 Good morning, everybody. I'd like to call to order the February 28th, 2023 meeting of the Board of Supervisors. If we could begin with a roll call, please. Supervisor Koenig. Here. Cummings. Here. Hernandez. Present. McPherson. Here. And chair friend. Here, and I'm sorry I can't be with you right now. I'm in Sacramento. I'm gonna be doing a presentation to a joint assembly committee just after this board meeting on behavioral health related funding issues. And so I appreciate your willingness to let me do this remotely. We're gonna begin with a moment of silence. Does any board member like to dedicate this moment of silence? Would any board member like to dedicate this moment of silence? Supervisor Cummings, please. I'd like to dedicate this moment of silence to two individuals. I'm so sorry, Supervisor Cummings, your microphone, please. Thank you. I'd like to dedicate this moment of silence to two individuals. Daniel Lamoth passed on February 19th, 2023 at the age of 38. He was participating in a joint fire academy training in the moment when he became under some distress and into passing on the scene. Daniel wanted to be a firefighter so he could give back to his community. And so I'd like to mourn his passing and honor his passing during this moment of silence. The second person who I'd like to dedicate this moment of silence to is Harry Mayo, who on February 13th, 2023 at the age of 99 passed away. And I wanna take a moment to just say a few words about Harry because he meant a lot to this community. Harry Mayo, the quote unquote mayor of West Cliff caught his last wave on February 13th, 2023. He lived a glorious 99 years calling Santa Cruz, California his home for 97 of them. Harry was born on November 26th, 1923 in Pacific Grove, California to Portuguese and French parents. His father worked as a manual labor to support the family of six. The Salvation Army provided assistance to his family during the Great Depression and Harry's lifelong support of the organization was recognized in 2017 when he was given a Lifetime Achievement Award. Harry became one of Santa Cruz's first local surfers in 1936 at 13 years old building his board in a shop class at Mission Hill Junior High School and becoming one of the founders of the Santa Cruz Surfing Club. He graduated from Santa Cruz High in 1942 and joined the Coast Guard that same year serving until 1945 as captain of the board detail stationed on the Santa Cruz Pier. After World War II, he worked in the local cannery and ice plant until he joined Santa Cruz fire department in 1949 where he works for 30 years. During his tenure at the fire department he served as a firefighter deputy in the Fireman's Association, president of local 1716 and Santa Cruz fire captain. After short-lived marriage in 1948, Harry married Edith Marie Judy Parsons, and she was a seamstress in 1936 until she passed in 2006. Harry was a gardener, RV traveler, dog lover, joke teller and a loyal and kind friend. He delighted in the company of those he loved. Giving back was important for Harry. He was one of the founders of the Santa Cruz Surfing Museum in 1986 and the surfing statue in 1992. Besides the Salvation Army Emergency Canteen, Harry volunteered for the Santa Cruz Surf Club Reservation Society, giving tours to the museum and serving as the club's photo archivist. Harry donated his extensive photo collection to Santa Cruz City in his surfing history to UCSC Special Collections, which is available online as the Harry Mayo Surfing Photo Collection. Harry Mayo was survived by his brother, Chester Chetmayo, his daughter, Linda Diane Tonery, sorry, grandchildren, Sherry Jacob Padilla, Alicia Jacob Ringo, Michael Jacob Michele and Heather Voss, as well as the folks up and down West Cliff and the many surfers in the community who called Harry a friend. And so I'd like to conclude my statement and we'll proceed. Thank you Supervisor Cummings for that beautiful tribute. I'd like to add a name as well. Actually, Supervisor McPherson, please. Yeah, I just want to thank Supervisor Cummings for mentioning both Mr. Lamont and Mr. Harry Mayo, who was a good friend and I have a photo of him with the surfing club and those surfboards in those days were twice as big or tall as they, the surfers themselves quite a lot of difference in the years gone by, but he was a tremendous person and I appreciate your mention of him. He was a great member of the Santa Cruz community. Thank you. Thank you. And I'd like to mention the passing of not a local resident, but somebody who had a significant local impact and that is Tom Menser. Tom Menser had worked in a senior capacity for Congressman Sam Foster in the last decade, served in a senior capacity for Senator Dianne Feinstein with many people in the community may not know Tom's name, but he had an outsized influence on our success at the federal level ensuring he was just such a strong advocate to ensure that we were able to get things at the federal level, including the Pajaro River project. I think that Tom Menser played an outside role, but his personality, his humor and just his friendship is something that will be missed by many of us. And so even though he didn't live locally, he was just such a strong voice for Santa Cruz County to make sure he's recognized. So if we could have a moment of silence, please. Thank you. Supervisor Koenig, could you please lead us in the pledge? Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God and indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. Ms. Coburn, are there any changes to today's agenda? Mr. Friend, there are no changes this morning. Thank you. Are there any board members who would like to remove an item from the consent to the regular agenda? I'd like to look at number 46. Is it just something you would like to discuss? Do you want to actually pull to the regular agenda or is it something you just want to ask questions of during consent? I can maybe ask some questions, but I did want to add some additional information to it, though. Not a problem, but we'll keep it on consent and you're welcome to do that. Thank you, Supervisor Hernandez. All right, then we will move on now to the next item, which is public comment. This is an opportunity for members of the community to address those items that are not on today's agenda, but within the purview of the Board of Supervisors or to comment on the consent agenda or if you're unable to stay the regular agenda. Is there any member of the community that would like to address us in board chambers? Please step forward. Thank you. Good morning, welcome. Yeah, good morning, welcome. It's February 28th, 2023. Two minutes is never very much time to deliver corporate shit sandwich. Unfortunately now with what's happened in Ohio, the quality of bread, everything's going to be polluted with dioxins. Kind of challenging. I do have some information here for the middle of the corporate shit sandwich and it's actually just what it is. It's factual information. So if I were doing an ideal corporate shit sandwich, it's the bread that's really important. So I gave something to a street vendor about two weeks ago and this is what she said. That stuff you gave me last week was amazing. It makes me feel so good. I need to buy some more from you. I want to keep taking it. I think it has the potential for anti-aging benefits and so many other benefits. I really love that stuff. It's amazing. You know, I'm reminded the first time I was actually, then I noticed I was hit with directed energy weapons and that was actually in the Santa Cruz City Council. I think Justin Cummins was there. Fortunately, I found something that helped me recover from what was going on and it's actually what I kind of drink every day because we all should take care of our health. That was a nice compliment from that street vendor who has a permit to sell some really delicious products. But as far as the inside, you guys are just following scripts. Here's a great article from 1982 about some of the shit you guys are following. This is March 28th, 1998. This is something I shouldn't say because it'd be really rude, but it's appropriate. And where's the one I'm looking for? So there's information that from 2013, men like Manu Kunig and Mr. Keely, the current mayor of Santa Cruz, just following agendas and scripts and I wish I had more time to develop it. I'd be happy to discuss all these topics, particularly with the sheriff, Jim Hart. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Whitman. Anybody else in chambers, please feel free to step forward. Good morning and welcome. Good morning, Gary, Richard Arnold. I hope you're in fine tow there in Sacramento. One of the people or some of the people that are never mentioned, when we commemorate that moment of silence, are all these children that are being killed by fentanyl and the cartels moving their power and politics into the state of California. And seven million people of which they're probably assassins and saboteurs if Red China or anybody else wanted to continue their problems. Communism is not the communists or a group of people trying to overthrow the banking establishment. Communism is a tool of the banking establishment in order to control, call, and kill the people such as COVID-19 and also push for world government. You can find, I encourage the grand jury and independent reporters to look into connections by our board of supervisors and their influence with such organizations as Sivanomics, Green Energy Private Organizations in which even Carlos Palacios who's usually sitting here is going in and out of their offices as I once saw. And conduits to both the United Nations and the World Bank usually covered through ICLEI. On the front page of the Good Times, which is an extension of in these times, which is founded by communist James Weinstein, praise Sivanomics. So far they've cut 30% of people's time right here at the microphone. Today, they only had four copies of the agenda out there and it includes members of communist collaborator, Leon Panetta's California Forward, which includes Bruce McPherson, Fred Keely and the list goes on. Don Lane, who gave the key to the city of Santa Cruz to communist vice president. And David Cantolisi. Thank you. Is there anybody else in chambers I'd like to address us? Please feel free to step forward. Good morning and welcome. Good morning and good morning to all of you. Thank you for being here and thank you for your work up in Sacramento, Chairman Friend. My name is Becky Steinbruner. I live in rural Aptos. I'm here today to talk with your board and I wish CAO Palacio were here about the decades of violation this county has committed of the Brown Act. This came to light in last week's Lookout Santa Cruz article by an investigative reporter, Christopher Neely. There is an item on our consent agenda here today that should be taken off. And that is item number 25, wherein supervisor Cummings has appointed himself as a nominee for the coastal commission. This should be addressed because it relates to the article wherein the city selection committee that is required by state law, government code 50270 to exist in counties with two or more cities that those meetings be open to the public. They have never been. They have never been. And Mr. Neely's article brings to this to light. They've been meeting in restaurants. Now locally and recently the selection committee chose supervisor Zach Friend, council from Capitola, Evette Brooks and Santa Cruz city mayor Fred Keely to be a nominees for this county's representative on the California coastal commission. That has been called the most powerful body in the United States and you know why. Now why hasn't, why were none of those meetings publicly noticed? There's not even information on the website. By Brown Act, it has to be redone. It was February 21st. That meeting was not noticed to the public either. So you've got to do something. You've got to hold your CAO accountable. Thank you Mr. President. Thank you for stepping on to the representative of the county and I think that the other for the king. Thank you, Ms. Steinbrunner. I'm sorry, he wanted nothing to do with the violations of the Brown Act. Not to hold the CAO accountable. Thank you, Ms. Steinbrunner. I'm sorry that it was not full. Is there anybody else who'd like to address us during public comment? Please feel free to step forward. Good morning and welcome. Good morning, board of supervisors. I have a question in light of the law breaking that's come out on the news. November 3rd, 2022, former supervisor, Ryan Coonerty stated that if we saw teachers or police officers or security guards grabbing and violently removing kids like this, there would be serious consequences. I'm wondering why the board of supervisors, all of you who are seated here have ignored all the letters and emails from myself and from other concerned community members regarding police brutality to children in this community. According to city clerk Julia Woods, none of the Santa Cruz city staff are bonded as they are required to be by California government law and by charter of the city of Santa Cruz. I would really like to hear your explanations for why nothing has been done to hold the police officers who violently assaulted an innocent 13-year-old girl who was a victim of a violent crime who saw her mother being suffocated by her father and no consequences were handed down. I look forward to your explanation. Thank you very much. Thank you. Is there anybody else in chambers that would like to address us? Good morning, welcome. Good morning. My name is Denise Barr. I've lived in Santa Cruz for 30 years on Pleasure Point. I've been attacked by dogs twice. My issue is that I would like to see the Santa Cruz animal control give-out tickets. I would like to see posted warnings. You have laws 6.12, 0.0, dogs at large prohibited, 612 leash requirements for dogs off-premises. Somehow when I see people with dogs not on a leash, I make a comment, like can you put your dog on the leash? They think it's a joke. They say things like, oh, my dog's a good dog. Well, your dog's a good dog until he's not a good dog. And so a person that has to pay $100 a year to have my dog that's federally licensed, he's not neutered, I pay $100 a year to have my dog licensed while somebody else pays $26. Anyway, so you have all these dog parks that could all run around. But when I walk on East Cliff Drive and I have to be threatened every day by somebody that doesn't put their dog on a leash and has mixed stupid comments, like, oh, I don't have to. It's because nobody is doing their job. ASPCA, they like to collect the money, but why can't they just post some signs? You have laws, get them posted on East Cliff Drive, get them posted on West Cliff Drive, get them posted around Santa Cruz, stop wasting my tax dollar for things that are not being done. That's all I have to say. I don't need to be a 72-year-old woman walking in the streets that's threatened by other people that don't take it seriously. Thank you. Thank you. Is there anybody else in chambers I'd like to address us this morning? Good morning. Welcome. Good morning, Cove Britain, Matt's from Britain Architects. I did want a second, Mr. Steinbrenner's comments regarding the nomination. I appreciate that Supervisor Cummings is nominated, but I believe that this type of nomination should be vetted to the public and that some sort of explanation of why that nominee wants that position, what their beliefs are of the Coastal Act and the current Coastal Commission. So I would appreciate that being removed and having some discussion regarding that. Also, I'm very concerned. And while this has happened in the county district three for years, it's also highly unusual. So the appointment of Andy Schifrin, which is Supervisor Cummings' direct employee and works in his office appears to be a violation of government code 1099. It's incompatible office. Mr. Schifrin works directly for the supervisor. He's not a county employee. He is actually serves at will for that office. And by definition, those are incompatible offices. I suggest this item be removed and that County Council contact Attorney General and verify whether that's allowable or not. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Britten. Is there anybody else that'd like to address us in chambers? I see no further speakers in chambers, Chair. Madam Clerk, is there anybody online that would like to address us? Yes, we do have a speaker. Thank you. Colin, user one, your microphone is now available. Garrett, I want to address 5G technology which is being installed all over this county. My understanding is it's part of the LED streetlight submitting 5G to quotes from a DVD by Thoughts of the Stone called 5G Apocalypse, The Extinction Event, and supervisors received copies of those several years ago. Quote, it's important to understand what the 5G is doing and what they say it's doing. We're told on the IEEE beamforming document that this technology cooks your eyes like eggs in World War II. We all need to understand these are military weapons. These are assault frequencies. If you garner nothing more than that, that's what you need to know. It's microwave radiation warfare. That's what it is. And to quote a book called, where did I put it? Here it is. There's a section on 5G. This is by Dr. Thomas Cowan in the Contagion Myth, a section on electricity and disease. A particular concern is the fact that some 5G transmitters broadcast at 60 gigahertz a frequency that is absorbed by oxygen, causing the oxygen molecule composed of two oxygen atoms to split apart, making it useless for respiration. And the illness has followed by- Thank you, Ms. Clerk. Madam Clerk, is there anybody else online that would like to address us? Yes. Mila, your microphone is now available. Yes, hello. And I am here with the same problem that's going on for 10 years. It's the same administration ignored every my complaint. And I was exhausted by getting attention to the problem in mental health system and it's still going on. The same way as it was with the previous administration. And it's very difficult for me to write. It takes a lot of time because English is my second language. It's easier for me to talk than to write. And it's just that ignorance, complete ignorance, like the administration act like they're blind and deaf. So like there are no live people over there. So what is going on? The mental health department dominates here even more. I'm scared that they will talk to me. Mila, we're having difficulty hearing you. Why? But I'm talking loud. Do you hear me now? Yes, thank you. Yes, so. Mila, we're having difficulties again. So do you, what the phone number to call? We can hear you now, Mila. It's possible that you were accidentally covering up the microphone with what you were doing, but we can hear you clearly now. So whatever you're doing now, if you could continue it, that would be great. Well, I didn't know microphone in the computer. So I don't touch microphone at all. And I'm waiting for action that needed. My daughter needs rehabilitation. And now those two departments blocking rehabilitation for my daughter. I need to rehabilitate my daughter. I need help with that. I cannot live every day on daily basis with the mental health crisis. Thank you. So please do something about it. Thank you, Mila. Adam Clerk, is there anybody else online that would like to address us? We have no further speakers, Chair. Thank you. We'll bring it back to the board to consider consent. We'll begin with Supervisor Hernandez. I know you had an item that you also wanted to discuss on consent, but I'll start with you for all of consent. Yes. I had a comment on item number 49. You know, there's a bike and pedestrian safety improvements that are being done on Hullahan and 152, and you know, I'm always happy when they're doing bike and pedestrian safety improvements, especially in that area. It's, there's a lot of traffic that goes by there on the intersection. And we have a number of schools that are there. We have Lakeview Middle School that a lot of the students walk to and St. Francis High School, but a lot of students walk to Watsonville High School and Anseldo Elementary. And there's a good amount of neighborhoods from there that are routes to school. So it's really important that we have those pedestrian improvements as well in that area. But my comment was, or my, what I wanted to provide is additional direction on 46. You know, for me, I think that this is a priority for District 4 on item number 46, this Whiting Road property that provides open space and park space for our district. Our district has a lack of park space and even within the city limits, there's a lack of park space per capita in our district there. And I wanted to provide additional direction to look at alternative ways to finance this project to get it accomplished, to get it done. So looking at, you know, creative ways, you know, whether it's bond financing, a lot of Mid County parks have been purchased through bonds. And so looking at different ways in addition to grants, other fundraising efforts, you know, I'm always glad that this project is that we do have this finance, or this purchasing agreement to buy. But when it comes to fruition, I think that that's what I'm really looking forward to because when people talk about equity, you know, when we have this park space and open space that we can have in the fourth district, that's what real equity looks like. And so that's what I wanted to provide the additional direction to look at more alternative ways to finance this project in, you know, bonds or, you know, grants. So that was my comments I wanted to add on 46. And I will move the agenda, but the consent agenda as well. All right, Supervisor Hernandez, we will, I know there's comments from other board members as well. I appreciate hearing the additional direction on that item and that seems like a very fair and reasonable ask on that. Supervisor Cummings. I'll just, I do wanna respond to some of the comments that came up from the community about the item number 25, which is nomination of the Coastal Commission. So just so that people, so the members of the public know we received a letter from Anthony Rendon about an assembly asking for nominations to the Coastal Commission by the Board of Supervisors, also the city select committee. My nomination today is coming to the board to ask for support from the board. It's been publicly noticed. This is an opportunity for members of the public to comment, which we just had. And the reason why I've decided to put my name forward, I've been studying in the fields of biology, ecology and environmental science since 2001. So I've over 20 years of experience working in the environmental sciences field. I have a bachelor's in biology from Eastern Illinois University, a PhD from UC Santa Cruz and the Department of Ecology and Evolution Biology. And I feel that it's really important as we're moving forward with the impacts that we're facing from climate change and the need to preserve our natural ecosystems that we have somebody with a strong science background representing our community on the Coastal Commission. As it's been mentioned, the Coastal Commission does have a lot of power and authority. And as we're continuing to develop in our community and as we're continuing to try to protect our natural resources, it's important that we have a strong representative. And so I've put my name forward for consideration by this board. And so I'll just end with that on that topic. And I wanna thank members of the public for bringing that up and for asking the questions on that. So the next item, item number 31, which is the Mobile Success Vans. I wanna just thank the staff for bringing this item to the board. These vans will help people who have children who are being detained to be able to visit them in Sonoma County. My real hope is that we can continue to work together to help bring our kids who are currently being incarcerated closer to home so that there's less of a challenge for families to be able to visit their children who are being detained. But I wanna thank the staff for their work on that. Item number 32, the New Life Substance Abuse Beds will increase the number of beds per day by three beds. And this is a great step forward. And I really hope that we can continue to work to expand on the number of substance abuse beds that are available in our County. We obviously know that fentanyl and other substances have made their way into our community and that there's a high need for more beds. And so I'm hoping that we continue to work towards expanding the number of substance abuse beds that we have in our County. Number 38, that is the master plan for aging. And again, just really wanna thank staff for their work on this. We see a rapidly growing senior population throughout the state and country. And I think that's really important that we are trying to make sure that we're gonna protect our seniors as they're entering into their later years. And I also hope that as part of this we can have discussions around the Live Oak Senior Services Center because we know that there's a potential that some of those services are gonna be displaced. And so if we can also work on trying to help with finding a home for Meals on Wheels and some of the other services, I think that would be a good thing for us to do as well. And then just wanna support what Supervisor Hernandez was mentioning around the South County Park, there's ways that we can find funding, whether it's publicly funded, privately funded, but ways that we can really try to make sure that we can secure that park. I think it would be a great way to expand open space in South County. And those are all my comments. