 Morning, I'll now call to order the regular meeting of the County of Santa Cruz Board of Supervisors. It's 9 a.m., August 23rd. Clerk, will you please call the roll? Supervisor Friend. Here. Coonerty. Here. Caput. Here. McPherson. Here. And Koenig. Here. You have a call. Thank you. We'll now have a moment of silence and a pledge of allegiance. Is there any member of the board that wishes to dedicate this moment to anyone or anything? Mr. Chair, I'd like to recognize a longtime friend of my first life in the newspaper business, Mel Bowen. Very active in sports writing and very active community member who passed away. Really a really kind, considerate gentleman who did a lot for this area for youngsters and so forth. But Mel Bowen should be remembered. Thank you. Thank you. I'd like to mention Ramon Ortiz who passed away, good friend of mine also and a longtime member of the Knights of Columbus in Watsonville raised a lot of money for charity. He passed away about two weeks ago. Okay, thank you. Thank you. We'll hold Mr. Bowen and Mr. Ortiz in our hearts during this moment of silence. Thank you. A allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. I'll like to say is foundation under God, indivisible with the United States of the world. CEO Palacios, do we have any additions or deletions to the consent or regular agenda today? Yes, we do. On the consent agenda, item number 23, packet page 413 is to be replaced to correct the contents in table one, County of Santa Cruz estimated FEMA public assistance claims. And then on item number 40, attachment E, replaced to correct the title of the resolution. The corrected title should read resolution of the Board of Supervisors of the County of Santa Cruz, authorizing the grant application acceptance and execution for the Santa Cruz water hauling and waterman gap water system improvement project. That concludes the corrections to the agenda. Thank you. Would any board member like to remove an item from the consent agenda to the regular agenda? Seeing none, we'll proceed with public comment. First, I would also like to make one note about an item on the consent agenda, which is item 29, pursuant to government code section 54953. I'm announcing that this consent agenda includes item number 29, which is an amendment to resolution number 279-75 to amend the salary schedule for the unrepresented group, which includes local agency executives. Stack recommendation is to set 3% cost of living increases over a three-year period annually, each September, as recommended by the personnel director and county administrative officer. And we'll now move on to public comment. And first up, we have Gail Pellerin, who's speaking on behalf of NAMI at the National Association for Mental Illness. She'd contact me ahead of time and Gail, you may have four minutes since you're representing a group. I'll talk fast. Good morning, Chair Koenig, and thank you board members for the opportunity to speak to you today. My name is Gail Pellerin, and I'm here as a member of NAMI to talk to you and members of the public on a topic that has profoundly impacted me and my children. Suicide was not a topic I spent much time thinking or talking about before November 19th, 2018, when my husband, Tom, the father of our two children, died by suicide. Never gets easier saying that. I am motivated to speak openly and publicly about suicide and mental conditions because suicide is preventable and mental conditions can be treated. Early in my grieving process, I went to talk on suicide and the speaker encouraged us to put our grief to work. That resonated with me. So I joined a suicide survivors group, did the overnight walk to raise money and awareness, started a Facebook group for suicide survivors and joined the local National Alliance on Mental Illness Board. NAMI is an incredible organization providing education support to families and people in need. I participated in their family to family program, which is a free educational program for those with a loved one with a mental health condition. If you are a loved one is having suicidal thoughts or experiencing a mental health condition, please reach out to NAMI. I know how difficult it is to talk about suicide and our mental health. In the beginning, it was very hard for me, but now as my friends and family will test, I do it often. The reality is each and every one of us has struggled, has felt hopeless, has been depressed, especially during the 29 months of living through a global pandemic. Yet many of us silently fight our own battles. The 988 Emergency Mental Health Hotline that launched in July is a great step forward in meeting the needs of those with a mental health crisis. It's an easy to remember number that you can call or text. The goal now is to provide 24-7 mobile mental health care response and provide the essential trained professionals in care facilities needed to treat those in a mental health crisis. I was happy to read the report on today's consent agenda about the incredible work Eric and his team at County Behavioral Health are doing to expand services in Santa Cruz County. I'm gonna skip all the statistics, but bottom line is suicides is second leading cause of death for people ages 10 to 14 and 25 to 34. There's one death by suicide in the US every 11 minutes. Suicide does not discriminate. It impacts all people of all ages, genders, race, ethnicity and comes in sexual orientations. But suicide numbers are higher for white males, veterans, people who live in rural areas, LGBTQ youth and transgender adults, middle-aged adults and tribal populations. Lots of factors are linked to suicide including drug use, financial job problems, relationship problems, health problems, children who are bullied or sexually violated have a high suicide rate. Depressions, the leading cause of suicide and depression can be treated. So what do I hope to accomplish by being here today? I want us all to recognize that suicides are public health crisis. I love the fact that the county has a suicide poster in their bathroom. I'd love to see it updated with the 988 number and have that in all public bathrooms. I want all workplaces to talk to their workers about suicide prevention. I love the fact that the County Superintendent of Schools for our Sabah is supporting wellness centers. We need more health counselors on campus. I want everyone who is listening to accept that we all have a role in preventing suicide. Learn the warning signs, ask the difficult questions and let family, friends and neighbors know they are not alone. Talk to them, listen, you don't have to be an expert and it might feel uncomfortable but let them know you're available and it helps available. Their decision is, their condition is temporary. Suicide is final. And one thing we need more in this world is kindness. Please be kind to one another. You don't know what's happening in someone's life so share a smile or a wave, be positive, be supportive, be encouraging, considerate of others and closing, I want everyone to know who's thinking about suicide that your life matters. Your family and friends will not be better off without you. Take it from someone who knows. Please reach out for help by calling or texting the hotline 988. And now Regina would like to say a few words. Thank you, Carol. Chair. Good morning, members of the board. My name is Regina Deal and I'm here to put a human face on the issue of youth mental health in our schools and communities. My son, Mateo, was a freshman at Scotts Valley High School when he took his own life in February. Here is a photo so you can see this is Mateo. He was a kind, generous and well-liked student. His teachers in middle school selected him as the most compassionate student in his class. Another student took their life a couple of years before in our little small community in Scotts Valley. The only support these young people had at school was an overworked counselor who focused primarily on the academic needs of students. I think our young people deserve better. Prior to COVID, one in five children had mental health challenges. The pandemic, of course, exacerbated the problem. In December, the US Surgeon General warned of a devastating mental health crisis and various doctor groups have called it a national emergency, citing the unprecedented increases in depression, anxiety, and, sadly, suicide. These problems are especially acute among our LGBTQ-plus population, students of color, and other marginalized groups. In Mateo's case, he was very badly bullied at school as a result of his race. Meanwhile, many families find it nearly impossible to even get an appointment with a therapist or a psychiatrist. Even if they can, the lack of financial resources leaves too many of our young people without help. I'm here with a very simple request to require that the life-saving 988 number be posted in all public bathrooms. Many young people who do not have access to any other resource may reach out for immediate help in the midst of a mental health crisis. It might have saved Mateo's life and so many others before it's too late. I ask for your support. Thank you. One more thing, September is the National Suicide Prevention Awareness Month, and thank you for doing a proclamation in honor of that. So thank you for all the work that you do. Thank you, Ms. Pellerin and Ms. Deal. Chair, if I might interrupt, we become aware of a typo in the Zoom link online and we'd like to read the corrected link so people can participate fully. Okay, let's go ahead. The corrected Zoom link is H-T-T-P-S colon forward slash forward slash U-S zero six W-E-B dot zoom dot U-S slash J slash eight five one six three two one zero two zero zero. Thank you, Chair. Thank you. Go ahead. Hello, good morning supervisors. And thank you, Gail. My family has also been touched by suicide and I really appreciate your efforts. My name is Carolyn Bliss-Eisberg and I'm a 34 year resident of a complex of roads called the Ellen Roads Community up in the Santa Cruz Mountains in Bruce McPherson's district. We're here. I'm here with four of my neighbors and we're representing our community which has 30 households on five to 10 acre parcels on a complex of three roads. We're urgently speaking for 23 of these residents who have been deprived of trash collection services since July 31st, even though they've been trying very hard for a month to get this resolved the entire month of July turned into something with subject title of trash talk. Determination of the service that we had used for about three decades was justified, I believe. But the way that the rollout happened was not justified. I've got it documented for you and if the county clerk or the clerk of the board could distribute these I'd appreciate it. The month of July was an entire month of confusion, chaos and inadequate information. We reached out and asked for some kind of resolution, some kind of community Zoom call and that was ignored. When we finally did get definitive information back from Public Works and from GreenWaste, we learned that for the service that had been ideal for us was gonna, our prices were gonna go from $20 to $77 a month and it was for a service that we virtually didn't need. In fact, you could use the Ellen Road community as a model to a zero waste universally serviced community. And we've pretty much gotten there by ourselves. I- Thank you. Good morning. Morning. My name is Rob Boyer. I'm the elected resident of the Ellen Road Association and the middle Ellen Road manager. Well, I'm sorry, pull up the mic. Our community consists of professionals and retirees who contributed substantial tax revenue to the county and who also maintain our private roads without any county assistance. In 2022, for example, owners of the 37 parcels were assessed $56,000 for road maintenance and repair. During emergencies, such as mudslides, special assessments are collected for repairs and rebuilding. Residents also routinely volunteer to clear the road of debris and vegetation to keep it safely passable. We are concerned about heavy trucks traversing our roads, especially during the wet season, when the underlying soils become soft and our roads are extremely susceptible to damage. Literally our lives depend on well-maintained roads, both for resident evacuation and emergency vehicle access. Anything that compromises road safety is a huge concern. Our Road Association maintenance agreement states that residents are responsible for any road damage they cause either directly or by services they hire. Greenways requires us to sign a waiver freeing them from any responsibility for road damage. This is unacceptable. Greenways plans to make two pickups per week once for trash and other for recycling. This will put more stress on our roads, generate more pollution and cost more for residents than the smaller sized trucks and flexible pickup schedules offered by Summit Waste. We do need a trash collection service. Halting trash pickup on the Allen roads is not the solution. Many residents are not physically capable of hauling trash bins more than one mile to the Zianti Road gate or 10 miles to the nearest transport station. However, green waste is clearly not the best solution for our community. Please allow us to use Summit Waste as our trash pickup service. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Boyer. Hello, supervisors. Thank you for letting us speak to you today. My name is Gloria Fulveri and I have been a resident of Middle Allen Road since 2012. My husband Fred died suddenly a year ago. Although it's a special challenge to live alone in Santa Cruz Mountains, I choose to remain here because I love where I live. I love the trees, birds, mountain lions, deer, rabbit bobcats and even the rats, lizards and snakes. I love the forest smells. I love Santa Cruz. To me, this is truly paradise. I only buy biodegradable packaged goods with the recycle symbol. My carbon footprint is as small as I can make it. I do my own composting. My cardboard glass and cans would be one kitchen tall trash per week. I am happy that Universal Service is a goal for the state and the county, but Universal shouldn't mean required three-car weekly service if not needed. That contributes to pollution. Physically, it has been a challenge to haul my 20 gallon can to the end of my driveway. I have several underlying health conditions and have sometimes been confined to my home. I discovered that summit waste occasionally picks up at the door for other mountain residents in similar situations. Green waste is much more than I need, want or can afford. I can't self haul and I believe summit is the only logical choice for me under these conditions. Santa Cruz County forcing people to use service companies that don't meet their needs is not the Santa Cruz way. I want to use summit. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Fullberry. Good morning, gentlemen. My name is Sharon Ilgis and I live on Upper Ellen Road. My husband and I built our three-story two-story four-bedroom bathroom 46 years ago. We raised our sons there. In the beginning, we were a mile and a half from the nearest paved road and we had a well dug, we installed a septic and we lived off the grid for almost five years. A handful of other folks in the same area had the same goals and at the same time, together we paid road dues, cleared culverts, dug ditches, hauled and spread gravel and eventually got our roads paved. It was a community effort then and it's a community effort still. It's always been a wonderful and close community with everyone working together to make it possible for us to live and raise our children in the mountains. New young families with children are moving in. Today, the Ellen Roads have evolved into a gated, high tax-paying community of homes with price tags well over a million dollars. We have a legally constituted road maintenance agreement governing all homeowners. Last year, our personal annual road dues amounted to close to $3,000. Over the 46 years I've lived up there, we have invested over $300,000 in our roads, including special assessments for bridges, washouts and defensible fire clearing. Keeping our roads in good condition is vital to our existence. We support local government and don't ask for much for our tax dollars. We do not resist regulations. We vote and we actively participate in causes promoting the common good. We know what works and what doesn't work. Only a nimble provider like Summit Waste that can provide and meet our unique needs and preserve our investments in our roads is a viable solution. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Hildges. Hi there. My name is Aaron Alhung-Zaden. Thanks for taking my time today. We moved to the Elans just over four years ago. And when I moved to the mountains, I knew services wouldn't ever be guaranteed. Things like septic, data connectivity, water, I wouldn't be easy and we accepted that. And further, I come from a family of public servants was a volunteer fireman myself. And I knew those services would be challenged as well. And unfortunately, I've now been the first unseen of several local emergencies on our roads. I've also spent a lot of time putting things back on the road that should be there, like an Uber driver back in June that fell off Zaini and putting things off the road that shouldn't be there, like a countless number of trees. And I'm okay with that because all the positives that my neighbors have mentioned about this, this mountain living, however, I'm not okay with dealing problems that haven't been problems that used to have solutions. And when addressing this trash problem, instead of consulting with us about a solution which keeps with the county goals of universal service and zero waste, we were forced to use an oversized company designed for high density urban usage. And now this hack job of a plan is gonna take my Monday. And so on Monday, I'll be voluntarily dragging a trailer from house to house, picking up their trash to haul to the transfer station. Where if history repeats itself, I'll get there. I won't be asked about myself haul or permit. I won't even be asked to separate recyclables from waste. We need a choice of a small business who can take this on. Somebody nimble, flexible and they can serve what we need. And we need your support to enable that. Thank you. Thank you, Aaron. Good morning. My name is Shirley Johnson. I'm here to speak about the county's request, the Planning Commission for KSCL radio station to tear out all the perimeter concrete they put in seven or eight years ago. My daughter was in architecture at Cal Poly in 08. And when I drove down for the pre-graduation several weeks before, it's about a three hour drive. And I listened to KSCL when that morning there was fire and coral lettuce and I could see it from my home. My brother called and I was up but I hadn't opened the curtains and he says, do you see the fire? And I said, what fire? Upon looking out the curtains, lo and behold, it was very red and didn't come down to our homes. But most people evacuated as I did, driving down a day early to Cal Poly for the show of their architecture plans. Anyway, to go on, I feel that it's not right for the county planning commission to request them to tear out all this stuff as a lifeline long wildlife biologist. I don't feel it's any great harm to the lagoon there to the wildlife, animal life, aquatic life, anything. It would probably be far more damaging to hack out all that concrete that had been in to secure the safety of the radio station. It's the only thing in this community, this Santa Cruz County that when there's an emergency that was a fire emergency. And is the time correct on that? No, I don't think, anyway. It is, thank you, Ms. Johnson. It was that all the time. Thank you. Good morning. My name's Antoinette Bauer-Smidberg and we find ourselves all celebrating the Monterey Bay Sanctuary 30th anniversary this year. It took a lot of people, ordinary and prominent to make that happen. And while substantial as being one of the most pristine areas in the world and stellar in reversing environmental degradation, those efforts are paling in comparison to the deep ecological wisdom and protection of the First Nation people who stewarded this land for thousands of years. As the earliest foreigners described the coastal plains, skies and waterways were abundant with life. I wanna recognize that we are on a Waswas territory. The Waswas and Mutsun speaking people now call themselves the Alma Mutsun. They're dedicated to relearning the ancient knowledge of their ancestors and re-envisioning the commitment to protecting and storing this land. The land was always sacred to the Alma Mutsun and is sacred still. Uristak, their most sacred site, sits in the southern end of the Santa Cruz Mountains and is being threatened by a sand and gravel mine. It's your responsibility to protect us as county citizens and the environment. Please direct the qualified and professional staff in the county's departments and commissions to review and comment by September 26th, 2022. The Santa Clara County Sergeant Ranch DEIR. The mine threatens the tribe's indigenous rights, protection of endangered and threatened species, highly protected, highly critical wildlife corridor. It threatens the quality of air with micro-particle sand and it threatens the groundwater and the Pajaro River watershed from depletion, contamination and increased flooding. I also call upon- Thank you. Should I start? Hello, my name is Dora Rosen. I'm basically here to say ditto to what Antoinette Bauer just said. I'm very grateful and humbled to be volunteering with the Alma Mutsun Tribal Band who's stewarding this area on their native plant restoration project and also ask y'all to have comments made by your staff on the DEIR and to pass the resolution opposing mining on Uristak is not needed. In fact, there's sand and gravel quarries right here in Santa Cruz County. And this is just such an important thing. We really need to learn from the Alma Mutsun and the city of Santa Cruz passed a resolution recognizing as I'm sure you all do that this is part of an eco region. It's not, you can't really divide up the environment according to government jurisdictions. So I hope you will also pass the resolution and talk with the county supervisors and people you know in Santa Clara County. The Santa Clara County Humans' Right Commission also declared the mine, a violation of human rights for the Alma Mutsun. And it has been this part, Uristak, the sacred land of Uristak also is a transportation quarter. It's the only transportation quarter for animals. It's in the Santa Cruz mountain range and it connects to the Diablo mountain range and also to the Gavilan mountain range. So thank you very much for your time. Thank you, Ms. Rosen. Thank you, good morning. My name is Becky Steinbrenner. Ironically, I was listening to Valentin Lopez, leader of the Alma Mutsun tribe talking about this very issue on Radio KSCO this morning coming here. So I do want to also support your help. Supervisor Koenig, I know you are working with Mr. Zwirling at KSCO Radio. There are many reasons why that project could get a riparian exception. I have written your board with extensive information about county codes that support and justify your helping him with this 1947 structure that would be protected by the concrete slab that was poured in the back along Corcoran Lagoon. In the event of sea rise, it could help preserve that historic building and help preserve the emergency response communication that it provides and has historically provided for residents throughout the Monterey Bay and beyond. I personally saw during the CZU fire evacuations when I was volunteering at the Santa Cruz County fairgrounds. I saw people listening in their cars and on their phones to the daily cowfire updates on the fire because they were not at the fairgrounds. People were listening live on KSCO. We need to preserve this. So please work with staff to secure a riparian exception. You can meet all of the five findings that are necessary to do that. And I outlined that in my email to you last night. Finally, I just want to say on item 21, the Davenport recycled water. I'm happy that it's going to be at least used in further conversation with Mr. Hio. I found out that it produces 28 acre feet a year of recycled water that is not being used at all. That's a crime. And I just want to ask on number 40, the RFP. Why is the water for water haulers being limited to an amount that would be less than two people or a household for six weeks? And my last comment is, why is there no flag of the state of California flying outside the county building? It hasn't been there for weeks. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Steinbrenner. Seeing no one else here in board chambers, is there anyone online that wishes to comment? Yes, we do have speakers online. Call in user one, your microphone is now available. Good morning, Marilyn Garrett. Supervisors, please take the direction of the speakers this morning in your policymaking decisions. I am calling because I saw on top of the sheriff building, what I believe is a 5G antenna globe. And I right now am looking at a photo of what looks the same on an article. Let me tell you what this is. The evidence mount, this is cell phone task force.org from May 5th, 2020, a photograph of the diamond princess on February 5th, 2020, while it was quarantined in Yokohama, shows the five antenna globes on board. What you have looks the same to me. And it says this is a satellite company, SES, that both sets a satellite system. It's part of the Global 5G network. We offer the fastest wifi on the seas, and it goes on with movies, 7,000 sensors, 650 well-mounted touch screens, 1,700 wifi access points. This was massive microwave radiation on this princess ship. First thing that counties should always do is make sure that there is proof of no harm to people or the environment in their policy. Thank you, Ms. Garrett. Surge, your microphone is now available. Good morning. Board of Supervisors and Chair Koenig. My name's Surge Cagno. I'm the co-chair of the Mental Health Advisory Board. I'd like to thank Gail Pellerin and Regina Field for their courage and compassion. I and the Mental Health Advisory Board support their advocacy for suicide awareness. The Mental Health Advisory Board's 988 committee has had Andrea Tuleo of the Family Services Agency to give a presentation of their lifeline suicide prevention phone line, and now easily accessed through 988. We have also been working with her to get bilingual flyers and posters created and shared throughout the county's public bathrooms and hopefully the school's bathrooms as well. We support Gail's advocacy for more mobile mental health services to respond to the increased calls and have written a letter in recommendation of this to the Board of Supervisors previously. We also support the Crisis Hub program being created to help people access services. We would also like to thank Chair Koenig on the suicide awareness letter proclamation for the month of suicide. Thank you for your time. Stay safe. Thank you, Mr. Cogna. We have no further speakers, Chair. All right, then I will return it to the Board for action on the consent agenda. Does any member at the Board wish to make comments? Yes, Chair. First of all, I know it's not usual that we respond to public comments, but I want to thank Gail Peller and Regina for coming forward. I remember as a state legislator that I tried to get a psychologist at every school. They said no funding available. I said every district, no funding available. Every county, no funding available. We're going to face that problem on a statewide basis, but I think the best thing we can do is really promote the 988 number. We can prevent some of these things and we should really work harder at it and make sure that people have more knowledge that they can have that line. On the garbage service, believe me, as people know, I think that issue was poorly communicated and it took too long to respond. I think we are going to respond. That will be satisfactory. And I appreciate those remarks, but which I have received a lot of. But getting now to the consent agenda on item 26, I just, I think it should be noted that we have the results of that election, of the primary election, and there are 74,627 votes cast. Most of them were sent in votes by mail. But what the good news is we had the third highest percentage turnout in the state. The bad news is it was 47%. That is pathetic for the state of California. My congratulations to the Santa Cruz County voters, but let's get to 100% come November. It's unbelievable that with the intensity that we're seeing in our politics of this day and age, that we don't have a higher turnout. And I just, come on people, you can mail in your ballots, it's easy to do. Let's do better than that. Let's get in the 100% if we can. But congratulations on being third highest. On the mental health grant updates on item number 39, I wanna thank the behavioral health team for providing these regular updates and given the connectivity between the mental health needs, substance abuse disorder and homelessness. I think the public benefits from understanding how we're working to address these issues. During our last meeting, I expressed an interest for a study session for the board on the intersections that exist between the healing, the streets plan and the health services and our housing for health in our human services department and health services departments. We agreed to wait until after we know the outcome of the care courts discussion that's in the state level. But I just wanted to remind the board that I think we should benefit or we would benefit from having a more detailed look at all of these programs and funding streams. When we heard the percentage of people that are homeless either need behavioral health assistance or suffer from substance abuse, it's close. I thought it was a third and they said, no, it's certainly over half and maybe up to 75% shocking news and we need to, we're trying to do what we can but we need to get a better coordinated effort to address that issue. On number 40, which was mentioned also by somebody from the public, I wanna thank our environmental health team who worked on securing these grants to provide drought related support to the community. We have a number of private well owners and small water systems that are particularly vulnerable into drought in our rural areas in this day and age. And I do have a question that I'd like to have someone answer if they can. Do we know if there are any or if there are particular systems or portions throughout the county that will benefit from the most from these efforts, Mr. Ryan. Hi, good morning supervisors, Chair Koenig. I'm Sierra Ryan, I'm the water resources manager and environmental health. To answer your question, we have been undergoing a process over the past four months to identify the most vulnerable parts of the county based on a number of factors, including current groundwater elevations, historical water challenges and water quality concerns. There are a number of locations that we've identified that are more likely to suffer due to groundwater changes, especially due to long-term drought. So for example, portions of the summit area, portions of South County have water quality challenges. There are some examples in Bonnie Dune of groundwater elevations being lowered, but there are also opportunities in most of those places for either new wells to be dug or for interconnection with existing water systems. And we're hoping that we can step up our role in the county and start providing greater services to these areas. Okay, thank you. Go to the target areas though in general. Yes. Thank you. That's it. Thank you, Supervisor McPherson. Hi, I'm Mr. Charles. I'm Mr. Franklin speaking on one item, which is item 48, a great appreciation for public works on this Green Valley project that will benefit both Supervisor Caput and my constituents. I don't want to understate the size and scope of this project or really is a significant improvement for biking pedestrian safety as well as some of the metro improvements that'll be made along that two-mile length corridor. They're a very heavily used area in particularly by young families in that area, low-income young families. And so to have these improvements, to have public works be able to secure the state funding and to have the county contributing the final match is pretty significant. Today's action just moves us forward through the first steps of the planning stage, but to have that into construction next year is pretty significant. So there's a lot of appreciation for public works for continuing to improve areas in the South County that really advantage these, in particularly these young families throughout South County. