sort of objectives we set forward around local hire and uh apprenticeship pipeline so those are the other key elements we need a clear direction on so we can come forward with an agreement in April and if no questions on that okay Lisa would you like the questions now or should we um I have one more slide and then we'll be at questions for sure okay the next slide is just really quickly around pilot program administration clearly our teams need to get experience with this and how it's going to play through managing large capital projects and this a pilot approach gives us that opportunity we also anticipate we will be utilizing consultant project labor coordinator services to really help with both project by project compliance and making sure we're getting the outcomes we're looking for as well as that consultant outside perspective on developing and implementing programs that are embedded in the creation of the pilot and then lastly we wanted the opportunity to really collect some data locally you know does it have an impact on bidding what does it look like for costs we've seen studies all over the country where it varies by jurisdiction and really the conditions of their labor market and their construction environment so we really need to get that on the ground experience here to understand the how PLAs can meet the intended policy objectives with that I am we've completed our staff presentation and happy to take questions thank you for that presentation our learning board members who have questions for staff on this item this chair if I may I was going to begin with the question for director Adlo about the non-responsibility stuff you know my interest concern was peaked around this whole area of discussion that we're talking about today because of the long delay we've seen with the LIBOC library annex project I think we're close to a year now I mean the core question here is what could we do differently in the future to prevent a situation like this from happening again I think our typical processes the filtering so to speak that we do during the bidding process I had mentioned has historically worked when we're looking at the performance of a contractor and past projects we're requiring them typically to have worked on projects for a five-year period generally that's the best indicator to show that they will be a irresponsible player so to date that is satisfied that need moving forward one of the things I mentioned is utilizing the alternative project delivery methods that is a tool that is afforded to us and what that does is an example just to kind of simplify it talking about a pre-qualification process a step it adds time it adds money to a project but that's to me in our current tool set the best way to help prevent that okay and we've received the board received a letter from one of the subcontractors on that project concerned that they hadn't been paid even though the general contractor on the project had is there anything we can do just to our base contract to acquire some kind of you know leak subcontractor lien releases as a necessity for payment of the general contract that's correct it would be building up our current contract to make requirements during payment more robust okay is that something you're looking at we are okay actively okay great um on the um so I know we have members of the building trades here and I'd like to be able to ask them some questions as well so um on the subject of project labor agreements so for the building trades the port said that PLAs have historically been utilized for larger projects the tighter deadlines that typically provide minimal returns on less expensive projects through the increased administrative costs and lower potential for strikes or walkouts um I'm just curious how if one of you could respond to that I mean we had a lot of uh the membership here today talking about um you know requesting that we consider a master PLA down to one million dollars um you know clearly that says this has been explained on the lower uh and or even small project size I mean how would you respond so can I hold on one for one second I was going to mention this that we did have members from the building trades to talk about the staff um the staff recommendations but I want to see if there's any questions for staff because um I'm going to give a little bit more time to the representative who's here from the building trades so they can kind of go through some of those items so maybe if we could see if there's other questions for staff specifically on those last two recommended items and then I can have the trades representative come up and give a more extensive um uh some extensive comments on what's been presented okay of course chair um well I guess a question for staff I was interesting to note in the report uh I figured I understood this correctly that with Watsonville's experience you're suggesting that the private sector had actually been impacted because I guess presumably smaller contracts contractors have gone out of business or just not been able to survive as well because uh they're they're not being able to secure government work and therefore can't sustain themselves is that what was I read that correctly asked uh Mr. Machado to come up and speak to that yeah good afternoon everybody uh Matt Machado director cdi and so to the question about Watsonville's experience uh they did share that with us uh I don't know that I have any specific examples