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Koenig. Supervisor Koenig. Thank you, Chair Friend. On item 25, approving the nomination of Supervisor Koenig to the California Coastal Commission, I think Supervisor Koenig would make a great addition to the California Coastal Commission. And thank him for putting himself forward. I think also just to clarify this process, in my understanding is actually the more people we have nominated from our community, the better off we are, more likely we are to get someone from Santa Cruz County actually on the Coastal Commission. There's a fairly extensive process, even just after the nominations and ultimately Speaker Rendon is going to make a decision. And so the more options we give him to select from the better off we are. And so in that spirit, and also just to make sure this process feels transparent and open to everyone, I'd also like to add additional direction, putting my own name forward, self-nominating here. And I'd be happy to support anyone else here on this board that also is interested in the position. And again, in transparency, the reason I'm interested in this is I certainly in the first district, I have dealt with a lot of issues between the Coastal Commission and oceanfront property owners. And we're seeing this issue continue to play out. In fact, even to some extent in the courts, in San Mateo County and Half Moon Bay recently, we saw actually the spirit court rule against the Coastal Commission. It's going to be interesting here, I think as we see a lot of the, this tension play out between our values for public access and values of protecting private property rights. I don't think that there's a clear black and white answer to this, but I do think that I can help being an honest broker between these parties and ultimately trying to come up with some creative solutions that help our entire community move forward. That's all on 25. And then on item 24, approving the appointment for Andy Schiffen to the Planning Commission, I'm going to have to register a no vote on this. I do think that Mr. Schiffen is a great person and very knowledgeable certainly about planning issues. However, we're also on the same agenda nominating him to the Housing Authority Board of Commissioners. He also is, as was mentioned by a member of the public, employed by Supervisor Cummings as an analyst. He's also an alternate on the Regional Transportation Commission for Supervisor Cummings. And I think that ultimately the spirit of these commissions is to have more information, more perspectives involved in county decision-making. And I think we would really benefit, especially on the Planning Commission. I mean, we are facing an extreme housing crisis in this community. Look at item 33, the update on expansion of behavioral health services. We have been hamstrung in our ability to hire and expand crisis mental health services because of our housing market. And we can't keep doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. And so I really, really think we need someone who's directly involved in building and housing on the Planning Commission. I think that as I said, Mr. Schiffen has a lot of ways that he's able to provide direct advice, including on housing to Supervisor Cummings. And I'm just gonna have to register a no vote and encourage that we get someone with more direct experience on this commission. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Koenig, Supervisor McPherson. Yeah, thank you. Item number 25, it's just gotten more complicated. The, I'm very supportive of nominating Supervisor Cummings for that. And now we just heard that Mr. Koenig, Supervisor Koenig is interested in that as well. And in light of color correspondence from Council Member Capitola, Council Member Yvette Brooks, requesting the Board nominate her also to the Coastal Commission. I'd like to get some clarity if I could from the County Council of how we can nominate more than one is my understanding. And in essence, because this came up today from Supervisor Koenig, can we officially nominate him at this point? And Yvette Brooks has written us a letter that wasn't able to get on the agenda. So we can, how many can we can nominate more than one, is that correct? Yes, that's correct. Okay, all right. And for today, do we just stick with the one nomination of Supervisor Cummings or can we also be nominating Supervisor Koenig at this time? A maker of a motion could add additional direction to add any number of Board of Supervisor members to the nomination, as well as any number of individuals from the City Selection Committee pool. I know there's controversy on the selection committee process, but we do know that Council Member Yvette Brooks has been, it says she is not interested as well. And I do think it's good that we have so many people interested from our County. So I would like to put her name and nomination if that's the proper procedure at this point. Would that be proper? Yeah, when it comes time to approve the consent agenda, a maker of a motion would approve the consent agenda with whatever additional direction on any items that the Board is considering, including that one and offer the additional individuals that are being considered. Okay, I would like to then introduce the nomination of Yvette Brooks, Council Member from Capitola. And this is not saying that our two, my two colleagues here are not worthy of that, but she is interested and I think that would be, she is capable as well. So I'd like to have her name included in the nomination process, as well as Supervisor Cummings and Koenig. And then on item number 38, I'm a member of the AAA, the Area Agency on the Aging. And I wanna thank the County Human Services for taking a leadership role in developing the playbook for the state's master plan on aging. This has really come about in the recent years in partnership with the agency on aging and the seniors council and senior advocates and stakeholders throughout the county. I really look forward to working on this important plan to identify the services and policies that we can put together to serve our aging population. And likewise for reasons mentioned, by Supervisor Koenig, I will vote no on item 24 as well. Thank you, Supervisor McPherson. I'll make some brief comments on some of these items as well. I'm supportive of all of the names that were just mentioned on the coastal commission. I agree with Supervisor Koenig's assessment that increasing the number of names from our region or from our county can only help get somebody from our county on. Our voice has not been as strong as Santa Cruz County since we haven't had a direct Santa Cruz County rep in about a decade. And I think that it would be valuable for us to have somebody from Santa Cruz County on the coastal commission. I'd like to echo comments that Supervisor Cummings made on item 32, which is in regards to increase in beds for substance use treatment. We can't underscore enough the importance of this in our community. Increasing the beds is a significant first step and I just think it's something that it would be nice to be highlighted to the community more broadly that this money is being spent that way and that we are expanding beds that way. On item 40, which is Willowbrook Park, I just appreciate again, this board has been very supportive of helping finance it. This is the acceptance of funds from the community. The community raised well over $200,000 toward this project, which is both honoring Sergeant Gutzweiler who was killed in the line of duty and also reimagining this park for in his honor and his family's honor moving forward. It's the groundbreaking has already occurred, the work has already begun and it's just gonna be a remarkable testament moving forward in that way. I'd also like to mention on the item on the master plan on aging, that Supervisor McPherson and I had brought forward an item a few years ago in regards to age-friendly communities. And in some respects, this is also an offshoot of that. As Supervisor Cummings and McPherson had noted, this is a very important component of recognizing in particular in our community, we have an aging population and having a master plan around some of the needs and services that will be needed moving forward and how we're gonna fund those services as we move forward that way is very important. I agree also with my colleagues on item 24. I also like to register a no vote on item 24. I think that what we're facing in Santa Cruz County is a crisis in housing and in transportation and in future planning, that's of crisis proportions. And I think that it's very important to have a voice, to have voices on the planning commission that'll lead us forward in that effort and not move us in the past. So now it'll be appropriate for a motion. Supervisor Koenig, do you wanna try and articulate a motion on this, perhaps including the direction that Supervisor Hernandez had? Yes, I think I can do that. So I'll move the consent agenda with additional actions on item 25 to approve the nomination of myself in a Supervisor Koenig, in addition to Supervisor Cummings and Councilwoman Yvette Brooks from Capitola. And then on item, I believe it's 46 with the additional direction to look at other options to secure financing and monies to purchase the 188 Whiting Road property, including I think bonding and other grant opportunities. Is there a second? A second from Supervisor McPherson. A roll call vote, please. Supervisor Koenig. Yes, with again a no vote on item 24. Supervisor Cummings. Supervisor Hernandez. Aye. McPherson. Aye. And Friend. Aye, also registering the no vote as well that I believe Supervisor McPherson was registering as well. So that passes unanimously with a three noes on 24 and additional direction on 25 and 46. Okay, we'll move on to the regular agenda. The first item of the regular agenda is item seven, which is to consider a presentation of the 2022 Oral Health Access Report by Executive Director of Dientes Community Dental. Laura Marcus is outlined in a memo that I put forward. And I'll just like to briefly introduce this item because I have the honor of serving as a co-chair of the Oral Health Access Committee. And I have to say that the two people that are standing in front of you and the community right now have probably done more for Oral Health Access than anybody has in Santa Cruz County history and ensuring that there's equity associated with this and also elevating the needs of Oral Health Access in a way that can't be underscored enough. And there's been real successes in the last five years that I'm looking forward to having them articulate. Ms. Marcus, please I'll hand it over to you. Thank you so much Supervisor Friend and good morning members of the Board of Supervisors. I am Laura Marcus, CEO of Dientes Community Dental Care and founder of Oral Health Access Santa Cruz County. This coalition of health and social service providers, government and education partners is focused on increasing access to dental care and improving the Oral Health of our community. Today we especially want to commend Supervisor Zach Friend who took a leadership role and together with Dientes Executive Vice President of Operations, Dr. Sepi Tagbhai, access co-chair of Oral Health Access's Steering Committee. Zach has been a steadfast supporter and advocate for improved Oral Health in our community and we greatly appreciate it. Now we'd like to share an update on OHA's activities, results and future plans. Okay, let's go over some history first. So in 2015, Dientes conducted the first ever Oral Health News Assessment in Santa Cruz County and we actually also included Monterey County and we had an Oral Health Summit in 2016 when we went over the data, we presented it to the public and we also introduced the new members of the Oral Health Access Steering Committee co-chaired by myself and Supervisor Zach Friend. Since then, we've had a lot of activity and a lot of amazing results that we're gonna be going over with you. Next slide. The first Oral Health Access Strategic Plan included the following goals for 2020, increasing dental visits for children aged zero to three, maintaining dental visits and increasing the number of kids with a dental home for children aged four to six and increasing the number of Santa Cruz County residents with access to quality dental care by expanding services and sites. None of this work would be possible alone. These are just some of the members of our OHA and I have to say that having such an amazing group of different leaders with different expertise was so nice because they all brought their own expertise and experience and resources towards a common goal. I also wanna mention the State of California who funded our work with a $1 million grant in 2017 from Prop 56 funds and then $1 million in 2022, again, to continue our work. Oral Health Access activities have included launching a first tooth first birthday education campaign with first five and Santa Cruz County Health Services Agency to reach new parents and their healthcare providers, promoting kindergarten or health screenings with the local schools and the County Office of Education, recruiting more mid-level providers and pediatric dentists at D'Enthus and Salud and building new sites to increase capacity. Our dental providers trained medical staff, how to apply fluoride varnish at well child visits which is now reimbursable by the Alliance and as a standard of care. Lastly, we launched an Oral Health and Pregnancy Media campaign and prioritized seeing pregnant women during their first trimester at both D'Enthus and Salud. So we started this work in 2016 and by 2021 in those five years, we had some amazing results. None of it would be possible without our collaboration and our partnership with everybody who was involved. Before we go over the data that we presented in the 2021 report card, I do wanna say that this information is only about MediCal patients. It doesn't even include people who are not insured or who are underinsured. So there has been a significant increase in access to care since 2014 with 25% more MediCal patients visiting the dentist. That's 6,000 more people able to access dental care on an annual basis. So as Laura was saying, it's considered best practice to bring your baby to the dentist when they have their first tooth or when they turn one because we wanna focus on prevention and parent education. And because of the work that OHA has done, as you can see the number of kids zero to two who were going to the dentist for a dental visit went up by 60%. So right now in our county, we have about a 57% utilization for MediCal patients between zero to two. And that's amazing. And compared to statewide averages, it's really high too. More children going to the dentist by their first tooth, first birth, they can have a ripple effect. The same is true for fluoride application that well-baby and child visits. We're seeing fewer kindergartners entering school with cavities. And there's been a 79% increase in kids with a dental home. And the last piece of good news is that the number of adults who were visiting a dentist who had MediCal went up by 75%. And that's mostly due to dientes and salud parlehente growing their clinics, including our clinic in Watsonville that was a partnership with the County of Santa Cruz, accepting 1,300 new patients every year. I just wanted to mention that sometimes all the problems in our world and in our county seem so big. And this is just something to celebrate this amazing data. And it just shows that if we work together and we collaborate and we partner, we can do great things. But now some hard news. As you can imagine, there's still a lot of unmet need and our MediCal population locally is growing. Last year, our research partner, Barbara Avid and Associates conducted a new needs assessment which looked at data from 2019. This was due to the dramatic drop in services from COVID in 2021. Otherwise, we would have looked at more recent information. Avid compared the new data to the original data from 2014. And although we've made some great progress as was mentioned, especially with our youngest, most vulnerable kids, there are some populations that really need more attention. So as you can see on this chart, the percentage of kids on MediCal who are going to the dentist is really peaking between the ages of six and nine to 68%. But as you see that big drop, when they get to the teen years, it's really dropping. So we definitely have a problem there. And then as you can see in adulthood, it stays really low around 20 or 21%. This drop in adults accessing care is shocking, especially if you consider the repercussions of poor oral health, which can have so many detrimental effects on your overall health and well-being, including your ability to get and maintain a job and create a better life for yourself and your family. The 2022 needs assessment showed that only one in four MediCal adults accessed dental care. And this problem gets a lot worse as we get older. As you guys were mentioning, we have an aging population in Santa Cruz County. And unfortunately, 64% of seniors are known to have gum disease. Utilization rates for MediCal seniors is really low at about 20%. But we're not even talking about those who have Medicare, but no dental benefits. In this country, we still exclude dental services from Medicare, and that's a really big problem. Before we get to solutions and OHA's future plans, we wanted to share some important data on utilization of dental services, oops, next slide, yeah, on dental services by race and ethnicity. We're happy to say that we've considered equity in the work OHA has done over these years and successfully communicated by lingual and bicultural oral health information and education. In fact, 48% of MediCal patients identifying as Hispanic and 30% of those identifying as other have utilized dental services as compared to only 25% of whites. So now for the future of OHA. OHA is gonna continue to work on our current goals that we have, but we also wanna expand. As you saw, we have a big problem with teens not going to the dentist. So we're gonna explore expanding our outreach programs and our direct services to teenagers. We're gonna be working with our members of the OHA to work on diabetics and increasing access for care for diabetic patients. And that's not all. Before we conclude, although it's not been publicly announced, we are thrilled to share that just a few weeks ago, Dianthes and our partner Salud learned we will be receiving a $5 million five-year grant to help us expand access to dental care for seniors in our community. This is a direct result of the collaborative work that OHA has been doing and the successes they've achieved over the past seven years. We'll be sharing more about our plans for seniors soon. But now we'd just like to say thank you so much. We couldn't have achieved what we have without all of your support and we welcome your questions. Thank you both for your amazing work and that presentation. I'd like to open it up to the board, Supervisor McPherson. Yeah, thank you for that presentation and it really a phenomenal success story. And what it does to give especially young children self-confidence and just in the elderly population too, we've got to work on them a little more. Thank you very much. I do go to the dentist annually so well. But, and then your success story, it builds upon success that $5 million five-year grant and Ms. Marcus, you've been at this for a long, long time. And I know you're associate there too as well. And I want to especially want to thank our board chairman, Zach Friend, who has made this a top priority of his throughout his service on the board of supervisors. I'm glad that the county could participate and be part of it. But most of all, I want to thank you for, it's giving people a better feeling of themselves. And we know that psychologically when they have better dental healthcare. So thank you very much for what you're doing. It's going to make a big difference in the lives of young people and old people as well. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, supervisor McPherson, supervisor Koenig. Thank you, chair friend. First of all, I want to take the opportunity to congratulate you on the fabulous new space of 1500 Capitola Road in Live Oak and invite my fellow board members. If you haven't seen that space, I highly encourage you to go check it out. It is just beautiful clinic. I think anyone who goes to the dentist there is going to have really happy feelings associated with that experience. And it's really great to hear about this $5 million grant you just got, particularly to expand services to the senior population. I mean, as was said earlier in the meeting, there is a bit of tension right now between senior services and student services in Live Oak and the future of other sites, really in that immediate area on Capitola Road. And this really shows how we can provide services to all populations and be inclusive. So I'm just, I'm really glad to know that everyone will be getting service at that new center. I just had one question for you, which is, did you guys get those chairs open at Amaline? I... I'm... Good question. We did not. We paused on that plan as we were working through COVID and opening Capitola Road, but we are partnering with the county at a new site on Pioneer Street, which is close by to the homeless services and HP HP facility over on, what is that? Street? Yes. Coral Street, yeah. Okay, good deal. So that's good for now, but later hopefully. So you will eventually pursue the chairs at Amaline. We do hope so. Okay, great. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Koenig. Supervisor Cummings or Hernandez? Yeah, no, I just wanna thank you all for the amazing work that you do to make dental care accessible to everyone in our community. We know that, you know, we have one of the most expensive communities to live in in the United States. And so the more opportunities we have to provide people with access to medical care, including dental care is really critical to ensuring that we have a healthy population. And I'll just say, I've actually spoken with some folks who've utilized your services and they were just praising how much better they felt they got care at your facilities than they did at some of the, you know, the more expensive dental clinics here in town. So just hearing from them about how while they were treated and the quality of service they received, I just really wanna compliment you all for your hard work. So thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Hernandez. And I wanna thank you guys for all the work you do in South County. You guys have the clinic there, of course. And you know, we do have a lot of young people in South County. We have one of the largest populations of young people there. And so thank you for all the work you do there. And I know there's probably a lot more work to do with the young, the teens. I have a lot of teens there. And of course all the work that you guys do with the underinsured working people that we have there as well, the Latino community. And I look forward to, you know, the more services that are gonna be rendered to the senior community. We have a senior, an entire district that's a senior community there in Watsonville and ever growing population of seniors in the city. And beyond just the senior community in Bay Village, we actually looked at some GIS figures and we found that district one and district two, the two Latino communities has overlays of large tracts of senior communities within those Latino communities, the two council districts that are pretty big, almost as big as, you know, Bay Village itself. So it was a big, big population of senior community in Watsonville as well. So thank you for all the work you do. Thank you, Supervisor Hernandez. And I'll just briefly say how much I appreciate that you have been able to elevate as I started by saying, dental care as healthcare in our community, we generally seek, there's a lot of coverage on healthcare and healthcare needs and healthcare access. There's much less on dental care. So I wanted to make sure that we, before we open this up to the community for comment, I did wanna give you an opportunity because you covered a lot of information in a very short amount of time. What would be if you're a community member watching at home or the local media that generously covers our meetings, what would you want as a key takeaway from today's presentation for them to be? What would be your key point or virtue that you wanna ensure that we really do present? I think I would say that oral health matters. It affects your overall health, it affects your social, your self-confidence, your ability to get a job. So it's important and it's something that we should all care about and that you don't have to be a dentist to make a difference. As evidenced by this work that we've been doing, anybody can make a difference. So if anybody out there in the community is interested in having some outreach services or having some education for their clients or for their family members, we're happy to help with that. I also wanted to add that I think the collaboration itself is what has made this effort so successful. It's utilizing organizations that have very different focuses like education or social services, utilizing their talents and their resources to include oral health in what they're already doing and that's made this a huge success. Lastly is you can find out more information at OHA, is it oralhealthscc.org? And you can find the full needs assessment there as well as the report cards and soon the new strategic plan for the group. Thank you. Well, this is a non-action item but we still are gonna open it up for the community for comment. Is there anybody in board chambers that would like to address us on this item? Thank you, Laura and Sepi. Welcome. Thank you. After that presentation, I just had a few questions for you. I saw that you want to put fluoride varnish on children's teeth and it seems to me that the use of fluoride is now antiquated because it is known to be highly toxic and when it was being put in the water supply, we know that that was actually poisoning people. Anybody can read the MSDS, that's the material safety data sheets on exactly how toxic fluoride is and that's why we now have products that do not contain fluoridated toothpaste. I'm really curious on why you chose to still do that. Dental health obviously is a very good idea but on these wellness visits, I'm a mother, I've had my children in the schools and I still do want to make my own decisions for my children under the rights of my four, protected by the 14th amendment and Supreme Court decisions. And I'm curious about these wellness checks are the schools going to be requiring parents to have them for their kids? If we don't do this, are there going to be consequences? And these are some issues that I am concerned about. As far as the assertions that you can't get a job if you don't have oral health, I'm not really sure how you come to that. I pay out of pocket, going to the dentist really doesn't cost that much money and I think there is a lot of personal responsibility and on that matter, thank you very much. Thank you, anybody else in chambers? Good morning, welcome. Good morning, Becky Steinbrunner. The issue of the fluoride application really worries me too. As the previous speaker said, there's lots of data out there showing that that is not good for brain health, especially in young people. So I would like to see that practice disbanded. Having a good teeth not only helps your physical appearance, but also your nutrition. And that wasn't discussed. If you can't chew the food, you can't have proper nutrition for your body. And I'm reminded of that when I take a walk downtown Santa Cruz and see some of the homeless population that have very few teeth. I'd like to give them food, but I don't think they could chew it. So I would like to see some outreach to the homeless and also to the veterans who many are on the streets. So please extend invitations and outreach to them. Now, regarding the issue of nutrition, rather than painting teeth, kids' teeth with fluoride, why not teach them good nutrition? Teach them that eating candy and sugar and all of that stuff is not the thing to do. And teach them how to properly brush and floss their teeth. This could be done with free public workshops in the clinics or in community centers and make it a fun thing for kids to come and learn about proper nutrition and oral hygiene. I want to really caution those in the 1600 Capitola Dantes that you need to make sure that you are aware of the toxic soil issues there. And if ever the power goes off, make sure that you exit the building because there are volatile chemicals that hopefully the vapor intrusion. Thank you. Is there anybody else in chambers I'd like to address us on this non-action item? Good morning. Yeah, hi, this is James Ewing Whitman. I don't often get to thank many of you supervisors for things you say, but I am going to thank Zach Friend for asking what did you say? Key takeaway, oral health matters. You don't have to be a dentist to make a difference. You know, I was taking a class at Foothill College in the 1980s and there was a young lady there from Haiti. And she was describing a situation where the children were being fed a Fanta orange drink as a baby formula and these young people didn't develop baby teeth because they just rotted away from their diet. So there really is a lot of that people can learn about education. Now, there's a lot of different ways, you know? Okay, to fluoride's benefit, I think in some ways it can be helpful, but I mean, I could go on for hours in ways that it's not. I mean, before 1936, it's primary use was as rat poison, you know? Cause it's part of the process of mineralizing aluminum and mineralizing uranium. And they have to take it out of the fertilizers from petrochemicals because if they kept the fluoride in there, it would kill the plants. So it's my understanding that it takes 240,000 gallons to make one pound of fluoride safe. So what did they do? They put it in the water. So there are a lot of things that the Nazis learned from people who created Planned Parenthood and that's how to docile the people and your ingesting fluoride is gonna change your physiology and you're not gonna be as intelligent. So the easiest way to control a population is to make them weaker. I will say that I do think there are many positive aspects to what I just heard about this dental stuff. The fluoride's just not one of them and so I'm glad that this process is happening in this county. Thanks. Thank you. Anybody else in chambers that'd like to address us? Nicholas Whitehead, at the risk of being redundant on this fluoride issue. As a chemical technician at the time in Johannesburg, South Africa, I had to work with hydrogen fluoride, hydrofluoric acid and it's true. Whenever we wanted to get rid of something we threw it in the vat of hydrofluoric acid and it just utterly consumed it. But of course, when you work with chemistry you learn that heavy, heavy dilutions make things safe. So I'm not against categorically against any use of the fluoride on kid's teeth but it should be very, very restricted to essential purposes and in serious dilution. During the presentation by the excellent representatives of dientes, I noticed that there's a high proportion of seniors not getting dental treatment. I was wondering, could you answer a question about that? Do you have any reasons that that is particularly so? It occurred to me that it's possibly transportation. It's possibly that they're on medications or under medical treatment and don't have ready ability to get to a dentist. And I assume that the high number was not reflecting the COVID period. Am I right or am I not? It was a general, if you'd like to volunteer any information further I'd appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you. Is there anybody else in chambers that'd like to address us on this item? We have no further speakers in chambers. Adam Clerk, is there anybody online that'd like to address us? Yes. Colin, user one, your microphone is now available. Marilyn Garrett and I wanna thank the people who spoke during the comments here on the toxicity of fluoride that has no place in dental care. You know who promoted fluoride? Edward Bernays working, he wrote a book on propaganda known as the father of propaganda. He's the one who working with the tobacco industry got women to smoke in the 1920s. And fluoride comes from the phosphate fertilizer in uranium industry, totally toxic, has no place in dental work. We've been lied to like so many other things. You said you, in the presentation, we want to focus on prevention. And I wanna recommend the source, WestonAprice.org. This is Weston A Price Foundation for wise traditions in food, farming, and the healing arts, education, research, activism. They have a trifle on sugar. And this should be basically artificial sugar is so damaging. And it's based on the work with dentists who at Weston A Price in the 1920s and 30s traveled to about 12 different cultures around the world looking at traditional diets and the lack of cavities and the teeth formation. And of course, when white flour and white sugar came in, the dental cavities and deterioration came in. Adam Clerk, is there anybody else online? We have no further speakers, Chair. Thank you, that'll conclude the item. It's a non-action item. We appreciate the presentation and the community engagement on the presentation. We'll now move on to the next item of our regular agenda. Also noting that we do have a 10-45 scheduled items currently 10-10, but this is item eight, which is to consider the general fund mid-year budget report with updated estimates for fiscal year 22-23 and an update on the 25-24 impacts to adopt a resolution accepting unanticipated general fund revenue in the amount of 4,500,000 from the property tax loss reserve fund, 860,000 from increased TOT and 147,488 from prior year, other revenue in providing for various appropriations, including 2 million in storm disaster response costs, adopt a resolution cancelling general fund revenue in the amount of 1.5 million from the cannabis business taxes and 1.15 million from the sales taxes, prove the addition of a full-time, of 1.0 full-time code compliance investigator three for vacation rental enforcement and community development and infrastructure and take related actions as outlined in the memo of the CAO. We have the board memo and the two resolutions here to present to us is our budget manager, Marcus Pimentel. Welcome. Your friend. Great button, there you go. Good morning, chair friend, Marcus Pimentel and thank you for that well-detailed introduction. I'm Marcus Pimentel, your county budget manager on behalf of the County Administrative Office, Carlos Palacios and Nicole Colburn, who is here today. Thank you for giving me this opportunity to prevent to you, our board and our community. The overview of our 22-23 general fund budget and updated five-year financial outlook. We have four elements and then we'll finish with the concluding actions that chair friend already read out loud. I'll ask that you hold your questions till the end and we can address them all at once over the next 15 minutes or so. I'll provide a recap for 22-23 fiscal year, the development of next year's 23-24 budget cycle and an updated financial outlook and concerns with impacts from climate change and local disasters, three disasters, three years, FEMA delays, those same storylines that you're all seeing are starting to really erode our confidence looking outward. As a recap to our community, I know this board is well versed in this. As a county, we have dual roles like all counties, different than most counties though, we serve half of the population. So 131,000 lives in the unincorporated areas, greater than most counties across the Strait, greater than all of our peers who about half that size. So we provide municipal services to 131,000 population, we finance those municipal services and then we finance services to an entire countywide population of 260,000. So that puts a lot of strain on our general fund and our funding capacity and resources. When we adopted our budget last June and approved the budget last June and adopted it in September, the general fund budget was at 712 million while we have other funds and other operations and special districts and internal service funds, the general fund is where we'll spend most of our conversation. It's where we have a discretionary general fund revenue or tax base that is where we make our hard choices about how we allocate that to our primary services. The county has a history of strong financial stewardship. We've adopted balanced budgets. We have a AAA bond rating and a AA plus bond rating for lease revenue bonds. We've reached our reserves at 10% level and those are all great phenomenal things. We have developed a long-term capital plan and not only developed or implementing elements of that plan. So these are all really strong financial stewardship amendment accomplishments. Our challenges are well versed, aging infrastructure that's any district, any agency, any county, any city across the entire country. We have out year gaps that are unique to us given our systematically unfunded status and we are struggling, struggling, struggling with our female reimbursements and we thank this board to their leadership. We thank our congressional representatives but we are still struggling mightily to get those funds flowing back to our county. From a general fund perspective, we are financed through many department fees, department revenues, clinic revenues. You heard a little bit about the end days. We have a very large health and human services divisions that receive federal and state funding but when it comes down to it, we have a pot of money that our general fund receives that we allocate and have choices of where to allocate that to. Our general fund revenues or general fund purpose revenues are 181 million were in our adopted budget last year. The largest share of that is property tax. Our next largest element is vehicle license fees between those two, it's 120 million. Vehicle license fees and property taxes we'll talk about in a little bit are very stable revenue basis and we're very happy that they're stable and growing dependably. Sales tax is a concern, $25 million base but we're concerned about its outlook and transit occupancy tax while we're not as concerned. We think an economic slowdown could have hurt some of the growth trends that we were hoping for when we looked in our out years. Within the general fund, there's about 22 million of other sources that little pie chart there talks about that, tobacco tax, cannabis tax, state federal funding transfers in. That's kind of a combination of the major revenue sources in that other column but that's a snapshot of our primary general fund revenues 181.8 million. We use that to finance 216 million. So you might do quick math and see well you're financing 216 million with 181. You've got a gap there and we do. We anticipate that gap. We allocate more authority to our departments and maximum budget authority but we're expecting that departments will have salary savings, operational savings. And so that true spend level will be closer to the 181 from a general perspective. We've traditionally in over the last several years that increased our contributions to our public safety and justice departments most notably our public defender. In the last year, we brought public defender in house. That was an incredible commitment by this board and this community. And I think the benefits are gonna be well documented over the next decade but that's come at a cost. $104 million is allocated to our public safety departments and share of public probation, public defender, district attorney, helping human services combined get about 40 million so they're the next big allocation. And then the rest goes to our general government and certainly to our debt service that we have obligations to and capital funds. Where we're at in our budget cycle. Again, this is kind of repeating. So I'm speaking a little faster. I wanna get to the meat and potatoes for the next show of the next couple of slides. We're right in our budget cycle and the development of the 23-24 budget is today's February 28th and we're presenting to you the mid-year. We have received a department submission request for the 23-24 cycle per our directions to departments last November and December. We'll be developing that and working with departments and proposing to this board by April 25th a proposed 23-24 balanced general fund budget. We'll be doing brand new a presentation on May 9th. Typically the budget's been presented on consent. We'll be doing a more detailed presentation on May 9th to disclose and provide our community a chance to really understand what's in the budget that will effectively allow us to really start having conversations much earlier in the process. We'll be following that up on May 30th and 31st with our budget hearings and including our budget hearings on June 13th. We then just from a process standpoint to work with the auditor controller is a fantastic job closing out the year, reconciling all the budget actions and then producing the final schedules that go to this board September 19th for adoption in compliance with the state of California's controller's office. So where our outlook is going? I'll be not a shocker to you and I was gonna read something but when we published our online budget last year we took a shot at projecting out where this year was gonna be and I'll read just a little snippet of it to be clear. Due to continued global supply chain issues reduced inventories and sustained levels of consumer demands, recent price increases appear likely to remain. Higher prices will erode national local consumer purchasing power like pushing down discretionary spending that could lead to locally to reduce travel. That was our statement a year ago and unfortunately much of that came through when we developed that statement in March and published it in April. We were just at the beginning of the inflationary period we thought it would last and it has unfortunately inflation has stayed persistent through January the CPI and PPI, CPI is a consumer side PPI is producer manufacturing side both saw increases of 6.1, 6.2 and 6%. So inflation is still here it's still with us unfortunately it's been very persistent. Mortgage and debt costs for consumers is rising the average mortgage three year rate went from 3.2% now to well above 6% in just the last year consumer confidence is dropping. We're seeing stats where consumer confidence dropped by 8.5% in the last year and 17% from a year from the high about two years ago. Consumer confidence is the big deal because nearly over two thirds of our economy are driven by consumers. 16% of the gross domestic product is driven by our consumers. So they're spending patterns really trigger what's going on in the economy. And just it's remarkable to think about this number personal savings rate has dropped from 17% from a couple of years ago to 3.3% our national savings rate from 17% to 3.3%. So when you think of all that piling up inflationary costs it all makes sense but we hear that number that's a huge, huge, huge change in our savings rate that will lead to consumers pulling back. Fortunately the job market has stayed strong across our national and locally we're seeing historic levels of great low unemployment at 3.4% nationally 4.4% here locally but our labor force is shrinking. We know that in our County, our population has decreased our labor force is shrinking and that's keeping the unemployment rate low. So while unemployment is great losing population losing labor forward, not great. The tech sector continues to lose jobs. There's a news report every day about a company in the tech sector leading off dog shedding jobs. Fortunately that really hasn't hit the rest of the job market, the job sector. But once it does, if it does that will really be huge impacts. So I really feel that most of the signs of a recession are here but the jobs are holding steady and they're keeping it together. Now there's a lot of projections that jobs will stay strong and I think that's true but I'm concerned that we will enter we will, we projected last year a mild economic slowdown we're still holding to that projection that 23-24 will be a mild slowdown that'll creep into 24-25 and then we'll start seeing recovery in a calendar 25. We think that's a more credible place to be. So sorry for the doom and gloom. I like the years when I don't do this presentation but I just wanna disclose what we're seeing. From a revenue standpoint, I talked about our revenues and we have a very, while a large portion of general fund revenues is property tax base, BLF back in the triple flip some of you were around back then, 2003 the governor switched vehicle license fees from going directly to communities and now being tied to property tax growth. So property tax and BLF follow similar trend lines as property tax grows, BLF gets pulled up with it as property tax drops BLF gets pushed down for our community, for a tax base, property tax will continue to grow. That's a great thing for the revenue base, bad for housing prices. Housing prices go up, assess value goes up, more property tax revenue, that becomes a two sides of a coin that's a good story for us locally as a tax generator but a bad sign of our economy. Sales taxes we're concerned about we are seeing a drop this year below our projections. Sales tax has already decreased below our projections. This action today will reduce our sales tax projection by $1 million. We are projecting a negative growth rate 1% next year. I think that's credible. I hope I'm wrong, but right now we have no other indicator of saying we're too thin of a county not to see the signs that are out there. We're still feeling strong and bullish with TOT that it will continue to grow. Revenue per room, occupancy per room will continue to grow. Voters approved a new ballot measure last year and we're thankful to our voters for that that will bring $2.3 million more into this revenue stream next year. The end result of that action has reduced our general fund deficit to 6.4 million. I wish it would have eliminated our deficit but it did reduce our deficit projection. So we're now down to 6.4 million projection for the next fiscal year. Unfortunately, cannabis tax has taken a hit since 2020-21. We saw a high 6.3 million and we thought that was a good floor. Unfortunately it dropped in half. So we're now we're projecting a floor of around 2 million a year. So not six, but two. So that's a $4 million loss in cannabis tax. We hope we're wrong but we don't know where that floor is gonna be. It dropped really precipitously this last year. And so we have nothing other to project that we're gonna hover around a floor of 2 million a year in our combined cannabis business taxes. Again, while it's a small revenue stream that $4 million loss is a big number. And that alone could have, if that $4 million would have held if we didn't have the drop in sales tax, we could have had a projected balance budget already at this point last year would have been phenomenal. And what we're projecting next year of a peak to that number, 6.4 million. This might be a confusing chart. There are two data sets there. The blue chart with the numbers are real where we are projecting our current real deficit to be. We think this