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Supervisor Friend. All right, seeing no other comments or questions by the board, I'll just make a couple of notes. On item 19, I want to thank Katherine Lee for volunteering to serve as Parks and Rec Commissioner for the first district. And on item 24, the fourth quarter report on cannabis licensing office operations. You know, I started to read that 75% of our cannabis business remains illegal in the state and locally. That to me suggests that we continue to fail with our policy around this emerging industry. The report also shows that retail revenues were down 30% from last year and non-retail down two thirds. So I do think it's important that we continue to iterate on this policy. The board has done quite a bit of iteration since the emergence of this industry. And I think we need to keep doing that. About a year ago, the cannabis licensing officer presented a number of ideas that would help support local cannabis industry. And I'd like to see additional direction for the CLO to return to the board with an agenda item to again, present options that would help support the local legal cannabis industry operators and help to increase the tax base of local operations. Those are all my comments. I'll move the recommended action. One second. Okay, any further discussion and supervisor Cunardy, that's without any additional direction? Yeah, unless any of my colleagues want to add additional direction. I think Chair Koenig had some additional direction on the update, yeah. Sorry, sorry, with the additional direction. Okay, thank you. I'm sorry, and that was a motion by Supervisor Cunardy and a second by Supervisor Friend. Yes, that's correct. All right. Any further discussion? Seeing none, clerk roll call vote, please. Supervisor Friend. Aye. Cunardy. Aye. Caput. Aye. And Koenig. Aye. Consent agenda passes as amended. All right, thank you. Then we'll now proceed with item seven, which is to consider an update on the study session on development of the Climate Action and Adaptation Plan and direct the Office of Response, Recovery and Resilience to return on or before December 13th, 2022 with the 2022 Climate Action and Adaptation Plan as outlined in the memorandum with the Director of the Office of Response, Recovery and Resilience. And for our presentation on this item, we have Tatiana Brennan, Senior Admin Analyst and David Reed, our Director of the Office of Response, Recovery and Resilience. Take it away. Good morning, Chair, members of the board, members of the public and county staff. We'll get the presentation up here and we'll get started. So we're gonna start our presentation today with a land acknowledgement. It is with great respect, humility and accountability that I start today's presentation with a land acknowledgement. The land on which we gather is the unceded territory of the Owaswa-speaking UP tribe. The Amamutza tribal band comprised of the descendants of indigenous people taken to Mission Santa Cruz and San Juan Batista during Spanish colonization of the Central Coast is today working hard to restore traditional stewardship practices on these lands and heal from this historic trauma. It is our intention that as we consider this climate action and adaptation plan today, adopt it later this year and implement in the years to come that we seek opportunities to partner with and take guidance from our indigenous community members who understand the dimensionality of what generational stewardship of this land and all its inhabitants means and that we acknowledge and understand the role of colonialism and that it has had on our current climate crisis. We are gathering here today with great responsibility. We have arrived at a pivotal and critical moment and our tasks with leading our community through a gateway of transformative change as we face this climate challenge, how we respond, adapt and mitigate the climate crisis will be a living process and will be woven from social, governmental, adaptive, technical and individual actions. Let's see, I can advance the slides for you. Thank you. So on today's agenda, we're gonna Tatiana and I are going to address the board, introduce you to our climate action and adaptation plan team, discuss the goals and strategies for our 2022 update. We're also gonna reflect on some of the lessons learned from our 2013 climate action plan. And then we're gonna give you an update on where we are in the process, present some of our draft greenhouse gas inventory information, discuss critical targets set forth by the state and next steps in the process before we come back to you in December. We wanted the cap to be a plan that our county staff could own and one in which they could see their contributions. Staff from 10 departments are participating and we also have, oh, thank you. And we also have a internship program where we have interns from Cabrillo, Monterey, Berkeley and UCSE. We also understand that we are stewards of the land for the next generation and that is why we have this internship program. We wanted to bring youth into the development of the cap and the youth that we have represent South County and North County. We also wanted this to be a plan representative of our entire county using similar methodology where possible. So we hired the same consultants used by Watsonville and Santa Cruz and those are the Rincon consultants and with us today, we have them on the line. We have Eric Feldman who is the principal for Rincon and then we also have Eric Vaughn who is the project manager and then senior environmental planner. And finally, we wanted to ensure that the goals and actions in this cap are feasible and that is why we have a steering committee comprised of department heads and deputies and they provide the visionary planning. This guy, oh nice. And here you can see the cap organizational chart. This provides you a visual of the scope of the involvement in the development of the cap. I also want to acknowledge one person that isn't on this chart and that's Kathleen McLaughlin. She's a grad student supporting the development of the regional collaborative. Next slide. Thank you. And here we have the cap goals and strategies. I want to take a moment to highlight what we are working towards. We're working towards alignment with state efforts and targets. We're also working towards a plan for implementation in 2023 but near-term actions that can be implemented as we develop. We're also focusing on goals and actions that address climate change impact on all in our county especially those with the least amount of resources and increased vulnerability. We're also working towards a plan development that has a collective county process. These are the questions that the work groups are asking of each measure. Thank you, Julia. They're asking, does the measure result in specific reduction actions? Does it have trackable and measurable metrics? Is it mandatory or voluntary? Is a lead defined? Is it supported by the community? Is it equitable? And what is the cost to implement? And what are the funding strategies or opportunities? Here you can see the process for designing the strategies in the cap. We start with the goal and then we develop a policy that has a long view towards a target. And then following that we develop an action that develops, that proposes an action or actions that will implement the steps to achieve the targets. Here I just want to take a moment to acknowledge Central Coast Community Energy because they have had a significant impact on decreasing our green house gas emissions and you'll see that in a following slide. And I also want to acknowledge the work of our general services department in completing a county solar installation project. And I want to highlight these things because they are major accomplishments that our county has done. And so they help pave the way and show us what we are capable of achieving. And here I want to briefly take a moment to reflect again on the positive work that has been done and is still occurring in a review of measures in the climate action strategy from 2013, 24% of the measures had been completed. I also want to draw your attention to the fact that we also saw a challenge in the area of land use. That was where we encountered the most barriers and were unable to achieve progress. Here's a slide where you can see the timeline of the plan of the CAP. Phase one and two are complete on target. We have the greenhouse gas inventory and the climate vulnerability assessment. And those have been informing the work groups in terms of what kind of actions and measures they're going to develop. As part of that process, the cities of Watsonville and Santa Cruz are meeting with the work groups to share their plans, their measures, lessons learned, and methodology. We also have assistant director from the community development CDI, community infrastructure. Stephanie Hansen is going to be sharing about the sustainability update and so ways that our county can align with existing code and existing plans. We also want to not only align, but we also want to find where there are gaps so that we can develop new strategies and opportunities. And here is our greenhouse gas inventory. I just want to take a moment to highlight a few things for you. You can see here that the majority of greenhouse gas emissions are coming from passenger vehicles. We also have 14.7% coming from residential natural gas and 12.9 coming from commercial vehicles. So those are three of our greatest contributors. We also have non-residential natural gas at 7.7 and then off-road equipment at 9.9. And to summarize this, what this means is that 61.4% of greenhouse gas emissions are coming from on-road transportation. And then gas usage in buildings is 22%. So what we want to talk about now is where we need to go given the state of our current inventory. And so what I want to do is that the next series of graphs is kind of describe where we're at and where we need to go and how we want to get there with the work of the working groups in the Climate Action and Adaptation Plan team. So this first graph shows you what business as usual, the forecast of our emissions would look like if we did nothing to address climate change and that growth that you see in that red line at the top of the graph represents the natural growth of our county from a population standpoint and the emissions from that addition over time out to 2045. What the adjusted forecast or that kind of purple downtrending line represents is the adjusted forecast and that represents the things that the state has control over and the things that the state is doing to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions through their legislative resources and tools. So things like transportation legislation to improve fuel efficiency of vehicles, for us having 3CE, the California Renewable Portfolio Standard which addresses electricity is not as big a factor because as Tatiana mentioned, 3CE is doing an amazing job at converting our portfolio to renewable and then the California Building and Energy Code Title 24 standards are continuing to try and make our homes particularly new construction more energy efficient. The thing that I also want to highlight in this slide and it reiterates what Tatiana mentioned in the pie chart is that that red, orange and yellow areas are the significant contributors to our greenhouse gas emissions portfolio. And that again is the passenger vehicles in red, then the residential and non-residential gas in yellow and orange. And then we also have the commercial vehicles as well. So it's that transportation sector and our building natural gas which are the biggest areas that we can address our emissions. So where do we need to go is an important conversation in how we get there. We have two pieces of state action. One is state law SB 32 which says we need to reduce our emissions by 40% from our 1990 standards or our 1990 baseline. And in this graph you can see it's maybe a little bit small but our 1990 was just north of 800,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions. So to reach that target, that green line, that trend line coming down, we need to reduce our emissions by just over 200,000 metric tons of carbon CO2 or CO2 equivalent which is all greenhouse gas emissions. That is the state law to reach that target. That is a statewide target. What we wanna recognize is that if we don't take immediate and an important action in the near term, we may lose the local control to dictate how we reduce our emissions. So we wanna begin that trajectory down towards meeting that 2030 target as quickly as we can so that we can show that progress and that we don't get impacted by future state legislation which mandates strategies that may not be as advantageous or supportive to our county's goals and strategies. The other target that's significant is executive order B5518 which talks about carbon neutrality by 2045. At present that is just an executive order but we certainly expect that in the coming years and decades that that will become a state law as well. So again, while that target is not a state law at this time, we again want to make our effort to move towards meeting these targets so that we are making the progress that needs to be made and that we don't get negatively impacted by future state actions. As a frame of reference, that 200,000 metric tons of carbon equivalent that we need to reduce by 2030. Most of the time, most of us myself included we don't talk in metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent very often. That represents essentially the entire emissions of the city of Watsonville with a population of over 50,000 people. So we as a county just as an unincorporated county need to reduce our emissions by that measure to meet our 2030 guidelines. So this takes a concerted effort and what I want to highlight are some of the areas that the Climate Action and Adaptation Plan team and the work groups that Tatiana articulated will be looking at a number of different strategies and evaluating those strategies on their effectiveness and timeliness to meet these targets. And so what I want to highlight are in the transportation sector to reduce vehicle miles traveled or VMT. We have a number of resources at our disposal. Obviously from a transportation policy and infrastructure standpoint, safe routes to schools, multimodal infrastructure and expanding public transportation options are key tenants to reducing vehicle miles traveled in our public work staff and our Metro and our regional transportation commission which you all sit on are making great strides to address those areas. The other most more important area is how we build. Where we build, is it vertical or is it horizontal development? And how quickly do we move to address our housing equity affordability and climate crisis? So it's really that land use policy and where we choose to build and how is an important part of that in terms of reducing vehicle miles traveled. The other place in terms of the transportation sector is obviously in terms of electric vehicle adoption. Our general services department is working hard to analyze our own county fleet with the goal of right sizing it, modernizing and electrifying the fleet as well as providing charging infrastructure for our own vehicles and the public. But that is just a small fraction of the need in terms of reducing the emissions from our transportation sector. So most of the incentives for moving in that direction to the public will still continue to be air board, state and federal incentives and rebates. On the building electrification side, there's a menu of electrification ordinance strategies out there from new construction only to all remodels to time of replacement. So when a piece of gas equipment is in need of replacement and they need a permit to do so, they would not be allowed to replace it with a gas appliance. They would have to replace it with an electric solution. All of these tools will be analyzed by the CAP team and we would expect some sort of phased approach to bringing these to the community because we know that from other jurisdictions, no single one of those strategies is sufficient to meet the need, but it likely is best achieved through a phased approach by implementing those in steps. On the solid waste side, obviously SB 1383, which is the Organics Waste Diversion State Law will play a big role, but also fleet electrification over time of our waste transportation infrastructure as well as the off-road equipment, both our own off-road equipment, but also in the ag industry. The other thing that's not shown on this graph is the role carbon sequestration will play. We expect that as we get and try to achieve that 2045 target of carbon neutrality that it will have a balance of sequestration strategies. Many of those candidly don't exist on an industrial scale, so we expect there to be some technological advances, but there are things that our local planning, Metropolitan Planning Organization, AMBAG, received a grant to study working lands and its carbon sequestration capacity and how the use of our working lands, our agricultural and forest lands impacts climate. Obviously making efforts to regrow and restore the forest that we lost during the fire and then also exploring different agricultural practices and crop portfolios that reduce our greenhouse gas emissions in that area could be considered as part of that sequestration equation. And lastly, there's an emerging market and an emerging science in the realm of Biochar, which is a byproduct of burning organic waste in a non-oxygenated environment and it concentrates that carbon and can be a soil amendment. So that's an emerging area of research that we in collaboration with the city of Watsonville are exploring and is certainly something that is peaking the interest of folks like in our community that have experienced a wildfire and we have a lot of standing dead carbon and dead trees. So sequestration will be part of that equation, but the key take home right now is that we are gonna be looking through these measures at these areas and more to reduce our carbon emissions to meet these trajectories and to meet these targets in 2030 and 2045. And on this side, you can see what Dave and I are talking about in terms of a phased approach with just the work on the cap. So we have the work that the cap work groups are doing to design a plan that can be implemented next year. But we also have county actions that are occurring right now. TSD, as Dave said, is working on fleet electrification and vehicle charging stations and then replacing hot water heaters with electric heat pumps. We're also looking at the inflation reduction act and what kind of funding opportunities are available for our county. We're also looking at build back better funding opportunities. And then we're also working on the regional climate collaborative, which is a consortium of cities and counties that are working towards regional electrification. And then I also wanna highlight the work of the Central Coast Community Energy initiatives in terms of electrification. And before I move on to our final slide, I would like to take a moment to see if there's anybody in the audience that is working on, that's on the work groups. And if there's anybody in the audience that's working on the work groups, would you please stand? And I just want, thank you, I just want you to see this is your staff and they've all dedicated a significant amount of time and continue to dedicate time towards this. They meet after each meeting, they go back to their department, they meet with their department staff, they meet with their department directors, they gather feedback. This is truly a county wide effort. So thank you. Thank you. And then, can you move to the next slide? And then finally, I'd like to close with our recommended actions versus to accept and file this status update of the Climate Action and Adaptation Plan. And second is to please direct the Office of Response Recovery and Resilience to return on or before December 13th, 2022 with the proposed 2022 Climate Action and Adaptation Plan. So we're happy to answer any questions you may have. Thank you, Ms. Brennan. Thank you, Director Reed. Are there questions or comments from members of the board? Yeah, Mr. Chair. Supervisor McPherson. I just want to thank everyone that is a part of this report. Congratulations on seeing where we are and not unusual for Santa Cruz County to be at the lead of the state of California as far as I know. In addressing climate change issues that we have, it's a daunting task that we have to address. And we've got a great start on it. And I just like, you've answered some of my questions about the timelines and benchmarks for implementation. So I do appreciate that. A great report that you have. And maybe you answered this one too, that what will be the priority adaptation initiatives for the new cap? I mean, I guess it's going to be vehicles and residential gas. Those be the targets, because they're the biggest. Yeah, so I mean, I think one of the things that we talked about is the distinction between mitigation and adaptation. And so the mitigation measures are the measures to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Adaptation strategies will include things like the hazardous fuel reduction strategies that we need to do to reduce the potential negative impacts of wildfires. We're going to need to look at adaptive strategies around sea level rise. The public works or community development and infrastructure and the RTC and OR3 were awarded a grant to look at the vulnerability of our transportation network and explore adaptation strategies to address those vulnerable areas of our transportation network as well. So those are a couple examples. Okay, thank you. And as we continue to electrify our transportation system, big question is going to be where will the funding come from? And I know the state is trying to push things on and that's understandable. We've got a great start here in this whole, this county and this whole region, but that's going to be a big question of the financing of it because it's going to be a very expensive operation that we have to fulfill. We're going to have to depend on state and federal sources, I'm sure. Yeah, Tatiana can share briefly the regional collaborative and the purpose of that, of gathering those folks. Sure. Yes, I do want to acknowledge first that in the Inflation Reduction Act, there's significant funding for purchasing electric vehicles, but also on a broader scale, the regional collaborative is coming together to apply for grants, large multi-million dollar grants that will fund. And we're in good position on that, I would assume, right? Yes, we are. Yes, we are. So that's really our angle towards doing that. The key to highlight there as well is that we are more competitive for these big federal grants and federal opportunities when we collaborate with the city of Santa Cruz, the city of Watsonville, the county of Monterey and the county of San Benito. We're just a small region, right? But if we work together collaboratively and we apply collaboratively, we believe we'll be more competitive for those funds. So that's one of the key strategies of building this regional collaborative. Thank you. Sure. Thank you, Supervisor McPherson. Supervisor Coonerty, you're next. Yeah, thank you. So it's a great report and I appreciate the collaborative nature of both the other jurisdictions and with students from UCSC and other institutions. It's great to have this multifaceted effort. I encourage you when the goals are developed that I like the questions that would be asked and I encourage you to focus on a few big ones for which every people are specifically accountable to reaching and agencies are accountable to reaching versus 30 or 40 smaller ones where the accountability is dispersed. One of my biggest questions though is it looks like we're working off the 2019 data and as we all know, the world has changed dramatically since then. And is there a way that we can get updated information because it feels like we're a business making decisions or an institution making decisions based on budgets from three years ago. And I'd like us to be more nimble in our and adjusting to the big macro trends. Great question, Supervisor. So the 2019 data is the most recent complete data set that we have on the emissions inventory. One of the things that Ms. Brennan mentioned is the consistency across jurisdictions in methodology and data available. One thing that was actually noted by the consultant is that preliminary initial data from 2020 actually has some anomalies that are unusual. Obviously we were in the middle of or starting our pandemic. So 2019 represents kind of the cleanest data. It does represent, we did achieve kind of the mid SB 32 milestone of being 20% below 1990 levels by 2020. So we achieved that by 2019. So that was a good kind of data point metric to track. But we just, the way the data is collected at a meta level, the 2019 is our best data to date. Is there an effort to update that? I mean, I'm just, what I'm thinking is, like 2020 and 2021 were anomalies, but they also spurred a remote work innovations that if we can target our policies around those macro driven events, we're gonna have much more success than trying to sort of swim against the tide. Yeah, one of the things about standardizing our methodology, and I do wanna acknowledge that the planning department and David Carlson did an amazing job in 2012 and 2013 and with our original climate action strategy. But they were working in an environment where the standardization of greenhouse gas emissions inventories hadn't been developed. So they created a system to account for our emissions. With this update, we're standardizing our methodology, which will make it much easier to integrate the new data as soon as it's available to be able to track our progress on a much more regular basis. And what we intend and hope to do is to integrate these initiatives and efforts into our operational plan on a two year cycle. So really begin to track and measure and recalibrate based on best available data