on those contractors uh but they've gone about 10 years without bids on some of their utility projects and they've had a fair amount of testimony from small contractors that have suffered greatly from from those experiences over the past 10 years but I don't have any specific names and project names for that example though okay thanks those are the questions I had for staff thanks supervisor friend um I don't have a question but they were seeking to sort of general commentary on on some of the elements of I mean I think that to the degree it fits with every other element that the board has been doing regarding uh diversity and supporting local workforce development that I think that when you do come back in April veterans minority owned women owned I mean I think these are important to have these these considerations as as part of it I mean again the point of this action shouldn't be to exclude anything right it shouldn't be to add cost or exclude it should be to to bring for the benefits that the trades have been committed that this would bring forward to and so I think that then there should just be parameters to ensure that that that happens I mean I I believe that it's true I just want to make sure that we have those elements and so I'm comfortable with those final slide suggestions Supervisor Hernandez and I think I'm okay with those you know the targeted local hires the apprenticeships and I'd like to ask though do we know the sort of the demographics of the local labor in terms of like where they're from the veterans stuff like that like on the third uh suggestion that we have um but overall I would like to see just a little more collaboration between labor and staff too I'm not sure if that question would be for staff or so we don't we don't have um demographics for the trades related workforce on hand that might be something that that the trades unions can present but we don't have those on hand on hand this at this table we can also check with our workforce development staff around what they understand around the demographics of the construction trades workforce thank you Supervisor McPherson yeah I just as I mentioned before I I know a lot of work has gone into this and I think you've got to a nice center spot on this and especially as it relates to prioritizing county residents and apprenticeship programs those are in that I think it's a very good balance I'm very impressed with this I mean this hasn't been an easy recommendation to come to or maybe it has been because it seems like there's been a lot of collaboration getting here so I'm very encouraged by that and I'm very supportive of what you're presenting I'm just wondering Elisa can you put up the last the second to last slide because I have some some questions on that sure let's see if we can do that so it'd be on the uh-oh on the wrong one it's going to be on the the policy objectives slide where we're focused on the local hire and apprentice a print one back from here apprenticeship requirements and then that question of okay let's see okay yes chair Cummings are you able to see it yeah I can see it now yeah and I also um I know that like as I mentioned before this is represented from the trades because I was speaking with them about how this kind of fits in and there were some concerns that were brought up but I do think that you know the objective is to try to really um you know get people who are experiencing poverty who have been underrepresented to get in with the trades so that they can have access to these kinds of opportunities so just figuring out how to operationalize that I think it's really important that staff is working with the trades to really figure out how you know they're able to meet those those goals within their kind of recruitment process that will ultimately meet the goals of what the county wants to see as well and then can you go to the last slide this one pilot administration yeah um so the one so this actually brought up some questions for me not so much regarding this program but just what does the county do currently to kind of track where contractors currently are hiring and where the people where their workforce lives you know are they you know paying prevailing wage and these different aspects because it sounds like you know we want to get you know oversight for unions but a lot of times where the oversight has has been you know needed in in the past has been with non-union contractors just broadly not calling out anybody here specifically but you know trying to make sure that non-union contractors are compliant has been an issue and in the past and so I'm just kind of wondering how we're tracking you know we're putting all these requirements or you know hopes and desires on the unions and this PLA but I'm just wondering do we have something similar in place for non-union because we don't I don't think we should be creating a double standard here you know we should we should be making sure that both our union and non-union contractors are you know trying to hire locally increase diversity and all those other things we're just wondering what's what's happening currently with non-union contractors I'm going to let Damon has much closer proximity to running these projects yeah so typically projects are registered with a dir and that allows us access to that information as well as through the bidding process the steps requiring bidders to submit in the test to hiring locally but beyond that