year will finish balance with the actions that we're taking in this mid-year report to finance our storm response from the December, January storms. But we are still projecting deficits in the out years. They shrunken a little bit. We've increased our model and increased, we believe the accuracy of our model. We've gone out to 27, 28 with a general fund projection. So we believe these estimates to be credible. They include assumptions on salary savings, general budget savings, credible revenue growth. And they're still producing some small deficits for us to still struggle with. The bottom line number, the gray box represents what we want to bring back to this board of consideration, kind of a multi-phase approach of modernizing our reserves. We want to bring back some action by June that would convert our reserves from perhaps a revenue base to the calculation based on our operating costs. So that's what we're trying to protect our ability to serve, not the revenue stream, which should have a marginal difference, but it's just a better mectorate. And then work towards a longer goal of how might we get in five years, six years, seven years to a 15% reserve level. And I'll talk about the why as we get a little bit deeper into this presentation. Sure, I'll see that I get excited about this stuff. Fortunately it's recorded and you might be able to play that in slower speed, which would sound more, most normal than most people. Systematically underfunded. This is a storyline that we've been talking about for about a year. I don't want to stick on this way too long. I know you're all very familiar with this, but it just bears repeating. Our county is unique. We serve a greater population than most. And we have to, by doing that, we're providing municipal services to a greater population, which erodes our cost base and we spread more revenue over more than most counties. On average, our property tax per resident is $463 per person. Our peers are nearly 1500, sorry, state average is 1500. Our peers are near 4,000. So our peers get 10 times more. And if we were only at the state average, our peers, if we were just at the state average of all counties, that would be 128 million more in general fund we receive every year in property tax. That's a huge number. It would cure deficits. It would fully fund our roads. It would have a go a long ways to bring our facilities up to code, not code, wrong word, but up to our standards and expectations about where they want to be. It would be tremendous to just be at the state average. Now, unfortunately, that's not our decision. That's state four decades of property legislation. So that's not an easy thing to change. It's just trying to explain why we continue to be so struggled with financing everything we want to do. The question we get a lot is where do our property taxes go? So this slide has a two for talks about sales tax and talks about our property tax. For every resident in the unincorporated area, if they pay $100 in property tax or $100 in sales tax, where does that go? For sales tax, we get about $0.19 on the dollar or in this case $19 out of $100 in tax paid. And for property tax, we get $0.14 or $14 for every $100 in property tax paid. The unique thing with online sales, we talked a little about the four decades of legislation that's driven property tax. Similarly enough, sales tax exploded with online sales in the last 15 years or so. But the allocation of online sales taxes based on decades of legislation when trucks were delivering physical items that you'd buy from the manufacturer and it would be delivered to your county. That's not online sales. That was in the 1970s. And that's the same methodology how sales tax is allocated now. So the result is that online sales, the best case scenario, our unincorporate resident buying anything online, coming back to the county, we're getting about a third of that revenue of that sales tax. So instead of getting $0.19 on the dollar from our brick and mortar purchases, when it's an online sale, we get $0.05 on the dollar, $5. And then there's a carve out that just happened a couple of years ago with the state. They changed the rules and looked at the ownership rights of some of the warehouses. And now there are some online sales that we get zero. And so when you're resident in Live Oak, when you're resident in the mountains, when you're resident in Coralitas, when they're buying something online, that sales tax might go directly to Lathrop or Mantica or wherever they're building the pop-up warehouses. And that's great for them. I'm not disparaging that, but the way our allocation methodologies have been based on old, old models at the state that really hampered us on sales tax as well. So online sales is great. It's really bolstered the economy, but it's created unfair disadvantages on where the money flows. Now, getting back to reserves or why we want to propose some modernization of our reserves is currently we're at 10%, which is fantastic. That's a good number. We've been in his Orpheus 7. We've set a goal to give it to 10. At the city level, you might find cities in the 18 to 20% range. But for us, getting to 10 was a big step and I applaud the efforts. When we look into our reserves, 6% of that 10% is based on our friends on Health Services Department reserves that they have, funding that they receive for service delivery, for expansion, for investment in supporting healthcare and mental health operations. Because of our reserves set at 10%, we're unable and we're restricting a lot of those health reserves from being allocated in the way that other counties can. So that puts us a lock on those reserves. And if we were to back those out, those health reserves, we dropped a 4% reserve level, which is less than two payroll cycles. So that's just not a place we can go to. So what it ends up doing is it ends up us having really tough conversations with our health and services who want to do more. And there's a lot of demand out there, but some of our investment capital is locked up because we have to meet our general fund and we need to have some reserves in place that we've found out with three disasters in three years and the delays that it takes for FEMA. We just cannot accommodate a reserve any lower than 10%. So what we'd like to do is convert it and then find a target reach place where we try to get to 15%, with still a floor of 10% where we have that flexibility where if there's a great project that the health wants to do, we can tap into that without jeopardizing our 10% reserve policy, but we've built up our general fund number from 4% to 6% to 8% to 10% so that we have that flexibility. We still are a cash strapped County will continue to be probably until the early 2030s when there's some other things that we can talk about on the more deeper budgets at any time, but that's some of the justification for reserves. And again, not to sensationalize it, three events, three years, the story very well. We've just had went through another recent, this weekend, whether created event that we had to react to that's resulted in 67.7 million still stuck with FEMA. Fortunately, FEMA has obligated about 500,000 this year. With that set number, they owe us 67.7 million. They've obligated 500,000. We are expecting and built into this year's forecast that we'll have 5 million. So we'll receive another 4.5 million by June 30. We think that's credible, given all the congressional pressure are weekly and by weekly meetings, we're having with different FEMA staff. So we think we're generating the pressure but 67.7 million dollars locked up. 18% of our claims have only been paid over, you know, multiple, multiple years. We're approaching 26 million stale claims to years old. That's become an issue for us. It's become a challenge with more storm events with more disasters likely. We really need to have some flexibility with our storm frequency. So I'll finish with our actions this year or to consider and receive this report, accept unanticipated revenue, appropriate $2 million for our recent storms response December, January, not this weekend's but the December, January response. Reduced in certain revenues, we've talked about cannabis tax and sales tax and per the board's direction that I think cumulonated on December 13th, adding vacation rental enforcement to the staff and operations costs for vacation rental. So that's what is included in the recommendation. This concludes my presentation and I'm available for questions. Thank you, Mr. Pimentel. Always a wonderful presentation and extremely informative. Bring it back to the board for questions. Are there any members that would like to ask a question? Mr. Chair, I just wanna thank you, Mr. Pimentel, for that report to lays out what many of us have been saying, anticipating it's gonna be a really tough budget year, facing a $6.4 million deficit to begin with. There's a lot of other numbers to be concerned about as well. And while we're seeing some encouraging growth in some of our revenue streams, we're also looking at some sizable general fund deficits in the next few years that will hold. It's gonna require some increased revenue. We're holding the line on expenses and to close the gaps. And so that's gonna be a tough decision we're gonna have to make. And what really concerns me is a serious lack of clarity about reimbursement by the federal government that we're facing. And for disaster expenses and as you mentioned, we've had enough of those for a long, long time, thank you, three and three years. And the amount of unpaid reimbursements by FEMA from COVID and the CZU fire are at $67 million. It's just incomprehensible. How do we fill that gap? And yet we haven't figured out yet the reimbursements that will be needed to cover the atmospheric river event. And what kind of uncertainty, well, with that kind of uncertainty, what can we, how do we account for these reimbursements in future budgets? I mean, it's a crystal ball. I don't know how you do it, but it's here and it's upon us and it looks like it's gonna get worse. No, I think that's probably the greatest and hardest projection right now for any budget person facing that number. Projecting a revenue stream that has some history you can understand the trends and the impacts of it. Understanding staff and FEMA land of their decisions from bureaucratic policy, cash flow management, it's all best opaque. We don't understand the methodology behind it. So Supervisor McPherson, that's a phenomenal question. It is the question we're struggling with. We're projecting again, five million that we'll receive this year. We're anticipating that from a cash flow perspective. We're anticipating each in the next two years between 16 and 19 million. We really believe that by that three year, four year mark, they have to start performing. And that's typically been the worst case scenarios for reimbursement of costs we've already incurred. Different from like this last storm damage that we might be facing $40 million of infrastructure or other damage that will take years to work on engineers and environmental studies and everything else it takes to repair those infrastructure items. Just our response costs, it's hard to predict that. And that's a phenomenal question and more we're gonna continue to struggle with. And thank you. I understand you can't give a definitive answer on that. But there's a lot of numbers that you mentioned but the decrease in savings from people from 17 to 3%. I mean, that's kind of reflective of what we're facing too. We just don't have the reserve fund that we want and should have and thank heavens we've had that and we built it up to 10% in recent years. But through an old fault of our own, it's gone. So thank you very much for that presentation. And I felt you talked about revenue streams. We still have some flexibility with our sales tax base where we are on the lower end of sales tax while though at 9% there are many jurisdictions at nine and a quarter, nine and a half. So we have some flexibility there but. Right, I know that there's gonna be some discussion on a tax measure possibly next year as well. And people say, how can you do that to us? Increase our taxes of the sales tax or whatever. But if we wanna provide the services we do to the half of Santa Cruz County that's in the unincorporated area and throughout Santa Cruz County, we're gonna have to take some real serious and not really pleasant actions, I think, this year in our budget sessions. Thank you, Supervisor McPherson. Any other board members with questions? Supervisor Koenig. Thank you, Chair. First of all, budget manager Pimentel, thank you for the report. So it's a particularly sobering one here. I know this is a lot of themes that we've seen now for at least a couple of years I've been on the board. And it's always a shock going from all the things that you campaign on and ways that you wanna improve the community and then running into this stark financial picture here where we're really getting the short end of the stick, particularly with a lot of the apportionment formulas coming down from the state level. You know, I guess I would certainly thank voters for passing the increase in the transient occupancy tax and also thanks staff for the recommendation of adding a position to code compliance for vacation rentals. You know, it's difficult with all of the needs that we have in our community to be spending money on enforcement. I'm sure if you don't deal with this issue every day of the way, I know I do and Supervisor Chair Friend does. But at the same time, transient occupancy taxes have been one of the bright spots. And of course, they have a very significant, these short-term rentals do have a very significant impact on the neighborhoods where they are. And so I think that we really owe it to the community to ensure that we're being, especially, you know, responsibly helping to manage this business that is taking place in residential neighborhoods. And so, you know, I get asked about changes that we could make to the short-term rental ordinance all the time. But I think the most important first step is ensuring that the ordinance that we have is properly enforced. So, you know, I again, appreciate this recommendation all supported. The other question I have is, you know, again, kind of giving back to the state apportionment. I mean, I appreciate the slide on sales taxes, right? I knew that I thought that we were doing better with online sales, but to see that we're doing that much worse is pretty concerning given that, you know, I think this is probably a trend that will only continue as people continuing to shop online is just so dang convenient. As much as I know, I want to support local businesses. I feel like nine times out of 10, I go into a store to get something. And unfortunately, it's not in stock. And I find myself again, shopping online, despite my best intentions. I mean, should, this is a question, maybe as much for Supervisor McPherson, who I know as a representative at CSAC, I mean, is there any discussion at the state level about changing this apportionment, particularly for sales tax, or is it something that our board could advocate for further? I mean, I'd be prepared to move that we, you know, write a letter to our state legislators, which, you know, we picked up one. We have a little bit more representation for Santa Cruz County this year. It seems like, you know, we really need to highlight this problem and ask them to address it because otherwise we're in big trouble. I can just say generally that this is a concern for a lot of people, counties throughout of our 58 counties throughout the state, probably the most significant ones is the property tax revenue, where we are and we're set. And to change that, it's going to take a statewide saying, okay, Santa Cruz County will give you more, but we'll take less and it's just not going to happen. But the point is how can, what can we do? I mean, there's a limit on the sales tax and so forth. We could present that if we wanted. That'd be a good discussion to have. That's great. I mean, we, there's a limit to the sales tax and we're at 9% and I think you can get a cap at nine, three quarters. Yeah, nine, three quarters. Yeah, right. Yeah, I mean, I'm looking even just at the way that the sales tax, and I think this is the state sales tax that is collected, how that then comes back to us at the county and other local agencies. I mean, I think we can pretty fairly make the argument that if we're being asked to add 4,634 units within the county over the next eight years, we can't continue to maintain services for our existing population and add residents, that many residents, if we don't have at least the same amount of percentage of our sales tax that we have historically, if we're being asked to take less, then this system will crumble. Thank you, Supervisor Koenig. I think that those are good points and maybe when it comes time for motion, Supervisor McPherson, this could be considered at CSAC by the board as far as an item. And also it could be maybe added to our ledge program or legislative advocacy program that the board produces. Supervisor Hernandez, I believe you had a question. I actually have an additional question with some of Manu's comments. Do cities have the same apportionment for their online sales tax as well as counties? Yeah, it depends on their tax, sales tax base of brick and mortar. So a city like Capitola, a small population, but shrinking mall, but still a heavy tax base, they'll get more of the allocation. So it's really based on your brick and mortar size proportionally because we don't have a lot of brick and mortar retail sales in our county. A lot of our counties undeveloped land. We're punished by that. I think we should tag team with CSAC and League of Cities probably as well. I'm sure they would be on board with that as well. My question was, it was pretty daunting to see the decrease in sales tax with the cannabis from 6 million to 2 million. What contributed to that was that the decrease in sales or loss in business licenses and I think in South County we still have, they're still vying for licenses over there. I don't know what's going on over there. I think we're really seeing in consumer preference and maybe they're just finding other options outside of retail commercial. Oh, we have to look at something, you know, to ensure we preserve what we have. Thank you, Supervisor Renez. Supervisor Cummings, did you have anything? I think all my questions were answered. You know, the presentation. I do have some comments after we hear from the public though. Thank you. All right, well, I'm in agreement with Supervisor Koenig's question slash additional direction that'll be coming forward. I did have one brief question, Mr. Pimentel, which is that in here it includes about $150,000 for communities or neighborhoods that are impacted by vacation rentals. This is something that Supervisor Koenig had asked for in addition to also the CODE compliance inspector, we appreciate that as being done. It doesn't really explain how or that will be allocated or what it'll be allocated for. Is there gonna be an additional item coming back to the board to discuss that? Or do you already have a sense of what the staff's construct for that week? That's a great question, Supervisor Friend, Chair Friend, we were developing that in tune with our OZ2324 budget. There's another item that we're looking for some environmental funded programs as well. So we've got two initiatives that will be presented as part of the 2324 vacation rental and environmental response. Perfect, you may recollect Supervisor Koenig and I had added additional direction at some time back when we had the update on the vacation rentals and we provided some construct of a starting point for how those funds could be spent in parks or some other beautification projects. Some ideas on that idea, but so we look forward. What I'm hearing is that I believe that this will be coming forward as part of the broader budget and then we'll have an opportunity to discuss the allocation at that time, is that correct? Yeah, and it'll be, I expect in line with the direction we received. Perfect, all right, we'll now open it up for the community. Is there any member of the community and chambers that would like to address us on this item? Good morning, welcome back. Yeah, good morning still. Yeah, I was around last year for the four days of the $1.3 billion budget hearings. That was fascinating. I'm not, it's just great to observe here. I think I haven't pissed all of you off yet this morning. You just weren't listening. So I don't know if I want to continue to do that. It really seems like you guys are surprised that the country is struggling and this county is struggling. You know, here's some information from 1998 written in the Aptos Times, March 15th, about agenda 21, pros and cons. And then there's a process called a Delphi technique for facilitators. I'm gonna read this. Our objective is to get the answers we want and make the citizens think they are participating in the public process while all the decisions have already been made beforehand. So I'm obviously here not making money actually care about my community and I actually care about you guys too. So I don't know, I'd probably be seen as a jerk to say some of the things that I wrote down, but I was paying attention to this budget hearing and I really wonder what's gonna happen when there's a real serious problem that happens in this community because Santa Cruz is not an island. It was 200 years ago and that's why we had the Oregon Trail. So just to kind of pay attention with what's going on and what else could be done, I guess I'll leave it there because otherwise I'd be construed as being mean. But thanks guys. Thank you. Is there anybody else in chambers that would like to address us on this budget item? Good morning. Good morning. Thank you again. I just wanna say the thought of raising taxes is just ridiculous. You can't bleed money out of turnips and all of us are also personally feeling cash strapped. So for me, I make decisions based upon how much I'm gonna be spending and luxury items or items that I don't need for my immediate needs go by the wayside. So I think that if you try to raise taxes rather than cutting spending, you're going to put businesses out and you're going to inflame a situation. I haven't heard anything about cutting expenses. There's a lot of frivolous ideas about parks. And while I love the idea of having parks, if you're having a budget crisis, then stop the wasteful spending. We currently have a non-functioning judicial system in Santa Cruz County. We have two high profile crimes of judicial child trafficking, one by Judge Connolly on videos that have been seen by both child victims who were brutally kidnapped in the same Santa Cruz neighborhood have been viewed publicly over 30 million times. We have police officers, we have sheriff's department who are not doing their staff. We are very much pension heavy and government employee heavy. How about cutting some of the expenses there? How about getting rid of these judges and this useless justice system? The district attorney has hung up on victim advocates. He's not doing his job. The victim's advocates such as Julia Schneider at Santa Cruz police department and others just hang up on victims. This is ridiculous. So I'd like to hear your ideas on cutting the spending and just getting down to critical measures. If too much of our property taxes are going out of this community, yes, then it's your job to take it to the state and say that we want our property taxes here and we will decide. And yeah, work on cutting the spending just like homeowners do. Thank you. Thank you. Is there anybody else in chambers? Good morning, welcome. Good morning, board members. Joe Hall, Live Oak resident. I'm actually here to thank you. It's been 10 years since we passed the Vacation Rental Ordinance and supervisor Conning and supervisor Friend took the lead and we're finally getting some enforcement. And I could say it's about time, but it's really overdue. And what you have basically are a lot of businesses and a lot of them know they don't have to even pay attention. But before I get into one other quick thing I wanted to thank Nicole Coburn who actually was part of the group that helped produce the funding that produces this position. So thank you, Nicole. She did a very quiet job. Never got any public recognition. So you get