on a much more frequent basis than every 10 years. Okay, great, thank you. Before we move on, I just wanna see if our consultants are on the line because what we've been learning is, or I had been learning, is the value in not having a greenhouse gas inventory every year, the value of having several years in between. So I wanna see, is Eric Feldman available to make a comment about this? Yes, I'm available, hello. Yeah, there's a pretty significant effort that's involved with collecting the data for inventories and the value of doing it when the data isn't granular to the level where it provides information on a regular basis just isn't justified. So we have been recommending that we develop a really concise methodology to calculate the emissions and then collect data on a every two to three year basis so that you're staying on track but you're not spinning wheels when there's a lot of other efforts that can be focused on during that time frame. Okay, great. Thank you, Supervisor Coonerty. Other comments or questions from members of the board? Supervisor Caput. Yeah, I wanna thank you also for the report. I remember I lived down in the Los Angeles area for four years back in the 70s. Your microphone, if you could, Supervisor Caput, just turn the, hit the little gray button there. The what? Your microphone's off if you could just turn on your microphone. Yeah, is that better? No. I guess just lean closer to it. Yeah, okay. Yeah. I remember living back in the Los Angeles area back in the mid 70s and late 70s and the orange sky from the smog and everything like that. They had smog days and everything. I'm wondering, we've done a lot since then to make the air better. Is there a point of no return where we've damaged it so much that it can't really heal? It's almost like there are natural causes too like volcanoes or different things, fires and all that. So, I mean, we really have a lot of work to do for the next generation. And it's obvious we've all, we don't have to be a scientist to see that things aren't like years ago. The climate has definitely changed as far as I'm concerned just by my own observation and not based on science. I would say, hey, what's going on? So, we do have a lot of work and hopefully we're not at that point where there's no return. I don't know, can, what is the science now on? Let's say there was no more manmade smog or anything like that. Would the atmosphere and everything somewhat heal or is it, are we at a breaking point? There's a lot to climate science for sure. Certainly the carbon cycle is, it naturally includes the growth of vegetation. So, green plants, photosynthesis takes carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, produces oxygen. So, in theory, over the history of our planet, we've had high carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and that's spurred large plant growth. But not to get too deep into the weeds there. I wanna take your comment and just highlight that there will be technological solutions to help us but really to achieve what we need to achieve there are gonna be adaptive challenges that our community will have to look different, live different, move from place to place in a different way to achieve those goals. So, we're not at the point of no return but we need to make important concerted efforts as a community, as a region, as a state, as a country and as a globe to avoid the worst effects of climate change. Those include things like the catastrophic failure of some of the ice sheets in Antarctica which could raise sea level by three to 10 feet and they are very worried that that is an accelerating process. So, a sea level rise of millimeters a year is what's been commonly discussed and everybody has a hard time conceptualizing that but I think it's easier for us to be, to recognize that three to 10 feet of sea level rise or more would be a very dramatic impact. So, we wanna take the efforts to stem that from happening for sure. Sure, and then there's other things. The city of Watsonville in the last couple of years has been giving away free trees to all the residents of Watsonville and then, of course, our office, we've given away 18,000 or more small redwood trees to plant throughout the county and part of them went to Monterey County. The problem with the tree part is if we're going through all these droughts, you gotta get the tree going for a couple of years before it'll catch on its own. So, that's where you're trying to help but at the same time, you plant the tree, if you can't water it through the first two summers, it probably won't survive. So, it's really tough, tough battle. Yeah, no, I wanna appreciate the work that your office and you've done in terms of tree planting. Certainly tree planting is part of that sequestration equation but also managed forestry is important as well. So, whenever a timber harvest plan is developed in our county, there's actually a carbon calculation done and generally speaking, I managed forest where there's selective harvesting of trees has a net carbon sink so the forest can grow more effectively. One of the things about our amazing redwood trees is that when we clear cut them in many parts of our county in the 1930s and 40s and before then, they grew back vibrantly, right? But they grew back at a density that was not a natural density of trees. So, the trees that burned in the CZU fire, that was forest that had been cut down in the early part of the 1900s, but grew back very densely. And so, we do need to look from an adaptation standpoint at how we manage our forests and how we manage our public lands to make them more resilient and ideally make them better carbon sinks. You bet. I've been a member of the Save the Redwoods Lake for 50 years since I was in college and everything and the Semper Virons Fund and League, they're starting to look at managing the forests that we do have so that in the future that they'll have older trees that'll survive. Like you said, about 100 years ago, they clear cut thousands of acres, probably about 80% of all the natural growth in California. It's hard to believe that that happened 100 years ago and we're still seeing the effects of that. So, yeah, that's what they're looking at now, protecting what we have, letting the 100 year old trees become 200 year old trees in the future. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Caput. Supervisor McPherson. In some context of this, I think the elevation of downtown Santa Cruz is 14 feet. So we're a target, so to speak. Thank you. Just a couple of questions for you. On the adaptation front, of course, we've all experienced the air quality when we have a huge wildfire. Are you looking at any strategies either to alert the public or some kind of clean air shelters during wildfires? And I think they were saying that breathing air on those days was like smoking a pack of cigarettes. Yeah, one of the exciting things that we're looking at is kind of moving away from the notion of just CRCs, which is the community resource center model that PG&E created to address their public safety power shutoffs to an all hazards resource center that would be available to the community during extreme heat events or air quality events. And one of the things that I'm really grateful for in the leadership of our library system is that our new library leadership recognizes the importance of the library system as serving in that function to some degree. So I look forward to working closely with them to build more of those types of resources through our existing library system and other targeted facilities around the county for air quality, but also look at grants for air purification systems because we know that climate change and air quality will disproportionately impact our lower income residents who can't necessarily may not have the money for an air conditioning system. And so they need good air quality in their homes during these circumstances because they may not be able to leave the window open. Okay, thank you. And then regarding methane production, I think that's typically mostly, are we measuring it? And I think mostly this comes from waste. Is the new composting rules going to attack with the majority of that? Is there anything else we can do regarding our landfills to reduce methane production? I'm not sure if Director Machado, that's not my area of expertise, but certainly methane from our landfills is a big contributor. We do a great job, I think, capturing and reusing that material, but I don't know if Director Machado or a member of CDI wants to comment on that specifically. Thank you and good morning, Board. Matt Machado, Director of CDI. If I could hear again the question or comment on methane production and the expanse of it. Yeah, the question is in regards to the point of vista landfill, obviously, my understanding would be that's the primary source of methane emissions in our county. Now, obviously we should see some improvement with the new composting rules and removing that from the waste stream. Is that pretty much our primary strategy or are there other things that we're doing to reduce methane production from the landfill? Sure, that's a good question. So it's a multi-fold effort and so currently we do collect the methane from our closed landfill and we co-generate that into electricity directly. And then in the future, as we build a new compost facility, we are keeping an eye on additional processes like anaerobic digestion, which is a really effective way to convert organic waste directly into electricity through a co-generation process. And then there's an additional process that we're watching very closely as we build our own compost facility as called a gasification. It's a similar process where you can take organic waste and even other trash and convert that directly into electricity either through methane production or even into a liquid fuel. So there's a lot of technologies that we're watching closely and we're trying to ready ourselves through our own collection and creation of a compost facility and even through our transportation production. So yes, we're watching that and we're hoping the future brings us those opportunities to where we can convert our trash directly into energy. So yes. Okay, thank you very much, Director Machado. Just a couple more questions. I mean, clearly the biggest challenge ahead of us is transportation, reducing emissions from transportation, electrifying the fleet that we do retain. Do we have any requirements today or is the state developing any requirements for electric charging stations or electric chargers and new multifamily or single-family residences? I don't have the ordinance information on the top of my head. I know Assistant Director Hansen might be in the audience that could talk about current or future state legislation around electrification charging requirements. Good morning, Chair Koenig, members of the board. There are in the building code and the upcoming building code, there are some newer requirements that are going to start to address electrification and EV charging stations. We've been in the sustainability update as we finalized some of the policies related to vehicle miles traveled and transportation demand management, which kind of work hand in hand, to improve our transportation situations. We stopped just a little bit short of requiring electrification because we think the state is actually going to be doing some of that work for us and we didn't want to have a conflict in there. So, yes, we are expecting some improvements in that way and the hell green code. All right, thank you. Yeah, thank you. And then my final question is, I mean, my understanding is that both the city of Santa Cruz and Watsonville are now requiring building a new construction to be all electric, is that correct? That's my understanding, yes. Okay, I mean, this is a strategy that was outlined in the previous climate action plan, some kind of requirements around building electrification. I think it's really been clearly outlined of one of the two major things we can do, right? I mean, electrifying transportation and electrifying our homes. As you also mentioned, it's an incremental process. So I think that we should stop wasting time as clearly it's an emergency. And I would love to see, I guess, you work with the planning department to come back in December with the final plan, at least with an initial ordinance to require electrification of new homes, new construction of all types, ADUs, single family, multi-family, within the urban services line. I know we still have some kinks to work out as far as more rural homes and energy reliability, but I think that's a pretty clear place. We need to start and we should have those model ordinances from the other jurisdictions right here in our county and across the state. Okay, thanks. All right, any further comments from the board? Seeing none, I'll open it for public comment. Anyone who wishes to address the board on this item, please approach the podium. Thank you, that's a lot of information. My name is Becky Steinbruner. I'm happy to see that the county is working cooperatively with the cities within our county. That makes a lot of sense. And I'm happy that that's happening. I wanna see better preservation and protection for our established heritage trees. They take in a lot of carbon dioxide and there's virtually no protection for them during building developments. And that needs to change because the small trees that get planted in their place are nothing to what the large established trees absorb in carbon dioxide. So I'd like to see enforcement and better protection for our heritage trees. I would really like to see more micro grid projects within the dense infill projects coming along and with on-site battery storage. I have read that there is too much more than can handle solar electricity available with not enough battery storage capacity. The large bank of that that just went in an operational and moss landing is helping. But I think micro grid with solar and on-site battery storage is the better way to go. I'd like to see that happen here. I would like to see our county take a lead in using the rail that we have. We can make a pilot project right now using metro buses, electric metro buses with a rail conversion. They could be taking people on the rail now and they get them off highway one. I would finally like to see the raw data of RINCON. I'm pretty amazed that all of this is being built on 2019 data, which I agree with Supervisor Coonerty is not realistic. And I want to see the raw data. Hello, my name is Rowena Bush. I'm one of the interns for the Climate Action and Adaptation Plan project. I'm working with the Built Environment Work Group. And currently I'm doing some research for the Climate Action Plan on how we can have a successful implementation phase next year by studying what factors influence climate policy implementation. And recently in my research, I came across a study from 2011 that analyzed how effective Californian cities climate action plans were at actually reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The study found that while cities with climate action plans were more successful reducing their overall greenhouse gas emissions, this wasn't necessarily due to the climate action plan itself, but due to the public's environmental preferences and general political will around climate issues. And I think that shows that there's a real opportunity for us to increase public support for this project in order to make it more effective. Climate action plans also can and should do more than codify the public's environmental preferences. Our goal for the CAP should be to see a measurable impact on our community and our environment that would not have happened if the plan didn't exist. To do this, the plan must ambitiously, aggressively and comprehensively tackle the threat that the climate crisis poses to our community. And it cannot fall short when we start the implementation phase. Too often the best climate solutions such as building sustainable infrastructure with affordable housing, infill development and public transportation investments do not make it past the planning stages. And to close, there's a quote I'd like to share with you that's essential for us to remember while we are doing this plan. We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children. We need to make sure that we are taking direct actions now to protect the future generation, which is here now. So thank you for your time. Thank you, Ms. Bush. Hello, everyone. I am Jennifer Hernandez, the natural environment intern working along with Tatiana on the Climate Action and Adaptation Plan. This is an opportunity I am grateful for as I am passionate about climate action and being an advocate for my community. And this internship helps work with both as we're trying our best to list future climate actions but with an equity lens. I am from Watsonville, a town I feel is underrepresented and so I try my best to include my thoughts in this internship and provide feedback on how we can better include equity and or add a change in perspective. The routes in which policies are created for these caps are green or gray policies. Green policies encourage policy solutions that include open green space, addition of trees to streets and recycling. It follows its title by finding solutions to make the location greener. Gray policy actions in this category are more public transit with an emphasis on more affordable and or high density housing. I believe housing is needed in many areas as I have heard of many experiences of multiple families living in one home. Now affordable housing is greatly needed but I don't appreciate the idea of focusing on time only on dense housing. The action of creating housing opportunities is immense but this action should be done to an extent. Recommendations for the cap would be to have a combination of green and gray policies instead of focusing on one or the other such as the dense housing. We give this measure high value for its benefits but we need the greenery too. We need to consider both as beneficial and find a compromise and agreement to include both in measures as they will be beneficial for short and long-term goals. Both types of policies work at different speeds so they will complement each other and help bring change now and later. We'd also be needing to prioritize those who are more vulnerable and or require more resources as well as constantly checking in on the equity measures stated on the cap. Thank you for your time. Thank you, Ms. Hernandez. Hello, everyone. My name is Ian Nieves and I am an intern for the County Administrative Office. Together we are working on presenting a climate action and adaptation plan for the County of Santa Cruz that successfully addresses local pollution issues, address how we will adopt a changing climate and perhaps most importantly, includes equity for everyone in our community. As I'm sure everyone here understands, equity is one of the largest concerns that our government must consider when creating any policies, which leads into one of the most difficult questions to answer for our cap. How do we address equity in our community while effectively reducing greenhouse gas emissions? To answer this question, we must first look at what shortcomings current action plans have and research what strategies yield the best results. In this case, one essential piece of writing is the article why climate action planning struggles with equity, which delves into a few of the most critical issues the climate action plans have and what the most effects of solution is. According to this article, two of the most vital issues that consistently show up to other communities climate action plans are failure to create sufficiently ambitious plans that do more than plant trees and the fact that counties failed to follow the plan with any execution. Current climate action plans around the state focus arduously in promoting green solutions that lack substance in combating climate change and promoting equity. The quote, in general, plans tend to focus on green aesthetically oriented solutions rather than those that address systemic inequalities at the local level. In other words, current climate action plans are more focused on having clear flamboyant results that are easy to execute and may seem effective at first glance. Sadly, these green solutions are not going to solve the fundamental issues that are contributing to climate change. As we delve into the final months of our climate action plan, we must consider these mistakes our predecessors have made and learned from them. How do we address equity in our community while effectively reducing greenhouse gas emissions and avoid other climate action plans mistakes? Our most effective solution is to build affordable housing with access to transit corridors. Thank you for your time. Thank you, Mr. Yavuz. Good morning, board. My name is Kathleen McLaughlin. I'm a second year graduate student at CSUMB and the Environmental Science Masters Program on the professional science masters track. And I'm really grateful for the opportunity to work on these climate issues with the County of Santa Cruz. It's really important work. It's urgent and I'm grateful for the opportunity as well as specifically the regional planning collaborative. Like we've talked about, it's very important to not just be zeroed in on one location, but to collaborate and work together to find solutions. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. McLaughlin. Seeing no one further, you're in the chambers. Is there anyone on Zoom or the telephone that wishes to address us? We do have a speaker online. Colin, user one, your microphone is now available. Well, I think the intentions of people are, you know, well-intended. Your question Supervisor Caput of, hey, what's going on in your sense of it's like too little, too late to get a factual insight on that. I recommend that everybody listen to geoengineeringwatch.org because climate engineering is the elephant in the room. Dane Wiggington has his program on KSEO Saturday morning. Thank you KSEO at 8 a.m. But you can go to the website and see the dimming. Just a few excerpts from notes I've taken on his program. Geoengineering is the biggest cause of fires and droughts and climate engineering is a covert weapon of war. Stratospheric aerosols, millions of tons of deadly nanoparticles are injected daily. The climate engineering traps the heat at night. Geoengineering does further fuels and incineration and geoengineering flights were directly over the paradise fire. Arctic sea ice is at record low. Oxygen dead zones fall over the ocean and when the oceans die, we die. Check out geoengineeringwatch.org. Everyone, this is a very scientific factual source of information. Thank you, Ms. Garrett. We have no further speakers here. Thank you, then I'll return it to the board for action. Mr. Chair, with a huge thank you to the climate action team that we critically need. And as I said, Santa Cruz County, I believe and this region is way out front in front. I do see that storing our energy is a critical factor in how we succeed in the future. But I would like to move the recommended actions. And I'll second the. All right, we have a motion by Supervisor McPherson, a second by Supervisor Caput. I'd like to ask if the mover would be amenable to addition to ask staff to return with a building electrification ordinance in December when we finally look at adoption of this plan. Sure, for new construction within the urban services. Yeah, I mean, the timeline, is that doable? I would like to do that. I have to defer to the community development and infrastructure department on the timeline on that. I would like to do that. I just wanna make sure it's realistic to accomplish that. Ms. Burke. Hi, good morning. Carolyn Burke, Assistant Director of CDI. We are planning on coming back to your board for adoption of the 2022 California Building Code in November is our target. So we'll include that in that adoption. And so it should meet the December timeline. Except the recommended action to addition. And Mr. Chair, I do have a point of clarification on this, a couple of things. I'm totally open to having an ordinance come back. I mean, normally when we're doing building code changes, though, I imagine this might, then the council can weigh in this may need to go to the planning commission as well. But are we specifically clarifying that this is for new residential construction and not all construction you didn't differentiate as far as the construction component was? Yeah, thank you for that. I do think we should start with residential constructions and particularly a new residential construction within the urban services line since there will be particular challenges for commercial kitchens and other things like that. And then if I have a quick question for council on process on it, if something came at the same time as the building code updates, would it still need to be reviewed by the planning commission if we were doing an ordinance on construction? I'd have to look further into that, supervisor. I appreciate that. And part of this is just to manage expectations that there may not be something adopted, right? I mean, obviously we can't adopt in a first reading anyway, but it did just an understanding that it may not, that if it comes back in November, it may still have to go through an additional process. But I'm in support of this in particular if it's just on the residential side within the USL. Thank you. All right, thank you, Supervisor Friend. So the additional direction was amenable to the new construction. All right, thank you, Supervisor McPherson and Supervisor Caput, you seconded it, was that amenable to you as well? All right, then we have a motion and a second. Any further discussion? Seeing none, clerk Roll call, please. Supervisor Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. Caput. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Coonerty, Ms. Asamended. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Brennan, thank you, Director Reed. Thank you to all the staff who came out today who are working on this, as well as all the interns. We will now proceed with an item that was scheduled for 10.30 a.m., we're running a little bit late today. It is item 11, a public hearing to consider proposed amendments to Santa Cruz County General Plan local coastal program, chapters five and seven, SEC code chapter 7.38, sewage disposal to bring county provisions into conformance with state policy and the county's local agency management program, the LAMP, for onsite wastewater treatment systems, OTS, as approved by state's central coast regional water quality control board with associated California Environmental Quality Act, CEQA notice of exemption, approve LAMP for OTS, approve in concept ordinance amending SEC chapter 7.38 to conform with state policy for OTS and Santa Cruz LAMP. And direct clerk of the board to schedule ordinance for final adoption, adopt resolution, approving proposed amendments to general plan LCP chapters five and seven and implementing ordinance relating to sewage disposal, direct staff to file CEQA notice of exemption with clerk of the board and direct staff to transmit amendments to general plan LCP and SEC chapter 7.38 to California coastal commission as part of the LCP update and take related actions as outlined in the memorandum of the director of health services. And for a presentation on this item, we have Monica Morales, our HSA director, Marilyn Underwood, our environmental health director, John Ricker, our consultant for HSA and more. So everyone wants to start, take it away. Good morning. Can you hear me? Yes. Great. Good morning, board. Thank you so much for having us here today. This has been, I know, a very long process for our staff to present to you guys as an update on our sewage disposal ordinance. Just a friendly reminder, this is a state mandate that we're trying to actually need. It's been months of work and I'm very grateful to our team for all their commitment and really persistence to move through this very important issue in our county. Just a friendly reminder, part of our goal here is obviously to bring up, to par this and meet the standards that we have at this state. But at the end of it all for us, it's just improving the water quality of our county, specifically as it pertains to on-site wastewater treatment systems. It's very important as we know in our county that these efforts move forward. We're also very grateful to everyone that has provided input on the process, our key stakeholders, our commissions, our community members, everyone really that has influenced the development of the ordinance and where we're at. And again, just coming back to our team and really wanted to introduce Richard, excuse me, John Riker and Heather Reynolds who have been instrumental in moving these processes forward. But I'm kicking out to our director of environmental health, Dr. Marilyn Underwood to give more details to where we are in the status. Thank you, Monica. Good morning. As she has said, it is a long process for us to get here and I'm gonna try to move quickly through because I know you have a big agenda for today. Let me just see if I make sure I hit the right button. No, went too fast. Okay, there we go. And I've been trying to train myself. I know for many years we've referred to these things as septic systems, but really because they're so much more fancy and have much more bells and whistles, they're really called on-site wastewater treatment systems. Now, odds, another acronym to remember. So I will try to refer them as odds. And I'm gonna refer to something called the local agency management program or plan, the LAMP. And again, we are the local agency, the Environmental Health Division within the Health Services Agency under the state requirements. So a little bit of background requirements about the state and also all the impacts we've seen from odds in our county. So this is a long time coming. The AB 885 was passed all the way back in 2000. It took the state quite a bit of time to get their regulations or their policy in place, a couple lawsuits and some lots of input from environmental health directors and others from the county, including John. But finally, they adopted the state odds policy in 2012. It was followed by the Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board. That's the board that oversees our area, this county. And they had to update their basin plan. They did so in 2017. We were supposed to have then done a LAMP, a local agency management program by about a year later. We did not get it done. And so they did take the ability for us to approve enhanced treatment systems away from us for a while and folks had to apply down in San Luis Obispo. The good news is last October, we did take a LAMP to the Regional Water Quality Control Board and it was approved. It was sent to them with your approval. And Appendix A of the LAMP is the ordinance. So effective October 14th, we were required to start implementing the parts of the LAMP and the ordinance that were required under state, the state policy. Today we'll be describing some of the things that will be changing or updating due to just part of the ordinance and not part of the state requirements. And John will be getting into that a little bit more. Now, since we've been implementing it, we have noticed that there were some inconsistencies in it where like in one part of the ordinance, we talk about something, but in the other part of the ordinance, it's actually not quite as clear. And so we spent some time and in a way, it's been really good that we've been able to find those sort of inconsistencies and clarifications. And so we have posted those. Those went to the planning commission that we submitted talked with on June 22nd. We also let our TAC know we have a group, a large group of folks that are mostly consultants, septic pumpers, onsite service providers that we notified about the planning commission meeting so that, and the changes that we had been made that had been made, we also had a July 11th TAC meeting. So we made sure that again, our group of people that work with us, including also real estate agents were notified of these slight changes, again, clarifications. And they have those same changes have been approved by the regional board, by the way, any changes like that because the ordinance is part of the lamp do have to be approved by the regional board staff. It does not have to go back to the full staff of full board. She'll help me along. Thank you. I will just say the planning commission, I'm not gonna go through this, but with slight clarifications again, send the ordinance to you as long with the lamp and the general plan changes. So just to be clear, in updating the ordinance, we also had to update two parts of the general plan. And again, we will talk about that further in this presentation. So why do we care? In addition to the state requiring us to do this, we care because obviously we drink the water that falls within this county. We don't import water from anywhere else. So we wanna make sure our surface water, our groundwater are kept from various impacts, but the one I'm talking about today are from odds. And again, odds are very great if they're planned, designed, maintained, installed and maintained correctly. But if they're too densely packed, also if they're not designed and installed and maintained correctly, then they can have impacts which are pathogens and nitrates. And this diagram just shows you a little bit about how a cesspool, which is actually not allowed anymore in our county, but it could be a trench or a safe beach pit, can impact groundwater by starting to fail and not treat the sewage properly before it hits groundwater. Similarly, our groundwater feeds into our surface water in many places in the county. So it can then affect our surface water. And obviously it eventually gets to the ocean. The other failure that's probably more common, people don't think of, they typically think of failures only at the surface. But again, this is not the only thing that we're concerned about. We're concerned about failures you don't see. But the more typical one we hear about from people saying they see a pooling of sewage in their trench area or something like that. Not again, during the winter months especially, we can see impacts to our surface water from surface water runoff from these kind of failing systems. As you know that we are very familiar with, we have three primary groundwater basins in our county that give drinking water to a lot of us. And that's the Santa Margarita, the mid-county in the Pajaro Valley. These are all been identified by the state as overdraft areas. And we've been working on it in the county obviously for years and before the state knew those were concerns. And that deals with water quantity, but we also obviously are concerned about water quality. And I'll talk a little bit more about that and why we wanna protect these. In addition to the groundwater basins, you can see there's actually a larger area and a slightly different area where we have groundwater recharge areas that are really important to protect. Again, looking at our odds and making sure that odds are protected and installed and maintained correctly there. And then last, this slide goes to our watershed areas. What is some of our very important watershed areas from the North Coast that you see in the light blue to the blue of the San Lorenzo River and then down even to the Coralitos area. All of these are really important areas. Also the karst area up on the coast north of Santa Cruz. Really important areas to protect because of the surface water and the watershed concerns. And this I'm gonna transition now into showing some of the impacts we've already seen. These are the highlighted area. There's a very busy slide, but I'll just tell you that you wanna focus in on the yellow that I've highlighted. And you can see that in Pental Lake, we've had the second most important impact to Pental Lake, the first being agriculture and manure fertilizer that's across the top, the columns at the top, headers. But the second most important contributed to Pental Lake is odds in the surrounding area. The two ones are San Lorenzo. Now, these are where odds are the primary, they're the number one source of impacts of pathogens and also nitrates to the San Lorenzo River. You can see others play a role as well, but the number one is are the odds in those systems in that area, those watersheds. It's a very busy slide, but I'm gonna take you through it a little bit because I think it's important to show. The top graph is nitrate concentrations in two locations that we monitor out of the Environmental Health Water Quality Lab at Big Trees and City of Santa Cruz, their intake. Also, the second one down is the fecal coliform. This is a marker for pathogens in the rivers, again, in those two locations. The third one is the average daily flow of the river and then the fourth one down the bottom one is the rainfall. So what you see is, and I'll start with the top one, the black line going across is the level of concern, the target, we wanna be below that black line. And you can see in both locations, Big Trees and the City of Santa Cruz that we do have nitrate levels exceeding that in the groundwater, even in the surface water measurements. Similarly, in the fecal coliform in the second graph down, and this is even much more pattern that you see that's due to the rainfall. So as the peaks occur, those are the times when we're getting the rainfall during the winter. And again, in this case, the red line indicates the line at which we wanna stay below for health impact reasons. So you can see, we do know that San Lorenzo has been influenced by both nitrates and pathogens and the number one contributor again being odds. The nitrate concerns that I just described about, you can see in blue for the San Lorenzo, but there's other areas as well. You can see up around Bonny Dune and also in down and around in our South County and Mid County area as well. So these are ones where we have in the new ordinance, we will, well, even since the passing of the lamp, we have additional requirements that are needed for odds that are placed in these areas. The last slide I wanna show, talk about is that just that nitrate is a concern, not just in the San Lorenzo, but we've seen it at the Pajaro Basin odds as a contributor to the groundwater. San Margarita Basin, I've already talked about the water, the surface water, but we've also had water wells in the Quail Hollow area that have been taken out of service, been affected because of nitrates from odds. And then in the Mid County Basin, we had well taken out of service at La Selva Beach area because, again, of nitrate impacts. So these are not only, my point here is that our concerns are not only because the state required it, but because we saw them, we are seeing impacts. We've already taken steps even before the state required them, but these are additional steps that are required under the state to minimize odds impacts to our drinking water hours. And John will now describe further exactly what those are. Good morning board members. Excuse me, it's good to see you guys. Up, so it's not, I got it. Okay, good. It's good to see you guys again. Haven't seen you in a while. There are a number of changes to the ordinance, which we have already been implementing and some additional changes, which will go into effect after your board adopts the ordinance. Some of the big changes are the minimum groundwater separation for replacement systems. This affects existing development increases from one to three feet to five to eight feet, depending on what the soil types are and less enhanced treatments used. All new and replacement systems in those fast percolating soils in the sandy parts of the county with the nitrate concern areas that you just saw on that map will require enhanced treatment for nitrogen removal. In the past, we did not, we waived that requirement for repair of existing systems, but we found that the nitrate levels in the river have not trended downward as we had hoped they were. So we're tightening up that requirement to require that for all new and replacement systems. Enhanced treatment will be required for replacement of all seepage pits and in conjunction with remodels of existing homes that are served by seepage pits. Again, that will provide for both nitrogen removal and pathogen removal. The maximum trench depth for the upgraded systems decreases from 10 feet to four feet. In the old days, our standard trench was 10 feet, but now we are going to have to go much shallower. The shallower soils do provide better treatment and we're expecting that to again provide improvements in water quality. Sceptic system repairs, basic conventional repairs could be designed by a contractor, but anything very complex will now need to be done designed by a qualified professional. And the qualified professional must also conduct the soil and percolation testing that will be required. Some of the changes that we have not yet implemented, but we will be doing as soon as your board adopts or soon after as your board adopts the ordinance, the use of the site-specific assessment and mitigation of site constraints and lieu of the minimum lot sizes. Those minimum lot sizes have been both in the general plan and in the county code. We're removing those designations, those date back to the 1970s and we're really focusing more on better mapped information and on-site specific technologies on site to address those concerns. All existing enhanced treatments will be required to have a service contract with a qualified service provider. Up until now that's been optional, but we're really finding that those systems do need to have an ongoing contract to really ensure that they're working properly. We are going to have a provision for the local registration and conditional approval of all of our service providers, contractors, consultants, and the people that service the systems and it is conditional. And if there are problems, lack of compliance, we'll be able to suspend that approval until they correct their activities. And a big one that we've been pushing for or wanting to do for a while is the mandatory evaluation of the odds at the time of a property transfer. Looking at the system condition, what its permitted status, what it's how it's performing and likely requirements for future upgrades. We've seen too many instances where somebody has bought a home that did not, those odds did not support what they were hoping to do with that home without extensive upgrades. And we see this as a way to really inform the buyers and also to get systems upgraded similar to what the sanitation districts in the city is now require on sewer systems for evaluation of the sewer laterals. This package does include general plan amendments. There are a number of policies specific to odds in our current general plan in chapter five in the parks recreation and open space section and also the public facilities chapter. So we are recommending changes to those policies consistent with what we are also recommended in chapter 7.38. We've been working with planning staff to coordinate this with the sustainability update. But because the sustainability update has not been adopted yet, we do refer to the old policy numbers in our resolutions and our recommendations. We are deleting the policies, recommending deleting policies 5.515 and 1.6 to regarding the minimum lot sizes and constrained areas which I mentioned previously, 5.517 and 7.21.3. We believe are just too specific for the general plan they are covered in chapter 7.38. We're looking at combining 5.518 and 5.519 which deal with the use of easements for public facilities inside and outside the coastal zone and essentially just combine those into one policy. We're updating 5.7.2 to better define a seasonal waterway and to allow system upgrades within a hundred feet of seasonal waterways and streams if they're adequately mitigated through the use of enhanced treatment. And we're also updating policy 7.21.4 to rename alternative systems to enhanced treatment systems. We've really had a long history with what we used to call alternative systems but they've really become essentially state of the art and a regular tool to provide better water quality protection. So we were getting rid of the old term alternative and just calling them enhanced treatment systems and that stands throughout the ordinance chapter 7.38 as well. We have completed the environmental review of this process, a categorical exemption has been issued by the environmental coordinator and we also did notify the tribes as required under our policies and we've been in contact with coastal commission staff as well and have gotten some feedback from them. So we believe we're ready to move ahead and complete this whole program. Now I'll turn it back to Dr. Underwood. So at this point I was gonna read all the recommendations again. The recommended actions are to conduct a public hearing to consider the proposed amendments to Santa Cruz County general plan local coastal program chapters five and seven in Santa Cruz County chapter 7.38. To approve the local agency management program for on-site wastewater treatment systems in Santa Cruz to approve and concept the attached ordinance amending County code chapter 7.38 related to sewage disposal to conform with the state policy for on-site wastewater treatment systems and the Santa Cruz lamp and direct the clerk of the board to reschedule the ordinance for final adoption at the next board of supervisors meeting to adopt a resolution approving the proposed amendments to chapters five and seven of the general plan local coastal program and implementing the ordinance relating to sewage disposal to direct staff to file the sequel notice of exemption with the clerk of the board and to direct staff to transmit the amendments to the general plan local coastal program and Santa Cruz County code chapter 7.38 to the California coastal commission as part of the local coastal program update which shall be affected upon certification of the coastal commission. Thank you. Don't take any questions, we'll take any questions. All right, thank you all. Is there, are there comments or questions from members of the board? Yeah, Mr. Chair, welcome back, Mr. Ricker. I bet you thought this day would never come but it's been a long time and coming and I want to thank the environmental health team for that's been working on this issue for years and years. And it really disproportionately affects my district in the Santa Rosa Valley which I think was identified as the most concentrated area with septic systems west of the Mississippi. Now, I don't know if that's still true but there's a lot of them up there. So, and from an environmental perspective it's really important that we do this update but we know that we can come it's gonna come at a cost to the consumer and certainly affect a lot of building plans but can staff discuss the overlap in implementing these standards with fire recovery and how we might help property owners outside the proposed CSA 7 expansion which is up 236 and downtown Boulder Creek. They're comply with these new standards. That's one of the questions I had and are there grant funds that we can anticipate to meet these goals or recommendations that you've listed? Thank you for the questions. Yes, your area is particularly impacted by this and then of course the CZU as well. So for the CZU properties, two things. One is that do they do need to meet repair standards if they're going to build in kind and those have changed. So they are tougher and in some cases we think they will have a hard time building in kind without putting in enhanced treatment systems. For those along the 236, we think there's something like 260 properties along there. We hope that they might take part in a project as that you alluded to, which is to potentially bring a sewer system that would serve both downtown Boulder Creek and go up the 230, well, close to the 236 to the golf course. Now, they would also need something like that potentially not just in kind for upgrading. Obviously, if they wanna build something different than they had before the fire, they might come into issues as well. So this sewer project would definitely help them. I think there's some concerns about just to preempt this a little bit, some concerns about growth. The general plan does address growth issues. So that's not so much the issue that we'd have in trying to allow people at least rebuild from the CZU. As far as properties beyond that, again, I think there are is going to be impacts that they're going to find for building in kind. And at this point, we do not have a program to help support them. The state has not created any programs to help people as they implement lamps across the state. John can probably get some history. You apparently had a loan program years and years ago that we got some money from the state for. It wasn't a grant, it was a loan. And we might be able to pursue something like that, but at this point, that's not certainly in place. John, do you want to comment any further on that? Yes, that was a program where we received, the county received money through the state's Revolving Fund for sewer upgrades. And we were able to conduct a mini loan program where we made loans to property owners, but they were not grants. They were only low interest loans. I think the interest was around 2.6% at a time and the commercial interest rate was probably around five or 6%. So there was a little bit of help, but although the state gave us something over $2 million in funding, we were not able to use all that during the seven year period of that program. It was at a time when the real estate market was going up and down and people were leery of, first they were leery of coming to the county and then we were leery of loaning to them after the market crashed and a lot of the folks were under water. So we had to give a lot of that money back to the state, but there is the possibility of pursuing that again, probably not grants, but potentially low interest loans. Okay, so yeah, it's going to cost the consumer the property owner more and this has been an issue I know in the rebuilding process of fire recovery and but we just have to do this for the protection of our water system. As you said, we don't get our water from any federal or state sources and if the rivers and creeks become contaminated, we are in deep trouble. So thank you for this and it's been a long time coming, but it's welcome to have it here in Santa Cruz County. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor McPherson. Their comments or questions from board members. Seeing none, I got a few questions for you. The first is regarding separation of the leach field on the water table. My understanding is that a winter water test should be required in order to determine whether or not an advanced treatment system would be needed on some properties, is that true? Yes, typically we would need to see a winter water test. In some cases when there's a neighbor and we think there's a test was done there and we think that is a reflective probably of what is at the neighboring property, we could use that. We've also come up with some alternative approaches that we could fall back on, given the fact that this past year, we only had the winter water testing open for I think about three weeks because of the lack of rain. So obviously we did want to notice that there are not holdup development too much and people rebuilding, but the best thing is certainly we want to know how we need to know how high the water is during the winter time to really adequately design a good system that will protect the groundwater and make sure the soil is there to treat the pathogens and nitrates before it gets to the groundwater. Thank you. You hit it on the head there. My concern is that we require a certain amount of rain in order to get this test done and if we don't have that level of rain, then we can't do the test. So we could see an application essentially delayed for a year or more. I mean, I'm glad to hear that we'll take into account information from tests done on neighboring properties. I mean, what are some of the other alternatives that could be pursued to prevent that kind of delay till the next rainy season? I mean, who knows? Maybe that next season won't have enough water either, right? So what alternatives could be pursued besides a neighboring property? Some of the other things, and John might be on allude to this as well, is we are looking at soil profile and looking for modeling so you can kind of see from the coloration of where the high groundwater might have been. I believe we talked about some mapping as well. Yeah, we do have some mapping of winter water table areas. We don't require that winter water table testing across the board. There's a number of parts of the county where we're confident that the water table is deep enough that does not require the testing. So it is only required where we suspect that there is a water, excuse me, a water table that will be high enough that could impact the functioning of the system. I mean, one of our issues, we do get so much rain that the water table during the wintertime can fluctuate as much as 20 or 30 feet. So a system may work great for a couple of dry years and then we get one of our wet years and it may be underwater. So that's what we're concerned about. We generally do kind of hold the line for brand new development where we want to see that test, but if it's existing development, there's already a odds that's been functioning there. We will use various techniques, again, looking at neighboring properties, looking at soil characteristics, looking at the topography to make a best case estimate of where we think that water table would expect, we would expect it to be. And in a lot of cases where we don't know the fallback is an enhanced treatment system because there is a, with enhanced treatment, you can reduce the separation to two feet because the effluent is treated to a much higher quality so you don't need as much of the soil to absorb the effluent. Okay, and about what percentage of properties do you think would require a water test or alternative? I'm thinking about 40% at this point. Okay, so it's still pretty significant. Still pretty significant. And that does include the San Lorenzo Valley where there's a higher proportion in that area because it does rain so much up there and there's a lot of low-lying development in the valley bottoms. Okay, our second question is about the definition of a qualified professional. Currently it's a civil engineer, geologist or environmental health specialist. I've heard from some of the folks in the real estate industry that they'll try to call one of these folks, civil engineer, say, and it's three weeks, at least before they even hear back, right? I mean, let alone schedule the work. It could be six to nine months out. So I mean, I'm concerned as we add these additional requirements, we're gonna go from the hundred people who currently are looking at these advanced treatment systems to thousands, right? And the backup, we just won't have the technical knowledge or capacity under this definition within the county to actually meet these requirements. You know, why wouldn't a qualified professional include contractors who actually build these systems and how do you anticipate that we have? So first of all, the qualified professional is actually defined in the state odds policy and it's something we had to put into our own ordinance as well. There is the qualification that we can approve them and we are planning to allow, at least for conventional systems, allow contractors that we have come to us and we're gonna give them some training about the requirements and allow them to be installers as well of conventional systems. Again, if the concern is that they are doing things that are not meeting our code, which in some cases we've seen before, then they would be removed from our qualified professionalist and allowed to not allowed to design and they would still be allowed to install if somebody else would have to design it. And I would just say, I mean, I do think that is what the commercial capitalism is, as something is needed and more people get into it because it's a great place to help out people in our county to come here and do some of that work. So I do think that what we'll see is also as the demand people go over the hill and say, hey, I need somebody to come over here. I will see more and more folks hopefully come and help out with this situation. Okay, so there'll be an opportunity for contractors and goods standing to apply to be qualified professionals and you also anticipate that just market demand will get more people into the line of work. Okay. And then finally that just with some clarification on the point of sale requirement, is this, is it meant to just be informational for the buyer to understand the current status of their hot or septic system and whether or not they might need to upgrade it to the future or is the requirement here actually that if the system needs to be upgraded that it be upgraded before the time of, before the transfer. So it is mostly informational. I will say if during the, it's the part of the point of sale will be looking at our records and making this is again going to be done by not by our county staff, this will be done by folks higher to do this for a buyer or for a seller. They would look through our records and put, look for things like, what was the permit and was it permitted the septic system, the odd system? What number of bedrooms was it permitted for? Was the one time allowance of up to 500 square feet already used so that people aren't thinking that they still have that to use the setbacks to streams separate from groundwater. All of these things will be laid out so that people kind of can help understand what is the system, what are they buying and what might influence their ability to make changes to something in the future. Now, there will be an inspection also part of it in addition to the records review. And during inspection, if we see that something is actually an obvious failing, then the seller will need to correct it or the buyer can choose to sign off and say that they will correct it within 90 days. But we do obviously in those situations we don't want failing systems. And when I say failing, that means the surface failing. But otherwise they will just know whether it's permitted or not permitted. And as they make changes to their property or make changes to their structure, they will have, they have that information to know what will be required of them or what their limitations are or constraints and what might cost them. And therefore it can also influence their property value for