that's currently the type of controls that we have and type of information we're able to access if I could add on to that a bit so all of our projects do require certified payroll and we do check those to ensure that the prevailing wage rate is being paid and that's both for state and federal projects or funded projects and which apply to all of our local projects I will add that local contractors what we see especially in horizontal projects they certainly have an advantage so we know project by project who's local who's not and I would say on the horizontal small to medium projects the predominant contractors are local their advantage is is mostly due to mode costs you know with heavy equipment things like that so so we do see that as an advantage for the local contractors and so we don't track it per se even though we do have a list of all those contractors for the last you know hundreds and hundreds of projects that we could pull together if the board is interested in seeing where those contractors are from we certainly have that data we just don't track it as a database appreciate that those comments I do think though as well because it sounds like we're moving with the PLA is maybe I'm wrong on this one is it is tracking where the labor is coming from and I think that's another critical piece because you might have a local contractor but where's their workers coming from and if that's something that we're going to impose on the unions you know I think it's that we shouldn't be you know we shouldn't have one standard for one group of folks and another standard for another and so but I'll leave my comments there and we can continue the conversation but I did want to invite up Casey van removal who's with the Santa Cruz Monterey building construction trades and I know we've been in conversation a lot with the building construction trades and so just wanted to give Casey an opportunity to respond I think he's going to need more than two minutes just because there's a lot in here but really wanted to give the unions a chance to respond I know that staff only had one opportunity to meet with the unions and I think if we're going to try to have something that's going to be effective and successful we really need to hear from the unions and their experience and and how we can make this an effective program for Santa Cruz County so with that I'll turn it over to Casey van removal. Thank you, Justin. I would also like to submit to the board facts and myths around project labor agreements with actual cited sources so if you guys would like to see this it's right please double check those cited sources. I appreciate the staff's ability to bring this report after reading the full report and the full agenda item I definitely had some concerns with the report setting the threshold of a million dollars for a county wide PLA project offers numerous advantages over a higher threshold and invites the larger pool of contractors to participate promoting healthy competition this increases competition can drive contractors to submit more competitive bids and ultimately benefiting the project and taxpayers smaller million size contractors may have been excluded by a higher threshold and can actively participate in inclusion a million dollar threshold for a county wide PLA provides a balanced approach that maximizes competition encourages diversity and stimulates the local economy by ensuring ensuring continuous supply of skilled labor through certified apprenticeship programs. The strategy not only benefits individual projects but contributes to overall growth and sustainability of the construction industry within the county. One of the staff recommended is that it adds an additional layer of bureaucracy that may not significantly enhance these outcomes. In fact it can streamline the process and foster efficiency. PLAs are designed to establish a clear standardized terms for all contractors involved in the project providing a structured framework that can be reduce administration burden. The standardized approach that contractors are on the same page promoting smoother workflow and the need for constant micro management. PLAs often include provisions that facilitate collaboration and communication between stakeholders fostering a more comprehensive work environment this can lead to a quicker decision making and issue resolution reducing the bureaucratic red tape that might arise in projects without such agreements. PLAs can favor non-local contractors or sorry PLAs can favor large non-local contractors undermining the county's goal to support local businesses and development local labor. The assertion that project labor agreements exclusively favor large non-unique or large non-local contractors is misleading. In fact PLAs are designed to ensure fair and open competition promoting the involvement of all contractors including small to mid-sized businesses. These agreements establish a level playing field by implementing standardized terms and conditions fostering an environment where contractors of various sizes can compete based on merit. PLAs contribute to the county's over objective of supporting local businesses by encouraging a diverse pool of contractors which in return stimulates local economic development and labor growth. During their report they said that historically have been used for larger projects with tighter deadlines and particularly provides minimal returns on less expensive projects. I want