 Good morning, everyone. Let's go ahead and call to order the March 22nd meeting of Senior Metro Transit District Board of Directors. Can we have a roll call? Director Brown, can we have Director Downing, Director Dutra, Director Colin Terry-Johnson, Director Koneg, Director Lynn, Director McPherson, Director Newsom, Director Paikler, Director Keavos Carter, Director Rockman. Okay, Ex-officio Director Northcutt and Ex-officio Director... Chris. Here. All right. We have four of them. Great. Thank you. We'll move on to item three. We're going to recess to the SCCIC meeting. And with that, I will turn it over to Director McPherson. Right. Good job. Thank you. But I was chair of the SCCIC. I'll call the... I'll ask for a roll call, please. Director Downing, Director Colin Terry-Johnson, Director Koneg, Director McPherson, and Director Paikler. And we have four of them. Great. First of all, acknowledge the Director Paikler's appointment to serve as the board officer. I think this would take a motion. No, it does not. It was approved at the last meeting. Okay, excuse me. That wasn't at the last meeting. We have four of them, communications. Is there any more communications public? Anything on the line? We will add additions or additions to the agenda. All right. Okay. Number six, approve of prior years and then it's of March 4th, 2023. Attachment B. A second. Any comments from the public? Any comments on the line? Okay. I think we can just take a voice from all in favor. Aye. Point to number seven, acceptance of financial statement for fiscal year 23. Outfit C. Questions? Acceptance second. Second on Koneg. And anything, anything on line? The mic to addresses? Okay. All in favor? Aye. Ashes unanimously. Number eight, we're going to turn to the next board of directors meeting. I don't know what it's going to be. So thank you very much for all that time. All right, thank you. We'll reconvene now to our regular Board of Directors meeting and we'll go to announcements. I'll start by saying today's meeting is being broadcast by Community Television in Santa Cruz County. Language line services is providing Spanish interpretation, which will be available during oral communications and for any other agenda item for which these services are needed. Hello morning, my name is Hector and if anyone needs Spanish interpretation services, please. On any item on the agenda, please that board knows I can give assistance. Hola, buenos días, mi nombre es Hector y yo estoy aquí para dar servicios de interpretación si alguien necesita asistencia por favor, deja de saber a la directiva. Thank you. Thank you. Any additional announcements? Okay, we will move on now to Board of Directors comments. Are there any comments from the board? None required versus morning. Okay, I will just share briefly. I'm sure many of you know already the Regional Transportation Commission in Caltrans had planned to shut down highway 1 this weekend tomorrow for 24 hours to begin demolition on the Capitol Avenue over crossing, which is part of the bus on shoulder and auxiliary lane project on highway 1. That has been moved. The closure of highway 1 has been moved to April 6th. So you can get around this weekend, but keep your eyes peeled. Come April 6th. We will have that 24 hour closure after all. All right. If there's no further comments from the board, we will go to oral and written communications to the board. It looks like we have three written communications. Correct. And I sent you one additional one last night. All right, email. Thank you. Do we have any oral communications? Yes, please. Hi, welcome. Thank you. Hi, my name is Portia Rayburn. I wanted to talk to you today about bus stops and the wheelchair user friendliness are lack there for them. The bus stop at the fairgrounds and the one at Graham Hill Road and Highway 9. Both aren't very friendly, wheelchair friendly and in fact are sometimes challenging to get a wheelchair to get on and off the bus with a wheelchair there. They don't have a level place to load or unload. I realize that a lot of times there's not much that can be done about this issue. I also commend the bus drivers for their ability to make the best of the lack of level place to place the ramp for loading and unloading. However, the property at Graham Hill Road and Highway 9 is currently in flux. The businesses there have been shut down and rumor has it that a parking lot or something is going to go into that corner, which makes now a great time to explore options to improve the bus stop. Maybe something with a covered bench and on a level ground for loading and unloading. It would be nice if the stop at the fairgrounds could have similar upgrades. I would think that fairgrounds manager would be willing to work with Santa Cruz manager to improve the public transportation to and from the group. In addition to that, it would be great if the seven, the Highway 17 stop over at the Dyrdon Station could have a covered bench. There's plenty of room there and they do already have a lovely place to load and unload. Thank you. Thank you. Any additional public comment in the room? None? Do we have any public comment online? All right, we will close public comment and bring it now to labor organization communications. Any comments? Wow, we are all quiet. Moving on. Additional documentation to support existing agenda items. Is I emailed you the updated slide deck for item 17, which makes me. All right. Thank you. That brings us to our consent agenda, which will be considered in one motion. Is there any public comment on our consent agenda? Seeing none in the room, any online? Any further comments from the board? Oh, excuse me. Back up. Okay. We have Vanessa. Looks like she is joining, but she has her hand up. So Vanessa, can you hear us? I guess she took it down. Okay. And then there's also John. Can you hear us? Eric, can you give John permissions to talk? He just had his hand up. I believe in the room is upright. So people will be able to figure it should be to look like again. You guys figured it out. I was actually, my hand was up for the previous public comment, but I assume I can still do that now. Yeah, awesome. Excellent. Thank you very much. So I would like to talk about the bus stop situation as well. So many Metro is crushing it. I mean, so many of the phase things that you guys are doing like the new routes, fare free is one of the best things that all public transit systems could do. But our bus stops still have a lot of issues, particularly with the lack of seating. Shelter, I understand is harder. Seating is fairly easy to implement these days. So, yeah, I would I really like it if we look a little deeply more into that. In particular, I would like us to reach out to organizations in County who could maybe build the benches for us. This is what cities like Chattanooga and Tennessee have done. Edmonton in Canada is crushing this. Milwaukee, Chicago, all these cities are using local groups who are eager to fill this gap in our infrastructure. And I happen to know of a local group called stronger Santa Cruz, who is very eager to do this stuff. So, yeah, I would just like recommend we look to the private sector and in particular the nonprofit sector to solve this bench seating problem. Because I can imagine we can do it in like a couple of months this way. So those are my thoughts. Thank you for your time today. All right, any further comments? I like. OK, I do see Vanessa. Vanessa, did you want to speak? Vanessa, can you hear us? Yes, I can hear you now. I was just this is Director Kiros Carter. I was just hoping to be promoted to a panelist. I'm so sorry. Oh, Eric, can you promote her? All right. OK, so that brings us back to our consent agenda. If there's any further comments from the board, yes, I just wanted to comment and acknowledge I have 10.5. That's the one right at a time comprehensive report. I'm on great report. Thank you for all the work. It's just incredible to see it all together in one place. So just want to acknowledge the safety. Absolutely. And the acceptance. OK, all right, we have a motion and a second. Do we need to do a roll call now with Director Kiros Carter online? OK, OK. And I think she can hear us. So OK, both. But legally, we need to. OK, all right. We have a motion and a second. So whoever will call, please. OK, Director Brown. I sorry. Thank you. I directed. Director Callentary Johnson. Aye. Director Koenig. Aye. Director Moon. Aye. Director McPherson. Aye. Director Newsom. Aye. Director Pagler. Aye. Director Kiros Carter. Aye. And the motion has. OK, thank you. That brings us to the beginning of our regular agenda where I'm 11, which is presentation of employee longevity award for Isaac Holly for 25 years as our IT and ITS director and Elmer Torres, lead facilities maintenance worker. All right, Isaac, Elmer. So thank you for this. Thank you. Sure. When I come out of the room, actually, thank you. Well, a quarter century. Oh, when I say it like that. But yeah, it's I was thinking of the day that when I started here as a temp, that 231 might be facility to go. The 1900 series buses were brand new. And they're still going. I see people will ask me. I don't know. But seriously, it's been an honor and a privilege to serve our community. As a member of the Metro team. So thank you very much. Good morning. Well, leave it or not. We had a funny day with that. We're in board. Management for workers. It's when I said, thank you. Metro has provided this job security for all of these years. It's been a great experience serving the community, working with great people here as Metro. This will be my manager for the world. Channels, great manager, good person I work with. And my supervisor, Rob Willis and everybody else that I work with. It was just a baby when I came with that. I'm waiting for you to go in the picture. Let's take it. St. Brian's Muggin bus stop. Still, I think that pensioner was installing it. It's still it's employee. So I just want to say thank you and for five years. Like with I think I've ordered records. I want to congratulate these two fine men. They have set such a positive culture here at Metro that I think is inscribable. I mean, between the two of them being such hard workers for the last 25 years, they've kept that spirit and culture of a family. You know, Elmer, he has a smile on his face every single day. I think he's been a mentor for me as my manager. And so I think it's a great time today to celebrate their 25 years of service here at Metro. Thanks. Thank you. There are any board comments on this item? Any public comments? Any online? All right. Thank you both for your service. 25 years. Congratulations. We'll move on to item 12, which is an item to approve our FY fiscal year 25 and 26 preliminary operating budgets and capital budgets portfolio for review and TTA as TA plan purposes. We'll turn it over to check. Hi, good morning, good morning. Looking at the slide that. Don't choose that 72 slides. Of course, they didn't say it out loud, but. To be honest. All right, well, I'll go ahead and get started anyway, while we're trying to figure out page one. So every March, this is when we start kicking off budget season for presentations. And of course, we need to actually present a preliminary budget. And as Chairman said, it's actually for STA or TDA STA requirement that we have to get it in to put it into their consolidated budget, which then goes into. That gets rolled up in every year. So this is the first round will be changes and adjustments. You'll see it again in May. Of course, that will be our kind of final. And then, of course, June by a final budget. So we go on the first slide. It's not. Can you just flip to the next one? Did I just change that? Or you change that? I don't know. All right. So the first slide here is what I want to show you is I'm going to break the budget into three different parts just to make it easy to understand and comprehend, especially with all the different changes we're doing right now with phase one, phase two, and so forth. So the three phases are based. So assuming that we never or we were not going to go on phase one or phase two or any three fairs, we're just going to continue like we were a year ago and just, you know, business as usual. That will be considered our base. Then I'm going to talk second about phase one, phase two rollouts and the impacts of what it's going to have. And then a third piece will be free fairs. So initially right here on this first slide, as you can see, this is FY 25 and FY 26. You can see the impact of base phase one, phase two and free fairs. I'll go into a little more details in a minute, but ultimately we're talking about, you know, this is our preliminary view. Like I said, there's still going to be changes coming. Still a lot of decisions to be made, but at least this is where we stand as of today. So right now I'm going to talk base budget. So so in the base budget itself, as you are aware of our FY 24 budget, total all in expenses, we can look at the operating surplus line is about halfway down the page. We're talking about spending about almost $52 million loss and our fair price recovery is about 15.1 percent. We moved to about roughly the same 25 and 26. So we're holding it relatively the same going from 24, 25 to 26. One item to mention here is that we continue the free rides for use. So for every all the kids under 18 in school, they continue. We did not stop it, even though we're right now, we're stopping it in December at this point. We've baked it in here as we continue it doesn't mean we're still going to continue. Like said, it's still decisions to be made, but I wanted to show it in here. And then down below, we are actually going in and putting in money in order to help subsidize that 50 million. And that's where you see the sales tax that's included. And then you'll see two lines as federal state grants. So that's primarily our 50 307 formula funding that's covering it. As well as our coven relief grants, which by the way, run out this year. So all the code cares, Chris and our performance. We have now gone through all 60 million dollars. We've actually used it as part of our operating. And now we're going to go back to our 50 307, which we did prior to the code. And ultimately, we're getting down to roughly about the same bottom, all three. But I guess it changed off. OK. So now I'm going to kind of get a quick walk down between what changed from our 24 budgets 25. So right now we're pretty much flat, only about seventy three thousand dollars worse year over year, but we've had a lot of puts and takes. Like I said, you three fares, that's about seven hundred and fifty thousand dollar impact, because we didn't contemplate that in our twenty four budget, but now we are in twenty five. And then we have some knickknacks on the contracts on the changes on expenses. Nine hundred twenty five thousand dollars was just the cold increases. And then we had some reduced professional tech fees, which is like less on your piece spent spending, less on different contractors coming in. So we had a lot happening that we projected in twenty four. It's not going to carry twenty five because we have so that's why it's going down. Fuel the anticipated fuel based off futures, we're actually going to go up when we get back to twenty four. Well, as you can see, fuel is kind of not going up. It's actually relatively flat. I know it's going up a little bit now, but so we've reduced that down. So that's why we've got a little bit of a loss savings. And then the other piece down below, as you can see, this is this is the key. Our sales tax, we're still assuming it's going up. We haven't seen any pressure for either flattening out or going down like in other parts of the country. It's actually been pretty good here. And we're hoping to maintain kind of that same status quo, but we're not. We're not forecasting any type of extreme increase. It's very, very little. The next two, you've got to look at these as a consolidated basis. So we have our federal state grants. This is our fifty three seven formula funding. And the reason why you see a negative on ARPA and COVID is because we're swapping out twenty four ARPA and covid the covid funds with our fifty three seven. So you kind of net them together to see that number. And then our UAL. So we refinanced our UAL with the pension. But every year, CalPERS has to return six point eight percent on their money. And if they get six point eight or more, that number doesn't change. But if this that number would be zero, but they return less than six point eight. So when they return less than six point eight, they create a gap and we have to cover that gap. And that's what you see here is the six sixty six. If we didn't do the pension bond, that number would be much, much. So right now it's only six sixty six. And then as you're everybody aware that everybody's aware last year, interest rates were like three percent and they skyrocketed towards the end of the year and so forth. So we're actually getting a lot more return on the money that we have because of the interest rates. And that's really what's driving. So ultimately, all those puts and takes were flat. Yearly, we're holding it 24 to 25. OK, proposed FTE changes. Right now, our adopted budget in 24 was three was a count of three thirty one. Throughout this year, we've done a lot of swaps where we defund one and create another, basically a one for one swap out. That's primarily this whole list. I'm not going to go down this list of everybody, but you can read them. But ultimately, at the end, we're keeping that same level at three thirty one. And remember, this is base three thirty one. This doesn't include the additional bus drivers. We've asked for us for phase one, phase two. That's coming up. This is just based three thirty one to three thirty one. Now we're going to go on to basically phase one, phase two. So this is the next part of it. So phase one and phase two FY twenty five is assuming it's a September rollout, knowing that we're going to be paying some of the bus drivers prior to that as we gear up before we actually go out the service in September and then also all the way through FY twenty six. So the cost associated with the two years is about twenty one million dollars in order to basically run phase one base to starting September going on as part of it. We're using the Tersup funding to pay for this. So that's about twenty four million dollars. That's the offset in phase and phase one and phase two. We're assuming ninety eight more personnel. So that three thirty one goes up to four twenty nine. By the way, almost. So that's four hundred and twenty nine total personnel, eighty new bus drivers, eight paratransit supervisor, eight transit supervisors, seven paratransit operators and three mechanic one mechanic twos more covered. And like I said, this would be phase one and phase two. And I think John is going to talk more about it later. But this is just the foundation that we have right. So this is an addition to the base base, plus this. And now we're going to go on to free fairs. So free fairs are looking at free fairs for one year trial period starting in September, with the phase two rollout. Through through one year. So in September of this year through August of next year. So it's exactly one year. And that's what's got baked in here at this point. So right now we're talking about running free fairs is about three point four million dollars. Roughly, that's about a year. I mean, it is a year. So that's about what it's going to cost to run free fairs in a year. It's about three point four million. And again, that is covered by our Tulsa grant to do it. So just getting through our FY 26. So this would be June of 26. We will have spent twenty seven three million dollars out of our forty two point four million person funding. It leaves about five million dollars left. So at that point, we have five million dollars more to spend beyond June. And we're still working through to figure out how that's best to work if we need to get six