them, knowing that they might have to do some of these changes if they wanna improve it. Okay. Yeah, I mean, I'm talking about, I think you said in the report 19,000 systems. So could definitely impact a lot of transactions. And of course, we want people to be healthy, but we also won't properly be changed hands when there's a willing buyer and seller. I mean, I think it's certainly not important that people know what they're buying and the informational requirements are great. And it finally has, I'm hearing mixed reports on whether the onsite wastewater technical advisory committee has had a chance to review the final proposed ordinance here. I think that I know they've been generally involved in the process, but I've heard they haven't had a chance to actually look at the final ordinance. What's the status on this? So we again, sent them out an email, letting them know about the planning commission meeting almost, I'm trying to remember if any changes have been made since the planning commission. Oh yeah, cause the planning commission wanted a couple of changes, but most of these changes that were done since October 14th were part of that and posted on our website. And then we sent an email to the TAC, letting them know about the planning commission if they wanted to participate. Then we had a July 11th TAC meeting online through teams meeting and they were notified of that. Again, we had made those small changes that the planning commission wanted. At that point, we posted it also on our website and sent the links to them. So even if they couldn't participate in the meeting. And then lastly, we notified them last week of this particular meeting. Again, nothing really has changed since the meeting on July 11th, but we did notify them of this meeting today. Okay, thank you. That's all my questions. Any other comments or questions from board members? Seeing none, I'll officially open the public hearing. Any members of the public that wish to address us on this item, please approach the podium. Thank you. My name is Becky Steinbrenner. I'm a resident of rural Santa Cruz County. I'm on a septic system. I'm gonna call it a septic system. So I have a lot of concern, especially for the people in the CZU fire area that are already having a tough time trying to rebuild. And here is this expensive new system that they have to put in. It's gonna drive a lot of people out of our county. I don't think that this is CEQA exempt. I think it needs to have a CEQA evaluation because you're looking at the impact of growth, this case of not being able to rebuild one of them. And the impacts of on the rivers and streams really do have to be looked at from an environmental perspective. So I don't agree that this is CEQA exempt. I live in the Rio del Mar Lodge sites and I looked at the strike out and underlined version of the ordinance changes and noted that the Rio del Mar Lodge sites are now included in the special areas. And I assume that that is to address some of the nitrate concern areas that are listed in section 7.38.3030 number V is in Victor that lists the Valencia Creek watershed. The Rio del Mar Lodge sites are not part of the Valencia Creek watershed. Only if you count that it would affect possibly when trout gulch merges with Valencia but that happens down under the bridge on Spreckles where lots of homeless people live. And I don't think it's fair. I think that a lot of the nitrate and pathogens coliform in the San Lorenzo River and the city of Santa Cruz are coming from the homeless camps. I've helped clean up Sycamore Grove. I've seen what happens there. It's a mess. So I don't think it's fair and I think that there was some DNA sampling done that did not identify it as septic. It was more animal and linked to the homeless camps. And my final question is what about ADU? Thank you. Good morning. I'm Ryan Smith. I'm the wastewater division manager for the city of Watsonville. As a public servant, what keeps me up at night is thinking about the effects of natural disasters and water scarcity on wastewater systems. Anytime I give tours, I explain to people we're not just treating water. We're also treating the solids in the wastewater. The Water Board regulates treated wastewater and the EPA regulates the solid material, also known as biosolids. The goal of any sanitation system is to prevent human and environmental contact with human excreta and they fall into two categories. Systems that use water to transport our excreta and systems that do not. Waterless systems remove the water side of the equation completely and the solid material is typically composted to make it safe for reuse. This lamp is very good about adjusting systems that use water, but is silent on waterless systems. I'm told county staff estimate that septic permits requiring enhanced treatment will increase from 16 to upwards of 30%. And enhanced systems will be required for upwards of 1500 parcels. Septic and wastewater systems are increasingly costly to build and maintain. And there's no financial assistance that I'm aware of for disadvantaged communities and those affected by natural disasters. There are, however, American national and international standards for what we call non-sewered sanitation systems that can be incorporated into future iterations of the lamp and building codes. I believe we need to reframe our thinking around wastewater as the gold standard of sanitation. So I'll end with this. When it comes to climate change and disasters, there are a lot of things outside our control. What is inside our control is our own mindset. Here's a great example. Right now, state assembly bill 351 is on the Senate floor, which allows for natural organic reduction of human remains or the composting of human bodies. It's already legal in Washington, Oregon and Colorado. If we can change our minds about that, why can't we change our minds about how we manage our own excreta? I can talk all day about this topic, but I'm out of time and I got to go back to work. Thank you for listening. Thank you, Ryan. Seeing no one else here in chambers, is there anyone online or on the telephone or just a comment? We do have a speaker online. Call in user two, your microphone is now available. Marilyn Garrett, I can't help but thinking of that statement that corporations privatize the profit and they socialize the cost. Where do so many of these contaminants come from? Testicide corporations, the military, all kinds of chemical corporations so that the umbilical cords of babies now are tested for something like over 150 chemicals. And God didn't put those there. Nature didn't put those there. Why aren't these contaminants prohibited in the first place? And of course it's because they're profitable. This for the corporations, not for all of us. So while we're dealing with all this, these massive problems that you have put forward very clearly, why isn't there an effort to stop the pollution where it starts? Why are we the people having to pay for what various corporations have contaminated us with against our will and not being informed? It's just outrageous. I keep thinking of it's like a drop in the bucket of what we're trying to do to deal with what corporations have cost with their contaminants. Needs to stop at the source. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Carrot. Myrius, your microphone is now available. Hi, first off, thank you to the Department of Environmental Health for all the work that they've done here. My name is Myrish and I am actually an owner of a service provider company here, localing the Santa Cruz. Just a couple things in regards to the lamp that I have been reading over and over and over since I have to for my business. In regards, first off, in regards to the inspection of transfer property, this is something that I have seen over and over again. It is part of disclosure. It really does need to happen. I have seen so many failed systems, leech fields bleeding out. And as a service provider, I am the eyes and ears of the count. And there are things that I even believe that as a report should actually be filed with the county if we see a failed leech system. Also, with the sale of transfer property inspections, when there's enhanced system already installed and there's this inspection, maybe a authorized service provider should be required to do this inspection since many of the pumpers that do these inspections already have no idea about these enhanced systems. Another I thought regarding this lamp is I don't believe that the requirements for becoming an authorized service provider are actually stringent enough when there is a current need to be authorized by the manufacturer. But then an employee of a company doesn't have that same requirement where like in the automotive industry to be ASC certified, you need to be ASC certified and you need to be that specific inspector for like a smog inspection. You need to be certified for that, not just an employee. That's what I have to say. Thank you so much. Thank you, Mirish. We have no further speakers, Chair. All right, then I will close the public hearing and return to the board for deliberation and action. There's the chair, I am. If I may, I'm sorry. If I could just make some brief comments before we make a motion. This is a long time coming and I appreciate that a number of constituents within my district as well will have some clarity. I mean, I think that there are some unquestionable issues on the environmental side. There's also some historic land use decisions that previous boards had made 40 plus years ago that also helped put us into this situation. I mean, there were opportunities, for example, historically for sewer expansion that would have obviated the need for some of these issues. And I hope that moving forward, future boards will think about how their decisions can impact things down the road, both on the environmental and cost side. Because unquestionably, this is going to have an impact, a cost impact in some of the most affordable housing areas within our county. And it's really a difficult situation because the environmental elements, but there are real impacts to people on the cost side that this creates. But I think having also the clarity which has not existed in the last few years and the individual issues that occurred as a result of that is important for homeowners in particular in the rural areas to have. Generally, what people were concerned about the cost, they were also concerned about just a lack of clarity of what was really needed of them moving forward. So I'm supportive of the item, but I'm also very sensitive to the fact of what the costs will do in particular to areas that A have been hit hard in Supervisor McPherson and Supervisor Coonerty's District Board B and areas in my district that just really financially, it's a really quite a heavy lift. And I don't know what the solution is on the Part B of that, but there should at least be a recognition of the Board that this is creating additional challenges on that as well. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Supervisor Friend. Supervisor McPherson. Yeah, I think Supervisor Friend's comments are well taken. It's going to have a severe impact on those who want to rebuild, especially from the experiences we've had with the fire and the combination with COVID and all, but this needs to be done. If we don't, like I said, our waterways are really threatened if not going to be annihilated. So we just need to do this. We have a growing population. And when that happens, we need to be as protective as we can for our water resources. And this lamp has been a long time in coming and it's going to be costly. I hope that we can pursue some grant fund opportunities. We've worked with our legislators. I would like to try to do that. But with that, I'd like to move the recommended actions and thank you for your long and critical work in getting this become a reality. Thank you. So I make the motion that we accept the recommended actions. All right, motion by Supervisor McPherson. I'll second that. I have some of the same concerns that have been raised by my colleagues around the questions, something we have to do, but it's frustrating because it will have very real world impacts on people's ability to rebuild or to live here, to find affordable housing here for them and their families. All right, second by Supervisor Coonerty. I'll just add, I mean, first of all, thank you for doing all this work. I understand how well it's a long time getting here and it's been a huge investment of time by everyone here presenting. I've mentioned a few questions that have been brought to my attention by some members and not of the Technical Advisory Committee. Personally, I think we should, they've been notified of these meetings, but given that it's such a long process, I don't think there'd be any harm in going back to them and having one more cut at this just because some of these individual definitions could make a break for a lot of families trying to deal with it. So I'm not going to support the motion as it is. I'd like to see it go back to the Technical Advisory Committee for one last hearing. I also think that whether it's part of this process or in the future, we really need to look at alternatives to these advanced wastewater treatment systems, including wireless systems. I mean, an incinerating toilet costs $2,000. One of these advanced systems costs $80,000, $85,000. And I understand there's concerns about the ongoing use and maintenance of those systems, but hey, we're requiring on annual inspections for these advanced water treatment systems as well. I don't see why we couldn't get around the problem with the same thing. So I mean, I think at the very least, we should make sure that we slow down enough and allow the Technical Advisory Committee to review one more time. And I just really share the concerns that have been voiced by a supervisor friend and supervisor Curri and supervisor Muferson that we're just gonna make it impossible to add any housing in some of these parts of the county where it's feasible. I think we're gonna need to be able to add that housing, especially as we look at some of the requirements from the state in terms of our rena numbers. So I'm not ready to support it at this time. Mr. Chair, as opposed to just as a point of clarification, this is a question for either one of our directors that are there actually. What would just from a operational standpoint, if it went back for one additional Technical Advisory hearing? I mean, the reason I asked is because you wouldn't need to do this whole presentation to us again, just from a timing perspective, what would it add or what would it mean, if anything? We'd scheduled attack and have a call with them online. Sorry, I'm not sure exactly how it would delay your process. Maybe the next one would not come back at the next board meeting but would come back sometime after that. I don't know. County council might have to weigh in on that. I think it would just be a matter for us to conduct that meeting, get feedback, make changes. Usually as you probably know, it'll take a few weeks. And so ideally we would be pushing out approximately two months out. That's us being conservative at this point that we would have to base it on the feedback that they'll provide to us. It also depends on what you're asking the technical advisory community to do and if they want some kind of dramatic changes made to what we're doing that could throw the whole thing off in some respect. So it's difficult to kind of just forecast what the process is like or how long this would go on for. So yeah, maybe I should point out, I mean, I think what I'm hearing is that there's somebody that at least one person on attack that was concerned that they didn't see the changes that were done since October 14th. If they want something changed that the regional board already approved on October 14th, that was substantive, then that will delay the process. We'll have to get on those regional boards agenda for sometime next year probably, my guess is. So you won't see this coming back till sometime next year. If the issue is the slight changes, they felt like they weren't notified of those. Personally, I don't think any of them are anything that I will actually have an issue with, ironically. But if you wanna delay it for that reason, certainly because of process, you could certainly do that. But again, if there's substantive changes, it could significantly delay it. But if you're saying that you at least just want them to be able to weigh in and say, oh, those are the changes, I'm okay with those, then I think we would just be delay coming back to you. John, did you wanna weigh in on that as well? Well, there's one other, excuse me, one other piece of this, because this is an LCP implementing ordinance, we do have to get it into one of the three rounds this year to go to the coastal commission. And I'm not, I think planning staff is still working on the schedule for those rounds, but it could potentially kick it back into a more, you know, an additional delay if we don't hit the next available round. Well, I... Okay, thank you. I always want as much input as we can when we get to these. But I wanna have the public, I think this has been thoroughly discussed. I think that we ought to move forward and get it done. And, you know, if there was an amendment process or anything of that nature in the future that people wanted to bring up, I don't know if we could do it independently of our lamp or our watch or whatever you wanna call it, but I think we ought to move forward. And I understand the situation. I think we're always gonna get this, that I went more, it wasn't notified or I didn't know about it. It is a significant change, but I think it's time we put it to order. So I'm gonna stick with the motion. Okay, we have a motion by Supervisor McPherson. I believe the second was by Supervisor Coonerty. Any further discussion? Seeing none, clerk roll call vote please. Supervisor Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. Caput. Aye. McPherson. Aye. And Koenig. No. Item passes, four to one. All right. Thank you everyone for the presentation. We will now move on. I will go back to item eight, which is to consider a presentation from the Health Services Agency with an update on the public health and community-wide response to the COVID-19 pandemic as outlined in the memorandum of the Director of Health Services. And for a report on this item, we have, again, Monica Morales, our HSA director, Dr. Gail Newell, our health officer, and Emily Chung, our Director of Public Health Division. Good morning. We'll keep this brief. We know that you have two other presentations coming your way. So I wanted just to take some time to give the board an update on the various activities that have been taking place for almost 30 months on the COVID response. Obviously, we're not moving from a response to recovery. And there's some key updates that we want to share with you in terms of what we're doing to ensure that our health systems, our business sector, our community-wide response to COVID-19 and the sector, our community, are learning to live with COVID and implementing the key mitigation strategy. So we'll be sharing very briefly some updates on that. But in addition, we thought it would be important to give you guys an update on Monkeypox and exactly what we're doing in order to respond to that emergency issue right now, but also what we're doing in terms of educating our community and the different activities around working with our health systems and FQs, for example. So with that, I'll just turn it over to our Public Health Director, Emily Chung, to give that update and Dr. Newell. Thank you. Good morning, Board of Supervisors. Thank you for your time this morning. Last year, the Board of Supervisors received an update from our Public Health and Health Services Agency team about the COVID response being a marathon and not a sprint. We are still a mid-marathon and we are maintaining a measured pace to endure this long event. During the COVID response, we created the save lives framework, which is slow to spread, adapt and adjust, vaccinate and treat and elevate for readiness. We continue to work on all these elements with a focus right now on the strategies and empowerment of our community and our staff and workforce. Next slide. Okay, there, thank you. Some of the response achievements I would like to highlight are the strengthening of partnerships and engagement in our community. We really want to highlight the work that our teams have done with the County Office of Education and our schools, our jails, our shelters, our facilities, like skilled nursing facilities and healthcare partners like our hospitals. We've established a new network called the Promotora Network through Cradle to Careers program with some of the funding received in public health through the COVID pandemic. We've held many town halls, engaged in social media campaigns and video presentation, videos that have gone out on social media to advertise and teach our community about the continued mitigation, vaccination and therapeutic options out there. Our outbreak response has been focused on our highest risk settings like our jails, skilled nursing facilities and shelters. Our infection prevention team is a new team providing technical assistance to facilities and really helping with response through checklist and doing technical assistance in facilities and through guidance. We've held tabletop exercises and continue to collaborate with our clinicians and our healthcare coalition partners. We've been able to move from testing to test to treat just outside these board chambers are the, is one of the OptumServe buses provided by the state which now provides therapeutics to anybody who is there who may be COVID positive and can receive therapeutics on site before they leave. I skipped one. Just by the numbers, these are just some brief snapshot of the numbers of the items distributed to our community over the last 11 months. Our logistics team is really a key part of this. I wanna thank them for their endless hours of work distributing COVID tests, masks, face shields, gowns and gloves to our partner agencies and our facilities like jails and hospitals. We also helped distribute hundreds of doses of therapeutics once they were made available in this last year. Also by the numbers, we maintain our COVID dashboard which includes our case numbers as well as our vaccination rates. Just wanna highlight that of our total eligible county population, we now have almost 76% of our eligible population fully vaccinated. So where do we go from here? The future is sometimes uncertain but with COVID we know that we are living with COVID and we are looking backwards to look ahead. We are conducting an after action report now and finalizing those findings very shortly to really understand our response to recovery shift and our ongoing needs for public health and our role in the community. We are all learning to live with COVID still and we will continue to reinforce those messages to mitigate and protect ourselves from this virus. Our big efforts continue to be supporting our healthcare systems and maintaining community resiliency so that we have strategies embedded in all of our organizations in our community. We'll continue to distribute test kits, therapeutics and PPE and provide infection prevention, technical assistance and support through clinical and planning opportunities. I really wanna thank our dedicated and knowledgeable public health staff who have endured the last two and a half years and continue to work tirelessly with COVID even though no one wants to talk about COVID anymore they're still doing the work. They're still addressing outbreaks providing vaccinations and support and helping our providers. Our community partners are also our trusted voices and partners throughout this and we continue to engage and sustain those relationships with a focus on how we do this work accurately at the center. So the relationships and the people are what will keep our community strong resilient as we move from response to recovery. I would now like to hand it to Gail Dr. Newell for closing remarks on COVID as well as our monkeypox updates. Thank you supervisors. It's really nice to be with you in person. It's been almost two years since I've been in chambers and it feels really good to be here with you. Thank you. And I wanna thank the community and take this opportunity for the community-wide, county-wide support for everything we needed to endure during the COVID pandemic. As has already been mentioned, the pandemic is not over but we're learning to live with COVID-19 more of an endemic, something like the flu that we'll need to continue to learn to live with. I love the quote that's on this slide from the prime minister of New Zealand. COVID-19 highlights how truly interdependent we all are, how reliant we are on cooperation, communication and compassion to successfully combat the virus. This embodies our community and our county and our response to COVID. So thank you to everyone for your wonderful cooperation especially to our healthcare workers, our healthcare heroes, our healthcare and hospital systems and our community-based organizations. A special shout out to the South County group and our South County partners who worked so hard to bring an equitable response in our county. Big thank yous to county employees especially our public health staff and DOC staff. I know that not every health officer has been as fortunate as I to work with a supportive board of supervisors, a supportive CAO's office. Thank you Carlos Palacios, a supportive county council and supportive sheriff and sheriff's office. Next slide. Just a few brief comments on monkeypox. Monkeypox is not COVID. It does not require a COVID-like response but nonetheless it is a warranting many resources on our parts. We're awaiting official new language and terminology for which to address this virus. Monkeypox is very stigmatizing as a name. California Department of Public Health has encouraged us to use Mpox as a substitution for monkeypox. MPX perhaps as an abbreviation although that's also if you Google that it comes up with assault rifles all over the website. So perhaps not the best choice. We'll wait to hear. So worldwide we have updated numbers as of yesterday, almost 43,000 cases worldwide with over 15,000 in the United States, 2,660 in California. In Santa Cruz we've been relatively spared with seven known cases and a handful of suspects that we're continuing to work with as well as all of their close contacts and household contacts. What is monkeypox? Well, anyone can get monkeypox although the general population is at very low risk. Although it's not classified as sexually transmitted infection, it is very sexually transmissible and most cases in the United States have been in gay and bisexual men who have sex with men. The virus is like smallpox but milder. It spreads through skin to skin contact through sexual activity and even in very close range breathing, kissing or sharing bedding and clothing. And there have been some cases in the United States and California that have occurred with bed sharing including in children. Regular laundering with regular detergents will prevent this type of transmission. So no need for panic but we'd like our community members to contact their healthcare providers right away if they think they have an unusual or suspicious rash or have been in contact with someone who's known to have monkeypox. 