to reference some local PLA and county PLAs that were being discussed earlier. Santa Clara County a $2 million threshold their annual budget $10.9 billion dollars. I'm a Dean at County $1 million threshold annual budget $4.1 billion. Costa Rica County $1 million threshold annual budget in 2023 $5.5 billion dollars. And the San Francisco County PLA which is a 20-year PLA $5 million threshold for the first year $3 million threshold for the second year and then a $1 million threshold thereafter for the next their annual budget of $13.7 billion dollars. And am I excited to say that City of Hollister that just passed their community workforce agreement has a threshold of $250,000 and this is going to be able to provide a longer range of opportunity for statewide apprenticeship agreements and actually obtaining these hours for these apprentices to foster the next round of skilled labor. The potential administration complexities that introduced also warns consideration staff said. Once integrated into the policy's bidding procedure a PLA requires little time to administer. The key to the success of a PLA administration is to include the PLA and the bid packet. That requirement that the bid submittal by the general contractor include an assigned addendum A and agreement to be bound. The general contractor should then follow the same procedures when subcontracting bidding. This way everybody understands the rules up front and the burden to gather the signed addendum A's rests on the general contractor rather than staff. The local building trades make sure that all aspects of the PLA are being adhered to. This does not place any burden on staff. During one of their full reports, it was really concerning that they cited a survey that was done by local contractors and businesses that have historically been involved in implementing public work projects for the City of Santa Cruz. So yeah, we'd like to see that survey, right? But we got ahold of that survey and 29 contractors were conducted that survey. 90% were non-union. Four of those contractors have never registered as a prevailing wage contractor, which some of those contractors actually spoke to me. That registration fee goes to compliance for the state. So I understand why they would not want to pay that registration fee. 11 of the 29 contractors that filled out that survey has never filed certified payroll within the county in the last five years. Six of those contractors had serious social violations and failure to abide by workplace safety regulations. Now my favorite, 12 of the 29 contractors over 41 surveyed, 41% surveyed had civil wage and penalty assessments for labor code violations filed against them with the state division of labor standards and enforcement. That total is close to $1 million just by these 12 contractors in wage violations. So in short, I think that survey is very flawed and does not represent good contractors. And this is the type of homework that you need to do before hearing from these types of surveys. The city of Watsonville has a project labor agreement ordinance since 2013. We signed that agreement in 2014 in September. Discussion with staff revealed that several types of projects for sewer and water projects have been installed for 10 years due to lack of bidders to the projects. This is completely false. And you believe that council would allow a 10-year backlog? City staff also noted that PLAs have had an impact on private development projects due to smaller non-union contractors being able to unable to compete in the local market. The PLAs do not restrict these contractors to bid this work. I do support a lot of the key parameters in this agreement that staff has presented, but there's a lot that I don't agree with. We only have conducted one meeting for one hour. We have not negotiated in good faith and over a longer period of time. Some of the stuff that we do that they're recommending is already implemented, like the 20% of hours being done by certified apprentice for the classification. That is already a state requirement and should already be being trapped. One of the things is local target hire. As us unions, we have direct entry for veterans and trade prep program graduates, which we have one here with the county of education. We have one with an adult program in Watsonville, and we have one through the Monterey County Santa Cruz Building Trails Council. Our hiring requirements are set with the division of apprenticeship standards. To change that, we would lose our accreditation that we've worked so hard to achieve. One of the suggestions is targeting people without a high school diploma. We would not be able to do that. The DAS requires us that our applicants have EGED or high school diploma. Do we be able to obtain these high skilled jobs? Those are the basic requirements. So I think we need more time and we need an outline of a million dollar threshold with a term of five years and to negotiate in good faith and bring that back to this council in June, because negotiation doesn't just happen overnight. An education of these project labor agreements does not just happen overnight. We need to sit down and negotiate in good favor. Thank you for your time and consider my recommendations. Thank you so much. Mr. Sheriff, I may this isn't really seem to be a productive discussion right now. I mean, it isn't. And so what I'm hearing and I think that what we should do is just move to table this item, because at