more months out of it. I mean, you're talking about half of the three point four. So that's, you know, somewhere in the neighborhood of, I'll say, two million dollars to be around numbers. And then just the run fair phase one and phase two. You're talking about seven million dollars. So it's going to be about nine million. So we're about four million dollars short to get through. And at the same. At the same point as I'm sorry, it's actually more because we stopped the free fairs in August. So there's another year at that, too. That's why I knew it was somewhere around ten million dollars. All right. So so basically in summary, when you kind of look at it, we've done all our puts and takes. We've used our fifty three seven as much as our torso funding to get free fairs for one year for September from September through August for the year as well as a lot. Phase one, phase two, the full gamut by September. And at that point right now, we're talking about, you know, our operating operating surplus and deficit goes from fifty two, I mentioned earlier, to sixty four, sixty three, sixty four million dollars only because, like I said, we're taking away some of the free fairs that help offset that. But we're also putting a lot more cost basis. So this has to be managed wise as we go forward. So that is the actual budget itself. And then I'm going to present a little bit of the capital and capital. Right now, as we know it, and timing is really the big thing. This is our portfolio and we're still working through timing all the different projects and so forth. But right now it's eighty eight point four million dollars. Moving on to the next slide, the biggest pieces here is the hydrogen fueling station project, as well as the rapid bus enhancements on so called the main street order. Those are two big items at the very top for nine point five and about six million dollars. The next piece down is really the revenue vehicle purchases. This is the forty four hydrogen fuel cell buses. These are the forty footers for about fifty two million and another sixteen million for the nine hydrogen artists that are going to be coming in. And that's how you get to the eighty eight point four and all of this. All of this is funded basically by this pie chart. The VW grant, which has been tremendous, four hundred eighty thousand dollars per bus that we're receiving back for these buses. That's about twenty eight percent. And then our tourism is another twenty six million dollars of this. And this is the capital side of it. And then our FTA grants of another twenty six. So right there, you're talking about eighty percent of the pie just coming from three different sources. And then we're using about ten percent of our funding are our our internal money in order to kind of cover the scale. And then lastly, right now, this is our budget timeline, which I kind of mentioned before, March, this is the first show. So we're kind of showing the numbers now. April will be in the middle of, you know, fine tuning everything. But we'll be back here in May. We'll present, hopefully, the final budget at that point. And then in June, we'll get approval to inform the budget. Thank you. Any questions from the board? Yes, please. Thank you for the presentation. I've got just a couple of questions. So is it am I understanding right that the scenario of the potential twenty six sales tax measure is not included at any of these? Oh, no, no, no. Do you anticipate creating one of those scenarios so we have a sense of what's going to come up like? So I think there's another second. This is just two years. So this gets us through June 20th. Sales tax would be December or November of twenty six. So you really need a five year plan. And I want to find two of these numbers and put together the five year plan. OK. And I will bring one with the sales tax and then, of course, one without sales tax. Right. So I'll bring one of them. That's what's coming. OK. So, you know, we heard from public comments saying about the bus stops and the enhancement of bus stops. I've received some communication from constituents about concerns about bus stops as well. I just wonder if I don't know if you answered this question or not. But is that part of our capital budget? Is that in the works over the next year or two years to address the bus stop, bus stop enhancements? Very. Right now, we have, if you look on the slide, it says twenty three bus shelters, so at least twenty three. Oh, I see. Now, I don't know if that includes what you're referring to or not. So there may be some that are currently there. They just need to be refurbished, moved, adjusted, changed. I mean, but at least we have twenty three bus shelters in the budget to be replaced. You know how we select and prioritize those bus shelters? The. Let me go. The twenty three bus shelters was a clean California grant we received from Caltrans. And so those were prioritized actually redoing the prioritization a little bit based on the current condition ridership. Previously, we didn't have great ridership numbers by stop. But now to do. So those are the main criteria that spread throughout the county. And then there's thirty four shelters also in the rapid bus enhancements line item, and that's on the Soquel corridor and on Main Street in Las Vegas. So that's right. Fifty seven. And then Freddie has another twelve at his budget. Can you send us a list? Sixty nine. Yeah, that would be helpful. I already referred to today. So Graham Hill actually we're talking with RTC right now to try to get a shelter or a new bus stop there a part of the school's corridor study that RTC has been working on. So now it's actually under discussion. Great to hear. And one last question. The hydrogen buses that we're going to acquire are we planning on wrapping those with the one right at a time? And if so, is that included in this budget? If not, is it small enough that it can be sold to the school? But it's a part of the bus purchase price and it's small enough. Thank you. We're talking about fair, free, it was trying to get to hold on to I know that was twenty six day, right? And it should go past that right now. We're talking about going to August twenty five. Do we have any visibility to how we could? Stend the program all the way to the point of a vote? And then if we pass the sales tax. You know, wait. And we could we continue pre fairs after that? We are. I'm working through the numbers to figure it out, but I can tell you based off of. So this is actually a one year pre pre three point four. So in order to get it all the way through, it's three point four plus. Four more months. So you're talking about like four point four or something like that. So I had four point four on there. You're talking about eight million dollars. So you go from three point four to eight. I got to find that gap as well as. Again, for this right here, because this again, I've got to cover another 11 million dollars for phase one, phase two, plus another four months. So about 15 million. So I got 11 and 15. But I'm about 25 million dollar gap. And then I have only so much money at the Turse up funding left, but I do have 50 307 too. And then I got to figure out where we fall off at that point. Or if we continue sales tax, it's not an issue. But if I got to pull back, how do I pull back? No, we're working through that. There's a gap, let me say four months. Oh, September through like the end of the year. So these all stop at the end of the line. It's that one year. And I was just trying to go all the way through, you know, to get. And at 25, yeah. You just talked about 26. No, no, in the 26. So, so this right here goes through for the free fairs goes all the way through June of. Twenty seven June. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. This is one year. So this actually goes through August. So I need August through through the end of the year. And then for. I'm sorry. Yeah. August and then August one. I'm sorry, August of 25. So I got to get through the end in gear and a whole other year. And then in phase one, phase two, since I'm not showing it there, I'm only showing you this piece. This is only shown in the room in July. And I got to go through a whole other. From July all the way through the end of the year. That makes sense. Or so. This goes through 26. We're looking at November 26. Does it help you when it needs your mind? The primary will be in the 26. And I might not say that. But that helped. I mean. We knew what was half sooner. I know the better. Because then we can make decisions. Is if we're going down the path, we're going to get it. Great. We're all in. If we know we're not going to get it, then we need to make decisions sooner. Yeah. It's nice to know as soon as possible. It's interesting that it's primary, which I think every one of the bonds and measures passed. Yeah, it's positive sign. And I think I'm off. Thank God for the hospital. I just want to make sure I understand on slide 10. Looks like it shows that the two years or the two years you're fully funding one year of fair free and the full phase one and two. On slide 10. So fair for you is only one year. And it covers nine months in FY 25 and only three months in FY 20 seconds. Right. So it's a year of fair free. And it's the full expanded service phase one and two. And that leaves. Eight million dollar operating surplus each year. And it's leaves. Five million or so. First step. Sounds like they said maybe some. Some other federal. So. Doesn't fund the full fairs, but it funds the full servicing freeze through. June of 2026. Leaving operating surpluses in both years and leaving five million dollars. Trusted funds. Yeah, let's be clear on this operating surplus. So the operating surplus is because we put we pull money from our funding, which by the way, 26 we have received some of our FY our 5307 funding in a pot so that when we got out of all the COVID funds, they would start drawing that money down quickly. We are now actually getting not enough funding for the 5307 in year for what we need. So we're actually drawing from our reserves as well as what we get in here. And that money has to be higher than zero because if you look down at the bottom, you see what says bus replacement funds. So that's why we did from that we have to stick in so that we can buy and fix buses. And then the next one down where it says brand matching opportunities, we constantly have to go out and brands and just usually like 80, 20. So they give us 80, we get 20. This is our matching opportunities. And then we have reserves and we have to put us on. I mean, you're something like bandaid, much of our insurance, but we actually have to have a reserve that we can't touch. So the surplus gives you enough to cover those costs for the most part. But just technically it does. I mean, if you look at the very bottom, you see, it's like almost nine million, but our operating surplus is seven. So we're actually in the hole. And I hear the surplus is eight, eight and then nine. So and then in 26, it reverses back, but like said, there's flexibility. So we try to match that as much as possible. And if we have a surplus, we put it into our COVID reserve bucket or in this case, like where it's the opposite way, we pull the money out of there. And that bucket is going to be used to sustain service as we go forward in the future. OK, but so I guess maybe I shouldn't mention the surplus. This proposal, this preliminary budget would fully fund free fares for a year and expanded service, phase one and two and leave five million dollars. It will start the funding of phase one and phase two. I mean, this is where I this stops. I mean, if we were to say, let's just go for one year to June of 2026, then we have enough funding to get there. After that, no, then dam breaks. I mean, when we talk about just to do phase one, phase two, you're talking about almost 12 million dollars just to fund it. Only a five. And then if you want free fares beyond just this year, then that's this two year cycle you talk. Technically, yes, with the state budget deficit, I don't know how much the concern is that could that directly impact us somewhere or another? And secondly, I've seen or read about so many trends in the district throughout the nation that are deep financial trouble. I think we're much better off than those. But just the state situation concerning you at this time. I mean, we might funds. We kind of funds we've been getting. We're not going to get people. I'm not worried about. I know I don't want to talk about it later, but I know that our tourism funding, the 32.4 million to keep this stuff running was changed. So now we're going to get 50% in the first year, then 25% and then 25%. And that could be that they come back and even chop that number. And that is a concern. All right. Thank you. Thank you. We will go through the public comments on this. I have to approve this after public comment in the room. So I just want to encourage you as you move forward to do everything possible to continue the frame rates at least for the youth. I enjoy seeing them come on to us and take places, skill places after school and so forth, even though they are usually not very situationally aware. My kind of thoughts on the matter is if they're on the bus, they're probably going somewhere with something safe and fun is legal to do as opposed to being up to some sort of industry. I don't have any to my children are now too old for that. But I do have some reasons and that is that have taken advantage. And the wrapped buses came up and they're great. They're awesome. I get the point behind them. My only complaint or feedback about them is they're kind of dark on the inside. And I only notice it because I like to get on the bus, but it's kind of dark. That's my view. Thank you. Hi, welcome. Hi. I just kind of a question about if their free service would apply that they would start to use and then if not, if there was any tension for that to happen at some point. For example. Yeah, at this point in the whole system. Thank you. Any further comment in the room? Seeing them, we'll take your light. And John, can you hear us? Hello, guys, John again. So Director McPherson is right to be concerned about our future budgets and absolutely wrong that we are not in dire financial straits in our county. What we do is we have a lot of money that we do bring in that we can use. So if we make wise choices with it and if we direct our resources towards the things we really need, which I would say our metro and housing, but other people have other opinions on this. We like we really need to focus on our limited resources, the fact that they are dwindling and building the infrastructure now, sort of building our arc like Noah did before the storm. And we're really at the end game here. This is one of our last opportunities to start making these choices. So we need Metro to pop and for Metro to pop, you really need it to be fare free, which should really be called toll free. We don't charge cars for all the damage they do to our roads. I mean, my friend has like a 14,000 pound truck, tears up his driveway. He has to have it redone every couple of years, but he drives on our roads freely and we never charge him for that. And all these cars are tearing up our road infrastructure. Every person we have on a bus is less road maintenance we have to do later. And I understand our systems aren't sophisticated enough here to include such calculations directly into our budgets, like on a piece of paper he's going to show you in the presentation. But it is a holistic system. And when you guys are looking at it, think about these other things, even though they're not necessarily on pieces of paper in front of you. How do we minimize road maintenance? How do we increase youth getting out into the world, which is something we really want in our very dangerous road system? Buses are their last way of travel besides their parents. We have to drive our kids everywhere these days. It is a real chore based on what it used to be even 15 years ago in this area. So I just like really recommend we understand how bleak it is that we are only going to have less money from the state, less money from the feds, and less money from things like sale tax, our property tax will eventually come back. Thank God, but that's still like a decade off. So just like I really hope you guys realize what a big deal metro is right now. This is your moment. You will make decisions that will make or break our transportation system in this county. And if you can just like focus on the things that really matter and fare free as one of those things, we will increase ridership. We will increase people's interest in the bus. Right now you're selling an iPhone 5 in an iPhone 15 world. And that's not a great way to gauge ridership. So thank you for your time. I can't turn it on maybe ready. Can you adjust the AC? Thank you. Any further comment on that? Okay. Seeing no further public comment, we'll bring this back to the board for discussion and vote. Comments? If not, we can entertain a motion. Second. All right. A motion and a second. Can I have a roll call please? Director Brown. Aye. Director Downing. Aye. Director Dutra. Aye. Director Cullen Terry Johnson. Aye. Director Coney. Aye. Director Lynn. Aye. Director Richardson. Aye. Director Newsom. Aye. Director Paikler. Aye. Director Keebrows-Herter. Aye. We have the motion passes. Thank you. All right. We're going to move on to item 13. It's a state legislative update. Good morning. Welcome. Good morning. Welcome. Madam Chair and directors, good to be with you again this morning. I'm Michael Pimentel, your legislative advocate in Sacramento with Shahgut or Anthony Schmelzer in Lang. I did want to note for you as we begin that when it was last before you in October, I was able to report on some good news. At that time, we had seen the passage of the budget for fiscal year 23-24, providing 5.1 billion dollars to transit agencies statewide. I was also able to report on the enactment of Metro sponsored legislation carried by Senator Laird to allow for you all to move forward with a new sales tax to support Metro operations. Now as I come to you today, I want to provide an update on how things are continued to progress in Sacramento. I was before in October that was at the conclusion of the legislative year. It's seen a raft of actions by Governor Newsom. We're now at the very start of this legislative year and seeing a number of new items for consideration that we'll have to grapple with as an agency. And to just start, I'll just highlight for you where we are exactly in the legislative session. We are in California under a two-year legislative session. We are now entering that second year of the two-year session. That began on January 3 of this year. There was an introduction deadline for new legislation that passed in mid-February. And that gave way to what were ultimately more than 2,000 bills introduced in the legislation. What I'll reflect on is that is solely new bills, not bills that were carried over from the year prior to things that we call two-year bills. So in actuality, there are about 3,000 bills moving through the state legislature at this time. I note for you here what we call a spot bill deadline. Many of the bills that were introduced at the start of the year did not have fully fleshed out language included within that. They included language that spoke to the intent of the legislature to legislate on particular topics or areas of interest, but there were otherwise a lot in the details. What we've seen now is that- Let's go for a walk, guys. Don't come back and play double dragons, maybe even triple dragons. And let's all go on pajamas. Sorry, Mr. Pimentel. Can we just take a moment and make sure that everyone online is muted? All right, thank you. So what we've seen in March is the deadline for spot bills to be event. And so that means that the substance of the bills is beginning to be ported into those placeholder bills introduced earlier in this year. This year it's been a