49 of the 50 states, District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have all reported cases as well as 33 California counties. So it is becoming more prominent although the initial spread has slowed some since our initial work with this virus in the United States. Locally here on Monday, August 15th, the Health Services Agency and Public Health activated a low level monkeypox DOC, Department Operations Center, separate from our COVID DOC to support the administrative and organizational needs and to prepare for scaling up as needed. We've been doing case investigation and contact tracing with close to 100 suspect cases and their close contacts. And the close contacts have been offered and received post-exposure prophylaxis in the form of the genius vaccine. We've been doing education and outreach including community town halls and clinician resource calls. We've been offering vaccinations and therapeutics working with our healthcare systems and also offering pop-up vaccination clinics including most recently Sunday at the Pajaro Valley Pride joint event with Monterey County in Watsonville. We've been onboarding providers to vaccinate with the genius vaccine and to administer treatment with teapox. And lastly, we have resources on sanacruzhealth.org slash monkeypox. So please look at the website. We're keeping that up to date with not only case numbers and local information but with resources including our wastewater surveillance. So you may know that we've been doing wastewater surveillance to monitoring our COVID numbers which are going down by the way. And so far we have not picked up any significant amount of monkeypox in our wastewater here in Santa Cruz but many of our neighboring counties have. And so we're keeping a close eye on that and that's it for this report. Happy to take questions. Thank you, Director Null and Director Shang or Officer Null. Other questions or comments from members of the board? I'd just like to say, Chief Advisor McPherson. Thank you again. I wanna thank the Health and Human Services Departments for what they have done for the last two and a half years. It's, I know you've heard it from a lot of people consistently but it is just incredible what you have done under some really very trying conditioned. It's really been an unprecedented effort by our county. When you say that I think 82% have had the first one vaccination in 76 but I think that's high in the state comparatively with counties. Just like maybe get your comments on that. And I think we should be really proud of our community members who have put forth this effort to get this high rate of vaccination rates. And what continues to concern me about the COVID response is just how little is being reimbursed by the federal government. And I hope we can see that FEMA Federal Emergency Management Agency reward the county for its strong and compassionate response to Grand Riem and that we get a better reimbursement from the federal government. It's critical that we do. The money's already been out late put out there and to thank heavens I think a lot of lives have been saved because of it. And we acted and we did it with compassion and foresight and I think we should be reimbursed for that effort from the federal government. Thank you. I'd be happy to respond to the vaccination rates and I did mean to talk about our case rates and death rates as well. So our metrics overall in this county are far away and exceed any kind of national metrics. So for example, our death rates, if we compare them to national death rates from COVID, we literally have saved 500 or more lives with our efforts. And San Francisco and the Bay Area region has performed best in the nation in terms of case rates, death rates, vaccination rates, but if you look at the Bay Area region overall, Santa Cruz is one of the top performers within that region as well. And San Francisco has been held up in the nation as having the lowest death rate from COVID in the nation. However, ours is even lower. So literally our saved lives campaign saved 550 to 600 lives. That's impressive. Thank you. May I speak to the FEMA reimbursement that President McPherson asked about? We are in the process of working on our first of our FEMA claims for the COVID response. We have the cooperation of our Health Services Agency, Public Health Fiscal and of course the others team working with our county's FEMA consultants. So we are optimistic that we will have a positive result from our FEMA claim, but it is a lot of work and a lot of folks are working on that right now. But thank you for your support of that. We hope that was successful as well. Thank you. Supervisor Caput. Thanks for the report. When you look at the countywide effort over the last two and a half years, it's remarkable from going from zero to where we are now. And it's, I don't know, what I've been impressed by is it's countywide, it's not just one city or two cities, but the whole county responded and we're also cooperating with the state of California and the rest, you know, federal government and all that. So the cooperation between agencies and everything, and the amount of money that came in for, you know, I saw the work in Watsonville. We had the homeless population problem also combined with COVID and the fire and all that. And we were able to respond and the veterans building in Watsonville was transformed pretty much within about two months. They had workers come in there and put in hot showers and they set up testing booths and all that for COVID. And then of course everything that went on at the fairgrounds in Watsonville with vaccinations. I mean, we could go on and on about how much we had to do and looking back on it, I'm kind of amazed that we did it. Really, I want to thank you all. Thank you, Supervisor. Thank you, Supervisor Caput. Any other comments or questions from board members? I just want to briefly express my gratitude to the team that's before us today and all the people that they were able to mobilize inside and outside the county to be partners. And because we were also interdependent on one another, it took a community-wide effort and I'm grateful for the progress we made and then most importantly continue to make to save lives. Thank you, Supervisor Coonerty. All right, seeing no other hands raised, I'll open it for public comment. Anyone here in the chambers wish to address us on this item? Seeing none, is there anyone on the web or on the telephone that wish to address us? Yes, Chair, we do have speakers online. Caller ending in 1192, your microphone is now available. Hi, am I on? Do you hear me? Yes. Okay. A news article recently said that on August 4th, 2022, high-ranking Israeli doctor admits monkeypox is a side effect of the vaccine. Professor Shmuel Shapiro, head of Israel Biological Institute, the most senior medical scientific position in Israel, posted on the connection between monkeypox and the COVID vaccine. Myocarditis, fatal arrhythmia, 20% increase in strokes, fascialis, herpes, zoster, tinnitus, gynecological excessive bleeding, monkeypox, obscured long-term effects. No worries, be happy. That's the side effects of the vaccine. From a website called COVID Facts, Stop World Control, thousands of physicians and scientists and lawyers worldwide have come forward with evidence that this pandemic was planned with a criminal purpose. COVID-19 vaccines were already developed in 2019, months before the pandemic. 2018, every country in the world suddenly began importing hundreds of millions of COVID-19 test kits. 30 months before the pandemic, it was announced that a coronavirus pandemic was coming from Wuhan. Two months before the pandemic, Bill Gates organized a coronavirus pandemic exercise. Politicians receive large sums of money to enforce lockdowns. For example, the president of Belarus was offered a billion dollars, but he refused and exposed this bribery. The Nigerian government was offered 400 million to follow the agenda of Bill Gates. Italian politician Sarah Cuniel confronted the Italian president for accepting money from Bill Gates to lockdown the country. Hospitals receive $39,000 for every patient who dies and is registered as a COVID death. News media and celebrities are paid handsomely to spread COVID propaganda. In every country, there are organizations with thousands of medical professionals. Call in user four, your microphone is now available. Marilyn Guerra, thank you to the previous speaker for reading those excellent facts that have been omitted from your report. COVID vaccines are not safe and not effective. The error state are released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This is the official government bears report show 1,314,594 reports of adverse events from all age groups following COVID-19 vaccines, including 29,162 deaths and 241,226 serious deaths and serious injuries between December 14, 2020 and June, 2022. There is a CDC vaccine adverse events reporting system. Children's healthdefense.org has more information. We're told we're a free country and I received this flyer on the 4th of July The fear of COVID-19 is being used to remove our civil rights, destroy our economy, close down the small and medium businesses, separate, isolate and terrorize family members, impoverish people, destroy jobs and censor true information. We don't wanna give into that fear we believe in freedom. And these are the various global agendas behind the declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic, mandates and policies. Thank you, Ms. Garrett. We have no further speakers, Chair. Thank you. Then I'll return to the board. Their only recommended actions here was to consider the report. I don't believe any action is necessary. But if there's any further deliberation. All right, seeing none. Thank you all for the report today. Appreciate it very much. We'll proceed with item nine. This is to consider a report on activities to support the formation of the Pajaro Valley Health Care District and the Pajaro Valley Health Care District Hospital Corporation and the November 8th, 2022 election for two at-large seats on the Pajaro Valley Health Care District's board of directors to consider an update on fundraising efforts to both acquire and operate Watsonville Community Hospital as a community hospital under PVHCD ownership. Consider an update on the transition of Watsonville Community Hospital to a community hospital under PVHCD ownership and authorize a short-term loan of $3 million to be PVHCD to fund a required letter of credit that is necessary to close the transaction and take related actions as outlined in the memorandum of the Director of Health Services. And for a report on this item, we have our Director of Health Services, Monica Morales, and our Assistant Director of Health Services, Tiffany Kentrow Warren. Chair Koenig and members of the board, I'll be giving the introduction to this item today. It's been more than a year since this county and the community came together to rescue Watsonville Community Hospital from bankruptcy and to return it to public ownership as it was for more than 80 years of its history. It has been quite an effort. Let me tell you, first of all, I think it's important that the community really did come to recognize the importance of Watsonville Hospital to the community. It's easy to think it's just important to Watsonville or to the Paro Valley, but I think during the past year, the entire Santa Cruz County has come to realize the vital role that the hospital plays in our healthcare system. And not only our county, but actually in our region, our surrounding counties also would be greatly impacted if Watsonville Hospital were to close. And for that reason, the community has really come together and rallied in support of the hospital. This has turned into more than a full-time job for me and our other staff, including these two folks, we have a day job, but we've become full-time staff employees, including our county council and our health services agency, the CAO staff and other agencies across the county as well. And so the good news is that we have had a community-wide effort to fund the needed monies that we need to return the hospital to ownership. We set a goal of over $67 million to return the hospital to public ownership that included acquisition costs, as well as interim funding costs, consultant costs, to develop a business plan. And finally, operating capital costs so that once the hospital is returned to the public, they will have enough funds to keep the hospital going during the timeframe that it takes to turn the hospital around. We have had over 450 unique donors with donations of smallest $5 to the multimillion dollars. The community support has been tremendous. Today, I have very good news. We had a gap in our fundraising and we've just received word that we have received a commitment for a pledge of over $4.5 million from Kaiser. Kaiser has already committed $3 million. And so they just have let us know that they're going to be committing a further $4.5 million pledge. It's a multi-year pledge, but it will help us to close the gap. Our goal is over $67 million. We're now within $1.6 million of our overall goal of $67 million with that new pledge from Kaiser. So it's a tremendous news. It's very exciting to think that within six months we've raised more than $65 million for this hospital. It's an unprecedented fundraising effort. And it came about to the efforts of lots of folks in the community, but also your board, your board has been tremendously supportive, not only by leading the way and giving donations, but also we've stood up that Paro Valley Healthcare District as well and provided all the staffing that was needed to get that going. So we're now in the final stages of the actual close of the purchase. We believe we will close that purchase by early next week. We have the funds for the acquisition and we're within $1.6 million of having the overall funds for the operating capital as well. So congratulations to the community, to our staff and great news for the Paro Valley Healthcare District Board, which is taking on this challenge. I wanna thank each one of those five board members who have stepped up and will be taking on the very difficult challenge of leading the hospital into a sustainable, and I think a very thriving future. So with that, if you have a question, I'll be happy to answer. And if not, I'll turn it over to Monica and Tiffany for the actual staff report on the status update and also a new funding request we're making of you to help fund a letter of credit that's needed to secure the lease that the hospital is under. Did you have a question, Supervisor Caput? Yeah, if I may. You mentioned it's been over a year. It's remarkable how fast time goes when you're having a good time, right? Anyway, I wanna tell the other supervisors, we've heard in the past how South County gets ignored sometimes or left off of the agenda. That has not been true in the last couple of years. The interest and the support from all the supervisors has been remarkable. And I remember about a month ago, I was talking to John Laird, and he was going, how much more do we have to do for Watsonville in South County? I mean, the hospital and the Pahoa River and a park acquisition. And so a lot of everything is focusing on South County and Watsonville's hospital, if we don't keep it open, the impact would be more than just county wide. It would impact more people would have to go to Kaiser in San Jose, so that means people would have to go to Santa Clara County. And of course, it impacts Monterey County also. So it has been regional and the amount of attention and commitment from everybody, including all the supervisors in the county. I just want to extend my appreciation for all the year work and everybody else's work and for the attention that South County has been getting. It's kind of like a marathon. You can run 20 miles and you're doing well. So do you quit or do you just keep going? And we're at that stage where we were so close to making it that there's no way that we could have thrown up our hands and said, we can't do this. So I think we have completed the marathon, but now we have to get ready for the next marathon, which means we have to keep the hospital open. And so that's going to take some money and effort also. And I think we're capable of doing that. Actually, after the last couple of years, I think we're capable of doing almost anything. Thank you for emphasizing once again, help of Senator Laird and Assemblymember Rebus in securing the $25 million grant from the state, which is absolutely key in our fundraising efforts. And you're right. We've shown that with the support of our legislators as well as the support of the local community in the staff report is a list of the donors, some of the major donors, and it's just remarkable. And so it truly, I'm very confident that once the hospital is in local ownership, it's going to not only be sustainable, but thrive in its future. I wanted to introduce Monique Morales, our health services agency played a key role in doing the hard work of turning the hospital around in terms of our developing our business plan as well as standing up the health care district and Tiffany Cantrell Warren also has been a key player as well as our county council and our auditor, treasurer, tax collector and other CAO and other health services agency staff. So with that, I'll turn it over to you folks and we can get into the staff report. Thank you. I know we're way over time, so we'll try to summarize some of the key highlights that CAO Carlos Palacios has shared with you guys. And apparently I can't hear me in the mic, so here we go. Just a quick reminder in terms of really the impact that we're highlighting here, we know that not only does this really impact Monterey County, it also impacts our county and neighboring counties, even San Benito, but we think about the workforce. This facility hires about 600 qualified health staff. So that's really important for us to think about the economic impact as well as we think about the Watsonville Community Hospital. We also have more newborns delivered in the hospital compared to other hospitals in our county and they really are responsible 41% of the emergency room visits in the county. Just a little reminder too, we did also put in place the Hospital Corp Corporation, we call it Corp Corporation Formation, which really will help the business model. It really helps preserve about $10 million per year in supplementary funds from the federal government. So very important governance structure that we've put in place as well. Kind of highlighting a little bit what we've covered already, which is really the contributions from this board to this cause. It's remarkable, not only our community coming together, but our leadership at the board as well. And so you'll see here, just quick highlights being able to provide a 5.5 million grant to the acquisition of the hospital. In addition, you have about $52,000 that we've covered and $100,000 both for legal services and insurance for our directors of the board. And not to mention the numerous staff, we do have about a dozen staff working from the county on this project. So thank you to everybody that has been involved with that. I also want to highlight a key of the business activities. There's over, I'm not kidding you, about 300 activities that we have consultants and the Watsonville staff working on, but I wanted to highlight a few, looking at what areas that we can actually turn around to improve some of the cash and revenue coming into the hospital. So for example, we have insurance contracts with nine of the largest health insurance plans or negotiating contracts with them, hoping that they come up to market. So we're getting a fair pay for the services that the hospital is providing. In addition, there's over 600 employees, as I mentioned, we sent out letters offering key schedules for them. So those are moving forward as well. It's a lot of different HR activities that are taking place and just working alone with the staff at the hospital. Moving with the state and all of the requirements that we have with licenses, everything from pharmaceuticals, everything from our CAF lab and so on. So these are key licenses that we need in order to ensure that the hospital is not only purchased, but that we're actually able to open it moving forward. I'll highlight that our executory contracts, there is over 600 of them that needed to be approved and processed or almost there to ensuring that all of them are actually approved and moved forward. And this is very important for us, because again, if we don't have folks really moving in our IT systems and thinking about our lab systems and everything that it takes for mowing the lawn at the hospital and keeping the lights on, these are very important contracts and we're making sure that we're reviewing them and under the new ownership and obviously renewing them or canceling them all together. And finally, the revenue cycle is very important for us. We have unfortunately old systems that they've been using even paper still in processing some of the revenue cycle activities. And so we're hoping that this alone, for example, if we bring it up to par in terms of using sophisticated IT systems and also just following up in terms of the billing that we are able to generate about $3 million just alone in this initiative. So I wanna just summarize there. Again, there's a lot there that we can unpack and we'll leave it for some of your questions and just highlight what CEO Palacios has highlighted. We're 97% in terms of reaching our goal. And again, that's remarkable for a county of this size for us to be able to fundraise this level of funding, it's remarkable. So I just wanna highlight that. And now we'll pass it to my colleague, Tiffany, to highlight a little bit of the campaign. At the heart of this campaign is a large collaboration of organizations and volunteers. And I just wanna take a moment to thank the county staff, the community health trust of Pajaro Valley, the Pajaro Valley Health Care District Board members and the Pajaro Valley Health Care District Project who have come together to raise funds as well as about 12 campaign ambassadors who are volunteers, leaders in our community who have leveraged their financial contributions and personal relationships to make this possible. The campaign has included a variety of diverse fundraising activities that have enabled broad participation from our local community, from $5 gifts from members of our community to $5 million gifts from healthcare institutions and then $25 million from the state of California. So all together, we have raised $61,338,351 in just a few months. This is truly phenomenal. I don't think we've ever seen anything like this in our county. And I think it's something that everyone in our county should celebrate. It really speaks to how important the Watsonville Community Hospital is to our county's health. I'd also just want to note that the figures I'm presenting here are accurate as of August 19th. The figures presented in the staff report are accurate as of August 10th. So towards our total fundraising goal of $67,025,000, we've raised over $61 million. This includes community contributions of over $6.2 million. We also have pledge gifts of over $6.4 million, including what Carlos just shared today about the additional $4.5 million pledge from Kaiser. We anticipate that there will be an additional $4 million and donations still coming in, as well as other revenues. So taken together, our campaign has raised 97.5% of its fundraising goal. And that leaves us with a gap of $1.6 million. The community response has been overwhelming. We've had 450 unique donors, probably more since last week, who have contributed to save the hospital. And again, these are gifts ranging from $5 million to $5, and there's a way for everyone to participate in supporting the hospital. There is a list of donors who have contributed more than $5,000, and that's in the board packet. So if you or anyone listening is interested in supporting this effort, help us get to 500 donors by the end of this month. There's many ways to give, and you can learn more about this at pvhdp.org. Thank you. So in terms of next steps, we really are all waiting and anticipating August 31st, as that it would be the date that we will actually sign all the paperwork for the acquisition of the hospital. Something other areas that we're working on as well is just really starting to, one, celebrate, because I think that's very important. This is remarkable accomplishment. We will be sharing some dates with you in the future. We're still trying to lock down exactly the date that we're gonna have our celebration, our community celebration. But in addition, as you can tell, some of the work that we've done here in terms of fundraising needs to continue. We know that a health district hospital will require not just ongoing upgrades in terms of their business model, but also continuation of fund development. So this is one of the areas that we're gonna help ensure that it's in place for the health district, moving forward. In addition, thinking about staffing and transitioning the interim staff from the county into now the executive staff at the actual hospital and making sure that we have a smooth transition between both entities. So in conclusion, what I just wanted to highlight for the board is really taking action and consider the staff report that we just presented to you in terms of the formation of the healthcare district. In addition, there's gonna be the November 8th election for two at large seats, two of our board members, right, our health district board members, and also consideration of an update of the fundraising efforts that we've presented to you and also an update on the transition of the community hospital to a community hospital under the Power of Valley Healthcare District ownership. And finally, authorize a short term of up to 3 million to the Power of Health District to fund a required letter of credit as it's necessary for us to close the transaction and authorize the CAO to execute documents to complete the action. So with that, I'll conclude my presentation. Thank you, Director Morales and Assistant Director Contrall Warren and CAO Palacios. Are there any questions or comments from members of the board? Mr. Chair, I'll make some brief comments. Also some appreciation for Supervisor Caput for his kind comments about the board and county staff at it through as the other South County representative that there's been a significant focus and from this board and the county and the state and for that matter on the South County and there's a good reason I think for, I think the problems are significant and the challenges are significant and also the lack of investment over historically is needed to be remedied. In regards to the hospital, today is a remarkable accomplishment. I mean, when I was thinking about just the amount of puzzle pieces that needed to come together for this to even be possible and then even when those puzzle pieces were connected it turns out half of them were actually missing key parts that needed to be reconnected and it feels like the end but it's really just the end of the very beginning of not just a new era of public ownership but of new challenges that'll face the district moving forward. So it's really not an opportunity to rest and relax but really an opportunity to show that this community could come together to put this into public ownership and now needs to continue to come together to make sure that that hospital is viable long term. With the number of phone calls I've had with the CAO on weekends and at nights I just wanna take a moment because the community doesn't get to see this. The county staff that's here right now our health director, our CAO, our county council I mean everybody that's there right now the number of hours that they've put into ensuring that this succeed is really something else. When he said it was another full-time job that would be assuming that a full-time job was only a 40 hour additional work week. I think that realistically each one of them has put in hundreds upon hundreds of hours of negotiations. I mean I know for a fact that we've got additional conversations with the federal government coming up for additional help just even later this week and just the amount of time and effort they've put in while still managing the county is really should be recognized. So I just wanna express my appreciation. There's a lot of people in the South County that don't recognize what's happening behind the scenes but they wouldn't have any health options but for the work that's being done. And so people's lives will be saved, people's health outcomes will be improved and the next generation will be better off because of the work that was done and what better compliment can public officials receive than knowing that all those things would be accomplished. So I just wanted to make sure that that was stated Mr. Chair. Thank you for that. Thank you, Supervisor Friend. Thank you. Supervisor McPherson. Yeah, I think we're just hearing about the most significant healthcare accomplishment in Santa Cruz County history. I mean, this is unbelievable. And a lot of people have been mentioned starting with our CAO and our current staff members but there were two staff members that were our health services, former health services director Mimi Hall. She left the county but she stepped right in and rounded the bases and did everything she could as well as our former county council, Dana McRae. I think they should be mentioned too and congratulations everybody, great accomplishment. All right, if you know other comments or questions, does any member of the public wish to address us on this item? Thank you. My name is Becky Stuybrunner. I live in rural Abtos and I am within the area that the boundaries have already been drawn by the state that will tax to pay for this hospital's future operations. There's been no talk about that today and it doesn't really show when the people will get a chance to vote on whether we want that or not. That's gonna, that will be what funds this in the future is the new tax base for the hospital district. And it's a wide circle that's been drawn. The boundaries were stated already in the legislation that Senator Laird drew up. So I think you need to make that clear. And I have not been able to verify it but what I've been told by someone who is very knowledgeable and that I do trust is that the Watsonville hospital would not close. The state would not allow that because there are laws regarding a certain population base has to have a certain number of beds and emergency rooms available. Our county has to have two. The state would not allow the Watsonville hospital to shudder and maybe you can correct me on that but it is not as gloomy as I think it's been made out to be. I also wanna point out that Kaiser tried to buy it. They were interested in buying the hospital but were discouraged and that delay in their pursuit of trying to buy the Watsonville hospital caused them a whole slew of problems now in new laws at their Kaiser facility on SoCal Avenue. What has also not been brought to light here is that there are many nurses that are not happy with this. The Sentinel reported in it that there are a number of part-time positions that will now go away down to 12 from 118. The nurses are not happy