the end of the day, there should be more discussion with Casey. That's fine. But, you know, this isn't a one-sided discussion either Casey. I mean, there should be discussion with some of the small businesses that called. I mean, this isn't just a one-sided discussion. And so if it's not ready for prime time, which is the distillation of what you just said, that's fine. But we're not going to, this is not going to move to a productive discussion today, Mr. Chair. I think we should all recognize that this needs additional time, additional outreach of folks that feel that they weren't heard on the union side. And people that called on earlier that had other points that needed to be raised on the local business side. So I'm comfortable with, actually, I'll ask council of what the proper approach that would be, whether it's just a no action, it's a direction to do that or whether it's a tabling in order to, this was a request for June, that's fine. Whenever the month is, that's fine. I think first we need to take public comment. And then once it comes back to the board, any of those all on above of what you just outlined is available within the discretion of the board. You can reject staff recommendation and say that you want something to come back in June. You can give specific parameters around what you want to see come back in June. And I think staff would benefit from as specific of direction as your board could provide with what it is that you want to see happen between now and June, so that we can bring back something in June that is directly responsive. Okay. And then Mr. Chair, then I'll just suggest then moving forward, if we've been taking additional public comment at this point, it's just like a point by point refutation of every point in there. That's not, it's just not a productive discussion. So I do understand that, but it was an agendized item. And so I'm not, I'm not debating that. I'm just saying that it shouldn't be a 10 minute. I mean, at this point, then I think we need to adhere to our time limits, right? Yeah. Because others were afforded two minutes that had points to raise as well, right? So I think that if we're having a discussion here, we should honor the two minute limit than moving forward. So there's some equity in that discussion. So that's fine. I mean, so with that, I'll open it up to see if there's any member of the public who has not commented on this item yet today. If you are in chambers, you would like to speak on this item, you will get two minutes. I do have a few questions. I'll still that raise. So that third, you know, the consultant that would be used, would that be third house supervisor, maybe we could get through public comment. We can still bring this back to your questions. Okay. So let's move forward with public comment. All right. Good afternoon. My name is Ron Cheshire. I've been in the construction industry for over 47 years. I've been a rep for the Carpenters Union, the CEO of the Monterey Santa Cruz Building Trades Council, director of apprenticeship training, pre-apprentices. I'm not here to debate anything. You asked a question. You want to know what we're doing within your community? Casey already told you a couple things. We've been working in this community for decades. We've brought re-apprenticeship programs to the area. We've opened them to everyone in all the communities. We have specific agreements actually. We've worked with the county office of education. Your workforce and development board director was here earlier today. He couldn't stick around. He's for pre-apprenticeships. He's for working together, making job opportunities to make better citizens for you here in this area. We work with disenfranchised communities. We work with people that have been in bad situations. Okay. The breakdown, the ethnicity, we could give that to you. I guarantee I can almost give it to you right now in Santa Cruz County. It's probably about 60% Latino Hispanic. And then I can't get down to Pacific Island or whatever. But in Monterey County, it's a higher percentage. We search for women to do this. We search for veterans. We have a rough time getting both groups in. Okay. But we look for them specifically to get them involved and get them into good careers. We don't leave a stone unturned in this community, in your whole county, in regards to anyone that wants to get into construction. We'll work with them to try and get them into it. Thank you. Thank you very much. Not smalling, but Operating Engineers Local 3. Some of you know me. Some of you don't. I find this to be a great conversation with that great conversation. We didn't have the opportunity to talk to these three. Apparently, non-union did. So here's my part. I'd like to see you all gentlemen behind there. Tell them to come see us. We're down there. And we're, uh, Casterville, come on down. Let's have a conversation. You three want to know something? We'll tell you up front and honest. Like Casey did today, he'll give you the paperwork. We're not scared of any questions that you have, but we want the people in Santa Cruz County to have benefits, to have health insurance, to have retirement. That's a huge step into anybody's life. Now my son-in-law just got out of the military. He's an Operating Engineers. He's in the apprenticeship. He's got insurance on my daughter, my grandson and himself. That's huge. That's a worry that he does not have to worry about. And you know what it cost for a