it a little bit now. So thank you. What I also wanted to show you why you need to do enforcement is things are getting trickier out there. Here's an example. I'll pass it around. It's a house on 8th Avenue overlooking Twin Lakes State Beach. And what they have done, I've seen in other communities is they have come out with this proposal that you can only run it for 30 days. That way you're not subject to the vacation rental ordinance. And so by doing that, if you rent this house you'll end up paying $34,734. But none of that is taxed under the TOT because it's 30 days. And I know other cities have based this in communities and they've actually I think come up with some legislative solutions. A neighbor called this to my attention and I was rather aghast thinking of $34,734. So there's $3,000. If you figure out how to deal with this that the county would get every month. I don't know if it's rented. I walk by there all the time. I see cars there. I don't know how they get around it. But what's sad about it is that right around it just look at the red dots of all the people who have vacation rental permits. This one doesn't. So they're basically skating under the radar. And that's why enforcement's important. It reinforces the people who do follow the law and as a bonus you could get some additional funding. I'll give this to your staff here and thank you so much for the time. Thank you, Mr. Holland. Thank you for your steadfast advocacy on this. It's appreciated. Is there anybody else in chambers I'd like to address us on the side? Good morning and welcome back. Hello, my name is Becky Steinbrunner. I appreciate these mid-year budget reports and I've listened to them over the years that I've been coming to the Board of Supervisors meeting. What I didn't hear you talk about at all that has been discussed at length in the past at this time is the amount of unfunded PERS liability. That has been huge in the past and I didn't hear it discussed at all. So where do we stand in that? I've seen dire predictions of even larger deficits than what you're predicting here connected with the unfunded PERS liability. I appreciate your discussion, Supervisor Koenig, about going to the state and saying, hey, you need to give us back our money. And that brings me to my conversation I had recently with a fire chief about ERAF. And that was a travesty that has never been undone. So we should be getting more money back in our community from the state. And they said they would, but they never have. Supervisor Chairman Friend, you're up in Sacramento. Why don't you advocate for that up there while you're there now? The TOT compliance officer is something we have to do. It's what we promised the voters at the ballots when that went to vote. So that should not even be a question. And it is going to provide relief for those who voted for the tax and needs to be addressed with the problems in the communities where these things are. I think I appreciate, Supervisor Hernandez, that you ask why is the cannabis tax going down so much? And I think we need to be having conversations with those who are licensed and why that is happening. I'm sure they can fill you in. I ask a question, why is FEMA reimbursement so low? There have been questions about the county's problems with reporting. And I think we need to be talking about that as well. Thank you, Ms. Steinbrunner. Is there anybody else in chambers I'd like to address? Madam Clerk, is there anybody online? Yes, there is. Colin, you too, your microphone is now available. Garrett, I think the problems here be tied to like you enumerated upon is overall that we're living in a corporate dictatorship where the corporations are ruling and siphoning off money from local governments and everywhere. Also, one half of our tax dollars approximately go to the military Pentagon budget. And that's coming from us taxpayers. I didn't vote for that. First, do no harm. First do no harm is something medical professionals are supposed to abide by, but also elected representatives. I know ways you can save money and the broadband rate 4G, 5G radiation that's on. This radiation is also known to kill wildlife and bees. We have a large agricultural South County business production and is negatively impacted by this. And by the pesticides, you should require ecological and organic agriculture without poisons. Many farmers know how to do that. And this pandemic that we've had, part of the plan is for pharmaceutical telecom corporations to rule and not have local representation at all. So those are some of my overview comments and suggestions. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Garrett. Is there anybody else online, Madam Clerk? We have no further speakers, Chair. We'll bring it back to the board. I believe Supervisor Cummings, you had some comments. Yes, Chair, thank you. Your microphone, Supervisor. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. First, I'd just like to thank our staff for this update and presentation. Very sobering to get a glimpse of what our financial situation is like and definitely highlights the need for us to start thinking of creative ways to raise revenue for our community and for the county so that we can continue to offer services to the public. The comment though that I really wanted to make has to deal with the budget hearings. As a new supervisor, I mean, obviously the budget is pretty complex. And I think that it will be good for us to receive presentations from all the departments, not just the largest ones, because it's our first opportunity to really understand what different departments are facing, even the smaller ones within the county. I think it'll be really critical for us to just, and for the public, for the purposes of transparency, for everyone to get a sense of where these different departments are facing there, what their successes are and where their shortcomings are and what challenges they'll be facing budgetarily and monetarily in the future. And so I'm happy to move the staff recommendation with an additional motion to extend the budget hearings from two days to four days and to receive presentations from all county departments. Oh. Yeah, I'll second that. I think that I'm being a new board member too. I think I appreciate learning from different departments. I appreciated visiting some of the departments and learning about some of the budgetary issues, shortfalls, things to look forward to, some of the projects they're working on. And being a new supervisor, I think it's important, even for me, to be able to prioritize things that are in my district. And I think, and to figure out how to do that, for me, for example, I've got things like, rural roads that were mentioned earlier, road repairs. And so for things like me, like Murphy Crossing Road is important to our local agricultural economy in South County and I want that as a priority. And so figuring those things out, I think these longer meetings that have more explanation and we can have more in-depth discussion, I think are important to me, at least for right now, where when we're new incoming supervisors, I think would be good. So I support this motion, supervisor Cummings has. Well, let me just add a little bit of context all up for my other colleagues, but as somebody who's served on the board with Supervisor McPherson for a while, when we first joined this was more of a common practice that we would have presentations from a lot of the departments. It took a significant amount of staff time to put together these presentations for what really became pro forma actions of adoption of say the information technology budget or some of the smaller departments that you reference supervisor Cummings. So it is a significant onus actually on County staff time. There was a speaker that had asked, what about cutting costs? Well, the County's down almost about 17% staff from the point that when we first came in to office about 10 years ago, but yet the workload has increased exponentially. So I'm not really support. And also I'll say that the board actually adopted the budget hearing schedule. This was, they've already presupposed some plan for that exact schedule. And there's other things that are built around it, including some of the other commissions that we serve on have scheduled their meetings around like the airport, for example, the schedule their meetings around when we release our early schedule on. So it becomes problematic that there's conflicts with other commissions. So I think if this is something we're interested in doing, I think that it's a broader discussion than today. I mean, which is to say that it impacts the scheduling of other commissions. This was not the expectation we'd given staff when we adopted the budget schedule previously. And we need to give them the time and resources to be able to do it. I mean, I understand the thought process behind it. And I also like to encourage as new supervisors, I mean, you're not limited to conversations with the county staff on budget day, right? I mean, these are meetings like for you, supervisor Hernandez, everything you brought up was clearly brought up repeatedly by your predecessor. And these are meetings you should be having with public works and others in it well in advance of budget hearings. So that's my concern about the expansion to multiple days. I'm not opposed to like the concept of additional meetings associated with it. We've already been through this. I mean, we used to do this used to be double the length, I think it was five full days originally, but there was a strong preference both by the board at the time, as well as county staff to not just receive standard presentations on things that we were just adopting pro forma, but to really do deeper dives then into the departments that received more interests like public works or planning, for example, the Sheriff's Office, the DA. So that's the history on it. So I can't support that element of the motion. That's the only reason why, but I mean, I recognize you'll be chair next year and this board toward the end of the year will be making a determination of what our schedule is for the coming year and that should be built in at the expectation time at that time. In my opinion, if that's something that the board wants to do. Supervisor Koenig. Thank you, Chair. I mean, I generally agree with you that I've given how limited staff's time is. As I said, they're being asked to do more with less that I would encourage my colleagues to have those conversations with departments. Outside of the budget hearings themselves, I think that just establishing those relationships in general are gonna be beneficial and help make you the most effective supervisors possible. And other than that, I just wanted to add some, propose some additional direction as far as adding an item for our County's legislative program. But I don't know if we wanna take a vote on this motion first or how you wanna address that. Well, Supervisor Koenig, we could do it one of two ways or as a motion in a second, you could introduce a substitute motion and then we would take the substitute motion first. Okay. Yeah, then I will make a substitute motion for the recommended actions with the additional direction to add to the County's legislative program, an item advocating for change to sales tax and property tax apportionments to bring us Santa Cruz County in line with statewide and historical averages and direct the chair to write letters to state representatives and CSAC requesting action. Second that. Okay, we have a motion and a second and so we will need to take action on the secondary motion first. Supervisor McPherson, did you have any additional comments on the general, on either the motion or the general motion? No, you stated them very clearly, I think about why we are at the place and how we were going through our budget sessions today compared to several years ago. I think that there's plenty of time between now and budget times and as I will do to talk to individual departments about their budgets when they come out and their proposed budget when they come out. So I think we have plenty of time as supervisors to look at that. And the history of it is, is that it was pretty much a pro forma that we didn't read it or do look at it, but it was pretty much locked in of what these departments, if you'll excuse the term minor departments, what they were responsible for and how they were budgeting for it. So I would, I'm supportive of the motion that is made. I think we should stick with the program as has been listed. And if we want to adjust it next year, let's have that discussion. All right, thank you. So we'll take action on the alternate motion or the, excuse me, the substantive motion which includes the recommended actions except in file the mid-year report, adopt the various resolutions, approve the addition of the code compliance investigator and also authorize the auditor controller to make the necessary budget adjustments with the additional direction provided by supervisor Koenig if we could have a roll call, please. Can I ask a point of order on this? So this is a vote to accept the substitute motion and then we'll vote on the substitute motion after. It's not a vote to accept the substitute motion. The substitute motion is automatically heard under our rules in place of the original motion. Okay, I just wanted to be clear on that because I think that there was a different process that I'm used to working under at the city. So the substitute motion is now the motion that's on the floor and we won't consider the first motion that was made. That's right. Under Rosenberg's rules of order, that's the way the business is conducted. Can you say motion? Surveys are coming. So we would consider the original motion if the substitute motion fails, but if the substitute motion passes, then that is the only motion that's considered. And as I had already restated the substitute motion, it is for all the recommended actions in the agenda report plus the additional direction that supervisor Koenig outlined. So if we could have a roll call, please, Madam Clerk. And the additional direction was to add to the county's legislative program, advocating for changes to sales tax and property tax apportionment to bring us in line with statewide and historical averages and direct the chair to write letters to state representatives in CSAC requesting action. All right, if we're ready. Supervisor Koenig? I am. Cummings? No. Hernandez? Aye. McPherson? Aye. And Friend? Aye. Item passes four to one with the substitute motion. Thank you. We have a 1045 scheduled item that we are unfortunately running a little bit late for. So Mr. Pimic, I'm up to delay your items nine and 10 until after we hear item 12. So we'll move on to item 12, which is a scheduled 1045. It's now 1105, but which is to conduct a study session to review updates on addressing homelessness in the County of Santa Cruz and approve recommended priority goals for the next six month housing for a healthy Santa Cruz implementation cycle to accept and file various progress reports to defer ratification of project home key project agreement with 2838 Park Avenue LP and affiliates for the Park Cave and Plaza project to on or before March 28th, 2023 to approve the appointment of supervisor Cummings to the Santa Cruz County Housing for Health Partnership Policy Board through December 31st of 2023 and to direct the Human Services Department to return on or before August 22nd, 2023 with further updates and take related actions as outlined in the memo of the Director of Human Services. We have the agenda board item and multiple attachments. And here for our presentation, we have, I believe we have Mr. Morris and Dr. Ratner, Mr. Morris or Human Services Department Director and Dr. Ratner's are housing for health director. And Mr. Morris, please. Thank you, Chair Friend and good morning to you and board members and the public watching as you outline Chair Friend, just to add a touch of context and then we'll pull up a PowerPoint from the clerk of the board. Thank you and Dr. Ratner will go through a PowerPoint presentation. This is the two year mark of a three year strategic plan that your board adopted just over two years ago and all four city councils and the community adopted as well called Housing for Healthy Santa Cruz. And we come back to your board under board direction every six months to provide a look back of what has been accomplished and what we're working through in the last six months. And then looking forward what we recommend as staff to get direction from you to look going forward given the landscape changes dramatically in the field of homelessness funding issues needs of the community. I wanna underline what Chair Friend said about the materials and just recognize that they are actually quite voluminous. We put them together on purpose to do our best as staff to be very transparent and honest and direct but we know the materials are overwhelming but it is diagnostic of the complexity of the issue. And it is also diagnostic of the amount of work we are attempting to do to address this issue which unfortunately remains very complicated. In the interest of being very focused on today's presentation is not gonna go through all the materials. We are just gonna highlight the salient points that we think are of most interest. And I wanna just take a minute to underline a few of Chair Friend's comments about the six actions that are in front of you. Three of them are the very straightforward ones to open this hearing to adopt and file the materials and to come back in six months but I do wanna take a minute to be very clear why the other three actions are in front of you today. There was a lot of comment earlier today in public comment about transparency and Brown Act, et cetera. So I wanna highlight with District Three Supervisor Cummings here as a board member now. We are mandated by federal law under Housing and Urban Development HUD to run locally something called a Continuum of Care or COC. We worked very closely with your board over the last couple of years to adjust how that system runs and to have four county seats on that body. And one of those seats was former District Three Supervisor Ryan Coonerty. So to be honest and transparent, follow Brown Act, we're coming back to follow longstanding practice of having the new elected Supervisor Cummings to replace during that term. So that's why that's in front of you as a specific action in Supervisor Cummings is definitely expressed his interest to do that given the issues in his district. The second is a deferral item. We are dealing with a lot of money coming and going in a lot of complexity in state reporting and we had committed to returning to a board today on a Project Home Key Item and Supervisor Koenig's district. And there's still some I dotting and T crossing with the state and with the housing developer that we need a couple of extra weeks to return. So we have a deferral item. And then the last one is because of the volume and the timeframes of the funding opportunities we have with state and federal grants, we are consistently unable to follow practice and expectation to come to your board to ask approval to apply for grants. Because if we do that, we actually miss the window to apply. So we keep coming back to you and saying, please ratify after the fact that we made this application and we were just being very transparent with you and asked for this action for your board to consider approving that this is just the nature of the funding and asked for your approval. This is what we have been doing. We wanna do ongoing that in no way eliminates your opportunity to look at when that money comes in, what to do with it, how to appropriate is just to apply for grants because the turnaround time is very, very quick. Last comment I wanna make before turning it over to Dr. Ratner for the presentation is I've been in the field of safety net county government for over 30 years. And I am not sure I have seen a topic where there is more emotion, more complexity and more of a distance between the facts and the challenges and the complexity and how conversations play out everywhere, including in public hearings. And so I just wanted to take a minute to share sort of what I hope we are doing in interest of this community and for you as our elected officials. The emotions run deep and there are often finger pointing in every form we're at about why, what's the problem, who's the cause, where it's going. There is a lot of rhetoric particularly in light of a budget that is looking very concerning. We actually even have a governor who has arguably been the biggest champion of funding homeless services at local level who has shifted as we prepare for a budget recession at the state level facing a $30 plus billion deficit too. The problem is not state funding, the problem is local accountability. We disagree. We think this is part of how political rhetoric plays out and makes it very confusing for people and makes it very challenging for us. And on the heels of the budget presentation that just occurred, we want to be very clear and honest that we are facing what we're gonna call a cliff two. Cliff one is during COVID, we got a huge infusion of federal and state money to stand up a lot of shelter programs and a lot of services and that money went away. That was cliff one. We are now looking at a cliff two is a number of state and federal grants that are gonna term out in the next two to three years. So this leads to, I'm gonna end with the challenge but I then wanna turn it over to Robwith a little bit of hope. The challenge, we are constantly confronted with the issue of what to do with declining revenues and need that surpasses the revenues and the tension of whether or not to respond to emergencies or plan and invest in long-term so that people stop becoming homeless or stay housed. That tension will keep going and our job as staff is to share with you those trade-offs, share with you what we see as the opportunities and make sure the discussions are open and clear with everybody because they're not easy decisions. A little bit of hope. In Robert's presentation, you will see that we have been successful based on an action for your board of being the most successful jurisdiction in the state of California of helping many people get housed who are in the project room key co-ed shelter system more than any other community. There's a story to tell here that there are ways to invest and fund thoughtfully that keep people from being or becoming or returning to the streets. And so we hope as we deal with trade-off choices, emergency response choices, and investments in stopping and ending homelessness, it's a complicated issue, but we feel we have a good story to tell. So I wanna turn it over to Dr. Ratner and if we could lift up the PowerPoint. Thank you, clerk of the board. Thank you, Randy. And thank you, board, for the opportunity to give you an update on the work we've been doing over the last six months. We're gonna report on activities in our division between July and December of 2022. And this is the end of our second year of implementing the framework. Go on to the next slide, thanks. This is what I'm planning to cover as Randy said, I'm gonna highlight some things in your packet and then wanna save enough time for questions and comments from members of the board. So I wanna talk about how we're doing generally around the issue of homelessness. I think many people can see signs of progress and lack of progress in our community. What's working and wanna share as Randy alluded to examples of efforts that have made a difference in people's lives and talk about how we can scale that up. And then wanna share a little bit more detail on some of the challenges, given how the federal and state government addressed this issue and the complexity of grading funding together to achieve outcomes. It's quite challenging and talk a little bit about that. I know the board is very interested in members of the public what's happening with shelter capacity and transitional housing capacity. So we consistently wanna provide updates on that and what the landscape is looking like currently with funding and current programs. And then talk a little bit about what we're planning to work on the next six months. On the bottom of the slide, I wanted to highlight in preparing for today's meeting I did a little bit of historical research and found this article from 1990 