about this. So you, we need to be. Thank you. Seeing no one else here in chambers, is there anyone online or on the phone? So it was just to address us. We have no speakers online chair. All right, thank you. Then I'll return to the board for deliberation and action. Mr. Chair, I'll move the recommended actions. All right, motion by Supervisor Friend. Did you want to second? To both. Supervisor Caput, all right. Second by Supervisor Caput. Any further discussion? Then, excuse me, ma'am. And just a point of clarification that my understanding is in terms of future funding for the hospital while certainly attacks could be levied on the district, it is not necessarily required and it's not contemplated at this time. Is that right? That is correct. And, you know, our health district board right now is really looking at sustainability options. They're going to be doing an assessment in addition to what I mentioned, business model, what opportunities we have. We're going to be looking into potential federal grant dollars, state dollars, and obviously continuing the major donor campaign. So it's really going to require a portfolio of options for us to sustain this hospital. Great, thank you. One quick question, the celebration is this Thursday or a week from Thursday? So we know that we want to have a big bash with some of the snapper planning. Right now, we're trying to narrow down exactly the day. We're looking more towards the end of September because through the transition, there's still going to be a lot of detail activities that we need to put in place. So we're looking at the end of September and we will get back to you on exactly what date we're concluding with. Okay, yeah, because I saw something about Thursday so it was in the newspaper. It wouldn't be this Thursday, this Thursday we have a health district special meeting at four o'clock. Okay, that's fine, thank you. All right, we have a motion by Supervisor Friend, a second by Supervisor Caput to accept or approve the recommended actions, including the short-term loan of up to $3 million. Any further discussion? Seeing none, clerk roll call vote please. Supervisor Friend. Aye. Aye. Caput? Aye. McPherson? Aye. Schenkonig? Aye. Set him passes unanimously. Thank you. Thank you, Director Morales and Assistant Director Contrall Warren. We have one last item on our agenda before we go into closed sessions this morning. I believe it'll be brief and in respect to the health staff that is here. I think we should move through and address it now. All right, I'll jump in if it's okay with folks. And this is item 10 to consider a report from the Health Services Agency on the Syringe Services Program as directed by the Board on June 8th, 2022 as outlined in the memorandum of the Director of Health Services. And for a part on this item, Monique Morales. Thank you. Joining me is Emily Chung, our Director of Public Health and also Dr. Newell. Let me just get right in and wanted to just provide an update. I know at our last meeting in June, you tasked HSA to come back and provide an update in potential additional eight syringe disposable kiosks opportunities across the county. So in your report, what you'll see is we provided eight sites, 4 and Watsonville and 4 North County. You'll see the actual list of where these potential locations can be. I will just remind folks that these were recommendations from our community and also our SSP advisory commission. However, we really need to test for visibility with our jurisdictions to ensure that it makes sense for them and the key organizations that we have outlined there as well. Looking in terms of the cost for what it would take to move forward with these new eight kiosks, we're looking at about $52,000 for a one-time expense. And then for maintenance, we're looking at about $40,000 annually moving forward. Also want to remind you that in the report, you'll see some data. You asked us to come back and share with you. Some of the data as it pertains to the litter syringe pickup. And so what you'll see here is that overall, some of the data over the past two years remains consistent. We have key sites that we've been collecting data from and we are trying to get better at the data collection. I want to highlight that, that it's an effort for us where we're trying to work closely with the downtown streets team, save our shores and even including our own syringe program to make sure that we are collecting data that we're reporting it and also looking at trends over time. But in general, what you'll see is that our downtown streets team, as a collaborative, they're collecting about anywhere from zero to 150 syringes across their sites. Our safe shores are collecting everywhere between two to 26 syringes. Again, these are monthly. And then you'll see for our County SSP exchange sites, over the past two years, we have seen a downtrend, but it's still a significant amount of needles that are being collected by our team. So I want to kind of just summarize, thank everyone that has helped put this proposal for you in terms of potential eight sites and the data pieces. And also just really emphasize the work that we still want to continue with the local cities to make sure that this is a successful program. So with that, I'm going to pause. I know there's much more that we can cover, but I'll leave it at your leisure for questions. Thank you, Director Morales. Are there comments or questions from members of the board? Supervisor McPherson. Mr. Chair, you and I attended a community meeting recently with neighbors in the MLIN facility and where the county conducts a syringe exchange program and provides other health services to vulnerable populations. And I want to acknowledge the concerns of those neighbors that we heard from. They were very measured and polite, and but they do have some serious, serious problems. And they're sponsored throughout the county, but in that region it's significant. And I'm just concerned about the decreasing use of our SSP and related decline in the distribution of cling needles offered by our SSP. We've seen a steady decline in the recent years, as you mentioned, and I think the board members of the public would benefit from a deeper dive on this issue, which I know that you're looking into. So could someone from the health service address that issue briefly now? And perhaps we could have a bigger discussion about it during the next update, whenever that may be. Yeah, absolutely. Part of it for us is also we're looking at the data. We're talking to our community constituents to see what's happening. We believe it could also be linked to the harm reduction sites that have been scaled. And so folks have more options in other places of the county. We're also looking at potentially the impact of COVID and accessibility in some of our sites. I'm not sure if, Emily, you wanna add anything else to this finding? Thank you, Director Morales. Yes, those are some of the key issues that our teams are experiencing as additional exchange providers in our community, as well as there are reports that injection drug users are now switching to smoking instead as a means of drug use. And so there is a shift in modality that may be impacting the syringe needs in our community. Thank you, Supervisor McPherson. Any other, Supervisor Coonerty? Sure, so first of all, I wanna take a moment and thank Director Morales for meeting with Supervisor McPherson and myself to talk through some of these concerns. I think the eight chaos are a good step in the right direction. And I appreciate you pointing out that you have to work with the community and our jurisdictional partners to make that go. I do think that the decrease in the numbers of our program, which we've had many presentations over the years I've been here is credibly effective and reduces harm and connects people to needed services is deeply concerning. I think the more data that we can gain about HRC's distributions, which are clearly having at least some significant impact on our system and potential litter is great. And then finally, I will reiterate just yesterday, leaving the county building over the Water Street Bridge, there were five needles sitting on the bridge, 20 feet from a kiosk. And so needing to have an ability for those needles to be quickly and safely picked up is incredibly important. Thank you, Supervisor Coonerty. Any other comments or questions from board members? Then I'll add, yeah, I mean, thank you for the data-driven approach here. And I'm fully supportive of adding additional eight kiosks considering how many needles those kiosks have taken off our streets in 60,000 in one month is a pretty remarkable number and much better in one of those bins than on the streets. So I appreciate that. I share Supervisor Coonerty and McPherson's concerns about the decreasing utilization of our county exchange program and as Supervisor McPherson said, we did have that meeting with neighbors who are around the Emeline Clinic. I think there's a couple of issues there. I mean, not only the direct impacts to residential area, but also co-location with folks giving out syringes at a place where people are also trying to receive medically assisted treatment and really get away from old patterns. And I've certainly reached out to our sheriff's office and working with city council and the police department to ensure that we are stringent and make sure that there's no illegal activity happening in the area as we've heard repeatedly reported by residents. So I'm supportive of adding the eight kiosks. I'd also like to ask that our syringe services advisory commission look at the possibility of moving the North County syringe services program out of Emeline and look at other, whether it's another physical site like HP, HP at Coral Street or I know we have new HP HP mobile vans looking at utilizing that as a potential way to operate the program as well. All right, if there's no other comments or questions by board members, is there anyone in the public who wishes to address us on this item? I think no one here in chambers, is there anyone on Zoom? We have no speakers on Zoom, Chair. All right, then I'll return to the board for action. Super recommended actions. Second. All right, and just a question about asking our syringe services advisory commission to look at the location of the syringe services program in North County. Do you think that is that something you're- I think that would, thank you, Mr. Chair. Yeah, I'd like to add that to motion to have our advisory committee look at that. Okay, thank you. Is that amenable to the second? Supervisor Coonerty. Sorry, yes, it is. Okay, then motion and a second with additional direction, ready for the discussion. Seeing none, clerk roll call vote, please. Supervisor Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Caput. Aye. McPherson. Aye. And Koenig. Aye. Item passes unanimously as amended. Thank you, thank you to the HSA team. All right, that ends our morning session. We do have a 1.30 p.m. scheduled item. The board will now go into closed session. Are there any reportable actions from closed session today? There are no reportable actions today. Would you like to convene at one o'clock in closed session? Yes, we'll convene at one o'clock. Do we have the ability to reschedule the, I know we have a fairly packed closed session agenda in this 1.30 p.m. item. Do we have the ability to reschedule the 1.30 p.m. item? We don't have an ability to reschedule the 1.30 p.m. item. We can start late though, and we can acknowledge in closed session that your board has a 1.30 meeting. So we'll move through it as soon as we can. Okay, great. And then we'll convene in closed session at 1.00 p.m. Thank you. We'll now resume the regular meeting of the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors. We have a scheduled item for 1.30 p.m. I'm sorry, we're running a little bit late. It is 1.40 p.m. August 23rd. Burke, will you please call the roll? Supervisor Friend. Here. Coonerty? Here. Caput? Here. McPherson? Here. And Koenig? Here. You have a chair, Quorum. Quorum, chair, thank you. Thank you. All right, then we'll proceed with item 12, a jurisdictional hearing to consider an appeal of application number 211083, an application to operate an outdoor class A cannabis cultivation facility with a maximum of 20,000 square feet of canopy on the property located at 375 Old Mount Road as outlined in the memorandum of the Director of Community Development and Infrastructure. And for a report on this item, we have resource planner, Michael Sapanor. Good afternoon, members of the board. I'm Michael Sapanor. I'm the project review planner who prepared the staff report for application 211083 and took the application to hearing. So what I'll do now is just give an orientation to the site and the project and some of the key issues and go from there. The project is located in a upper Zianti watershed, 375 Old Mount Road on the figure here. You can see the polygon, the blue polygon. Advance. And a closer up view with the black lines showing the parcel or parcel limits gives a view of the neighborhood context and geography and the site again is outlined in blue here and the colored letters are abbreviations for the zoning designations. In this case, the parcel is zoned A or for agriculture. It's adjacent to parcels zone TP for timber production as well as an SU special use. Uses in the area are agricultural, residential and in timber cultivation. And here's a closer view of the site. This shows the property itself, the subject parcel right in the center of the graphic. And if you're looking at the middle of the photo where the vineyard is just to the right of the vineyard running directionally from the top to the bottom of the picture is a fence line. You see the white road there. That's the parcel boundary to the closest adjacent neighbor, their resonances are shown in the upper right hand corner of the photo. The proposed cultivation area is if you viewed the pond as the center of a clock, you know, an old school clock about five o'clock that cleared area with some faint traces of vineyard. That's the proposed cannabis cultivation site. And the next image is a quote, a view of that site, a plan view showing in relation to the lake these rectangular colored figures are the location of proposed hoop houses for approximately 20,000 square feet of canopy area cultivation in a series of seasonal hoop houses. Another thing that's worth pointing out is that you see the upper right, the neighboring resonance there's an arrow pointing to the resonance and the graphics aren't super bold or clear but you can see that arrow pointing to the resonance and from that resonance extending to the east a long arrow pointing to the dashed line sort of an arched line. That denotes the minimum setback of 400 feet that's required between a habitable structure on a neighboring property and an outdoor cannabis cultivation area. Hoop house cultivation is considered to be outdoor cultivation because it's seasonal and it's no utilities are permitted in as part of the grow operation itself for cultivation. And the next exhibit is this is a Google Earth image and this is looking from the perspective of from the Northwest the neighboring habitable structures are in the foreground here to the on the left of the graphic and then you can see the yellow polygon the top of the picture. That yellow polygon shows the outline of the cultivation area proposed and immediately in the foreground there is a green line that colored line shows the location of a hedgerow that would be conditioned to be plant installed as part of the approved project at the zoning administrator hearing. Okay, at two public hearings on December 3rd, 2021 and a continued hearing on March 4th, 2022 the zoning administrator approved application number 211083 after reviewing the record. This approval was appealed on March 11th, 2022 by Bill Parkin of Whitwurn Parkin LLP on behalf of Old Mount Protectors. On July 13th, 2022, the planning commission considered the appeal of the zoning administrator's decision to approve the application and after reviewing additional correspondence and testimony voted four to one against a motion to uphold the zoning administrator's decision to approve the application. On July 26th, 2022, the applicant appealed the action taken by the commission to your board. The project was approved on the basis following provisions, the commercial development permit findings CEQA findings for including a filing of a notices of exemption based on class one existing facilities category and class four minor alterations to land exemption. And the third, there were conditions of approval for the project, the building permit for electrical power to the temporary storage site as well as hardware for security apparatus would be required. The conditions of the archeological report prepared for the project, we need to be followed during operations. A cannabis business license, which is a discretionary license would need to be applied for, reviewed and approved. The best management and operations practices would need to be implemented as adopted as part of the approved plan set at the zoning administrator hearing. Provisions of a security plan would need to be implemented as well the condition of the development permit and a condition of the cannabis license. The temporary shade house covers for the hoop houses would need to be removed during the winter season. And the hedgerow, which you saw in the earlier photo would need to be installed to screen view of the site from neighboring properties. The planning commission's action was appealed to the Board of Supervisors by Trevor Luxon, attorney at law, representing the project applicants, Green Coast LLC and Old Mount Farm LLC owned by Aaron Medani and Masoud Medani. Pursuant to Santa Cruz County code section 1810340, the Board must determine whether to accept jurisdiction and schedule a public hearing of the appeal or allow the planning commission determination to stand. The Board also has the option of remanding the project back to the planning commission without taking jurisdiction. Just to summarize grounds for taking jurisdiction are that number one, there was an error or abusive discretion on the part of the planning commission zoning administrator or other officer. Two, there was a lack of a fair and impartial hearing. Three, the decision appealed from is not supported by the facts presented and considered at the time the decision appealed from was made. Four, there is a significant new evidence relevant to the decision which could not have been presented at the time the decision appealed from was made. And five, there is either error, abusive discretion or some other factor which renders the act done or determination made unjustified or inappropriate to the extent that a further hearing before the Board is necessary. To boil it down, your Board has three options for actions to take on this, jurisdictional appeal. You may take no action, you may remand the project back to the planning commission or you may decide to take jurisdiction. Staff is recommending that your Board take jurisdiction of the appeal of application number 211083, your Board schedule a public hearing for October 18th, 2022 and that your Board direct the clerk of the Board to provide written and published notices as required by County Code section 1810340E1. And that concludes the presentation, my staff. Thank you, Mr. Sapanar. Are there questions or comments from members of the Board at this time? Seeing none. So this is a jurisdictional hearing before we officially open it. Can you remind me of the procedure here? I believe it's the applicant will have seven minutes to present their reasons for why I believe the Board should take jurisdiction. And then since the applicant and the applicant are the same in this case, is there a set period of time for any other parties or would we just open it for public comment? So it should be seven minutes for the appellant, seven minutes for the opposition if there is any. And then oftentimes it's within your Board's discretion but you can reserve a short period of time for rebuttal from the appellant. Okay, thank you. We'll officially open the jurisdictional hearing and the appellant will now have seven minutes to present on why they believe the Board should take jurisdiction. Good afternoon to the Board. On behalf of the applicants, Masoud and Aaron Madani, we request the Board of Supervisors takes jurisdiction of this matter under Santa Cruz County Code section 1810 dot 340, as Mr. Sappner pointed out, that code section allows the Board to take jurisdiction of a matter where there was an error in the decision by the Planning Commission or where the decision is not based on the facts. So in this instance, after two thorough zoning administrator hearings with the recommendation of the Planning Department, the Cannabis Licensing Office, and after the review of the Sheriff's Office and Environmental Health and the Fire Department, all of whom recommended that the project be approved, the zoning administrator went ahead and gave approval to the project. That decision was reversed by the Planning Commission. In doing so, the Planning Commission's actions were procedurally incomplete due to making no clear findings on the record with regards to the reasons for their denial. At the time of the hearing, the Commission gave no clear basis as to why it chose to overrule the previous decision initially at the hearing. Planning Commissioners did not wish to give any reasoning at all after some discussion with Deputy County Council Daniel Zazeweta who was present at the hearing. Some issues were cited vaguely in particular issues with odor, water use and security. However, no legitimate findings were made to support the statements from the Commission. At the Commission hearing, inaccurate and exaggerated information was presented to the Commission on behalf of old non-protectors, the group that appealed the Zoning Administrator hearing. Information that was provided was a vastly inflated estimate of water use, claims that the project would negatively impact the environment but with no clear explanation as to why or how and claims that there would be a severe cumulative impact based on multiple licensed cannabis cultivation sites in the San Lorenzo Valley when in fact, there's actually only two other licensed cultivation sites in the entire Valley, the nearest of which is over eight miles away. None of the reasons that were alluded to at the hearing were legally valid or based on county code requirements for the project. The project, the application meets every single one of the requirements for cannabis cultivation license under code section 7.128 and section 1310.650 which lay out the requirements for cannabis cultivation licensing. As part of the application process, the applicants have developed and Mr. Sapanor as well as the Canvas Licensing Office have reviewed about the best management operations practices to address all the issues that were brought up at the hearing, such as odor and then security that plan was approved after thorough review. Overall, the planning commission's decision seems simply based on an overall dislike of cannabis. There was no clear articulation as to why the old Mount Protectors attorney argued that there were, that the planning commissions or excuse me, the planners determination on the CEQA exemptions was incorrect. Those exemptions were not addressed whatsoever at the planning commission. The commission hearing ended with county councils as a wetter describing the decision as a prime example of an abuse of discretion by the planning commission. Prior to this meeting, the county administrative office has submitted a letter to the board suggesting that the board does take jurisdiction over this matter. I've been in contact with the planning department, including Mr. Sapanor and Matt Johnson, the head of the department. They both stand by their support of this project. The Canvas Licensing Officer, Sam Laforti, also continues to support the project. As you likely heard today in his quarterly report, the county's cannabis industry is struggling. This is a project that could bring significant tax revenue to the county. It meets all of the applicable requirements and it fits well with what the board set forth when writing those requirements. It's located on an agricultural zone property. It's a large property of over 31 acres. It meets every setback requirement. The cultivation site itself is only 20,000 square feet, which is less than half an acre on a 31 acre parcel. So just to wrap things up, again, the planning commission's decision was procedurally incomplete. There was no factual findings made. If you review the minutes to the meeting, there's literally no information given as to why the decision was made. The county council president felt that it was an abuse of discretion. The county administrative office is recommending the board take jurisdiction. The planning department and cannabis licensing offices still stand by their support of this project. So we're asking that the board take jurisdiction and hold a DeNovo hearing to re-review the project. That's all. Thank you, Mr. Luxem. Anyone wishes to speak in opposition of the project? We're gonna have seven minutes. Mr. Chair, I see that Mr. Parkin is online, so he may need to be promoted or allowed to speak. Good afternoon, can you hear me? Yes, we can. Thank you. Good afternoon, Mr. Chair, members of the board, Bill Parkin for the Old Mountain Protectors. We were the folks that did appeal the zoning administrator's decision to the planning commission. We don't think there was anything wrong with the planning commission's decision. The planning commission did state reasons for its decision. And this appeal in part is about the integrity of the planning commission process. I thought your planning commission did a thorough job of explaining the reasons why they were not approving what is a discretionary approval despite what was said before the planning commission. This isn't just exchanging one crop for another. Cannabis is highly regulated. The county code considers this kind of use to be a discretionary approval, which requires scrutiny. And we had outlined, and I outlined in my letter to you that I sent last Thursday that the CEQA exemptions that the staff had proposed do not apply. Also, the reliance on the program EIR for the cannabis regulations that was never put in final form and never certified by this board can't be relied on because it was simply a draft document that was never adopted for some of the mitigations. So there's a whole host of environmental reasons on why this project should not be approved. I will point out that the deputy county council who brought up the issue of water said that we don't, the county doesn't regulate water. There's no basis, regulate water. But CEQA provides an independent basis in which to look at impacts and call for mitigations and alternatives for those impacts and water is one of those issues. So despite the fact that the county code may not regulate water in this particular situation, CEQA does, it requires full disclosure of the environmental impacts. I will point out that the planning commission was troubled by what the lack of water and odor and thought environmental review was necessary. In fact, commissioner Holbert pointed out that she agreed that with my assertions that environmental review was necessary. So there was nothing in firm with the planning commission's process. However, if the board, I urge the board at minimum not to take jurisdiction of this appeal. If you feel there's some problem with the planning commission's findings and alternatively other than straight out deny this taking jurisdiction, which is my preference. But alternatively, if there's, if you feel that the planning commission needs to provide further explanation or in fact, just detail its explanations which were already stated on the record to send it back to the planning commission to make those revised findings so that the record is abundantly clear about their decision. Again, I don't think there was anything in firm about the planning commission's decision. It wasn't based on an overall dislike of cannabis. Certainly in the community they have a great debate about whether some people like cannabis or dislike cannabis but that was not the basis of the decision. And this was not a prime example of an abuse of discretion. Again, this was a discretionary approval and everything was pointing the staff and the applicants were pointing to the fact it means the zoning therefore you must approve it. That's not how discretionary approvals work. Discretionary means discretionary. And so the planning commission exercised its discretion and found that there were significant environmental impacts associated with this particular project. I will note that again, if you send it back if you do send it back to the planning commission to make findings consistent with their determination I implore you to direct your staff to assist the commission since this again I think the planning commission did an admirable job under the circumstances. And if you listen to the proceedings it's very clear that the commission was frustrated it says while I am stating reasons as to why I'm denying this. And there was a little bit of push and pull between the staff and the commission. So I will hope that if you directed to go back to the commission that the staff assist the planning commission