veteran to join the Operating Engineers? Five dollars. So if you got a veteran, send him to me. I'd help him because I'm a veteran. Worthy chair, worthy supervisors. Thank you for giving the opportunity to speak here. Manny Panaro, CEO of Monterey Sanctus County Building Construction Trades Council, retired Operating Engineer as of today, the 27th of February, seven years. I got to go at 55. There's great opportunities here and a PLA for local people. Unfortunately enough, I could stay in Monterey County where I was born and reared and still there 62 years later. The opportunities here and by encouraging and entertaining a PLA for the county of Santa Cruz, a lot of young people have them established to stay here where the roots are. A good wage, a good benefit, and dignity when you retire. So let's continue these talks and hope you can make a decision today that we are going to go forward. So thank you for your time. This works. Good afternoon supervisors. My name is Steve MacArthur. I represent the plumbers and steamfitters. I'm the business manager for Local 62. Cover Monterey in Santa Cruz County. I have a great apprenticeship program in Castorville at our training center. I welcome any of you to come by and see it anytime. 8 to 4.30 Monday through Friday. We're there. I would just want to give a couple of points. Try to be quick, but any contractor can bid these projects PLA or not. There's plenty of examples even here in Santa Cruz. The Santa Cruz Metro, the sheriff's facility were both PLA projects and they were done by non union contractors. So any contractor says they can't bid it is totally lying to you. They can any contractor can bid these projects. There's nothing in it says they can't. I would argue their whole made up theory about the increase admin costs, you know, you could use you could save all the time and doing wage compliance and for that one little part about putting it in the PLA language into the bidding documents. The whole fantasy about it costs more. I'm not buying it. There's you can go over the hill the other way to San Jose. They bid a project a nitrification clarification rehab project with a PLA came in 39% under the cost estimate. So the other way they had one in 2016 that just finished in 2022 $100 million project for their digester and thickener project. It was 29% over budget without a PLA and it still came in $100 million over budget by the time the thing was finished. So there's plenty of examples PLA non PLA. It has no effect on the price at all. It's all prevailing wage. You have to pay the same amount. The material costs the same. It's all down to the contractor. I'm trying to get local people to work here locally. They want to work here locally. Thank you for your time. They don't want to drive over the hill to get a job. Thanks. Thank you. How you doing? My name is Danny Rubio. I'm an organizer. I've been at trade for 25 years. The last two as organizer. Well, the last 20 years I've been driving San Jose because it's not a whole lot of work around this area. A PLA would help people like me growing up in Monterey County. When I was young, I didn't know what I wanted to do. I was good to my hands. I couldn't afford to go to college. I was smart enough to go to college, but the building trades helped me find my way. And it's one of the best things I've ever done. It's the opportunity they gave me to provide for my family, to provide for my kids, and buy a home and stay in Monterey County. So I hope that you consider PLA and give these kids an opportunity that you don't want to go to college or can't afford to go to college. Give an opportunity to be productive members of this community. Thank you. Thank you. Is there anyone else in the chambers who'd like to speak to us on this item? Good afternoon. My name is Paul Bruno. I'm the CFO and a principal of Monterey Peninsula Engineering. I sent an email yesterday. I hope you had a chance to look at it. It outlined what happened at your December 12th meeting. Please recall that board direction from that meeting initiated the review of the counting bidding policies and led to the proposed actions before you today. At that meeting, Supervisor Koenig made statements that include outright falsehoods about our family business. When I inquired of his staff about his statements, I was stonewalled. The question you should ask is why was the impetus of these policies changes based upon misrepresentations and outright lies? Or better yet, you should ask why can't these bidding policy changes stand on their own merits? Perhaps it was falsely presented as a worker protection measure to keep anyone from noticing that absolutely no financial impact analysis has been conducted. A few years ago, the city of Seaside was considering a PLA. A capital improvement budget analysis showed that the PLA would cost that small city upwards of $26 million more over the next five years. What would it cost a large county such as this? The county needs to look at Watsonville. Their tenure experiment with the PLA has been an absolute failure. It did not produce more local jobs or training opportunities. It did not increase apprenticeship. Worse yet, the PLA has impeded their ability to contract much needed work. You should listen to them when they tell you they're telling the truth. An informative pilot program would bid several projects side by side with and without a PLA. That way, you can tell the difference. I suggest the county take no