bit of a slower process to actually see the bill language move into the actual bills that are published and available for public review. Over the coming weeks, we'll start to see more of the language out in print. This is just a matter of the Senate Rules Committee, the Assembly Rules Committee reviewing legislation, making determinations as to where bills will be routed. And we may have some more updates to provide to the interim CEO, Zero Goza, or the incoming CEO, Allbridge, when he resumes or takes on the role in the coming weeks. What I did want to highlight for you is that the second year, the two-year session will end in August of 2024. And then the governor will have 30 days to act on all bills. And that sets a deadline of September 30th, 2024. When I was before you last, I did highlight what was going to be a change in leadership. And in fact, at the time that I was before you, we had not yet seen that Assemblymember Robert Rielus had been sworn in as Speaker. That has taken place. And we had not yet seen Senator Mike McGuire, who was, at that time, President Pro Tem Designee of the California State Senate, take on the role at the helm of that legislative obstacle. Both have now transpired. And what we've seen is that they've started to make changes to key committees that have impact on issues that Metro cares about. So in particular, we've seen changes in leadership for the two transportation committees in both the Senate and the Assembly. We've also seen change in leadership in the budget committees in the Senate and the Assembly. And then change in leadership in one subcommittee that oversees transportation matters that would be in the Senate. Where there's been a change in chair. What we have not seen at this stage is a change in leadership in the Assembly budget subcommittee that has jurisdiction over matters that Metro cares about. That remains the same chair that we had last year, Assemblymember Steve Bennett of Oxford. Now, importantly, the two legislative leaders aren't simply making changes to leadership of the key committees. They're also making changes to the composition of those committees. And what we've seen is that your delegation has been appointed to several high priority, high impact committee. Senator Laird has been a longtime member of the Senate Budget Committee. He maintains that role on that committee, maintains his oversight as the chair of the Budget Subcommittee that oversees education issues. But he has also a number of committees that may ultimately impact Metro, depending on the bills that move forward this year. We've seen that Assemblywoman Gail Pellerin has been appointed to two very notable committees, the Appropriations Committee that has jurisdiction over bills with fiscal impact here at the state level, as well as the Assembly Natural Resources Committee, which will evaluate any bill that has an environmental impact. So anything clean air, climate change related, we'll run through that committee. Assemblymember Dawn Addis, who's on the outskirts of your jurisdiction, doesn't have seats on any committees that are relevant to Metro. However, she will play a role in helping to steer the priorities of your legislative delegation as a member of the Central Coast Legislative Delegation. So the biggest item I think folks are interested in learning more about is likely the fiscal year 24-25 budget. There was some conversation just now with your CFO about how exactly the budget deficit may ultimately impact Metro programs and funding that was authorized last year. I'm going to go into some detail on that in just a moment. But what I'm going to highlight for you at the highest of levels is that Governor Newsom released his January budget of January 10th of this year. And within that, he identified a $38 billion budget deficit that we need to grapple with in this fiscal year in order to keep the state's budget balanced. He proposed within that budget a variety of funding delays, shifts and cuts, what they called in this budget version, but he did not notably offer any cuts to transit funds. There's a caveat to that. I'm going to speak to that in a moment. What we are at this stage in the budget development process is that budget subcommittees with jurisdiction over particular programs, particular agencies, are beginning their hearings. And those will continue through summer and really be reset in May when Governor Newsom releases what he calls his May Revise. That is a mid-year adjustment reflecting how budget numbers have changed since the budget was released in January. And what I'm going to highlight for you now is that we expect that that $38 billion figure is going to go up. And that is important informed by what we've seen from legislative analysts office, that's the state legislature's fiscal arm, that has presented a series of reports that highlights that the budget deficit could be as high as $73 billion. And so likely the number somewhere in between that $38 and that $73, we have seen some good news in terms of tax receipts besting in this last month what was anticipated by the state. But we're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars or a multi-billion dollar problem. And so ultimately it may not be as high as $73 billion, but perhaps not as too much lower than that. Ultimately the budget needs to be adopted by June 15, 2024. But I will highlight that only means that the budget has to be adopted as a balanced budget. Oftentimes big high priority issues get punted into late summer, early fall. So we may still see some further action take place in the legislature as a result of looming budget concerns. Also reality that there have been in a variety of counties a delay in the requirement of file taxes with that that's going to delay what the state is able to actually project for the year. So before I go into precisely the impact on Metro, I want to highlight for you what it is that we got out of last year's budget. At the highest of levels, $5.1 billion for public transit agencies statewide. There are two components to that, $4 billion that flows to the transit in intercity rail capital program, $1.1 billion that flows to a new zero-emission transit capital program. From those two programs, the share for this county that goes to your regional transportation commission is almost $35 million over four years. I understand from my conversations with your past CEO, Michael Tree, that Metro stands to benefit pretty hugely from that investment. Now the only thing that the budget did is it established new accountability requirements and these accountability requirements ultimately will govern the release of the dollars to regional entities and then down to the individual agencies and they are codified through new financial plans that they'd be submitted by the regional agencies to the California State Transportation Agency that provides CalST with oversight of how these might as well be used, how they're driving toward fiscal stability for the agencies and with that, CalST has the ability to approve and I or request modifications to financial plans. They are in the process of reviewing financial plans currently. They have until April 30th to approve plans and release funds. And we understand that in the month of March and into early April, we'll begin to see approvals take place. I've been told that it's unlikely that there are going to be denials outright. There may be some areas where folks at CalST are asking for additional details or insights, justifications for why certain decisions were made. I'm speaking to that generally not the specific insight to what has been submitted by this county and what the agency should expect. The other thing that it did that's notable and ongoing this year is it established a new transit transformation task force that is looking to review the policies of funding that needs to be implemented to make transit more sustainable for a ridership and to ultimately deliver the services that we need in order to get folks to transition out of their cars and into high capacity public transit. I'll note for you that this region is represented on that transit transformation task force by two individuals. One would be Mr. Carl Sador, the CEO of Monterey's NIST Transit. He's a central post representative. And then I as with another have on as executive director of California Transit Association have a seat on that task force. We have built out an internal body within our association that is comprised of regional voices from across the state, make sure that any position the association articulates is reflective of our full membership, including Metro. And so here, speaking particularly to what Governor Newsom has proposed, there was acknowledgement of the 50-25-25 split that the state is considering for the TRCP dollars. That is fully correct. Governor Newsom has proposed to hold harmless the first release of two billion dollars. And by hold harmless, I mean that money is untouched. It will move forward as planned in this fiscal year and released on April 30th. So for the portion that Metro is set to receive in that first launch, no impact. Where there will be some potential impact is on the release of the second two billion dollars. There, Governor Newsom has proposed to take one of them 50 percent of the dollars and split it over two fiscal years, 25 percent, 25 percent. So one billion dollars, one billion dollars. That extends the appropriation timeline, but maintains a level of funding overall that will flow to regions and agencies. Notably here, that's in the governor's budget. The Senate has released what they're calling an early action budget plan. And that also approves this action. I'll highlight for you all that appropriation timeline extension is not ideal. When most other programs are facing significant cuts, it's probably the strongest position we could be in as an industry and as agencies against that backdrop. And then finally, I'll just note, and this is material for Metro. They are looking to also apply a cash flow analysis on the release of TIRCP cycle six funding. And so Metro had received just under $40 million from TIRCP cycle six. Here, the state is saying, you will get your money. But in the event that you don't need your money in fiscal year 23, 24, 24, 25, we will release the money on an as needed basis. And that allows for the state to have some additional flexibility in the general fund dollars that they use to prop up that cycle six funding and to direct those monies toward other areas, or perhaps the need is more acute and more tight. And so not anticipated have any impact on your building forward with your project, but just noting there's going to be a cash flow analysis and discussion that gets applied to the release of those dollars. And so I'm just going to highlight as I close a few pieces of legislation that I think are are germane to Metro and again, want to highlight, but the spot bill is still going into print, very likely I will be talking to the interim CEO and the incoming CEO to say, there are new bills that have some impact, here's what they are, they're just not in print yet. And so for what is in print today, one of the bills that is going to have some significant discussion sacrament was a bill by Senator Scott Weiner that is looking to provide greater priority for public transit and active transportation on state owned highway assets. And here the state has a maintenance and rehabilitation program called SHOP. It's used to make improvements on the state highway system generally to improve the payment quality index. What Senator Weiner is looking to pursue here is to say, if you as the state are moving forward with improvements, also consider how you could in the same action make improvements that advantage travel via bus rail or active transportation. The idea that you can get a two for four investments rather than making one time investment to simply improve the quality of the pavement and then later consider what may be another improvement that would advantage this type of travel. And so the types of projects that this bill is contemplating are things like your bus on shoulder project. How can we do more with the state owned assets to really get people to ride public transit to take active transportation? This is going to have its first hearing in the Senate Transportation Committee on April 9th. We'll note for you there's some amendments that are growing. The amendments so would preserve the intent of the bill, but just worth to improve the readability and the implementation can't accept that. I also wanted to bring back for your attention, AB610, there's some discussion during the previous presentations about fare free transit. There was a bill that Metro had supported AB610 that would have established a new program to fund the fare free transit programs. That bill ultimately did not move forward last year was made into a two year bill, meaning it could have lived again in this year. And it was made a two year bill because the budget support for moving that program forward wasn't included in last year's budget. So the author of the bill of assembly member Chris Holden that said, I'll try again this upcoming year. As the budget numbers started to be released, he acknowledged there's probably not an opportunity this year. And so what he has done is gutted and amended that bill. He's made it a bill with a completely different focus and intent now actually impacts fast food workers. And so that bill is effectively dead for this year. The only areas where they're still funding from the state for fare free transit programs would be through the low carbon transit operations program. That's still robust program, unimpacted by anything that is going on state budget or by some opportunities for Metro and any other agency pursuing their free program. And then finally, I want to close on on this bill. This is a bill that's being sponsored by the California Transit Association. And it's looking to address the unfortunate reality that many of our workers are facing forms of abuse and assault, as they're carrying out their duties as operators or as transit employees generally. Under today's law, there are some heightened penalties that exist. If you are an individual who assaults or batters a transit operator or a transit ticketing agent, but it stops there. And so what this bill would do is it would extend the same protections to other classes of transit employees and contractors. And so this would just clarify many agencies in state are moving forward with ambassador programs. Many of you will have custodial staff that interface with the public. If there is assault or battery against any of those individuals, they receive the same protections. The other area where this bill is looking to build into, but it's still a discussion between California Transit Association, the author, who I will note is the chair of the Assembly Public Safety Committee. And ATU is to also extend the ability for agencies to issue prohibition orders. Currently, there are only a few agencies in state who have that statutory ability. This would say all agencies in state are capable to do that. And also create a streamlined process for agencies to issue a prohibition order if those prohibition orders are triggered by assault or battery against a transit. And so this is looking to address what we understand is an epidemic within public transit nationwide, looking to solve it through at least one form. Well, there are some other actions focused on rider safety that are on. And so with that, I'll close and happy to entertain any questions or comments from the directors. Hey, Michael, thank you for coming today, giving us this presentation. I have a couple questions for you. I was just, what happened? I mean, I believe they were touting state surplus that California had at one point, I think around COVID times. And now it's we're in a huge deficit and getting worse. And from what I understood, what I learned today is that there's a certain amount that is going to be DRT for distribution and others that are a possibility. Is that how I thought? I think it was like two billion or the first portion and then 1.1 billion for the second. Can you explain those? Sure thing. And so I'll first take your second question and just note the TRCP dollars, total $4 billion. Under last year's budget plan, that $4 billion would have been released over two fiscal years, $2 billion in fiscal year 23-24, $2 billion in fiscal year 24-25. What the governor is proposing for this year is to say the first $2 billion for fiscal year 23-24, that gets maintained. That second $2 billion gets split over two fiscal years. In this year's budget, what you would see if the governor's budget gets adopted is the first $1 billion of the $2 billion will be released for a $3 billion commitment total that is signed seal delivered to the agencies. The other $1 billion, there's a commitment, what I think is notable is a commitment is not as good as adding cash in hand. And if the budget picture continues to be bad in future fiscal year, those monies could be under threat. The additional $1.1 billion that comprises then the $5.1 billion total is not proposed for any changes. And that is because those monies are derived from the greenhouse gas reduction fund and the public transportation account. Those are special funds, so don't have any bearing on the state's general fund picture. And so that money will continue to flow. So basically what I'm hearing is that it's going to be probably a $1 billion pet. I wouldn't say probably. I would say that there is some risk and potential exposure. I think what is notable here is that with the Senate Budget Committee, the champion for the dollars, the $5.1 billion, is now Senator Scott Winger. And so I should say Senator Scott Winger is now the Budget Committee chair that provides us probably the strongest shot possible of maintaining those dollars. There's a strong interest in maintaining them for some of the projects that he cares most about in the Bay Area. For the political coalitions that are in parent for maintaining those monies for the Bay Area, others will fall in line. We have a strong shot of maintaining those dollars provided the budget outlook doesn't continue to be great. So we will look forward to speaking to you about that. So then I do want to take your question about what's happened. We had these record budget surpluses. Now we have a record budget deficit. What's happened is two things. The first is that last year as they were developing the budget, they were having to develop the budget based on projected tax revenues. And they did those didn't that budget development because as you may recall with the flooding that happened last year, federal government in the state of California extended the deadline for filing taxes. And so last year, for the first time in recent memory, the state did not have tax receipts and they could not pinpoint exactly how much money they had to appropriate and they were massively wrong in their projections. And so a lot of the budget deficit is a reflection of the imbalance between the projections. What actually came in ultimately in proceeds, the state overextended itself in short. The other thing that's happened is that the state's budget picture and really, you know, tax revenue structure is heavily balanced on high income partners. The vast majority of the monies that we use to support general fund are collected by high income earners for income taxes, capital gain taxes. And as we've seen mass layoffs, we've seen folks not doing as well on the high end, we've seen and that this tax receipts have come down. That is what's impacting them the future year considerations. And so it's two twin efforts that are a rather realities that have me at them. I would think that someone that knew like previous levels of income coming from the state would have made a better, you know, it would have presented better of what would have actually happened, but you would have hoped so. And unfortunately, yes, if we ever started that, it's