in documenting the findings appropriately. Because I think it does a grave to service to the commission to let them hang and sort of spin their wheels and come up with reasons as to why they're going to deny the project but not a system in actually and directing them and how they are going to make findings for denial. I also believe that written findings for denial are not necessary, but be that as it may if that's the board's choice to send this back I hope that again that the findings will be fully detailed. I appreciate the ability to speak to you today particularly remotely and I'm happy to answer any questions the board might have of me and again appreciate your time today. Thank you, Mr. Parkin. Would the appellant like to make a rebuttal to any of the comments made of three minutes? I would just like to say that I did not spend a lot of time speaking about the merits of this project because that's outside of the scope of this jurisdiction. We're here simply to determine whether or not the board will or should take jurisdiction of this matter. I think the indications from the county administrative office and the recording of the hearing are pretty clear that there's a number of issues that county staff have with the way that this planning commission hearing was held. And I think there's no reason for the board to make a decision on the project now. It's simply a matter of having an additional hearing so that the board can hear the matter and evaluate the project at that time. I'll just speak real quickly. My name is Alan Hopper. I'm with JRG attorneys at law based in Monterey County have worked here in Santa Cruz for many years on cannabis related issues. Two quick points, one, certainly agree that cannabis is a highly regulated both at the state and the local level agricultural endeavor. And I think that that speaks more to the board taking jurisdiction here and supporting and hearing more if you wanna hear more from your staff but supporting your staff's decision because extra scrutiny has already been applied here by the CLO and by all of the other various departments that are tasked with looking into these kinds of operations. And then a second, I just would add I only had a quick moment to review the letter most recently submitted by council for the opposition to the project this morning. It was included in the packet I guess but there is a suggestion that these CEQA exemptions that the board found to apply should not be applied here. That's a pretty technical determination that I think deserves a more full hearing. So I would encourage the board to take jurisdiction for that reason as well because certainly that was never considered and articulated by the planning commission as a reason for overturning the planning department's determination here. They didn't find the planning commission didn't find that those exemptions ought not apply for legal legally sound reasons and articulate those and at a minimum that needs to happen. That's why we're asking that you do grant jurisdiction and grant another hearing. Thanks. Thank you. Now, would the opponent like to provide any rebuttal? So you have three minutes. Thank you. I wasn't getting into the merits I was pointing out the reasons why the commission denied the application. One of the reasons were environmental concerns and as commissioner Hobart stated she was in the majority on the vote. She stated she agreed that environmental review was necessary. So that's the reason I pointed that out. And so again, I don't think we raised extensively the issue of the exemptions before the planning commission and the planning commission ultimately agreed. So again, I'm not trying to get into merits. I understand this is to do jurisdictional hearing but again, the planning commission deserve to make its decision regarding its discretion to approve or disapprove this project. And I believe that the commission made the proper decision. But again, if the board is not satisfied completely with the planning commission's decision as it stands meaning the findings or the reasons why it made the determination it did give the planning commission it alternatively just give the planning commission the opportunity to again state what it already stated and articulate the reasons as to why they denied the application. Don't just rip it away from the planning commission because I believe the planning commission at least in terms from just if nothing else from a morale standpoint deserves the opportunity to again articulate its reasons and not have its decision-making hijacked by what I believe are just untrue statements about their lack of findings. So again, I appreciate your time today. Thanks very much. Thank you, Mr. Parkin. Are there any comments or questions from members of the board? Supervisor McPherson. Yeah, Mr. Chair, is this on? I can't tell. Yeah, this is my district. And so I think should give the opening remarks. The central question here is whether the planning commission error did not adopting sufficient findings that were supported by the adequate evidence that was available. The California Supreme Court has held that when the legislative body is acting in a quasi-judicial capacity such as approving or denying a project on a specific parcel that the body's decision must be supported by findings and those findings must be supported by evidence. In the absence of adopting sufficient findings the county is likely to face a significant challenge defending the commission's actions on appeal. I believe. For example, the planning commission could make a specific finding that the class one or four categorical exemption does not apply in this instance to evade further sequel review because insufficient information was provided to justify its application to this project and NEIR therefore is necessary. Or the commission could find that a co-location may not be used in the manner in which the applicant proposes to use it here which would allow the family members to double the size of a grow on a parcel as supported by the staff testimony supporting that conclusion. Therefore under the circumstances I'm ready to make a motion on this that the board not take jurisdiction of this matter at this time but instead return the matter to the planning commission under county code 1810340D2 with a direction that the planning commission work with the staff to develop and adopt findings that specifically reference the evidence the commission is relying on to arrive at its decision. That's the motion that I would like to make under these circumstances and I'm welcome to get a second or further discuss it. Supervisor Friend, you're on mute. Sorry about that, Mr. Chair. Thank you. Just a point of clarification. I'm willing to second it but I want to make sure a county council that we still need to open to this up for additional community comment before we go on the motion train, correct? That's right. So Mr. Chair, if we could just hold on that motion for a minute and I'd be willing after well, I'll consider it after we hear additional public comment on the item. All right, thank you. I will open it for public comment then if you'd like to address the board on this item please approach the podium. Hi, good afternoon. My name is Josh Leichter. I'm a immediate Southern neighbor of this parcel. I'm here to speak for myself, my family and a large group of neighbors as you heard called the old mountain protectors. We've circulated a petition opposing this application and almost 600 signatures in less than a week have been gathered in opposition. All universally the immediate neighbors and the community around this parcel oppose this application and obviously hundreds of other people in the mountains and Santa Cruz County and we can provide that to the board if someone tells me how to do that. And in respect of your time today and we're not gonna have hundreds or dozens of people talk we've just have six speakers to summarize our concerns and they all center really on that cannabis is not just another crop. It provides significant impacts to the environment and the community that have not been addressed and should either be obvious to everyone or have not been appropriately studied. All of these issues were raised at the planning commission and helped form the basis of their decision. They all made statements in that regard their reasons. I will speak briefly on our main concern about water that there's not enough water is obvious should be obvious given the drought and fires and San Lorenzo Valley mountains have suffered and at least has not been adequately studied. We do differ on our estimates but there are clear and real evidence that exists today showing that there's not enough water. First is the well report that the applicants put in themselves. It shows it barely qualified for the requirements of a residential let alone this large demand plus a six person residence. It was only an hour long test. It was not the required 24 hours and the well ran dry after 15 minutes. And this was two and a half years ago and during winter when there should be the most water. Second is the experience of all the neighbors all our wells are suffering our water is suffering. We all know that this drought cannot take this another use. So I respectfully ask the board to choose water over taxes. Thank you, Mr. Lector. Please, if you have a comment, please approach the podium and you can line up. Sorry about that. My name is Tom Kenville. I am a neighbor of the Madani parcel. We have a share a quarter mile western border and we are up the hill from them. So the aquifer kind of flows downhill towards their property. Our objections and our concerns have to do with water. It's all about water. We are in an historic drought and it's worsening year over year. The forested and domestic areas in our region are under stress and the stress is growing. I see trees dying. I see redwoods. I see Doug for the ridge just above the reservoir that you mentioned in that map. It's drying out. Okay. The land tilts from that reservoir down towards the reservoir from that ridge down towards the reservoir. So the ridges is drying out. So is the reservoir. Local wells are becoming challenged. Tank refill pumping is taking more and more time. When I say refill, every two or three days it kicks in pumps another 500 out. That takes more and more time. Particulates and hard chemicals, manganese iron are becoming greater in the water which means there's stress on all of the equipment we have in place to try to remove these chemicals from the water. The local domestic practice in our area is to conserve water use. We have native vegetation. We have very small gardens. And we do very closely managed household use in terms of showers and other water consumption. Historically from 1870 to 2020 local weather limited agriculture in this area to non-irrigated dry farms. The use of agriculture was apples, vineyards, cattle and timber. Thank you, Mr. Campbell. All right. Thank you. Hello, I'm Jason Madani. My brother's Aaron Madani. I own a company called Rural Estate. We have a location in Felton and one in Soquel. Just one thing I wanted to point out, my brother's organized and always wants to do things environmentally safe. My company has 40 employees and we're always trying to get back to the community. And one thing that I noticed I've sold probably around 2000 properties most of which are in the Santa Rosa Valley. And throughout the year as I've seen illegal platforms that are sprouting up underground, above ground in people's homes. What he wants to do is going to be organized, going to give money to the taxes for the community. And I know that he doesn't want to waste water when I woke up every morning. I saw my brother organize his jeans, take short showers and really care about the environment and plants. So one thing I can vouch for is that he's going to do things sustainably when I see properties throughout the mountains. I see a lot of people that aren't doing things correctly and there's hundreds or maybe even thousands of those folks out there. I think that the board should maybe focus or our folks should focus on, everybody should focus on getting people that aren't doing a good job and not doing it legally out and make some properties that are actually, I just sold the first cannabis property that was the highest sale in Boulder Creek for $2.4 million to a family who's growing marijuana there. It would help raise property values. And if we could kick out the people that aren't doing it legally, which are surrounded in that neighborhood, having sold real estate for 20 years in the mountains, it's abundant. So I think we should focus on getting rid of the people that aren't doing it legally and in place people that will pay taxes and do it with regulations from the state and the county. Thanks so much. Thank you. All right, so no one else here in chambers that wishes to address us. Is there anyone on Zoom or the telephone? Yes, we do have a speaker online. Pat, your microphone is now available. This is Pat Malo. Thanks for the board for hearing this issue. It's concerning to me as someone who's worked on transitioning the formerly legal industry of medical cannabis in the Santa Cruz Mountains to the new licensed system. We all worked so hard to create when there's only two other licenses in the SLV area when there was hundreds and hundreds of people and parcels interested in this. And that one of the groups that's made it through this arduous process has now hit a stumbling block that I think we all talked about years and years ago of that the having the planning commission and other levels of the public input are just venues for the same old kind of not in my backyard for lack of better turns and all due respect to the neighborhoods that we've heard over and over and the concerns that we're associated with unregulated, unlicensed cannabis. The water uses are similar to any other ag property or probably the vineyard that was there. So let's set a good example to everyone else that we're hoping to eventually get into this licensing program. We worked so hard to create and not send a message that even though you get through every single hoop we've put up, you could still make it to the end and not have it work out. So please board, let's take jurisdiction over this if you can and let's get back to the intention of what I think were as genuine efforts to create a licensing program that worked for the Santa Cruz Mountains. Thank you. Bye. Thank you, Mr. Malo. Claudio, your microphone is now available. Hi, thank you. My name is Claudio Argento. I am a neighbor. Can you guys hear me? Yes. Okay, thank you. Yeah, I'm an immediate neighbor to the Madanis. I just wanna address a couple of points. The Madanis in their petition for this, for the permit for the Grove said that this is an act, the action of a victim neighbor. That's not true. All the neighborhood is against it. All the neighbors around the Madanis properties are against it. All the neighbors have issues of water. I have my well run very low production in the droughts of 13, 14 and 2021. My consumption is between 30 and 40,000 gallons a year. The county estimate of the amount of water that will be consumed using this production is between 300 and 600,000 gallons per year. So it's more than 10 fold what I use in the water. We all drink it from the same bucket here. So if they're using that much water, I'm very confident that my well is gonna run dry. If it is continued drought, I mean, and as Tom pointed out before, we have stress in the vegetation. It's pretty obvious losing a lot of oaks, losing a lot of my drones. You know, the previous speaker just said that they're replacing a vineyard with a sport farm and therefore it's gonna be the same amount of water. That's just not true. The vineyard is a dry vineyard has zero irrigation and they're gonna have to top of that 300,000 gallons a year per crop, which is according to Aaron Madame himself, between two and three crops a year. So that's between 600,000 and 900,000 gallons a quarter per year. So it is just it to be irresponsible for the county to let the financial gain of one family put their livelihood or their village to be up there of all the neighbors. And again, this I'm talking about a dozen, a dozen families that live around it. Thank you for your time. Thank you. We have no further speakers at this time, Chair. If you would like to speak please approach the podium. Hello to the board. My name is Kaira Babinit and I am a citizen of the Ojibwe Ogichidakwe Water Protectors in Leech Lake, Minnesota, as well as a local resident. And our property as my husband Josh has said is on the southern border of this parcel. We don't have a dog in this race. We are doing this because we are concerned about the water for all. This is feeding into the river, which feeds Zionty, Felton, Scotts Valley, Santa Cruz. The entire city municipal water supply is impacted by these things. And if this is to go ahead, the precedent would be that it's open season on mountain water. And we will dry up the very fragile water shed that we see every day. And in the previous owner of that property, they had an illegal grow inside their garage. And I personally witnessed that the feeder stream that came down off of that land ran dry. And so it's something that we are doing to protect all animals, all life. It's not in my backyard. We're concerned about not in anybody's backyard because the environment and respecting climate change is the most important thing we have to adapt as humans. This is a larger collective. The entire West is drying up, Lake Mead, Salt Lake, things that are unprecedented. And so we have to act in an unprecedented way. Thank you very much. Thank you. Hello, I'm Sarah Madani. Sarah Madani and my husband Aaron Madani. We live on the property with our three young children and our fourth on the way. I would just like to say that our priority is safety, of course. And some of the neighbor's concerns was lack of security. But our number one priority is the safety of our kids and our family. And we plan to be there for a long time. We're young and we're starting, we're trying to start our business. And we ask that you please give us a chance to do the right, the things, everything right. And my husband wants to say a few things. All the properties around us pretty much range like around 30 to 150 acres. So it's not, you know, small parcels next to it. So I believe like we all have our space to kind of do everything that we wanna do as long as we do it in a sustainable way. And like with water, like anything that you wanna do with the vineyards and different things, they're always gonna use water, whether you're making wine or different things. So it's always gonna be something that's gonna be necessary for different businesses. So we're definitely looking to stay sustainable and do things the best way. Thank you for your time. Thank you. All right, is there anyone else that wishes to address us? Seeing none, I'll return it to the board for deliberation and action. You could have a chance to speak already. So just a minute per person. No other members of our group or meeting, I'm not sure. If they're online, we're happy to take their comments. Barry, your microphone is now available. Hi, my name is Barry Fitzgerald. I am a resident of Upper Ellen Road. And what I'd like to address primarily is the water issue. There's an old expression that a rising tide raises all boats, but a corollary to that is that a dropping water table dries up all wells. If this project were to go forward with a highly valuable crop, it would be easy for them to justify drilling deeper wells below the levels of current residences. This is an existential threat to the neighborhood. Water resources, a horrific drought year. The Climate Prediction Center, most recent report, gives an 86% chance of La Nina through the year dropping to a positive 60% through Q1. So we're not going to get any relief this year or early next year in our rainy season. Already, I know of residents whose wells have failed for the first time this year, leading them to have to truck in water. Trucking in water may be impossible for the factory farm, but will be critical for residences when their wells are dried up by the excessive consumption that will lead to expensive degradation of Zionty Road only two years since it was completely repaid. Thank you, Supervisor McPherson, for this repaving. Please help us take care of it. In 2013, a fire broke out at my house and was put out by muddy water from the pond where the project is to be. That pond will be long gone feeding the grove by the time fire season comes around. Anyone listening to the recording of the Planning Commission meeting would know that there were numerous issues generating opposition to this project with water being number one, security and appropriateness to a remote mountain residential neighborhood being broadly mentioned as well. This project is best suited where vast agricultural water supplies are available and not where people's neighborhoods and water resources are impacted. Please uphold the rejection. Thank you. Thank you. Caroline, your microphone is now available. Can you hear me now? Yes. Okay, good. Thank you very much. I wanna speak to three of the issues. The first being that this is about disliking cannabis. I'm 81 years old and I love CBD boils and I use them for my arthritis. But I also buy them. I'm happy that there are state regulations. I buy them from kind peoples. They're well regulated and I've never run into any kind of a shortage. The second thing I wanna say is I've lived up here for 34 years and in the last few years, we have shared our well with three other neighbors. Our wells are going dry. And right now we're turned into our own little water company. So we're very concerned about any kind of a drain on the water table. Most important, who I'm speaking for are people who have lived the environmental impacts and the quality of life impacts of having a pot grown nearby. In 2013, we had, at that point in time, it was a licensed grower who had gotten a license from the county, but it absolutely changed the tenor of the small feeder road that came into the Ellen roads. The young couple who lived there would like to testify, but they're clearly still traumatized by this and they didn't want to go public. So I agreed to testify for them. The odor was intolerable. The people who came up on their road was intolerable. Their children were unable to go outside because of rat traps. Cannabis draws rats and toxins that they used for fertilizer were killing the other wildlife as the rats would eat it and then the owls would eat the rats. And most importantly, I want to say, I know my time is up, but at one point I was leaving for work in Santa Cruz and I had to let an FBI agent into the gate who was coming up to check on things. This went on for four years. Prudy, your microphone is now available. Hi, my name is Prudy Fox. I'm a viticulturist. I was a licensed agricultural biologist level three with the agricultural commissioner's office for seven years in the 1990s. I'm speaking representing Charles and Sarah Liang who own the adjacent green earth xianti vineyards, immediately adjacent to the property where the grow is proposed. I want to support the planning commission in their decision to deny this appeal. I find it shocking, frankly, that the appellant is claiming that there were no facts presented. In fact, the meeting that I attended and of which there is a recording that anyone could listen to would know that facts were actually quite presented. And in fact, it was the county staff who did not have certain answers for questions asked by the commission. And that was one of the reasons cited for their denial. I want to clarify that the vineyards, both the existing vineyard on the neighbor's property, Madonna's property and on green earth xianti have always been dry farmed and always will because that's what creates our flavors. Wine grapes are sensitive to odors, to aromatics. That's why we can't harvest when there's smoke in the air. That's why we can't deal with eucalyptus or very noxious flavors. There's a lot of data that needs to be gathered to find out what kind of threat that is to our commercial viability. The winery does not use a significant amount of water and this is not one row crop for another. They want, the Madonna's are beautiful people but they want to build hoop houses, bring in plastic buckets, import soil. Their growth could happen on a parking lot. The vineyards are in the ground, the roots are deep. They require the land that they're on. Thank you. Thank you. We have no further speakers at this time, Chair. All right, then I'll return to the board for deliberation and action. I just stick with my previous motion and refer to the planning commission to develop and adopt findings that specifically reference the evidence the commission is relying on to come at its decision. I'll second and Mr. Troll makes some comments. I do believe in listening to the planning commission's deliberation that there were attempts at findings. I also think though, out of an abundance of caution, it makes the most sense to remand it to them for another review and specific findings to come up. I also think that there were very clear concerns regarding environmental issues that were presented during the commission hearing. I also believe by the way that in regards to the statement that was made about a professional staff recommendation, I mean, look, the purpose of a planning commission and the purpose of the board of supervisors to actually exhibit discretion and to review those findings. I mean, at the end of the day, this isn't a rubber stamp deal. We're supposed to do that and make the determinations of exactly that. This board, or at least a couple of members of this board had presented forward concerns about exactly this, exactly these environmental concerns on some agricultural parcels, the adjacency concerns. Obviously the board majority considered that and went a different direction, but I think that as part of this review, the board should review as we see this expanding in other locations, a greater review of the ordinance. Again, because it's clear that this is happening throughout the county, but I am supportive of it going to the planning commission. I do also believe that they did make some findings. I just think that we should be very cautious in this and ensure that they have very clear findings with the help of county staff moving forward that the board should just come back to us, can consider it at that time. Thank you, Supervisor Friend. Any other comments or questions? Supervisor? Yeah, so I am happy to support the motion before us. I guess I do want to make one comment, which is earlier today the board was bemoaning some very challenging decisions we had to make around water treatment systems and impacts the individual landowners because of unintended consequences of previous decisions made by the board 40 years ago. I think people should be aware that you could, the property owners could move to hemp which can make some of those salves and use and grow far, far more with far fewer restrictions and there's nothing the county can do about it. So I think people have to be aware that there can be unintended consequences where you're trying to set up, oppose one thing and then end up with some very different impacts that people may be created by that decision. So it'll come back to the Planning Commission, maybe back to the Board of Supervisors, but I think people have to work through all the different scenarios, figure out what will work best for their concerns. Thank you, Supervisor Coonerty. Any further discussion? To provide your cabinet. Okay, so the three options I believe we have or we don't take jurisdiction and then the Planning Commission decision stands, the other is we start out new to DeNovo and we take the appeal and then discuss it and then the last one is send it back to the Planning Commission. Those are the three and only options, correct? Correct. Okay, so if we send it back to the Planning Commission and then they come up with the same decision, then it would come back here and we would have to decide whether or not to take the appeal again. Well, the motion on the floor is your board is sending it back with specific direction to ask the Planning Commission or to direct the Planning Commission to create adequate findings under the Topanga decision and cite to evidence to support those findings. And so that is what the planning, I have every expectation that that's what the Planning Commission would do with staff's assistance. And so depending on those circumstances, it'll be up to the parties to decide what to do after reviewing those findings. It may come back to your board for review, it may not come back to your board for review. Okay, but sending it back to the Planning Commission doesn't mean they're gonna rehear the whole thing. It's just that they have to back up the reason for their finding. That is correct. Okay, thank you. All right, any further discussion? Seeing none. Clerk, roll call vote, please. Supervisor Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. Caput. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Koenig. Passes unanimously and is remanded to the Planning Commission. Thank you. That concludes our jurisdictional hearing. And that also concludes our regular meeting of the Board of Supervisors. The next meeting will be September 13th, Tuesday, 2022. Thank you.