action until it observes Watsonville's proceeds with modifications to their PLA. There's no need to rush this through. It's a solution in search of a problem. Thank you. Thank you so much. Good afternoon, everybody. I promise you I'll keep it quick. I got a three hour drive after this. So my name is E.J. Sire. I'm a political and public relations representative for Local 104. We cover the northern 49 counties. I cover the coastal counties from Ventura, all the way up to the Oregon border. And I do this in all of those counties, but all the way down to school board level, all the above. Generally speaking, whenever we see a situation like this, it's either because staff has inserted their own opinion into a project labor agreement discussion or there hasn't been enough meetings. Obviously, in this case, there has not been enough discussion as was pointed out earlier. And I was obnoxiously relieved to hear you just from the get go notice that it's definitely a relief because generally we don't have that. So just to make it real quick, you know, when you're talking about the diversity and inclusivity and all that, I'm on the board of directors for Rising Sun Center for Opportunity out of Oakland. It's a program focused on specifically underserved, underrepresented disadvantaged communities. On top of that, you mentioned the veteran status. I'm a disabled veteran. I was medically retired after eight years of service. I have 22 disabilities and the sheet metal worker still found a way for me to come into the trade, work with my hands. I spent five years as an apprentice. I built 80% of the duct work for the sales force tower in San Francisco with these hands right here, right? I have something to be proud of for that. As a veteran who thought that I was done myself, my wife and my four kids, we almost ended up homeless in 2017. The only reason why we didn't is because the local school district, the community college district, to where I live signed a project labor agreement, which required local hire, which meant they had to look for local applicants, which was me. So now myself, my wife and my four kids are comfortably in the middle class with healthcare, retirements, prevailing wage, a family sustaining wage. That's all we're looking for. So when you look at a PLA, whenever it comes back in May, June, whatever it is, make sure that those facets are put in there, the prevailing wage, the local hire and the apprenticeship programs. Thank you. Thanks so much. Okay. I'd like to ask if there's anyone online who has not already commented on this item. I guess we do have one caller. Yep. David, your microphone is now available. Thank you. Good afternoon, Chair and Supervisors. And thank you for your consideration of this item. My name is David Vincent. I'm a proud local sheet metal worker. I appreciate the councils proposing to move above and beyond the public contract codes requirements of responsibility to ensure that only the most qualified and reliable contractors are able to use our taxpayer monies to complete the public works projects in the Santa Cruz area. Additionally, I believe that the proposed use of a project labor agreement will augment the development of a skilled and trained workforce in the area, prioritize local workers for opportunities within the area, as well as those traditionally excluded from these sorts of opportunities. And it might actually minimize the risk of wage theft. That is the misclassification of workers on these PLA projects with the workforce compliance programs discussed earlier. And for that reason, I hope that the PLA is applied to projects that they even lesser threshold of $1 million. Thank you very much. Thank you. Is there anyone else online? We have no further speakers, Chair. Okay. I'll bring it back to the board. I just want to say that first, I want to just appreciate staff's work on this item and for the people who came out to speak today. I do think that there's an opportunity right now just based on the conversations that had to continue negotiating the project labor agreements with the county. And I think it's really critical that the county is working with the unions and a grant of their understanding the impacts to other communities. And I think that it's really important that we continue to do this so that we can get to some kind of usually agreeable approach, whether that's a three-year blanket or whether it's a number of projects that we're just going to select. And I know that initially the direction was that we were going to move forward with 10 projects. And if we go in this kind of selection of project direction, I think that it would be good if we had five projects between $1 million and $5 million, and then five projects above $5 million, just to see how the breadth of PLAs can be carried out at those different price points. Personally, I think that there's a lot of information out there that we can work off of to draft just a blanket three-year PLA with that $1 million minimum. But obviously, it's a conversation, it's a decision that's going to be up to the board. So I'll leave my comments there. But my hope is that we can move forward with having staff go back and continue working on this with the union so that we can get to somewhere where we're all comfortable. And so I'll see if there's any other board members who have any questions or comments or would like to make a motion. I got some questions and comments too. So it was suggested