probably fired. But I have one last thing, and I don't know if you're the right person to answer, but you did say that the RTC was receiving $35 million. How much is Metro getting of that? Is this the money that we? $125. Yes. So the $32 million. Yeah. This is the money that we have RTC appropriated back in December. Yes. And then yes, 32. Thank you. Question. Last year, you mentioned about a bill that would add transit agencies to emergency services, like, so please, so that if there's an emergency, they could be included in that. Did that make it into this year? So unfortunately, the bill was held last year by the Assembly Appropriations Committee and was not reintroduced. One of the things that is ongoing, however, is that bill was sponsored by the California Transit Association by the benefit for recognizing the roles that you play in mobility, the transition, but then also to the emergency response functions of agencies. The California Transit Association is continuing to pursue what may be a regulatory and administrative route for actuating that same policy. There was some skepticism, frankly, as the bill was moving forward. This could not just simply be done for regulatory action by the CPUC. So the author of that bill is pursuing that directly with the CPUC, seeing if we can bring that online. It's not born yet, but I would hope to be able to come on an update soon on whether or not we're told yes or no that it can be done within the regulatory powers of the CPUC. It'd be nice before next year. Absolutely. We've been bringing the law, the bill that would expand the application of enhanced penalties for transit employees, plus the likelihood of that is the prospects. Yeah, I would say that this year, relative to any other year, prospects are fairly strong. And I say that for two reasons. One is that in previous years, as the California Transit Association pursued similar bills, it hadn't done so much as the year. This year, we have the chair of the Assembly Public Safety Committee, first stop for the bill, who's authoring the bill. And so that gives us a leg up. The second thing that is providing someone in our sale is that we have a heavy balance of labor organizations representing or rather supporting them. So ATU, Teamsters, and TWU are at this stage behind the bill. And they're going to be working to bring online other organizations. I can't speak for their level of commitment at this stage, but they're going to be serving as an intermediary with SEIU and AFSCME. We have representatives and a number of agencies in various roles, hoping that that law of support can help us move forward. First of all, I want to thank you and your office for the excellent representation of the state agency. Thank you for being here. And especially this year, 3,000 bills, I mean, that's 6,700 more than the question of spot bills included than normal. So you've got your, like, every year it seems to maybe not increase, but stays at a relatively high level. Yeah. And as far as the deficit projection, I know that the governor can use reserves. Sure. The reality of it all historically, I think the LAO has been posted to the projected deficit than the governor saw, so do you think it's that correct? I would say absolutely that is correct. And in fact, the LAO's own analysis of the governor's budget suggested that his $38 billion figure was actually $58, because when you take into account some of the accounting renewables that were included within the governor's budget as developed by the Department of Finance, number again, closer to $58, we'll find ourselves somewhere between that $38 and $73 projection. I would agree with you. Year by year we've seen LAO be a bit closer to the number. Additional questions or comments from the board? Just to add on what Dr. Dudesch mentioned, it was two years ago, $200 billion surplus. And it is frustrating to see that this much, well, I mean, this much misjudgment of your billion surplus to so many programs that are so vital are being heard, you know, in all areas. And I know many of us went to Sacramento two years ago and advocated for housing funding and different funding for some projects and transportation. And so it's, thank you for the work. There is, yes, Director Dudesch, we go from $200 billion deficit to some misjudgment this one year. I would say certainly this heartening and one of the conversations in here I'm maybe speaking a bit farther than where I've got direction or deep knowledge, but one of the areas where folks have talked about some reforms is around the gamut. It's a constitutional limitation on really the ability of the state to save and to spend. And what it created in this last cycle when we had these record surpluses was the state had to make a decision, you want to keep the money. You have to either make investments, one-time expenditures in capital projects, or you have to release that money back to the people. And so the legislature and the governor did both things. And so we saw, you know, historic one-time investments in capital projects, which now, of course, are being bought back, but we also saw things like the gas rebates that gave everyday Californians and a debit card structure that was almost $20 billion that went out the door. And that is because the state was not able to hold on to those monies and just grow their coffers and grow the reserves. And so in a future year, kind of stymie what is this kind of boom and bust cycle, there may have to be some consideration to reform there to allow for the state to save more money, not spend in a compelled fashion to make sure that we can account for some of these challenges that we know are coming. Thank you. All right. Seeing no further comments from the board, we'll go to public comment on this item. Any public comment in the room? Seeing none. Any public comment online? Seeing none. Thank you so much. Really appreciate this. So sure. All right. We're going to move on to item 14, which is our federal legislative update. Hi. Hello. Good morning, Chair Brown and directors. Great to see you all here. Thanks, Donna, for putting that up here. In a very similar manner to the state, you know, we are right now in the what we would call the second term of a two-year congress. So that's going to end at the end of 2024. That's about where the comparisons with the state kind of end. Congress's lots and lots and lots of legislation gets introduced during a two-year congressional session. Very, very few of those bills get acted upon, let alone enacted, like tiny, tiny percentages. And so the one thing that Congress does have to do every year is approve a budget. They almost never approve that budget on time. October 1 is the start of the federal fiscal year. So October 1, 2023 was the start of federal fiscal year 24. And just two weeks ago for the Department of Transportation, the Department of Transportation budget was approved. So five months into the federal fiscal year, Congress finally approved a budget for DOT. And the reasons why that happened were various. But, you know, at the root of it was a disagreement between House Republicans and the White House and Congressional Democrats over spending levels. And you may remember about a year ago, Congress came to an agreement to increase the federal debt limit. We were getting ready to default on a lot of our obligations. And again, after lots of bipartisan negotiations, Congress finally agreed to lift that. Part of that agreement was to set spending caps for fiscal year 24 and fiscal year 25. That was part of that debt limit bill. Essentially providing pretty flat budgets for FY 24 and 25. When Congress last summer started to create their budgets, House Republicans took that spending limit as a floor and not a ceiling. And so they were proposing budget cuts of, as you can see here, in the case of the Department of Transportation spending bill up to about 25%. So there had been a pretty pitched battle between Republicans, the White House, Democrats over spending levels, which were ultimately not smoothed over, but decided upon. And the funding levels for FY 24 look a lot like the, a lot like FY 23, a lot like what the Senate Democrats proposed in their overall budget, a little bit less than what the House proposed. So for instance, by way of background, one of the things that the House Republicans did not suggest cutting were federal transit formula programs that 25% cut at DOT would have probably largely been realized had it been enacted. It wasn't, would have been realized by cuts to Amtrak cuts to what we call the capital investment grants program at FTA, which funds late rail, bus rapid transit, things like that with regard to federal funding for formula programs, which is kind of what Chuck describes as a Section 5307 program. It's our federal funding that we get by formula every year. Congress decided to fund that at its authorized level. I'll only get to that in a second, of just under $14 billion, representing about a 2.6% increase over FY 23 levels. I say authorized level, because if you recall back in 2021, Congress approved a pretty big infrastructure bill. That infrastructure bill was a big part of it, where it was new spending, new programs on a lot of different types of infrastructure bills. The second half of that infrastructure bill was actually a reauthorization of federal surface transportation programs. So highway transit, some rail programs as well. So that included about five years worth of funding for those programs. And so those authorized levels were set to grow. In the case of a lot of these transit formula programs, there was a big increase in the first year, which was FY 22, like about 30% increase. And then the increases after that over the next four years are fewer, somewhere between two and 4%. So we got a big burst in formula funding in FY 22, and now it's going to be more inflationary or less type of increases over the years. Those funding levels, like I said, were authorized as opposed to appropriated, which is what we're talking about with this budget. Congress can fiddle with those authorized levels. They rarely do. They rarely point down and reduce from those authorized levels, which is a good thing for transportation. And there are some cases where Congress has increased funding over authorized levels. And so that's next bullet. I'm talking about these bus competitive programs at the Federal Transit Administration. And you'll see that in a lot of these programs, what looks like to be reductions over FY 23 levels and in reality they are. But what those reductions represent are Congress's inability this year to agree on what we call in the goofy word for budgeting plus ups. So the 2021 infrastructure bill set funding for, I'll say the low-knowing emissions vehicle program at about $1.1 billion per year. Lots, lots more than traditionally that program got. I think the program got somewhere around 75 million per year. So the infrastructure bill really supercharged that program. The last two years, Congress has chose to actually add money to those authorized levels. So plus up, we're plusing up that authorized level. There's a truck here. God, this is the most boring call of that of life. It's killing me. Mr. Murray, can you please meet yourself? Sorry, you guys shouldn't really turn me off. I'm sorry. Can you? Was I boring or I changed out of my pajamas? No, no, no. It's not you guys. I'm sorry. This is, it was in my pocket. It clearly gets turned on. I'm just trying to listen. So you guys should have a system where after speakers meet, you remove them. Mr. Murray, it's not the time for public comment. We appreciate it if you would meet yourself at this time. So again, Congress has been very generous with these programs for in FY22, FY23. They added additional funding to those authorized levels. So while the low-know program is going to get what looks like, what is a cut of 4.4% from the previous year, it's actually still at very, very high, you know, levels of funding traditionally. It's a still over a billion dollar program. Bus and bus facilities took a bigger hit, 16%. But again, still larger than it's been in the past. And then the raised discretionary grant program, which is an FTA that's at DOT, but also a very popular program. Congress last year added $800 million to the $1.5 billion authorization. So it was a $2.3 billion program last year. This year, they plused it up by $345 million, but that was not as large as last year. So it looks to be almost a 20% cut. Again, a very, you know, a very large program, while also a very competitive program. So while a lot of these numbers have negatives next to their name, I think that DOT in many ways did a lot better than some other agencies. The transportation has this, you know, Highway Trust fund that funds the programs and these kind of semi-guaranteed funding levels that the multi-year authorization bills provide. And, you know, for those of you who deal with federal programs and in your other jobs, you know, for instance, you know, the HUD budget has been, you know, largely stagnant for, you know, over a decade. And so, so I think that even though you see these negative numbers, there's still traditionally high numbers for transportation. Go next slide, Donna. So, you know, Congress actually just just today during this meeting, Congress, you know, finally, you know, has has completed at least on the House side completed their FY 24 budget. The Senate needs to finish off the second half of the 24 budget. They're hoping to do that today. But they need to start with the 25 budget process right away. You know, the new fiscal year starts on October 1, 2024. Congress is unlikely to meet that budget deadline. They haven't in over 25 years. So I, if I were a gambling man, I would probably bet that they will not do that again. The president two weeks ago sent his proposed budget to Congress for them to look at. The Congress will spend the summer cutting in and rearranging that budget before, hopefully this fall before the election. It would be nice to see if we could get a budget passed before then. I'm not clear that that's going to happen. I would imagine the same issues that held up the 24 budget are going to hold up the 25 budget. We know that House Republicans want to concentrate on deficit reduction. They want to reduce the budget. And as I started this off, when Congress is not able to do a lot of other types of legislating, the budget is the only way where you can, you know, send a message to your voters that this is what you want to do. And so they're going to continue and to insist on that, that deficit reduction. I think the White House and Senate Democrats this year are going to push back on it, leading to this kind of gridlock. I will say that the last this this budget had to be approved with a majority of Democratic votes, even in the house where Republicans are in the majority. And and so I think you saw this last year when former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy did this, he approved that debt limit bill and some other spending bills using Democratic votes that got the conservative wing of his caucus angry. And they brought up basically what they call a motion to vacate the chair, the speaker's chair, and voted to oust McCarthy a speaker, took them all almost a month to come up with another speaker. That speaker, Mike Johnson from Louisiana has done the same things that McCarthy had to do to get some things passed. And that is use a majority of Democratic votes to do it. And so again, during this meeting, you may have heard of Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green, a kind of a gadfly from Georgia. Well, she she introduced a motion to vacate the chair. She's looking to get rid of Speaker Johnson. They're not going to take a vote on it just yet, but she's holding that over him. And so that, you know, that could cause problems for legislating and getting a budget done this summer, if we can't find a new speaker, if Speaker Johnson is toppled. So that will, again, I think we're going to see a lot of what we saw in 23 and 24 with regard to that. Certainly the results of November elections are going to impact what the budget, you know, what occurs with the budget at the end of the year. If Republicans take the house in the Senate and the White House, they're going to feel like they're going to be in a better position to deal with the budget in calendar year 25. So they may delay enactment of the budget. Same thing with Democrats, if they were to do the same, I think it depends on how each party is feeling with regard to leverage to get this budget done by the end of the calendar year. And then, you know, thinking a lot about this when I was listening to Chuck's presentation on the budget, this, as I mentioned before, the current authorization of federal surface transportation programs, including transit, ends at the end of fiscal year 2026. And so we need to start thinking about, you know, number one policy changes if we need to, that's the place to do it in this next authorization bill. And also the DOT funding programs were hopeful that the large increases in transportation funding that were provided in that infrastructure bill, particularly in the first couple of years, becomes a baseline for federal funding. I can see a situation, again, if deficit reduction continues to be a priority for a majority of Congress, that they might look to say, let's go back to these pre, you know, infrastructure bill authorization levels. That's where transportation programs should be. I think that would, that could be potentially catastrophic, because we'd have to go back to those pre, pre infrastructure bill levels. And that would be difficult, again, given sort of what we're looking to do in these, what they call out years with regard to the budget. So never too early to start thinking about that. I know that, you know, organizations like APTA and even Michael too over at CTA are thinking about those things as well. And, and I think we should, you know, on our, on our level as well. So that's about it for me. Have any questions, happy to answer those. And thank you again for your time. Thank you. Questions from the board? Seeing no questions. All right. Thank you again for that presentation and we appreciate the update. Are there any public comments in the room? Any public comment online? Seeing none. All right. We are going to move on to items 15 and 16. We're going to kind of take together. So this is an approval of the employment agreement for the CEO, general manager and revised salary schedule for CEO general manager. And I will turn it over to Nicole, who is here, sitting in for Julie today to report out on some of the key terms of the statements. Thank you. Thank you, directors. So at its last meeting, a special board meeting, the board appointed Corey Aldridge as its CEO and general manager. The item before you today, as the chair mentioned, is really two items together. It's approval of his employment agreement as well as approval of the revised salary statement for the CEO transition. The key terms and Mr. Aldridge's employment agreement are a base salary of $310,000, which is $25,834 monthly. An annual increase of 4% and no COLA on top of that. The third cop of 14%, an annual retention bonus of $18,800 and $1,000 monthly car allowance. So copies of the agreement I think are available for all of the directors as well as for members of the public. I'm not sure, Donna, if there's anything that we're going to put up on the screen, but we have all of these materials available. And with that, I'll hand it back to Richard. Right, thank you. Do we have any comments or questions? I actually wasn't here at that meeting, so I have a few questions. What was Michael's last, what was his contract? Do we have that information? I don't want to get more on that one. I loved it up a bit, but I don't know if something I found out was correct. So it was $200 and something. I'm sure we looked at it and it was in line. I know just that what we were told is this was having checked, where