that we do a three-year pilot. And I think Labor mentioned that they would like to see five years. I know that I actually spoke to Watsonville, some of the folks on their engineering side. And we originally were there. They looked at Berkeley, which was a seven-year kind of pilot that they did. And then they eventually did another one. But what's the difference? I don't know. What's the difference between three-year and five-year like they're wanting? I really don't know the difference. And then the other question is the consultant that they would use to oversee the project labor agreements. Is that third party or in-house? And when we have normal contracts, do we have a third party or is it in-house? I think Justin mentioned a little bit. But I think Damon mentioned that small bids are under 1.5. It'd be nice if we could see maybe medium-sized projects above that that we could look at for the pilot project. But overall, I really agree with Supervisor Zach Brand's statement about needing more collaboration. Let me bring it to primetime, something like that. Any words to his mouth? But yeah, those are my three questions. Yeah. So I can answer some of those. In terms of the three versus five years, we can pick whatever you like. A three-year would allow us to say, we're going to measure in a pilot structure for a period of time within the idea that we would bring something back and the decision would be, how do you want to expand this? What have you learned? So I mean, it's from a staff perspective, it's more about having a contained amount of time before you make a significant change to expand it, contract it, whatever you choose to do. But we're fine with three or five. I mean, I think that's definitely something to discuss. I want to stress we had one meeting with trades. The intention was not to negotiate a PLA for today. That was not what we were asked to do. We're asked to come forward with a report on non-responsibility. We're asked to come forward with projects. We did say we'd like to defer that to April, so about six weeks from now. But then we wanted to bring forward, what are some key policy questions? We need directions from you all to inform us coming forward with an agreement. And of course, we would be talking with key stakeholders between now and whenever you want us to come forward. So your last question, though, was around consultant. I'm going to let Damon talk about that and the idea of a consultant resource for the PLA coordination function. Is that okay? Yes. If it's in-house or third party and normal projects without PLA, is there in-house or is it third party? So typically, okay, so without a PLA, we're administering the projects primarily in-house with our project management team. We did do a little bit of outreach with other jurisdictions, and there's different models. But what we're proposing is to have it be consultant. So it would be a third party consultant that would be doing the project labor coordination. So it's additional oversight? Or is that just? It would be additional. Okay. And sometimes some jurisdictions have hired for that internally. So they have someone who's basically collecting the data from the contractor so you would see how things are playing out in terms of compliance with the policy goals. So our recommendation is for in a project scenario, we wouldn't be building a new function within the county, but we would be bringing that on as part of the project cost as a third party consultant. And I guess, alluding to Supervisor Zach Friend's statement, I think that we do need more collaboration amongst labor unions from here to end of April before you guys come back again. Have more discussion with all the parties interested, right? Absolutely. Right, Mr. Chair, I'm going to try and formulate a motion here. I'm just going to move that we reject staff's recommendations. This isn't a rejection of your work, it's just in order to ensure that this kind of starts a little bit blank slate and that you coordinate with some of the folks that are here today and actually broaden your outreach to include others and that you come back in June with revised recommendations as a result of that. So a new motion to put forward by Supervisor Friend, seconded by Supervisor Hernandez, more or less for staff to go work with key stakeholders and bring back recommendations. But I guess the first meeting in June, is that or whenever? Yeah, I don't have the master calendar in front of me to have a sense of what the extent of but the meeting that's the least impacted in June would be the preferred meeting for discussion of this magnitude. Thank you. That might be the second meeting, since I think we have last day of the first meeting in June. Okay, so, okay. Any further discussion? Hearing none, I'll turn it over to the clerk for an old call. Supervisor Koenig? Hi. Brent? Hi. Hernandez? Hi. McPherson? And Cummings? I couldn't hear McPherson, but I'm assuming that was an I. Okay, so that passes unanimously. And with that, that concludes our regular business today. And so we have one more item on the agenda, which is our closed session item, conference with legal counsel, existing litigation. Just want to ask if there's, if we anticipate having to report anything on a closed session. No. Okay. With that, I want to thank everybody for coming today. And we look forward to seeing you at our next meeting, which will be the first meeting in March. So thank you all and see you soon.