I could check similar agencies and this was what he suggested. I can look at the last one, but my understanding is the second one is this. It was at the complete package, or was that just his base payment? I believe that was just base payment. And this got in, this new person is $300,000, so can I just ask why are they hired? Right, what Greg said is there were several openings, several people moving, and basically this was what was in line with all the neighboring and like agencies. I just want to raise like $250,000, so I was just kind of here. It was natural. Yeah, what was online was done. Okay, so we have a sheet of like those that we're, that you guys all were able to look at. We did. We did. We can't look it up. I mean legally, I don't think that there's a problem with sharing that with people. I don't know, maybe there's any issue with that. It was, it was, yes, last time. So everyone saw this. We all saw it. And Greg was presenting it, so she had the power, I mean, had everything up on mine. Okay, so I guess we don't have those numbers today. So I think, I think one of my biggest concerns is the fact that we have been talking about potential deficit going into the future. We're going to be, we're going to be paying our new CEO more than I know the Watsonville, our city manager. We just lost our city manager to Salinas and he's getting the amount of money now that the CEO is going to be getting for Metro. So I understand when the public visually how it looks to them, you know, when they, when they see a large number like this. So I just want to make sure that we're aware of, you know, where we are, what standards we're setting or we're approving such a high number of a contract. I know, and also with like $1,000 car allowance, I mean, we got rid of those at our city managers a long time ago. I mean, everything, the package is really combined and we should be thinking about that in the forward because the public's going to be seeing, you know, $1,000 for car allowance, which I know we don't need to do anymore. I'm sure probably a lot of cities don't do anymore just because of the the fact that we get back from the community. I mean, $1,000, that's a lot. You know, I don't know kind of car you could be driving. But and then $8,000 for temporary housing, which we're doing a round trip economy airfares. I mean, he's he had a really, really, you know, nice package and we stand up here and we talk about deficit we're about to go into. So I just want us to be aware of what kind of message we're sending out to the community as we hire this new CEO. I think that we can't be fighting back on you know, cutting routes and doing other things when we're we're giving such a lavish package. So as we look forward in debates that will be reminding everybody about what we're proposing today as we're cutting route service, we're going to be making some tech decisions in the future. Thank you, sir. I just want to respond a little bit. It's directed to try certainly have the same general feeling. And I think, you know, at the same time, in many ways, you just explain why it is that the package looks the way it does, right? And it's a huge switching cost every time we recruit the new CEO. And as you just explained, lost the lost city manager, because another jurisdiction offer a more attractive package, extremely competitive environment right now, work this type of position. And, you know, even just like from the sticker shock, it's the salary, right? For your 10,000 dollars a year amount, I felt that. But if you back out, what it costs to buy an average price home in this community, our CEO is going to be lucky if you can buy a house that's bigger for him and his family in three bedroom, one and a half million dollars. You know, when you look at that after taxes, I mean, it basically costs $9,000 to $10,000 a month for that house. And that's going to be essentially like close to over 30% of his salary. That can be able to get a home. So that like, that housing allowance, I mean, the hope is that actually that'll help them grow up enough cash to be able to buy. Because ultimately, what we know, we have trouble recruiting for every position anyway, truly have similar challenges at the city. What we know is that employees that stay are employees that have own a home, have some stable living situation. So things to our benefit to set up our next CEO to be able to do that. People the same way, it's a high, it's a high cost, but I think it's an investment worth making. We've got a really qualified person here to take over this role. And so I think that it's an investment worth making. Let's respond to that. I appreciate that. Yeah. I just want to make sure that Salina is three times the size of Watsonville. So they're paying more because imagine their population and the people that they're serving the bad people. But I just want to be clear that like, I mean, it's also that it's the, it's what the perception of people see. So, you know, to be very clear, that's what I would say. And yeah, it is like, it's very expensive here. I was saying that the other day, we live in a very, you weren't here, but we're living a very wealthy county. I know people wanted to argue about last thing, but we do. We're in one of the wealthiest counties in the country. I get it. So as, but as long as we embrace that and know where we are, I'll be supporting this because we definitely need somebody. But I, I, you know, I just think that there are the perception is almost, you know, this may be in line with how other areas are doing it. We do need to bring people in and retention may be a problem. But we also have to realize too, so when people are in their careers, their pension is based on their highest payout. So I do not, you know, one bit, you know, feel that like ours is better just making the wrong decision by doing what's best for him. So. Thank you. Just, just one thought. We had a healthy discussion. I mean, there were a lot of the same questions that you raised. We asked these things to Greg and actually saw numbers and wasn't, you know, there was definitely a lot of, a lot of concern and, you know, but also I felt like we got a very good presentation from the Canadian from Greg. What was appropriate? What was likely to bring this person here? And the reality of what, what the contracts are in similar agencies. So it wasn't, it was a, it was a lengthy and involved discussions. That's what it was. Anyone who will look back, look at that. I do take it. I do understand it's very expensive to live here. So it's, it's, you know. I apologize. I stepped out while you made your initial comments, but I think I got the tail end and I just want to ask that there was, there was a robust discussion and that there were concessions and negotiations along the process. So, you know, I think we came back with some counter offers and met halfway. So I wanted to add that. How are you going to speak on behalf of the students right in the bus? And first of all, acknowledge that I'm glad we are saying how much it costs to live here and why salaries need to be appropriate because our students who are utilizing the service also feel that when they live here and some of them can't own and barely rent. But I did want to ask what the $1,000 was it $1,000 for a car per month? Because we're charging students to ride the bus but we're paying them to drive. And I want to make sure that as we negotiate our contract with Metro for Cabrillo next year that we acknowledge that too. How about a public comment just a second? Can I just add one thing? Yes, please. It's really expensive to keep hiring people every second you look at the salary from not from a right holder. We also explained how the transit executives are popping around these days that they're only staying two years, maybe three in their current jobs. So that's why we improve in pension bonus because we just experience what happens, maybe make it don't. And I think that that factored into the whole package that we offered when Donald was mentioning we made adjustments in different areas. We moved money into that retention bonus to avoid having to do this in two years. So was that I was talking about transportation. I know I was okay. And I totally agree. This would I think I think it's not a lot of how much it costs to live here and paying people for that is appropriate. I think I think that is the best business decision to make. I think we should also be mindful of the people utilizing the service and what they think they're paying for. I'll just say briefly and it's a kind of word even said so I'm kind of echoing but we didn't have robust discussion. There were concessions. There were negotiations. I think that we are making a really wise choice. There was an increase between Alex and Michael. There's an increase between Michael and Corey. We've talked about housing. I think what's really important to keep in mind when we're looking at you know what's being paid for and what kind of budget experiences we might be facing in the in the coming years that Corey has experience in running a ballot measure. Corey has put his transit system on to free fares has put his transit system on to 15 minute at waste. And so all of the things that we are hoping to do in order to make us successful both as an agency and financially he has already done. And so I think really what we're paying for in addition to just his great experience in the back of these wonderful candidates is again his experience where we're bringing in someone who's already done what we are looking to do. So I think it's really exciting. Yeah. I'm excited by this. I understand that we have you know questions moving forward and we'll continue to get them answered but I think this is wonderful. So my I'll take this to let me take this public comment first but just to confirm we're doing items 15 and 16 together. Okay but after public public right okay all right we will take this to public. I'm definitely not against a competitive salary to get counted here but I thought tooth and nail to get wage adjustments and any sort of raises for my employees and just to see kind of how easy this was for you know someone who already is the top earner at the agency to simply just get that extra you know compensation on top it feels classist and like I said I have been fighting to get my employees raises to even get market value and it's taking us about three years to even get the majority if not all of our workers to get market adjusted rates. With that being said I'm a racer myself as is the majority of people in Santa Cruz um where's my housing stipend where's my members in housing stipend where's our car stipends it just feels not very consistent with you know having someone who already made so much money getting so much added benefits and here we are struggling to even make rent so I want to say that you know I won't mean worry here but like I said it just feels classist. Thank you. Thank you. I do think that that's a really good candidate to again you know for their wage and package and so forth I just want to echo again some of the thoughts and comments that have already come out and uh you should consider public perception of a public transportation agency giving an employee a car stipend it just really looks counterproductive it just I mean I don't know it just really looks counterproductive even if you could just give him that something else being able to call it something else I don't know um but from the public's perception he should be being encouraged to use the public transportation as should all of the metro employees so that's my thoughts. Thanks Elizabeth and I really just want to echo biggest speaker said um I rely on public transportation day in day out to you know don't own a car and I really think it's important for the CEO of this organization and yourselves as board of directors to be familiar with metro um the positives of it as well as the negatives you know myself and my friends and the four of us here I mean and that it was like okay because I live in Seabright so I'm gonna take two buses here probably took me longer than it would have taken me to walk here but yeah really like the thousand dollar per month stipends as this is really close in my mind and I really want to thank you for raising it up. Thanks all. Thank you. I just want to echo all the same statements I think um metro should be discouraging core use and just incentivizing it and with the salary you could definitely pay for or on your own you will also pay for your course on your own I assume I saw nobody on the floor today when I came here um I was hoping to see you some director but I get it um so I think we should be working on ways to encourage um or to take the bus it's the best way for me like I've explored so many parts of the city to taking the bus and biking and with that salary you definitely afford to live near transit and that we're into development so I want us to move in that direction and I get the house excited but I think it's hard so I probably thank you. Thank you. Any further public comment? I was here before so now I'm going to speak to you as a unionist too so public perception it was rather when we're fighting for a common increment that Jordan has stated earlier and with a thousand dollar car allowance I think metro could buy a very nice SUV for our new CEO and if it happens to leave two years from now like the previous day we have a new vehicle for the next one I mean think about it six to five years that's $60,000 right there so um of course people have mentioned here right bus I don't think that's that's a good idea I mean who knows on that every now and then is to see how things run business is it's not a good idea I think but I believe that especially when we're talking about going to employers to ask tax increment measures so that's going to be very hard to justify when you're given this you know big salary plus all of these perks just I mean I leave out of this county because I can't afford even pay rent here and so I think he looks a little bad in metro when he comes to all of those things I know you had your discussions you know in private I understand that but I do believe that the little hide his salary and all this but it's my personal thank you so I'll keep it brief I think you've heard all of the comments and the feedback from this I'll point out that CEOs are leaders and I hope that he is going to lead the rest of the agency and catching up with the amount of money that he's making thank you additional comments in the room I'm just going to finish comments online no comments online okay back to the board yes thank you that was my initial initial thought when I saw the thousand dollars for the car allowance I was like very metro transit agency ever giving our CEO a thousand dollars a month for a car allowance I it really didn't sit well with me like I said we've taken car allowance without our city contracts for our managers a long time ago because of perception that you know the feedback we were getting from the public you know like what you just said about they're already making there's something but I don't make a lot of money that can do a nice car with that we also heard that many times when we were negotiating before so I'm surprised we're still doing that here at this agency we could make a nice package and entitle it differently where the person does have enough funding to go out and buy a car but I think we are a transit agency and we're giving them out thousand dollars to get in the car and and come here I also did like the idea of like having that maybe a wicked thing in the future is a company vehicle for this for the CEO something that we do that all the time with other people in our in higher positions that we did we do give them a car and then you know they do leave like up to two years then the car is still there it's still pretty new car you can give it off as a company vehicle but I'm having a hard time with that thousand dollar car allowance from the public I trust this function so I may be voting no on this because of the perception of that of this contract can I ask would it make a difference if it was called a transportation allowance I think that if you would have rolled it into the main package I think that I would have been better because I just think it's it's sending a wrong message it's it's you know that's how I see it okay I just a couple of things that this is no no different than what we had previously with my dream and I believe I don't know the amount with Alex but this is consistent with what was in our agreement with our previous CEOs and and the reality is that this car allowance is not just used for movement here in Santa Cruz County and in the city of Santa Cruz and getting to and from work it's to get the CEO across the state to the various conferences and events that they have to go to and and the reality is that our state does not have a stellar transportation system where a CEO can get across the state on a public transit so maybe one day we'll get there and maybe Santa Cruz will sort of lead the way in getting us there Santa Cruz County but we're not there yet so just just that that car allowance or transportation allowance is bigger than going from your home to a place of work but it's really to accomplish all of the all of the needs of that that this position requires not a lot of travel some of it is done by playing but a lot of it is done by driving to the you know Southern California or wherever it is so just wanted to point that out thank you I do again respond to that because our students are actually having a conversation about should they pay for transportation or not and so what what I would say in this conversation is if we're to call it a transportation violence you're still telling someone that you're going to pay them to get around where you're charging other people to use your service to get around and so I think that's the part that I'm bringing to you from the students at Cabrillo what I'm bringing to you is we tell them how useful it is to use metro and para crews to navigate their day-to-day business they voted for a contract during a pandemic and they very used the service because they believed in public transportation and they were willing to bear the cost as an agent of the campus for that service so for them to say transportation is worth their pains for them to do their day-to-day business and rely on a service that many of them are not even using it's hard for me to take back and say we're paying someone else to do the ulterior like that's that's what I so I don't care what you call it the conversation that I have to have as a metro rep to Cabrillo is we're paying this for someone else and we're asking you to pay for the thing metro provides you that's that's my everything else like I believe a retention bonuses because it is hard I believe everybody who works at metro should have a retention bonus because the possibility of thinking in a job as Santa Clara is better because it pays better I believe in all of that is the transportation piece that I have a problem with thank you any further comments all right uh so we've gone to public comment so at this point we are looking for entertaining a motion to approve both items 15 and 60 here we have a motion do we have a second a second yes second can I have a roll call vote please rector brown hi rector downy hi rector dutra hi rector commentary johnson hi rector college hi rector len hi rector mcpiersen hi rector mcpiersen all right rector piglet all right rector key rose carter hi and the motion passes all right thank you before we move on to item 17 um for you was uh is traveling today and it's having some connectivity issues but you did send me some comments about this item says uh thank you for your vote of confidence as we've prepared for reimagine reimagine metro phase two there's plenty on our plate it's more than just a project it's an opportunity to further enhance the way we serve our communities it's aiming for improvements that's everyone will notice and appreciate for more reliable service to environmentally friendly transportation options this effort is about making tangible differences in the daily lives of our current and future writers we will be successful by providing our employees with the resources they need to succeed and fostering collaborative relationships with our unions i'm excited for this opportunity and anxious to begin our work together and start moving forward all right uh with that we're going to move on to item 17 a public hearing to receive public comments on the proposed reimagine metro phase two service proposals for implementation in june and september 2024 but it's like way back for the main event right uh genre ago planning about the director it's great to be back again with this item so while daniel uh constantino from jar walker and associates is going up the slides there he is i'll just quickly remind us how we all got here so we came in february and presented the draft phase two reimagine metro plan to all we're going to hold the public hearing today and ask me to approve what really amounts to a 50 increase in service which is really exciting kind of astounding to be here when we began this process 15 months ago this was kind of a dream we thought well we'll do a plan for the resources we have and we'll do a dream plan for what we would implement if we had additional resources and here we are actually implementing the dream plan um we took that plan out to the public for the last two months what you'll see is a little bit different from what we presented in february based on the feedback that we received that i will just kick it off to daniel he's ready to present slides hi yes i'm ready let me just pull up the screen share and all right are you all seeing um this slide reimagine metro perfect um thanks so much thanks john thanks for the introduction and it's a pleasure to speak with this board of directors again today um so we've gone over this a few times but just a brief reminder for anyone who might be online and isn't aware of this reimagine metro is this process that we've been working on for the last 15 months where we're we've been reviewing in depth where buses go how often they go there and whether that should change and we did come to the conclusion that some of that should change um a lot of that some of that was implemented in phase one which started in december and is recently uh kind of finished implement implementing in march and really as we've done all this work we've had a few key goals in mind throughout there's been this strong sort of directing line of increasing the amount of service provided as much as is possible with the resources at hand uh about making transit more reliable about making sure that the transit lines reflect where people are actually going and how they're traveling in the post-covid world but most importantly making sure that we design and put out service that is useful and attractive for many more people's trips than has been the case for several years so um again we've been working on this since late 2022 we had the opportunity to analyze all the existing service in detail we've conducted several rounds of outreach um two during the course of the project there was also a survey that happened before we started the project um then um and then of course the one that happened just recently now um as of march 2024 um phase one has been implemented and so since your service changed on march 14th uh this map that you're seeing here describes uh basically the service that's out there right now um and so this is a lot like what was there in december but there have been a few recent service additions there's later evening service on route two which connects santa cruz to watsonville via capitol the mall paprio college and main street um there's more evening service on route three b serving parts of live oak um there's uh more later evening service on route 73 um which replaces the old route 71 um through parts of rural freedom more express trips on route 90x which is the direct service uh from watsonville to santa cruz that's basically non-stop coming out of watsonville all the way to so cal avenue in santa cruz um more peak hour trips on route 73 um so service every 30 minutes at peak on route 73 a new route 78 in watsonville um going out and serving uh west beach aloni parkway and um the new county social services office at west ridge um as well and a small realignment of route 72 whereas since route 78 is now kind of the direct connection from downtown watsonville to the hospital route 72 can now join route 75 providing more frequent more reliable service on green valley road so that's where we're at right now um and of course the next step is to go into phase two so this phase two are things that will happen between now and september um i think we're not quite yet sure exactly how much happens in june and how much this happens in september that's work that needs to happen in the next month or two but overall it's a 50 percent increase in service more or less um and we developed a draft network to show what that service increase might look like and then we presented that public that plan um to the public um and having now presented that plan and received a range of feedback we've made some revisions and we're proposing this revised plan to you for your approval so as a reminder here was the draft proposal so this is what we put out to the public um the draft proposal as you can see biggest key thing to notice is that on the last map so on on all these maps by the way the color of a line tells you how often the bus comes so if the line is red it means it's a frequent bus route it's service every 15 minutes or better um if it's dark blue it's a bus that comes every half hour and if it's light blue it comes only about once an hour and if it's kind of a thin orangey line it means it comes uh some of the time um so if you compare these two maps the biggest single difference is how much more red there is on these two maps and you can see that there are there's frequent service every 15 minutes or better in many many more areas that's what was that's the key part of this proposal um so you see new service every 15 minutes um in um almost all of Live Oak uh and Soquel in parts of Aptos in about half of Watsonville so a lot more areas with that frequent service also all-day service on route 90x right now route 90x the express from Watsonville to Santa Cruz operates at peak hours only that would increase to be all-day service seven days a week um also a very important thing that was that we really wanted to get the public's input on in terms of how we put the frequent service out there there's been a strong desire for a long time to create more east-west connections in Santa Cruz between the west side and UCSC and between all the residential areas in east Santa Cruz and Live Oak so this proposal put out a way to make that happen where you would have the current routes 18 and 19 um serving west Santa Cruz would be merged with routes one and two the 18 becoming part of route one um and the 19 becoming part of route two um and that in turn meant that because the lines would become very very long they would need to get split at Cabrillo College so essentially route one instead of being Watsonville to Santa Cruz would be Cabrillo College to UC Santa Cruz and route two instead of being Watsonville to Santa Cruz would be Cabrillo College to UC Santa Cruz and in exchange the um routes one and two that are in uh Watsonville right now would become routes 61 and 62 61 would go to every 15 minutes just like route one and there'd be route 90x with the all-day direct service so that was something that um we thought was overall an improvement and addressed a lot of things that we'd heard but that we also understood had some impacts and was important to present to the public as something to consider and let us know whether that felt um felt good and useful and acceptable so um why we did this in general I mean really what we've heard over and over and over from the public in this process from even before starting this this process was that people want more frequency and that makes sense because when the bus comes more often it's easier to use it's more likely that it'll come soon if you show up at a random time if you know a trip misses for some reason another one is coming not far behind it so for many many reasons frequent service is simpler simply easier to use um we also heard that people wanted better weekend and evening service we've heard a strong desire for more express service on highways reflecting the large number of very long trips that people have to make partly due to your housing prices and what that means about people needing to go up to the bay area or living in Watsonville and working in Santa Cruz or San Jose etc um and I've already mentioned the better east west connections in Santa Cruz as a thing that's desired so this right here is a chart from one of our earlier uh phases of outreach that shows kind of how people were ranking the different kinds of improvements that they'd like to see um if more funding were available which it now appears that it is um and so what you can see is people want all of these things and frequency really comes out ahead by far so these percentages are the number of people who ranked the priority listed on the left as number one two and three among this list and so you can see that over half of people who'd responded in that survey um were you know very clearly going in the direction of high frequency and these others are desired but frequency is number one and that's kind of why we prioritized it so as a result in that draft proposal um you'd get about 100,000 people and 40,000 jobs uh within a half mile walk of service every 15 minutes seven days a week and every 30 minutes even after 9 p.m so that's great um but then you know we also wanted to measure the impact of this and make sure that like okay are we really making service more useful and so we did um an access analysis that I presented to you in more detail a month ago but that basically shows that yeah the we're helping people get to more places in the same amount of time get to more place get to far more places as we've gone through this process um if you look at these charts they're bar charts that show how many jobs someone could reach within a certain amount of time so if you focus on the red bar that's jobs you could reach within 45 minutes using just public transit and your own two feet um and assuming an average walking speed um so this includes walking time it includes the time people have to wait for the bus it includes transfer time everything so this is really door to door it's comparable as a travel time to what people do on other modes like if they're in your car or biking or whatever and basically what we did is we have designed these services to maximize how much change we are showing overall on average on these bars so people can get to more jobs which means more places in general um within 45 minutes within 60 minutes within any amount of time we just measure it those horizons so this proposal as a whole that we had put out there um relies on a few things that it are important to know um one of them is the new state funding which I believe to be largely uh tersep and john can provide perhaps more details about that um it's also that that's really kind of the key number one thing other key thing uh was that you can't put out the this kind of extra service without a lot more drivers than you've had for the last few years so it was on the assumption that the hiring drive that's been going on would continue being successful and you'd reach a roster of 230 240 drivers um within the year um it's also assumed and this is really important to know a couple things about what's happening at ucsc and there's ongoing discussions with ucsc it's kind of we you know metro is not in a position to know exactly what's going to happen but we know that there's a lot of interest there's a lot of goodwill there's a lot of things that need to happen and we wanted to present kind of the best possible thing and so the two things that really matter about ucsc in this draft proposal are that there's an assumption that there is a place at ucsc where a bus can stop take a break the driver driver can take a break use the facilities and the bus can turn around and that's really important because it is the key to being able to provide reliable east west service in santa cruz without that you cannot do that because you don't when a bus comes into ucsc on the loop right now you don't know how long it's going to take before that bus goes out there's tons and tons of demand at ucsc both people arriving on the on campus people traveling through campus and people leaving campus all three groups are exchanging at every stop for every bus that metro runs through there right now so as a result when you have a bus that tries to go east west like route three's been doing for the last few months that can be problematic you get big reliability issues so this layover was a really key assumption the other thing that happens is that once you have this layover you're running metro buses for longer on campus than you were previously it's shorter one way because you're dealing with fewer types of trips but it also means that the bus comes in one way comes back out one way and in a way that will make service more convenient and more legible for a lot of purposes but it also means more hours of service which means more cost so there's an assumption built into this that there would be a ucsc layover and that ucsc would come to the table with more funding to increase that campus oriented service the number of service hours that are on campus and we didn't know where that um conversation was going to land but we wanted to present what seemed like the best reasonable outcome and that was put out there in the public meetings about this um and so anyway i'll keep on going but i just want you to be aware of that assumption so we had a whole public outreach process for this um there were various tools that we used to get feedback uh we had a project website um that was at um scmtd.com slash reimagine metro with all of the project information report presentations etc and links to the online survey there was also uh the metro's website also featured information about the project that survey that i just mentioned there was a bilingual online survey offered in english and spanish it was open for about a month we got about 500 responses on that um from people from all walks of life as i'll show you in a minute we also had three public meetings they were held um on the week of your last board meeting so the week preceding february 23rd um well during that week um we had three different meetings two were in watsonville one was in santa cruz they were all offered both online and in person and of course i presented to you all last month at the board meeting and i'm presenting to you now at the beginning of this public hearing um it's great to have meetings and a survey and all that but of course we would we you can't do that in a vacuum people need to have some way to know that it's happening and to decide whether they're interested in providing input so we had um a bunch of promotional tools that were put out there to make sure that people heard about it if people wanted to hear about it or might be interested they could you can never reach everyone but we tried to go out as as wide as we could and so um metro put out a news release produced some flyers um that were on buses there were um social media calls there were emails to um metros uh metros regular email as well as to everyone who we'd heard from in any of the prior rounds of outreach and had provided contact information um there were the two websites that i mentioned previously both on metro's website and the project specific website and also um uh the people from amma on our team who are sub consultants to um jerry walker and associates uh actually called all of the stakeholder organizations that we'd held focus groups with in the prior rounds of outreach and said hey this is happening the meetings are going to happen here there's an online survey here let your people know let us know if there's anything we can do to help you and you any information you need so all that happened um i think i've already briefly described the public outreach meetings but again they were hybrid meetings available online and in person two in watsonville one in santa cruz um the watsonville meetings actually we made a point of holding one in kind of the early evening time and one in the middle of the day so that it would be open to kind of as wide a range of people's schedules as maybe possible um and i presented in those remotely john and other metro staff were there in person answered some questions um and had i believe some follow-up conversations with the people who showed up in person afterwards um and the presentations were available um and were given in both english and spanish and we had some meetings where some spanish speakers showed up um and um you know so that we were able to kind of cover as many bases as possible with that in terms of presenting the general quality of the feedback the probably the the online survey gives us the biggest picture so i'm going to present you the results of that in a little bit more detail um we had uh 508 responses in total um that compares to about 900 responses when we went out a little bit less than a year ago about um the alternatives for phase one it's not that's a pretty standard thing that happens as you go through a project and things happen people think didn't this happen already so you have to work a little harder to get to get the same levels of um of engagement but we still got several hundred people letting us know what they thought we know that we got a really wide base of respondents um you know about 70 percent of people who responded are people who ride metro at least a few times a month and 25 percent are people who ride every day um we got uh you know a wide range of kind of people's incomes and abilities um and their stages of life uh about half of the people from uh low-income households about half of people um from uh don't have a car available to them uh 30 percent people of color about a third of the respondents were students at UCSC or Cabrillo so none of these like reflect exactly the demographics of Santa Cruz County but the point is that because we got these kind of high double digit percentages of people in all these different categories we can be relatively certain that we've reached a pretty broad range of people i also want to say before i show you the results that we got that um in the time that um some of the earlier discussions of this meeting were happening i went through these results again and the results i'm going to show you are averages for everyone who responded but in every single one of these categories the results we got are within like five to seven percent of the average results so no one category of these expressed like radically different opinions from everyone else we have kind of a even though we can't claim an exact statistic representation of your population we have a pretty reliable picture of whether the feelings generally positive generally negative um or in the middle so we asked a few questions the first one we asked was whether people had ride had ridden the bus since December and how they felt about those changes and so we got about 350 people who answered that they had ridden the bus since December and we got um more favorable than unfavorable reviews for things that had happened since December um i would say this is not a slam dunk um but on the other hand it's important to remember that people are generally a lot more motivated to provide feedback when it's negative than when it's positive so the fact that we have kind of a slight preponderance of favorable opinions is a generally good sign i think there's also a lot of kind of more long form comments that we got that were perhaps not so much directly related to with um the exact lines and services that are being provided but with a lot of the difficulties and understanding how how much things are changing because there was both the regular service change in December and the move of transit centers in downtown Santa Cruz in February um and it's simply difficult to manage that that level of change um in that short of a period of time and so it's not surprising that a lot of people are still getting used to this um i think there's definitely still work to be done um on on metro zen but overall we think we're getting a generally slightly favorable assessment on the things that have happened so far in terms of the plan that we're proposing for September however we got much more clearly favorable opinions um so of the people who answered whether the draft plan would make transit more useful for them for themselves uh we got about 60 of respondents telling us yes it would uh and only about 15 of people telling us no it wouldn't um with the remainder kind of either having neutral opinions or not being sure so we have kind of a you know a net plus 50 favorability on whether the draft plan would be more useful personally to the people who are responding when we ask people the same question but about the whole community whether would this plan make transit better for the whole community we got even more favorable responses with almost 70 of people telling us um that it would um it would slightly or definitely make um transit better for the community as a whole and only 12 giving us an unfavorable uh response on that either it would make it slightly or much worse so we're getting we got mostly positive responses those are important to nuance with kind of a lot of the um kind of more detailed feedback that we got both on what's happened since December and on things that are in the plan generally um a number of positive comments that really focused on improved frequency so that's very consistent with everything we've heard so far we did hear a lot about a few of the other things that are written here um reliability issues those are issues that you know are experienced on service um kind of network why but are especially severe on ucsc routes for the reasons i mentioned earlier and particularly as i mentioned earlier on route three which is the one route doing east west service right now and it's doing that east west service while doing the full loop around ucsc and not turning around which means that your outbound buses um on route three when they're coming back out of ucsc going to capitol amal they often leave ucsc rather late um and as a result you have just that just that service doesn't run as reliably as it should um we also heard um somewhat from people from the sand lorenzo valley um i guess there are some improvements for sand lorenzo valley in this plan in particular in the draft plan particular route 35 um which would be upgraded on weekends to have the same level of services on weekdays i think there is some um some desire for there to be more improvement in the sand lorenzo valley um given the improvements in other areas and some of that concern about the sand lorenzo valley wasn't about route 35 but it was about route 17 and kind of the uncertainty in the draft plan about how many route 17 trips would go through scott's valley where there's significant park and ride usage for trips to and from san jose so that that was something we heard um we also in the detailed comments heard from a number of people in south county about difficulties reaching capitol amal and dominican hospitals so those big mig county destinations and how some of the service changes that had happened since december had required new transfers to get to there and some of those transfers are between routes that aren't very frequent so there are there there's definitely some concern about that um that we wanted to address um also at ucsc just a perennial issue about just general capacity how much service is there and how much of that service is on the fastest possible path from um downtown to ucsc and how much service is available specifically on bay street where uh the most buses tend to get overcrowded and so um a lot of people basically as a result of that are telling us they really wanted route 15 back because that's the route that took laurel and bay up to ucsc we also heard some things that are not really related to the network design but that are important to a lot of people and that you should be aware of as board members um first of all highlighted a lot of concern lots of people telling us um why isn't there metro service on holidays um it's not something that you know we're resolving in the study for this project but it's something that you know metro could look at nothing about this plan prevents you from having service on holidays if you're not doing it it's for other reasons they may be good i don't know but people want to know so you should be aware of that uh as was mentioned previously um in this meeting by a lot of the public commenters a lot of concern about infrastructure issues particularly things relating to bus stops and also access to and from those bus stops um some concern that i mentioned earlier on the kind of difficulty about net with navigating multiple rounds of service changes um also um a little bit about real reliability of real-time information which i know is something metro is working on um we did hear though also a lot of positive comments about metro drivers and how helpful they have been in this process as people navigate the multiple changes and i wanted to highlight that um there's really a lot of positive feeling about that so um taking all that into account um we have devised some revised recommendation that we're taking to you um basically for your discussion approval today um at your discretion of course um so it's a reminder when we put out the draft plan for phase two it relied on these four things um that state funding from the tersep the new driver hiring and the layover and some new funding from ucsc um and stressing again that the layover and the new funding from ucsc are to some extent linked problems you can put a layover there and that'll be great and that'll help things but it'll also increase the the number of service hours ucsc has to put on campus so there's a fiscal impact so because metro can't control um um the convert the the outcomes of conversations with ucsc um we have devised kind of two scenarios for what metro could do based on kind of two ends of the spectrum of um how much ucsc might contribute um and i want to be clear i'm not expressing a judgment here about how much ucsc should contribute or how any of that works i'm just putting this out there so that you know kind of the the spectrum of difference that might be possible in one scenario or another scenario um so we have two scenarios scenario a is kind of i guess the dream of the dream that includes kind of everything metro would reasonably like to do around ucsc and scenario b is i guess the the basic dream which is that sort of 50 increase in service without new resources from ucsc um both scenarios they have a lot in common they both took into account um a lot of the same things we heard from the public um one thing that's important to note um that route one split at cabrio college route one um via soquel between santa cruz and wassenville that will go away in both scenarios route one would come from downtown santa cruz um through soquel drive cabrio college um highway one and to uh airport and freedom boulevard in wassenville so that was important it's partly a response to the reliability concern about route 18 and route one um and it's also partly kind of keeping those direct trips as much as possible kind of across the county um route 18 is also the longest path from downtown santa cruz to uh of the frequent routes from downtown santa cruz to ucsc so it's kind of the least valuable of those three routes not that it wasn't valuable just it was the one that provided the least new benefit uh big thing um significantly more service on route 17 than in the draft proposal so the draft proposal had hourly direct service from santa cruz to santa jose and a few trips um basically through scott's valley in addition to that um the the um proposal we're bringing to you today uh has basically service every 30 minutes from santa cruz to santa jose and half of those trips so once an hour through scott's valley um as part of what i was telling you about route one and also some changes made on route two 62 and 73 we've tried to maximize the amount of direct service in both scenarios um between wassenville and and santa cruz and those key mid county destinations capitol amal and dominican hospital um i would add to that for wassenville cabrio college which is also directly accessible from pretty much every route coming out um and route 15 has been added back um and also there was some feedback we got about route 20 which was proposed to be just get to the base of campus and then you transfer to other routes and that's no longer the case and what's being proposed today so um i've said all that that's a lot of words describing a lot of various very detailed things so appreciate your patience with it here's what this looks like on a map so scenario a the the the dream of the dream the extra dream so this is including ucsc layover and funding so on this one um key things to know you have that two-way service at ucsc and the layover um we have ucsc east side direct service maintained on routes two so via bay street into downtown santa cruz and then out so kell avenue uh and capitol a road to capitol amal and on route three which also starts at ucsc and ends up at capitol amal but serves high street and broadway and splits to serve kind of different areas um around sea bright and twin lakes um and parts alive before joining back again around pleasure point um so that ucsc side direct service is is in this concept um and you can see uh compared to the draft proposal routes 62 and 73 uh instead of ending um at cabrio college they're both extended to capitol amal one of them via 41st the other one via capitol village uh detail of this through capitol avenue will change based on what i heard earlier today but that's the idea um and so we're able to basically with that assumption get all of the benefits that were in the draft plan um and in addition to that um extra service on route 17 um and um one lost east west direct connection but one kind of regained or maintained direct connection between downtown santa cruz and watsonville so here's kind of the base dream here's what metro can control can make happen within your control um all the way um so scenario b um ucsc the relationship with ucsc kind of stays what it is which is your basic budget assumption as well as reported earlier um so to make that happen and to maintain service reliability and continue working towards improving it there's one key consequence which is that as long as you're running all these one-way loops around ucsc that east west service is going to have to break it downtown santa cruz because otherwise you're just making the east side suffer the reliability consequences of the extremely high demand and multiple trip types happening simultaneously at uc santa cruz so as a result what that means compared to today route three which is currently a throughout from capitol amal ucsc but isn't running reliably would split it would still double in service on the east side but route 10 would go back to being its own route uh on high street um and then route two which um you know would not merge with route 19 route 19 would make stay its own thing and route two as long as this is the case um would continue being a direct route well sorry a complete route it's not that direct it goes very long but from santa cruz all the way to watsonville by a capitol amal it wouldn't split into two and 62 it stay every 30 minutes at this time um and that's scenario b so at this time um staff recommendation would be that the board approved scenario b as the preferred service alternative so basically because you it's what you know you can do and because we've spent a lot of time thinking about it and incorporating um all the public input we've had uh into it and that's kind of pending future discussions and seeing where those go um and seeing how ucsc reacts to scenario a and what's needed to make that happen um so if the board approves this recommendation then the staff and project team are going to move on to the next step which is developing schedules and preparing for service changes starting as soon as june although i don't know if everything would happen in june i'm assuming there'd be a staggered implementation that's for john to determine so thanks so much for taking the time uh to listen to all this today um i will let you move on to the next step i am assuming there's some public comment before we go to board discussion um thanks again and if anyone uh needs me to move back to any of this and provide anything in more detail i'm happy to uh at any time thank you appreciate it before we move on i think we should just pause and take stock of how historic and transformational this service increase is that we're talking about there aren't many maybe any agencies talking about service increases right now and and definitely not at the scale that we're considering and we're able to do that because of all the success we had last year raising capital funding to to fulfill our zero-emission vision we raised 90 million dollars for the hydrogen buses feeling solid so when the one-time tourism materialized we can invest that in service whereas most agencies are using that to augment their capital zero emission transition button so it's it's a pretty incredible position to be in even if it is one-time funding we're able to really invest in a community at the service so i just wanted to make that point before we move on to the discussion thank you all right board discussion yes so a couple of questions first when the polling was done the 425 people who gave kind of two-thirds i think 67 in favor were they seeing scenario a or scenario b they were seeing the originals attracted so so if we didn't pull on a b a b kind of take elements from yes both a is mostly the draft scenario with some of the changes that we incorporated based on the feedback and b is the without ucs where i was going with that is is it fair to say we don't have a clear read on the desire for cross county commuters to the campus despite the timing issues and the delay issues you have a sense of whether we've got for students yeah writing from capitol the mall all the way to ucs i don't have good data on that currently we typically kind of do the summary quarterly right and we're we're just at the end of the quarter we know that previous to the service change about the quarter of live oak customers were ucs the students and that was on routes that ran hourly that required transferring to an hourly route right so with the direct connection anecdotally it seemed to be having the intent we we did see people riding through downtown on those routes the reliability was a big issue and we did pull on that so you know daniel showed the kind of the survey results it was towards the bottom there wasn't you know as high as frequency the weekend service levels but it was noted for sure the reason we we addressed it is kind of kept coming up the second question earlier this week at a spark meeting there was discussion mentioned bringing the route 10 back there was discussion possibly making it route 11 so that it ran clockwise through the campus and sort of balanced the service within 19 and the 15 if it's coming back to our school term you already got the 18 the 20 18 is carrying twice as many riders per month as any of the uc routes so it's certainly not i kind of missed the comment but so i was underperforming it's been really well so i think the route 10 on the map is to show coverage on high street the way we route around the campus let that play what to balance counterclockwise so we vote today to call it a 10 that's we still have that flexibility yeah we'll still have that flexibility responding to rude 18 it's not that routine is um underperforming in any way it's that if you're coming from from across county and connecting towards campus rude 18 is a longer path into campus okay so among the east west connections it's the one that provides the least benefit coming from the east certainly got plenty of ridership and performing extremely well on the west side thanks for clarification which is why we kind of split it in both scenario a and b um i forgot the number it's not bus 35 it's the other center into a valley that i've been hearing too about but i forgot the number it's mentioned it's not been um reliable probably the 35 no wasn't 35 they said not 35 and that on the slide there was a second three is it the three it's like a seven seven seven it could be 17 i a number like that oh wait wait wait it is okay it's not 17 all right yeah 35 more 17 and that's it no but you knew you were right the route three said reliability issues and now i kept hearing that some of the people weren't used in it because of that i was trying to say yeah you'll have to report back okay i'll make a note thanks so with the recommended action they would just be improving the routes and sort of with the idea that heading on where our final budget lands we would start rolling out June or as soon as possible but all right yeah it's less the budget than the operator availability so i think we have uh authorized the hiring up to 80 new operators i think we'll have 60 for training so that's my piece of it so theoretically we could implement three quarters of the service in June the other big piece is having enough buses to do it and that's something we're still working on so the hydrogen the 53 hydrogen buses aren't coming most aren't coming at the end of the year but we need a bridge uh in order to implement the service before we get the full order of the hydrogen buses and so that's something we're still working on we think we have a solution to get most of those by June but those are really impediments to implementing the full thing now so we we didn't expect to have the hiring go so well with so that's why we've always been targeting September but we pretty much have the bus operators we need now and now we need to work on it thanks i mentioned because if we are looking at a budget gap and there are various ways to try to fill that and hopefully we can identify the thoughts we've seen i think it would benefit us as an agency to push much of the service improvements and fare free as possible right up to a potential vote on funding to continue them right rather than the worst thing would happen if we had this gap where oh wouldn't you remember we did for you last year right yeah that'd be terrible so i think that maybe delay is a good thing i mean the other thing to consider is that we've got kind of construction on our roads right now i mean the improvements on highway one the initial bus on the shoulder section is there i mean those won't be done until 2025 the so-called drive improvements have been done at the end of this year so ultimately our bus can be told a lot better when those improvements are done and so that could also benefit a little bit of the way because public will be able to see the benefit of these service improvements yeah so it's a good point and we are even even though we've been more successful in the bus operator hiring we are still looking to target the majority of the improvements with september and also aligns well with ucsc schedule most of our riders should not fall um the only complicated factor there is the of that one time sd-125 per cent funding is available now to draw down and through mid 2027 i think so there's still an opportunity to delay a little bit except that we have the operators on staff so we want to put the service out there i think thank you the work is a great mission um so depending on how conversations go we're used to going to see what is the process to revisit scenario a should we adopt scenario b today we can we can come back yeah just to come back but you know in some sense we've already done the planning uh i was going to ask like maybe we prove both but i think we should come back and once once we get greater detail specifically i guess the follow-up to that is um this is a lot of what ifs but let's say we eventually get into scenario a how challenging will it be to shift from the service provision of scenario b to scenario a in terms of the what the agency can handle uh it's it's because we didn't change one of those throughout it's it's basically two made corrupt changes so most of what we implemented in b will stay the same when we move to a but there will be a big route change on two two route structures and then a new operation around the lake over but it was doable definitely and and you'll need the extra drivers and i'm just trying to understand the budget part of this but i thought i understood that when metro staffs went to rtc in december the lord of the 32 million he said is that fully funded that reimagined metro phase two at least that's what was reported the paper what i understood from the budget presentation earlier today was that both phase one and two and free fares for everyone but students that's a 3.4 million dollar hit you're taking like you're fully funded uh to do this for the next two fiscal years so i guess one quite but then we're hearing that there's a gap and i guess maybe the gap is to go beyond the two fiscal years but i'm trying to understand why there's a gap when it's reported to be fully funded with the rtc money and it appeared in budget today to be fully funded for two years so i don't understand where the gap is and then second even if there is a gap i'm not understanding why the one route to close the gap would be for ucsc students to pay more than they already do they pay i think we pay close to five million dollars a year of student treaty funds they pay uh to metro so going forward they would continue to pay that amount that everybody else except the brio students would be writing for free so i think there's an equity issue there that perhaps i don't know if that was discussed when the board discussed fair or free for everybody about students i don't understand why the presumption would be for this dream of dreams plan that is a great plan and that you went out and clearly secured great public support for buy it would fall to ucsc to fund the gap that i don't even see is there but if it is there why why would that be on ucsc since this is a countywide service and freedom yeah so no one here on the metric side is asking ucsc students to pay more than they already pay i mean that's one way they could do it we have some students here that's one way phase two could be fully funded but that isn't the assumption the assumption kind of built into the service planning and the service model is that because of this turn turnaround metro is now operating the same level of service that today metro and taps operate because we go in one way we come back the other way doing that means metro is doubling the amount of service around the loop that it currently provides so i think the assumption or one logical conclusion of that is oh the cost of doing that there's a cost right because it's double the revenue hours around the loop and the fact could come from the tax budget assuming that ask me drivers are willing to come over to metro and there's you know other discussions that need to happen there but the kind of the built-in assumption into that was how can we without duplicating service come up with a rational way to provide service around the loop so it it ends up costing about the same for metro to add that service to the loop and taps currently spends to operate the service if that makes sense that that was kind of the built-in assumption i think when we presented this at plan in december to be frank we hadn't fully thought about we hadn't fully quantified the effect of for the cost of duplicating service around the loop and there's i would turn the equity question the other way directing all this service at ucsc is really unfair to the rest of the community um because we would have ended up essentially doing this doubling of service around the loop which mean which would have meant we could have you would have had to do much less in the rest of the community so that's that's kind of why we we pulled it back in scenario b and said well wait a second if we are going to provide this level of service then there's there's really no equitable equitable way to do it um unless there's more contribution coming from ucsc and again the assumption wasn't that students pick more that is one way to happen the working assumption was let's figure out a way to kind of use a part of the tax budget that's already used to operate loop service if there's a way to rationalize that as part of metro service in the future so that was that was the assumption that we've now drawn back frankly so we love this dream of dreams we think makes a lot of sense for a lot of reasons these frequent network at 15-minute routes extending from the highest demand point in the system right throughout Santa Cruz County but there's a lot of sense to that um but it's going to take it's clearly going to take more work to come to an agreement of how can we actually make the work and that's what we're putting forth the scenario b and did the budget that was presented earlier today and i'm 12th represent scenario fee or a little follow-up but i think maybe an answer to the question is we are we're also looking at instead of $32 million in two years $32 million for years now thanks to the legislature saying hey i'll give you everything in profits in year one but your two is actually your two yeah for that obviously i thought in one of the acts that got flowing in the final two years of this plan but that actually has slightly less to do with this discussion around the service around your csc we we could implement scenario a but it would mean getting a lot of the other service that we've because we're now really focused on doubling service around that that's the issue is the allocation of resources i'm recording a real-time view of the of the trips i've i've heard some comments from folks that it hasn't quite i don't want to say been accurate but yeah and so i wanted to know when you put these systems into place how how quickly that information is available to the customers for some folks they look at it and i realize if you're offering 15-minute service maybe they don't care but if they have a longer wait or they thought the bus was going to be here by now are as you keep adding these things that as you have added in the last phase how has that changed is it is it pretty smooth or are there some challenges so it's been a challenge with new buses so currently what we're experiencing is all of the articulated buses that we got from san diego to serve ucsc none of those buses yet have the real-time information equipment on stall so most of the complaints that we receive are related to those buses that's the 18 and 19 primarily those routes they're also the most frequent so it's in some sense the west impactful the bus should be coming every 15 minutes but still the advertiser system it works on the rest of it people expect it they want to see it so it's in process the equipment has been ordered it's being installed but that little caveats at the bottom of that so that people who can't find because that's very frustrating yeah um you know yeah i mean on all of the real-time apps it it does indicate to the user whether or not it's tracking real-time information or schedule information so you can't actually know oh this bus is tracking right it's subtle yeah but it's there uh whether or not it's right and it has to refresh yeah thank you for the questions right seeing none we will now open the public hearing and take public comments on proposed reimagine metro phase two service proposals any comments in the room hello so as Larry knows we've been through this a couple of different times and smart smart has had their feedback heard by staff the only difference that i would like to bring up between some of the maps that we're doing here versus what we've been talking about we still maintain that there's a question about having the 55 dot continue to serve capital of village extending that through the 73 we would rather see the 73 go through core lead us on a more regular basis and restore service into that area rather than shorten the 55 and have that connection be made i don't think that there is a huge amount of people that are using rural freedom to capital of village it would mind transferring from one bus to another at cabrillo compared to the amount of people that could be served if we did actually go into core lead us around to the market like they used to do i think that that would be a much larger community that we could serve so i'd ask that we continue to be able to explore those and make that change if necessary i'm not proposing that we abandon capital of village because if you look at the map close enough to 55 would now begin and end at cabrillo college it would just continue to run as it does today so we can use that cost savings to extend service to core lead us on the 73 with that being said it option b is what we are endorsing at this time without proper layover facilities without proper break facilities on the university we can no longer maintain this looping around the coming back thing we've been trying to hold that together on the route three and that is probably one of the most unequivocal things we're doing right now because the community of live oak is suffering at the expense of the university and that has to stop so option b is really kind of our only option unless we can break those routes in half we just cannot keep them on time it doesn't matter if it's busy it doesn't matter if it's traffic the route is too long the longer that the route gets the more unreliable it gets and bogging down around the university especially right now is we're seeing a massive increase in the amount of on-campus usage that we're having not sure where that's coming from but current events could play into that we're leaving a lot of people behind and having the next bus have to come pick them up but the actual loading time that that takes especially in an articulated bus when we are literally emptying and refilling at almost every stop is just impossible to continue that service through live oak at that point because it could take us over an hour to loop the campus at the site so with those changes in mind we're endorsing option b at this time unless we can figure out something different on the university campus with the slight change that i'd like to consideration of currently the service returned just pretty short comments from my arms but i think the way daniel summarized it earlier has been my experience with those phase one changes i live on the east side and i've pretty much just all about these things just come about at the expense of operations there i live right by the three and three d broadway sad transport eclipses that stop to me and there's times where the bus will be delayed 45 minutes 30 minutes so really glad to hear that it is something that's being studied and something that's come up as a concern um also scenario b just sounds like the best option at the site for that reason but if scenario a is further explored in the future um really just keep in mind to not put more service on campus at the expense of places like watson mill three of college is then from watson mill to come to santa cruz that be split up into and that's just not there in any circumstance um i just really want to urge to for service to be restored on soak hill avenue on any of the buses that do you go to talk to mill for anyone that lives east of soak hill avenue for me it turns into a 20 minute walk to go to watson mill where i have doctor's appointments i see family just like shop there enjoy going to watson mill so it's really been difficult just to get there um theoretically there could be a connection from the 3d or 3a to the one or two but that never works out because of the problems um being on time from campus and just one last thing so it was mentioned earlier too but broadway south france of hortie there's no lighting there you know where to sit so especially once we get started there's already been several instances where the bus has just passed by and then it's waiting another 30 minutes 45 minutes really the up in discretion of the member the bus to show up so just really hope you all take these things into consideration thank you thank you hi again uh thank you john and daniel for the presentation um i want to talk about scenario b it's a little bit disappointing to lose that uh one seat ride from the other side i completely understand it's not working right now it's not fair to um east side commuter so i get that but i'm more concerned about like how in the long term can we plan for a transit center on campus so regardless of if there's any like additional ucsc funding um just kind of hoping that there's something in the pipeline long term for ucsc and metro work together to like get a transit center on campus so we can run east side routes and have them be reliable because like we did fight hard to get that one seat ride to catch tola and sucks that it's not working but it also sucks to leave that and to lose um basically cutting frequency on high street and have that's just that's selfishly we really don't need that much frequency on high street i just move there and i'm like and it's only i think one was an hour um and then as well i know we're not talking about communication right now but when it comes to the timetables um for weekend routes making sure they're kind of staggered because a couple weekends ago i was trying to get to campus from circles and the 20 of the 19 came like within 10 minutes of each other and then there was no bus for an hour so having those be you know more spread out especially because like 20 doesn't come very often and it's like weekend route for this tub um i have some more open ended questions about so does base to restore the precoded levels of service to dcsc um and then when will the scenario be mapped be posted uh online because the agenda it's not updated with the when we saw in the presentation and then also where can we get i don't so this is my first coordinating but i'm not sure with the procedures that are when you get updates on data so like when will you hear the real-time gtfs data like and will that be presented um like after phase two is implemented like some wedding september when can we expect to hear that yeah those are my comments thank you thank you the additional comments in the room i i do kind of agree that at this point uh and i think it is it's more realistic to implement but i do want to encourage everybody that's involved in the process to continue to try to get um a transit center or whatever's needed to work at the college to have that directory from there up to to the capital area maybe perhaps i don't know if it would be needed or it would help perhaps a directory from the campus area to spots belly since i know that one of the main reasons they go over there is for your target your polls and your own and that kind of stuff that they don't can't get in Santa Cruz area um i don't go out that way very much but just when i even though the service wasn't really reliable it did have a positive impact just on my rights that i did take because we didn't have all the uc kids college kids transferring with all of their stuff at the bus station so i even know i don't use that particular service i do think it would help the overall niceness of it i guess i don't know what to say but yeah thank you thank you further comment yeah do you want to address the question uh sure it should be posted now uh the real time is in the process what was the other question you have three questions store pre-covid left for store pre-covid it's 13 buses an hour at peak of the peak it was around 16 pre-covid at the base it's more it's pre-covid service hours the base was a little bit more i did want to address one thing i mean hope we don't lose sight of scenario a that we can keep working towards that idea you don't have to be in this town very long to notice the difference in traffic on the day you see a season session and the day they're not and part of what this was trying to address was getting a longer one-seat ride that's a frequent network you know to the campus and all the other benefits that pass for the rest of the community and getting people out of their cars um a comment was brought up i think on both both side maybe i go down the career side that if we go free fare everyone's going to be paying but the students i think we should think about it i think it is that we should we think about it differently the students paid for service natural wouldn't be operating the level of service that we operate to usc or cabrillo without those contracts for transit service we just went um and so it's it's less about payers than paying for the service and the benefit that that provides the students um so i hope uh i hope we can still keep working towards scenario i think you know as a lot uh it's a strong vision for the community as a lot of that but there are obviously some additional considerations made to keep working thank you so i really appreciate the pleasure but that goes to usc set those for their comment right any further public comment in the room right we'll go to virtual public color saying none we'll bring it back to the board for discussion in a vote oh i'm sorry and we are officially closing the public here so we'll now bring it back to the board for discussion in a vote they should be the scenario b with the caveat that we continue discussions around scenario a partnership with um mr rayskin and ucsc team and i don't know if you need more than that but come back in the next year with an update on some really long motion we have a moment in a second uh okay we have a roll call vote please director brown hi director downy hi director newtron hi director palmetary johnson hi rick japanic hi ricky lin hi ricky rick fearson hi ricky newson hi ricky things like i rick japan's current hi in the motion access thank you i will move on now to our interim CEO general manager oral report i'll turn it up to you i i'll try to be brief because i know it's been long these um just a couple of things that i want to touch on um metro's going to be participating in the senator's birthday event let's take a place um april 20 and um we will also have a booth and bring one electric raft bus um to this event and we're also going to be offering free rides for both bus and parents on mond i think it's monday um april 22nd and then a quick update on bus operators we currently have um full fully qualified we have 167 bus drivers and we have 51 trainees one more class is coming in in april which will be about 20 more bus operators so we we currently have a total of 180 and then lastly i wanted to talk about um the vibe magazine that everybody has um we made the spring edition and it has some really nice pictures and it talks like that uh about one ride at a time reimagine metro um and a few other things there's some beautiful pictures and that's all i have for you right yeah we got a lot of friends and no it's really nice nice very nice yes question uh so where's the booth going to be at certain day question oh i'll get you that the other questions public comment on this item in the room any online done all right well thank you so much that brings us to the end of today's meeting we will adjourn to our next regularly scheduled meeting on friday april 26th at nine a.m so then please take care of yourself and take care of each other thank you