in an editorial in a public health journal. That's my background in healthcare and public health. And it referred to homelessness as a game of musical chairs. And in that editorial, the author highlighted and you can see in the quote that homelessness is primarily a problem in our country of making sure we have enough housing that's affordable for the people who live in a community and the incomes that they have. And in 1990, this was called out as the major reason why we have homelessness. And I will lead to this later in my talk in 2022, there's a new book from some professors at the University of Washington that says homelessness is a musical chairs problem. And the primary driver is we don't have enough affordable housing. So ultimately at the local level, what we're faced with until we collectively in our society invest more in making sure we have affordable places for people to live. We have to make difficult choices about people who are better off and not better off given this game. And in the game of musical chairs, there aren't enough options for people. So where we invest our time and money are the groups that tend to be more likely to get into housing. So I'm gonna talk a little bit about that more. And there's some statewide trends where the state is putting in money and we are locally where you see progress in addressing homelessness and other groups where we're not investing money in time and we're seeing increases in homelessness. And I think those are important trade-off decisions that policy makers make when we're looking at budgets. And I know you have really difficult decisions to make around those budget issues. Going to the next slide, thanks. So how we're doing, members of the board, I think at our last meeting, you are aware that we did a point in time count comparing the data in 2019 and 2022. Last week, a group of volunteers, I wanna shout out to all the people who helped do another account, a survey of people who are unhoused. We'll have data on that by the end of April. And the full report will come out in the fall. Overall homelessness went up 6% in our county and the number of unsheltered people went up 4%. And the number of deeply low income households, that's a category that's not actually used a lot in the housing world because the housing world is concerned with people with higher incomes, but people with seniors and people with disabilities, people who are on public benefits managed by our department are in this deeply low income category where we don't invest enough in creating more affordable housing options for them. They're competing for limited housing slots and the groups that are more likely to end up homeless are in that income category. And then where we do make investments, you'll see certain groups are better off. So on the slide, you'll see that in our point in time count, last time we saw reductions in homelessness among families with children. And this community has invested heavily in making sure children and families are in stable living situations. And we saw progress there. The same as the case for young people, ages 18 to 25, where we've collectively made more investments. Then groups that are not doing as well, seniors, they came up in the dental presentation earlier. We have an aging population statewide. There's a growing number of seniors who are losing their housing. That is the case here as well in Santa Cruz. Veterans, this is an outlier in our community that we're gonna see if this was an anomaly in the point in time count or if there's an actual trend in seeing increased numbers of veterans. But between 2019 and 2022, there was. Then these other groups statewide, we saw increases. So people with disabilities, particularly people with disabilities that impact their ability to function and their brain activity. Mental health, substance use, dementia, those kinds of health issues have significant impacts on people's ability to maintain housing. People with histories of criminal justice involvement, there's a lot of barriers to returning to work and getting back into housing. And it should not surprise us that as the state has reduced the number of people in prisons and jails, there aren't enough options and supports for people who have those personal histories. And that's an area for some attention. We continue to have significant racial disparities in who ends up homeless. And between 2019 and 2022, we saw an increase in the number of Hispanics and Latinos, which is actually a trend that hasn't been the case. Hispanic Latinos have not seen significant increases in homelessness until this pandemic era. And so this is a statewide trend we need to pay much more attention to. And then since modern homelessness became a thing that government has tracked, blacks and African Americans have been overly represented. And so we need to tend to the racial disparities in this issue as well. I did wanna share that the board six months ago approved of our department using some funds to help with the ending of the Housing is Key program. It's an emergency rental assistance program during COVID to help people who are struggling to pay rent. And the board authorized us to invest $500,000 in some local nonprofits to help outreach to the applicants to housing is key and to help as many people as possible keep their housing. I'm pleased to report that the nonprofits have done really good work. They've reached over 1,400 people and 1,100 people compared to when we had data in February and early in 233. 1,100 new households got assistance from the Housing is Key program. And that brought in $13.6 million. Can't directly correlate, but I think there is a correlation between us locally investing and supporting nonprofits to follow up with families and individuals. Very positive that those resources were here. And then the other side of the coin is that even with these local efforts, we had hundreds of households that still weren't able to keep their housing because their incomes couldn't keep up the cost and rising rents and people selling homes, et cetera. So I think there were over 280 households according to the nonprofit reports that weren't able to keep their housing. That doesn't mean that they became homeless, but it doesn't mean they can't afford to live here and they may need to live elsewhere or move in with others and doubled up often overcrowded situations. And go on the next slide. So what is working on a positive note, Randy alluded to our work with the project Room Key. And I do hope we get our FEMA reimbursements like all of you as soon as possible. One of the areas where we invested heavily was in creating safe places for people experiencing homelessness during COVID to land and to be safe from the virus. The federal government also made available which we need on a much larger scale some special vouchers called emergency housing vouchers for people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. And we braided money together from multiple sources to create what we call a rehousing wave program. And we worked closely with the housing authority to make these vouchers work. When I started here, I heard a lot that vouchers are just a piece of paper that are useless. And I had worked in another community and I knew that having a voucher to subsidize your rent is hard to use in a private market. I think you need a graduate degree to be able to navigate the process of getting a voucher and understanding it and being able to use it. So what we did is we paid for service providers to work with our clients to help them navigate the process of using the vouchers. And then we also created incentives and supports for private property owners. It's also complicated if you're a property owner to understand where do you go for help? What does this form mean? What's HQS? What's AMR? All these different jargon terms and acronyms. So together by working on this as a collective and branding funding together, we have the highest utilization of these vouchers in California. And this is the 13th highest in the US, but we're actually 10th. It went up because we've got more people using vouchers. We've exceeded our allocation and we're lobbying the federal government to get more of these vouchers because what we're doing is working. 188 property owners and managers are partnering with us and helping households move into housing in the private market and 57 of those property owners are new to the program. So our outreach efforts, our incentives are bringing in new property owners whom I'm incredibly proud of, the fact that they are contributing to being a part of the solution by participating in these programs and working with us. We helped over 295 households that were homeless moved into permanent housing and that includes over 425 individuals that's balanced against the people who are getting displaced and losing housing in the community. The next slide, we can go ahead and just like, how did this work? How did we do this? And I think it comes from taking money from all these different sources, bringing them together to create a model that thinks about how do we help people go from being in their cars or places where the folks shouldn't be sleeping into a safe place and this diagram is the hotels, the project room key, but any shelter that's low barrier that is welcoming to people. But the shelter is not enough. If all we do is shelter, people will just stay in shelter. We have to braid that with the services and supports to help people get back into permanent housing. So that's the middle part of this diagram, the service providers who build relationships and help people reconnect with family and friends and take advantage of money that we have applied for affordable housing, et cetera. And then helping folks move and transition from homelessness into permanent homes. But we also need to wrap around the services with the property owners. Property owners have a lot of questions, need support with navigating these public programs. And then once folks move in, many people have significant health issues, as I alluded to earlier, where they need that ongoing support to be able to keep their housing. And then I think the incentives for the property owners makes a big difference. We provide incentives for owners that are participating. We help them understand if there are issues that come up, there's some resources to help in that situation and then we give them some phone numbers to call if there are challenges. Using subsidies in the private marketplace is more expensive. A cheaper but takes longer to do is building housing in our community with the intention. So over the long run, it's a lot cheaper to build housing with some units targeted to people who have special needs, seniors, people with disabilities. So over the long run for government, that's a cheaper approach. Right now we haven't built enough. So we have to partner with the private market and use these vouchers. So it costs more per household to use that kind of approach. We can go on for the next one. This is a picture that artistically represents the maze of funding that we navigate in our division. We get funding from the federal and state governments, different agencies. We have currently 46 different funding sources and that doesn't include money that goes into other agencies like probation and the health service agency also get money to address homelessness. Each funding source has different rules and different contracts and levels of staff support on the end of the funding agency that can help us understand the rules, et cetera. There's different start and end dates and deadlines and reporting requirements and reporting systems. So we spend a lot of our time as staff navigating and braiding this funding together to try to get outcomes. It's a lot of wasted taxpayer dollars to be honest with you. The amount of time I spend, the amount of time my co-workers spend in all of this work, we'd rather be helping people move into housing. So the extent of the federal and state government can make it easier and consistent with the funding that we receive and be more predictable. We can have a much bigger impact on our communities. I just read on my phone this morning that there's some state legislators who are pushing for legislation to have more consistent ongoing funding at the state level. As you can tell, I'm personally supportive of that as a staff and would encourage the board to think about weighing in on those recommendations at the state level. Next one. So this is related to how much does it actually cost to implement the framework that we adopted in March of 2021? The framework that we have currently that we're working from did not include budget numbers and going forward, I recommend to the board and to my colleagues that we really be more transparent about how much things actually cost. So our framework called for a reduction in homelessness of 25% and based on calculations that are in your packet, I estimate that's around $78 million per year that were needed to implement that framework fully. The current funding on the graph below shows where we are. We have a $39 million gap to that total. And of the money that we have, 14 million is housing subsidies. So I mentioned those housing subsidies earlier and that's not the only source. It's important to remember the housing subsidies are really homelessness prevention. When people see them listed, they think, oh, there's 14 million dollars to help people are currently homeless, get into housing. No, housing subsidies that help people afford to live here. If they lost those subsidies, they would often lose their housing again. Then state and federal grants, $12 million dollars. Other grants that we receive as a department. There's county general fund and city contributions and then we have that gap. So the state and federal grants and the other grants are unstable. So depending on what policymakers at the federal and state level do with the allocation, their budget allocations and their programs, 23 million of the 39 million is not stable. We have in our department taken multi-year grants and spread them out over several years to try to smooth the edges off these peaks and valleys of funding. So we're often asked what's happening with all of the money that you received. We're actually spreading it out over multiple years. So we don't start a program and close it, start a program and close it. We can go on to the next slide. This is a slide about our shelter goals and shelter in this context means temporary housing and emergency shelter. So the goal in the framework is 600 beds. Currently we're below that, I think 461 and the graph on the body, the bottom shows where the funding is coming through to support those shelter and transitional housing programs. So 217 of the beds are funded through our division in some fashion or supported not entirely by us, but we're involved. Another 184 are supported by private fundraising or those nonprofits going after money on their own. That's an unstable source of shelter. When private donations go down or other public sources diminish, those shelters struggle. It's come to my attention that several of those shelters in that 184 are struggling. So they're at risk of closing or having to cut back staff or beds. The city of Santa Cruz received a $14 million one-time allocation from the state to help them address homelessness. Supervisor Cummings, you're aware of this and that helped increase some capacity but that was one-time money. So that money is at risk of not being available to sustain those extra 60 beds. And then we have that gap in your board packet. I referenced the fact that we're a staff working with other partners to go after some grant funding to start up some new shelter and expand capacity to sustain that we need to partner with our managed care plans because the one stable source of revenue for temporary housing right now is through MediCal, the health insurance system and partnering with the central California Alliance for Health. All the other shelter money we have is very unstable. In the board packet, there's a recommendation and given the budget context you all are working under, I know it's a very challenging request, but the amount of funds that are coming from city and county contributions to shelter to the extent that we can look at expanding that, it will help stabilize the universe of temporary housing. And as that gets more stable, I think the outcomes improve. When people know there's a stable place as staff member or stable place where I can go, the outcomes are more likely to increase. So one thing that considered during the budget season is if and how and when multiple levels of government can increase the base funding for shelter and transition to housing in the county. And what are we working on the next six months? We are making some major shifts in areas where the federal government expects us to manage how we approach homelessness. There's something called coordinated entry, how homeless individuals access services and how we assess and prioritize people to get connected to programs. HMIS is a fairly mandated data system that our COC board adopted some new policies and procedures, we're gonna implement them. When it keeps supporting building more permiss supportive housing, the board has supported us applying for home key funds on the consent agenda. You authorized us to release an RFP for the next round of home key funding. We were very successful the last round. We got three or four projects approved. I think we can do that again. I anticipate we can get at least two projects approved in the next round. And we need to keep working on expanding affordable housing. I alluded to the stabilizing the funding and temporary housing in the community, learning from what works the rehousing wave. How do we do more of that? How do we expand that and keep it going? And then a big area where there's funding opportunities is in the health services and with MediCal. So helping our organizations learn how to go from being housing providers to health providers and building for services. And it's really complicated and it's gonna take probably a year plus of work to help our nonprofit community and even our own county government to learn how to work with managed care and bill for services. And then I alluded to the desire of trying to stabilize that puzzle, that funding landscape, that maze that we as staff have to deal with. If as policymakers, we can make it more predictable and stable where the funding comes from, we'll get better outcomes for the community. And that's my presentation, opening up for questions and comments. Thank you, Dr. Ratner. Are there any questions or comments from board members? Supervisor McPherson. Yeah, this is a full house or a mouthful or whatever, but you know, when members of the community read and this comprehensive report, my hope is that they grasp the complexity of this issue. It is beyond belief of what we're trying to deal with and everybody else in this state as well. And I'm grateful that our CAO Carlos Palacios and the board approved the creation of our housing for health office several years ago so we can give some concentrated focus on what we wanna do. And even though the county has developed a strategic plan and garnered millions of dollars in grant money and from state and federal agencies, the county is seriously under resource. I mean, you said the need to really address and get to accomplish our goals was 78 million a year, I think. And we're only halfway there. And it's through no fault of our own, that's a huge success story. And so I wanna compliment you on that. Yeah, we wanted to do it all, but we're doing better than most. And so I really wanna congratulate you and this county and addressing this thing is this issue is something that we all hear more than anything else. And it's to coordinate the effort is so critical. I think there was 14 different agencies in the state that were looking at homelessness. And I don't know to try to get it all together. And that's a big problem from the get go from the state. But I don't wanna say I don't appreciate what they do give to this county. And one of the most positive shifts that I've seen this dialogue is from the 25 years ago is how we talk about the core causes of homelessness. It's really complicated. The health services aspect of it is critical. I think the estimate is that maybe half of those people at least that are in need of homelessness are in need of behavioral services as well. So that's how it gets just beyond the housing aspect of it all itself. It's a better, one of the most positive shifts, like you said, is that we've tried to coordinate that effort and these reports reflect the nuanced approach that we're taking to provide the services that are needed. And I think that it's worth, what it's going to take is we hope to continue moving in the right direction. And probably the start of that is keeping people who are in-house, have-house and keep them there. Let's don't add to the problem. And I know we had just our point in time reference. I don't know when though, I'm curious to know when that number is supposed to come out. I think it was 2,502 years ago or in that range. And if you have any guesstimate or what that point in time or PIT was, I just really wanted to think that you should be complimented and we should be complimented in the coordinated efforts we've had with our cities to reducing the homelessness among families and women in particular and the young people. This is an important goal set by our county. And I hope we can make even more progress with the individuals experiencing homelessness. It's a task that is monumental in front of us. I know that I think that each and every one of us, we hear about this issue more than anything else that we address. And it's a highly costly situation problem that we have to address. And we're only getting halfway there with the funding from the federal and state resources that we need. So I wanna congratulate you on the successes that we've had, the more participants that we've had. We have a long way to go. I think we're on the right track and you're to be highly complimented for getting us there. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor McPherson. Are there others that would like to comment on them? Supervisor Cummings. Yeah, I wanna thank you all for the presentation. Definitely underscores the need for, not only housing, but policies that are gonna help people stay in their homes because while we're making progress with building in the state to put pressure on local communities to build more housing, they've also done that with a lot of unfunded mandates. We don't have the funding from the state to build the very low and low that they're requiring us to build. And I think my big concern is that we're gonna over develop market rate housing and under develop a lot of the low and very low income housing and middle income housing that we really need for our workforce. But I do wanna just thank you all for the hard work that you all have been doing on this topic. I know that Robert, you came on, I think in 2020. And so just the county making that commitment to having someone who's dedicated to working on homelessness, I think is his progress. And so I think you all are doing a great job. And also with being able to secure the housing vouchers and get people into housing and putting us into the national ranking for housing people who are homeless, I think is a great thing that we should all celebrate. And hopefully we can get more resources so we can house more people. The one thing that I did want to just two brief comments. One is that I think from what you've highlighted is that the people who are really experiencing homelessness have been kind of under invested in historically. We have African-Americans, Latinos who've faced the highest rates of poverty when compared to others. Also over-represented in the criminal justice system which then is another population that you highlighted. And then seniors or people who are on fixed income that's also very underserved population along with people who are experiencing mental health issues. And so I think it really does underscore the inequities that we've seen within our society historically that are also reflected in our homelessness population here in Santa Cruz. But one thing that I did really want to touch on is that we're now seeing, we're now in a new shift as well where we have an aging landlord population. Many of whom have kept rents low for the tenants who have lived in their buildings, others who have not. And the issue is that as we see those people aging out of that industry and that profession, the turnover of these homes are gonna end up just becoming more market rate homes. So we're gonna be losing a lot of our affordable housing. And I think it will be good for the county in conjunction with the other cities to just try to get a sense of what that housing stock looks like because within the next five to 10 years, I mean, we're on that cliff right now where we're gonna see a lot of those houses come out of being affordable in those affordable categories. A lot of those people who are living there right now are either gonna go into homelessness or they're gonna leave. And we know that a lot of those folks fill the kind of middle class and working class population here in our community. And I know that the county has been struggling, the cities have been struggling to find workforce to provide these services and it's just gonna get worse unless we really figure out how we can keep people housed. And so I know it's one more thing to add on to this big issue of homelessness, but the turnover in affordable homes from affordable to market rate is gonna be another major factor that's gonna impact people going into homelessness. Thank you, Supervisor Cummings. Any additional comments from board members? Supervisor Conan. Thank you, Chair Friend. First off, I'll just say I certainly agree with Supervisor Cummings on the need to maintain a diversity of housing stock so that we can have a vibrant community of people of all incomes, income levels. And in fact, to that point, maybe I mean, might be something you have to think about more, but what could we do? What kinds of housing could we incentivize in order to make sure that we have that different housing stock? I mean, Dr. Ratner, you'd mentioned needing senior housing, I mean, should we be incentivizing the creation of 55 plus housing or section eight housing? What is there anything off the top of your head that we could do in our housing policy to make sure that we have more, these kinds of housing options? Oh, there are many, many, many debates on this policy issue. From my personal perspective, I think things that we can do to incentivize more mixed developments, mixed affordability and mixed target populations. One of the things that is happening with a lot of housing policy and funding now is that we're creating very segregated housing communities where many of the people moving in are either people who are histories of experiencing homelessness with health conditions. Some of the more successful projects I've been involved with in my career and the project on Capitola was mentioned earlier where the dental clinic, that's a mixed affordable housing development community where there's some workforce housing, 30% of area median income, 50% of area median income with some units for people experiencing homelessness. I think we need to do a lot more of those integrated kinds of housing developments that create the housing that people who wanna live and work here need to be able to afford to live here, but also for seniors and people living on fixed incomes who aren't gonna increase their income because of health issues or their age. So I'd like to see a lot more of those developments and that would require changes at the federal, state and local level and multiple policy areas. And I can think about ways in which we could look at incentivizing that. I think you all will be very involved with the RENA discussions, the regional housing needs allocation discussions. And as we as staff and you as policy makers look at that, I think figuring out how we can incentivize more of those mixed affordability projects. I personally would be very supportive of that. It also makes it easier to get the kinds of additional subsidies you need to make the units that are targeted as seniors and people with disabilities work. Because if you have higher income paying tenants in a mixed unit, it makes it easier to manage the whole project. If you have a whole project with people living on fixed incomes, it's a lot harder to make that project pencil financially over the long haul. I would like to just supplement it with a comment. I hope the candor is welcome and it's very honest and to the point, I think that unfortunately in communities like Santa Cruz and many like it who prioritize environmental issues, these end up coming a competition between environmental causes and affordable housing. And I think the secret sauce is something I wanna recognize and appreciate not only our CEO, your board and last budget hearing giving us more staff capacity to have those conversations with community. Because what happens is lack of conversation with community. The stereotypical image jumps up in people's heads of an encampment. And as soon as an affordable housing project gets let's that people immediately jump to a conclusion. I don't in any way shape or form and as a whole and under myself with children minimize or question or judge that. But I think top having capacity to talk with community and explain what the goal is as Dr. Ragnar just listed takes time. So your board approved an extra position rather than the process of hiring an extra position and we are going to try to have more conversation with community. So hopefully this can be less of a competition between environmental interests and affordable housing. That's not an easy issue. But I think with time and conversation with community we might be able to push through some of these projects with less frustration and finger pointing. Thank you for those general suggestions that I'm sure we can get into more details. As you said as the housing element proceeds this year and we look at those Rena numbers. I just wanted to echo the thanks to both of you Dr. Ratner and Director Morris for your focus on this as well as to CEO Palacios for creating the housing for health division so that we have this level of attention to really biggest issue in our community of homelessness. And I know a lot of the times community members and myself included are just like, where's all the money going? Let's just drop everything and grab some hammers and nails and build some housing. But the complexity of the funding streams really helps to demonstrate why we can't do that. Because if we did, all of a sudden there would be no money because no one was applying for all these complicated state and federal grants. I definitely support any advocacy with the state or federal government to simplify these grant streams. I mean, you'd mentioned that there might be a couple of bills in progress at the state. If you provide more information, I'd be happy to suggest that we support those. Because as you said, if your time is better spent actually getting people into housing than just applying for money all the time. And then of course, as you said, also just needing to equalize those funding streams over multiple years, manage the requirements of each one of those grants. That's just so much work. And finally, I'm definitely in favor of providing more money directly from our general fund to stabilize shelter options. We've got to reach this goal of at least 600 shelter beds. I know that, as you said, some of the private operators are really struggling with the funds that fluctuate that are there one year and not there the next and just so much work to constantly stand up these operations and then take them down and stand them up again. And so consistency is really something I think we should focus on in order to ultimately reach our goals. And so as we have that continued discussion about how we fund these programs, I'll definitely be an advocate for consistent funding from our general fund. Supervisor Koenig, I neglected to mention something that this board considered related to your question about housing and there is a state program called the Pro Housing Designation Program and this board approved a direction to staff in the county to explore during this arena process how to meet those pro housing designation requirements. I personally, as a medical person who learned about housing see that as a playbook of things that we can do at the local level to increase housing production for all incomes. So I would encourage all of you and myself to get more informed about it during this arena process and encourage our colleagues in the cities to look at that as well as a playbook of things we can do to increase housing development at all income levels. Thank you for that suggestion. Yeah, that is a great checklist to the pro housing designation. I know we're looking at it and we'll definitely have a good reminder to look at it again and get more policies implemented here during the arena and housing element process. That's all my comments. Thank you. Supervisor Koenig, are there any additional comments? I'll make some brief comments. First off is just one of appreciation, Dr. Ratner. One thing that I think is underappreciated of work is how much work you do at the state level. Supervisor McPherson and I last night were actually on a meeting where you were in attendance but you were called out for your remarkable advocacy and information that you provide at the state level. Nothing but positive comments. And to Supervisor Koenig's comments regarding the simplifying and consolidating the processes, it's actually one of the key points that I'm planning to raise today after this meeting when I testify the assembly. I mean, it's acronym SUP at HCD, Cal ICH, DHCS, DSS, all these federal government agencies and every single one of them has a different application. Every single one of them has a different reporting processes and just simply, I mean, one thing that could happen at least at the state level would be just simplifying or consolidating these processes for us as we do our applications. There's a lot more that can be done but these numbers represent people and we have to recognize that even though there's been an increase in some of the sub-populations, it goes to show how much pressure there is within the broader system that we can have this level of success and this level of investment and still see a nominal increase. Just think about what, but for those investments what kind of situation we'd be facing within our community and it goes to show how many lives have been helped. Another component of investment that I think that is underappreciated at least in state investment is protecting those before they actually fall into homelessness. There seems to be a significant interest and to quote the governor, you don't get credit in politics for saves. I think that that's exactly right. I think there should be a greater investment of those that are teetering on the possibility and ensuring that we can keep people out of a system that has a, or a cycle that has detrimental outcomes and to have greater investment on the early side of that would be important for our board to continue to advocate for but Dr. Ratner, you deserve a lot of praise for your advocacy, not just in our county but your comments at the statewide level are helping impact statewide focus in regards to homelessness and behavioral health issues. So please take my appreciation on that. We'll open it up for the community now. Is there any member of the community in chambers that would like to address us on this item? Hi there, thank you for that presentation. I had a few questions. I didn't see any demographics on homelessness and I believe a lot of the pressure for people not being able to afford homes. I was born here and raised here and I've seen the cost of housing go up from $20,000 to when my parents first bought a home to $2 million. What kind of income do you need to have to have a $2 million home? I also, when I was at UCSC my tuition was only $500 a quarter and now I'm told that the tuition is $20,000 a quarter. So there's a lot of college debt and mortgage debt that is prohibiting people from having traditional homes. And while I find that really unfortunate, I know a lot of younger people have chosen an alternative lifestyle. They're having a diversified lifestyle by choosing to live in vans, choosing to live in RVs. And that's a much more affordable way to be able to have some sort of autonomy and ownership. And what I see lacking here in Santa Cruz County are RV parks. We don't have any RV parks. I haven't seen any presentations on implementing those with dump stations and hookups. And I'm wondering if that could be something that we could consider because not everybody is homeless or that doesn't live in a house regards themselves as homeless. They're just living a diversified lifestyle by choice because they don't wanna be in debt. And all housing is debt. The interest rates and the mortgage rates are ridiculous. So I would just really hope that someone can make a comment to that. Obviously we live in Silicon Valley and tech. And so there's a big disparity between the house and the have nots. Tech people made a lot of money. They came in here, they bought up the houses and they kept driving the prices up with the pricing wars. And so those were issues that I don't know how we control any of that. The average single family home I've been looking at is $6,000 a month to rent. The newer two bedroom apartments are $3,000 a month. That's still so cost per hit. Thank you, we appreciate your comments. Is there anybody else in chambers I'd like to address us? Yeah, Nicholas Whitehead. Thank you, Dr. Ratner. That was very lucid. Appreciate it. We have a lot of land in this County in Mr. McPherson's district. There are these extensive former quarries and gravel pits. The ownership of those might vary. Some were corporations. I think I got a very interesting hint from a member of the planning department once. He said, we should get the state to buy some of that land that was formerly used for quarries. And let the housing department of the state buy that and then hand it over to us either for ownership or use as a county by housing and shelter development. That's one thing I'd like to see. I think we need a much more imaginative creative approach to attract the right kind of funding. Instead of having camps and shelters, we need to set up learning schools or homeless and other low-income people where they can learn the skills of land renewal. There's a lot of land that needs to have its natural habitat restored and we could train people who say they wanna live outside. If we could set up such training centers, the public would support it, the politicians would support that more. We have to have creative engagement with people who are unfortunately unhoused. They're citizens with potential. Well, I've probably said enough for now, but I hope to be working with some of you on alternative proposals that would have a wider buy-in from the community. Thank you. Thank you. Is there anybody else in chambers who'd like to address us? Welcome. Thank you, Becky Steinbrenner. Thank you to the two previous speakers for their questions and their creative solutions. Mr. Morris, you will always be one of my heroes for getting the Great Plates program put together. You helped a lot of people, both seniors as well as businessmen during COVID. So thank you. I would like the $78 million figure to solve this problem is a lot of money. I'd like to see a breakdown in that and maybe it's in all of that. I can't, that needs to be discussed a bit more, I think. And I saw that the city of Santa Cruz contributes a certain number of beds for homeless. What about the city of Watsonville? There's definitely the issue there too. And what about UCSC? That's a big contributor as well. We need to partner with everybody. I would hope that our county would look to neighboring counties like Sonoma County and Alameda County and what they've done. Sonoma County, I think did some very creative things with pallet shelters. Oakland did some very creative things with tough sheds. And I think that this board has approved money for 30 to 38 pallet shelters, but you're still trying to figure out where to put them. There are lots of places like in Watsonville behind the community health center, maybe that big parking lot at C-Cliff that just sits there empty all the time. Also, we need to be asking why 12 brand new trailers that were given to the county for COVID, transitional youth sequestering, were being then given when the money ran out, were given to parks as offices. That should be shelter for people. We need to look at all time. Thank you. Is there any other member of the community that would like to address us in chambers? We did at the, for your good. Thank you, Ms. Tyler. Is there anybody else in chambers that would like to address us on this item? Oh, wherever you are. Thank you. Hi, I'm Judy Hutchison and I'm the board chair of the Association of Faith Communities. Dr. Ratner alluded to a lack of funding for privately funded sheltering providers. And I'd like to encourage this board to really consider Manu's suggestion of adding more money from the general fund. Without that, your numbers are not gonna look good. Half of us will be unable to continue to provide the level of service without additional funding. Thank you. Thank you for attending. Thank you for your comments. Anybody else in chambers? I don't believe we have any further speakers in chambers but we do have speakers online. Thank you, Madam Clerk. If we could move online then. Joseph, your microphone's now available. Thank you very much. This is Father Joseph Jacobs. I'm also from Association of Faith Communities. I just want to also thank Dr. Ratner and Director Morris for your good works on these issues. I recently sent an email of the weekend and Dr. Ratner suggested I make some comments at this meeting. So I just, in case you're not aware, I've been running the AFC safe spaces, this parking program for almost four years. And we're seeing increasingly older and older people in this program. Nearly 50% of people in safe parking are age 60 and over. Over 20% of them are age 70 or older and many of them are in their 80s. And this just continues to increase. We are providing between the Faith Community Shelter and Safe Spaces program. We're providing about 10% of your 600 shelter beds. And I really would like to see some kind of emphasis placed on helping elderly people who are losing housing into this county for a variety of reasons, many of them health related. Many people are just one health crisis or one paycheck away from losing their housing. I would like to see more emphasis placed on helping people who are over age 60. And really that's my main point for today. So thank you very much. Thank you. Any additional speakers, Madam Clerk? Yes. Colin, user three, your microphone is now available. You just asked the question of me going and to contextualize this actually, I'd like to quote from a book here and the section is enriching the wealthy. And I wanna thank Dr. Ratner for his very informative disturbing report. Enriching the wealthy. This is from the book, The Real Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, Big Pharma and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. Dr. Fauci's business culture, closures, polarized America's middle class and engineered the largest upward transfer of wealth in human history. In 2020, workers lost $3.7 trillion while billionaires gained 3.9 trillion. Some 493 individuals became new billionaires and an additional 8 million Americans dropped below the poverty line. The biggest winners were the robber barons, the very companies that were cheerleading Dr. Fauci's lockdown and censoring his critics. Big technology, big data, big telecom, big finance, big media behemoths, Michael Bloomberg, Robert Murdock, Viacom and Disney and Silicon Valley internet titans like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Larry Ellison and Jack Fauci. The very internet companies that snuckered us all with promise of democratizing communications made it impermissible for Americans to criticize their government or question. Thank you. Adam Clark, can any additional online speakers? Yes. Serge, your microphone is now available. Good afternoon. Can you hear me? Yes. Good afternoon. My name is Serge Cagno, executive director of the Recovery Cafe Santa Cruz and member of the Mental Health Advisory Board representing district four for Supervisor Hernandez. My thanks to director Morrison, Dr. Ratner and the many staff and partners who work tirelessly to support some of our most vulnerable members of our community. As I know some of you know, Recovery Cafes support those both housed and unhoused, build community and work on their healing goals of mental health, substance use, domestic violence, homelessness, post-incarceration and social isolation. Our program relates to multiple strategic focus areas in our healthy Santa Cruz framework but particularly to number three, increase connections and number two, prevent homelessness. My thanks to your support and those of you who have given of your time to learn more about our program. Thanks to Chair Friend and your visit to our Santa Cruz program. Thanks to Supervisor Koenig, Supervisor Cummings for your visits to the San Jose's program. And thanks to the county staff, Dr. Ratner, Karen Kern, the Bay of Real Health Adult Services Director and Shelley Barker Healing Streets Program Manager for your visits to the Recovery Cafe San Jose as well. We also hosted representative Panetta and a representative from assembly member Dale Pellerin's office. We invite and hope to offer future tours for you Supervisor Hernandez and Supervisor McPherson. The 57 Recovery Cafe is across the country and in Canada provide a safe and supportive space for those who are unhoused and connect with services with a warm handoff, proven method of engaging people who are resistant to being a part of the system. The Recovery Cafe has provided services. Santa Cruz has provided services since 2021. We create a meal together. We eat a meal. We have peer support services. People gain certification and gain more responsibilities. Santa Cruz lacks day services, options for day services for those experiencing homelessness, both house and unhoused. And we ask for your help in acquiring varied and grants and contracts to enrich people's lives and lessen the impacts on our many other county services. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your work. Are there any other speakers? Yes, we do. Kailin, your microphone is now available. Hello, can you hear me? Yes, we can. Okay, great. So I've heard so much today about making sure that housing is affordable and potentially putting new housing units available which I think is clearly so vital. I'm wondering what are the efforts on the other side of the drivers to homelessness, including mental health as well as drug addiction and what are the services available? Do we have the capacity for those that are in need? Which is my understanding that we don't. And what emphasis are we putting on that side of the equation when it seems like it's pretty important to limit the repeat cycle of homelessness and the other factors that come into play as far as safety for the community. I won't take my full two minutes. That's just all I had to say. Thank you, Kailin. Call-in user ending in 0249, your microphone is now available. Thanks, Carol, Paul Hamas. Thank you so much for taking my call. I would first like to say thank you for the informative report. I really appreciate it and all the hard work that you've been doing on this issue. I have just one quick comment to make. I'm on the board of a group called Westside Neighbors which is a 3,000 member, mostly lower Westside Santa Cruz organization. The lower Westside has been greatly impacted by people who are living in their vehicles. An average count is about 65 vehicles a night on city streets in the lower Westside. We've been advocating for several years for more safe spaces parking on county parking lots. And I wanna highlight and underline what the other two speakers said with regard to that. I think increased RV parking, increased vehicle parking with services would allow relatively easy access for people to enter into the county system to help receive even more services and put them on a path to housing. Although I think that building more housing is absolutely key and I support that effort. I think the immediate need is for services for people who are already living in their cars where they do feel some degree of safety. Some people would rather live in vehicles than at the shelter. So thank you for whatever you can do to increase those safe spaces parking. We have no further speakers chair. Thank you, Madam Clerk. And thank you for everybody that participated in this. We'll bring it back to the board for action. Is there a motion? I'll second. I just had one question before we vote. So in terms of some of the immediate needs of private shelter providers, I understand that at some point in the near future, we might be considering the creation of a housing for health of the vendor pool and that through that process, we may be able to make some additional funds available at least until we consider a new budget. This June, May and June, is that accurate? And at what point will we consider that vendor pool? Oh, my auditor colleague left. So yeah, vendor pools are not the only means to the end goal. It is a means and a couple of communities have adopted them. We're working with GSD purchasing and our auditor colleagues on some important details before we bring it to the board to support that. That would do is organizations that are in the vendor pool with the auditor and purchasing approval, we can more expeditiously bring to your board a contract with some available funds to sort of hold some of these organizations together. We are endeavoring to get that back to you within a month, but I can't speak for kind of how the process will play out. Even if that doesn't happen, we will come back to your board. We hear and recognize the sort of challenge. And I guess I just want to underline how I started. There is not enough money and every single thing, every public comment made is all important. So we will bring forward everything. And we think as staff, we just wanna say, and if we choose this, it's to the neglect of that, or if it's direction of this and we don't have new funding, we have to take away that. So we just as staff wanna make sure that complexity is very clear. But I think what your point is we are actively working on trying to how to support current capacity. And just, I guess, stay tuned. We're working very hard as staff on the process. I don't know if you wanna add any details. Okay, thank you. I look forward to seeing that in the next month or so. Thank you. We have a motion from Supervisor Cummings and a second from Supervisor Koenig if we could have further recommended actions, if we could have a roll call please. Absolutely, Chair. Supervisor Koenig. Aye. Hernandez. Aye. McPherson. Aye. And Friend. Aye. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Ratner and Mr. Morris. We'll move back to the agenda items that we needed to skip for the 1045 scheduled items. So our next item is item nine, which is a public hearing to consider a resolution authorizing the issuance of Santa Cruz County Capital Financing Authority Lease Revenue Bonds 2023 Series A. And then not to exceed amount of $18 million and take related actions as outlined in the memo of the CAO. We have the board memo, the resolution sub lease series and notice of sale series and indenture of trust series and assignment of agreement series. Here to present for us today, we have our budget manager, Mr. Pimentel, as well as Santa, I imagine you're there too. I can't see you right now, but I imagine that we've got Ms. Harrell and Mr. Kerry, if I am correct on this and I appreciate Ms. Harrell that you're waiting for this item to be heard and welcome back, Mr. Pimentel. Thank you, Chair Friend. Before you, we're gonna actually do a presentation on both items nine and 10, while they're separate items. The first one is us asking the County Board of Supervisors to act as the County Board of Supervisors to open up public hearing, close up public hearing and adopt the resolution authorizing issuance of bonds. Item 10 will be our Santa Cruz County Capital Financing Authority. You'll be acting as the Santa Cruz Capital Financing Authority Board of Directors and that's where we'll be asking for the adoption of the resolution to issue the bond. So it's a two-step process. We're gonna do both, cover both items with one presentation and then you'll be taking the item separately. So with us today are myself, your County Budget Manager, but leading the presentation will be Suzanne Harrell. She's our financial advisor, Harrell and Associates. She's been guiding the County for a long time and expertly so. She does a really nice job making sure we get the best financing package at the best deal at the best time. So we really appreciate that she's here today and to present what we also have Travis Carrier, Director of Capper Projects, who will be here from Public Works for any questions about the project that ends my point and I'll turn it over to Suzanne. Thank you. Good afternoon, Chair and members of the Board. We're here today to talk about the financing of the improvements to the South County Government Center at 500 Westridge in Watsonville. You don't know if the presentation is up on this screen, everybody can see it? Great. Thanks. So in 2021, the County acquired the office building at 500 Westridge with the intention of creating a South County Government Center. The total cost after the completion of the design and the construction bids is estimated to be about 27.9 million. You do have 11.2 million remaining from the 2021 bonds that was raised for the purpose of doing the improvements. The 2023 bonds that you're gonna be considering later this morning or this afternoon would raise about 16 million and there's about 700,000 of investment earnings and other funds to provide the total funding requirement of $27.9 million. So the issuance of lease revenue bonds is the County's traditional method of financing infrastructure. You've used this many times over the last 30 years. It does require a public hearing by the Board of Supervisors as the legislative body where the improvements are being located. And then following the public hearing for your consideration will be approval of a County resolution and then acting as the Board of Directors of the financing authority, a financing authority resolution. The 2023 lease revenue bonds are expected to mature in 2051 which is consistent with the maturity date of the 2021 bonds. So the whole financing of the project will be paid off at the same time. The annual debt service is likely to be approximately $1.2 million and it'll start in budget year 2526. The bonds will be sold at a competitive sale scheduled for March 9th and the expected interest rate is going to be somewhere between four and a quarter and four and a half percent depending on market conditions and which can change obviously before the bonds are sold on March 9th. The resolution before you does approve and not to exceed 5% but we do expect it to be something less than four and a half percent. The approvals that are included in the resolutions before you today are to authorize the sale of the bonds and they set the parameters for the bond sale. Like we were saying, not to exceed a 5% not to exceed $18 million in principal amount. They appoint your financing team. They approve the distribution of the financing documents to investors and they also approve the form of various documents required for the financing and they're listed on your screen. There's a sub lease, a sub-sub lease and indenture of trust assignment agreement and an official notice of sale as well as the preliminary official statement which describes the county and its finances. So the recommended action is for the county board of supervisors to open the public hearing and take testimony, close the public hearing and after such time you can consider adopting the resolution authorizing the issuance of the bonds by the financing authority and then the companion item is for the financing authority board of directors to consider their resolution authorizing the issuance of the bonds. And that concludes my presentation. Thank you, Ms. Harold. Are there any questions from board members before we open up the public hearing? I'll just like to make a quick comment about as we've said it before but this investment in the South County Service Center is really one of the greatest investments that our county has made in equity in South County in transportation equity even for employees that work in South County and service providing in Watsonville and the broader South County. This is just such an important and integral investment and I appreciate the leadership of our county staff and helping bring it to reality. I'd like to now open up the public hearing. Mr. Chair, I'd just like to repeat some of your comments but in particular I'd like to thank, it's an opportunity to thank our CAO, Carlos Plosch, who's the former city manager of Watsonville who's without whose leadership this wouldn't have happened. It took a lot of people to do it but it took a leader to get them there. And he was the one that was really the core of what made this happen. And it's another really example of how we're expanding and developing more services and accessibility to the South County. In addition to expanding that presence in South County and the new government center will shorten the commutes for some and help us on our Highway 1 bottleneck that we have, which is in everyone's best interest, I think, and it comes as a CAO and health service played a pivotal role in keeping Watsonville Hospital open as well as Supervisor Friend's leadership in addressing the Pahoa River project. Huge projects all addressed at the South County and I'm really glad that we are able to have a number of success stories just in the recent, this year really, that has all come together. So thank you for everyone who's been really directly involved in all of that and there's been many, many people involved but this is great that we're gonna be able to address some real needs in the South County. I appreciate it, thank you. Thank you, Supervisor McPherson. I'd now like to open up the public hearing. Are there any members of the community that would like to address this on this item during the public hearing? Currently, there are no attendees in chambers and I do not see any speakers online, Chair. Thank you. Well, then I will close the public hearing and bring it back to the board for action on item nine. I'd like to move item nine and open up the hearing for the revenue bonds. I wrote a little of my paper. Supervisor Hernandez, are you moving item nine's recommended actions which includes the public here? Okay, so we have a motion from Supervisor Hernandez to move the recommended actions on item nine as there is second. We have a second from Supervisor Koenig if we could have a roll call vote, please. Absolutely, Chair. Supervisor Koenig. Aye. Cummings. Aye. Hernandez. Aye. McPherson. Aye. And Chair Friend. Aye. And we'll move to item 10. We had already received the initial overview, but this is as the board of directors, excuse me, as the board of the Santa Cruz County Capital Financing Authority to consider adoption of a resolution authorizing the issuance sale and delivery of a not to exceed $18 million aggregate principal amount of lease revenue bonds 2023 series A and improving related documents and official actions as outlined in the memo of the CAO. As outlined before, we have the agenda board memo as well as the preliminary official statement series of 2023 A, the sub lease series, the notice of sales series, the notice of intention to sell bonds, the indenture of trust series, the assignment of agreement series and the authority resolution series. We've already received a presentation on this. This is simply an adoption of resolution does not require a public hearing, but I will open it up for public comment. Are there any members of the community that would like to address this on the resolution that are in chambers right now? Again, Chair, we don't have any members of the public wishing to speak in chambers nor do we have any speakers online. Thank you. So I'll close public comment and we'll bring it back to the board for action on item 10. This is our motion. And so moved items A through H as well. Second. All right. So we have a motion from Supervisor Hernandez for the recommended actions on item 10. We have a second from Supervisor Koenig if we could have a roll call, please. Of course. Supervisor Koenig. Aye. Cummings. Aye. Hernandez. Aye. McPherson. Aye. And Chair Friend. Aye. Thank you. That passes unanimously. Thank you for Mr. Pimentel, Mr. Kerry, Ms. Harrell for your presentations. We'll move on to item 11, which is the last item on today's agenda. Just like to note confirming with council, there is no closed session today, correct? Correct, no closed session today. All right. So this is the last item on today's agenda, which is item 11, which is to consider a report by the County Administrative Office and Office of Response, Recovery and Resilience on operational area alert and warning best practices, public information and social media communications and approve a recommended technology platform for further consideration and direct the Office of Response, Recovery and Resilience to Retune on November 4th, March 28th, 2023 with a contract is outlined in the memo of the CAO. We have the agenda board item as well as the attachment and here to present we have Lisa Benson, our assistant CAO, Dave Reed, who's the director of our OR-3 and SAM with 40-yard cannabis licensing manager, Ms. Benson. Thank you, Chair. Good, I guess good afternoon, everyone. A quick introduction. We're excited to be before you today with a report back and recommended path forward to rapidly improve our public safety emergency alert and notification system. We received this direction four weeks ago and took the opportunity to apply our Primo 90-day Sprint model to this work. As a quick reminder, core principles of Lean and Primo as we call it here in Santa Cruz is to involve the people on the ground who operate the systems and processes that you're trying to fix, focus on customer experience and the value to a customer as you craft new solutions and really work to measure your improvement as you do stuff in an incremental and continuous fashion. So with that, I wanna also say tremendous thank you to our public safety partners who jumped into this conversation with us very quickly in the last four weeks. And with that, I'm gonna pass it to Dave and Sam to talk about what the problem is and how we worked with our partners to come up with a solution to present to you today. Good afternoon, board. So on behalf of OR3, look forward to having a brief conversation given our afternoon time. We wanted to just briefly discuss the problem as articulated by the board and as we identified briefly and quickly review storm impacts and then go into the Primo process description, make the recommended technology platform, discuss how we wanna look at a holistic improvement to our emergency communications and then touch briefly on best practices. So as identified by the board, the OR3 and prior to OR3's existence, the Office of Emergency Services has not had the independent capabilities for alert and warning at our County. That is a defined gap in our skill set that we wanna identify and address through this process. As your board identified on the 31st as well as in communications during the event, we had community members receiving multiple evacuation orders over the weeks of the event. Community members were directed to various different shelters, maybe not always the most appropriate one for where they were being noticed. Evacuation areas were too large relative to our zone haven zone definitions. Our alert and warning system code red doesn't currently integrate with social media. So we had a multi-step process to get information out through the various channels. We obviously, as I believe Supervisor Hernandez articulated on the 31st, wanna reduce our barriers to subscription to get more folks engaged in alert and warning. And then obviously there's real-time situational awareness from our public and being able to differentiate between information and intelligence in the event. In emergencies, this is a critical piece, but we wanna be able to capture and use that information from the public as effectively as we can. The other thing that we identified at the staff level was to make sure that we have an updated current emergency communications playbook or a plan on how to implement our communications tools effectively to meet the needs of our community. We don't currently have that document in our quiver of tools. The other thing that we recognize is that as a small county, we need to integrate with Netcom, not compete with them. And then obviously to be effective in communications during a disaster, we need to have the right PIO resources available to us and implement the technical solution as well as the techniques outlined. So in the interest of time, I wanna be very brief through the next series of slides, but as we all know, we experienced nine atmospheric rivers and in those first few weeks, one hit the entire coast of California in 2022. So really unprecedented. Of those nine, four of those events caused major damage in our community, a series of emergency declaration proclamations on the third and sixth, but also a series of evacuation orders, warnings and orders, and then lifting those evacuation orders through those series of events, definitely created that yo-yo of communication and impact for the community. This is a complex slide, but I'll just very briefly articulate that the black line represents the river levels in the San Lorenzo River and the blue and orange boxes represent rainfall totals at two different rain gauges. And what we saw as the storms went on is that the rivers were responding more dramatically to less and less rain, which made figuring out and understanding based on forecasts and expectations, what the river was gonna do complicated, which obviously complicates communications when what we're seeing is unprecedented responses to what would normally be relatively mild rain events. So as I said, the four atmospheric river events that we hit experienced, caused a series of evacuation orders being issued and lifted over those the fourth, sixth and eighth atmospheric rivers. And obviously that communication that we were making through the various channels without some of the tools that we're gonna talk about today led to some confusion and complications and emergency communications that we wanna improve upon moving forward. So with that, I wanna hand over to, actually I'm gonna couple more real quick slides here. Wanted to just highlight that Code Red as our primary current alert and warning platform, we saw a subscribership increase over the disaster. So that middle yellow highlighted figures shows over 4,000 residences, over 5,000 new phone numbers were added to our Code Red database through the process. We obviously used all of the normal tools as well to try and communicate out to folks. But again, I think there's a lot of room for improvement that we wanna work on. One immediate improvement that we've already started to implement with our social media posts is something from Facebook called Facebook Alerts. And as a local jurisdiction, we're able to elevate the importance of all of our Facebook posts during disasters from a local alert level, whether it's a weather, transit, public safety or other issue, we can elevate our social media posts to raise the level of attention of that post in people's feeds. So that's one tool that we've already started to use in this most recent weekend of extreme cold weather with some of the alerts that we've posted on social media. So with that, I'm gonna hand over to Sam to talk about our process. So we chose to view this as a Primo project due to the time-sensitive nature of this challenge. Our first step was to determine a path forward and we knew we needed more voices in the room. So we formed a working group with the sheriff's office, Cal Fire, Central Fire and Netcom. We then defined the process we'd follow which included analyzing the root cause of the issue and our current process. Then we'd review all potential technology solutions and finally review product demonstrations before making a choice to present to you here. Sam. So as we began the root cause analysis and review of the current system, we discussed the problem that needed to be solved. As we completed this step, we began refining the goals to what you see here. The technology solution had to be able to serve Netcom and meet our needs while meeting the board's objectives of integrating social media, decreasing the barrier to entry and retaining the current enrollment database. The working group identified this as the priority. Netcom's critical life safety dispatch function has to utilize the same system as the county. We need to ensure that our emergency communications complement Netcom's mission and not distract from it. The working group recommends the use of the GEM system or Genesis technology system for the following reasons. It fulfills all of Netcom's dispatch needs. It integrates with zone haven and integrates with Facebook and Twitter in a way that allows us to push out messages via multiple Facebook and Twitter accounts while simultaneously issuing text message alerts, voice messages, county website updates and email notifications. The GEM system utilizes RGIS through a live link. This allows us to make adjustments and new layers on the fly utilizing RGIS team and EOC staff. So think of evacuation zones and zone haven that can be refined in moments by our staff to provide more accurate and applicable messaging as situations evolve. It allows county staff to provide that critical messaging to our community in emergencies while allowing Netcom to focus on their critical core function of emergency dispatch. The platform allows Netcom, OR3, Sheriff's Office, CDI and the fire agencies all to have access to the system with each user having to find capabilities and viewing privileges, which ultimately leads to better situational awareness in emergencies. Now, this system will follow the guiding principle the working group sought when they refined the board's goals. Dave? Yeah, so what I wanted to just wrap on with our presentation today was to discuss kind of three pillars of this effort. One, obviously, as I said earlier, is that we need to have a good sound emergency communications playbook. But on top of that, we need the right staffing. So our public information officer, the Joint Information Center and EOC leadership need to be coordinated and working well in a disaster to make sure that we're pushing out the right information effectively. And then obviously, as we're discussing today, it's a suite of tools. It's not one tool that will be able to communicate with everybody, but utilizing a suite of tools, we want to be able to give the best information to our community so that they can make the best decisions based on the conditions that we're experiencing. And with that, I just want to end on some of those best practices that we hope to strive towards more effectively in future disasters. Obviously, we want to be first in communicating with the community around disasters. We want to give them information as early and as timely and as accurate as we can. We want to be accurate with that information. So that's really where we discern information versus intelligence. So actionable intelligence is something that's verified during a disaster versus speculative or information from an unverified source. So we want to be accurate in how we communicate. Obviously, we want to be honest and truthful. We want to express empathy for the trauma that folks are experiencing during a disaster. We want to give clear direction on what should be done, get out of your house now, or just a warning or an advisory. And then obviously we want to respect everybody throughout our communications. So I think we appreciate as Elyse Benson articulated at the beginning, we appreciate the opportunity to explore this deficiency in our communications and look forward to returning to you based on the board direction with further movement towards enacting this new tool and this new capability within OR3 in the county. And with that, we'll stop and answer questions that you may have. Thank you, Mr. Reed. And thank you, Mr. Laforte and Ms. Benson for the presentation. This was an item that I brought forward. I do have some comments and questions in a minute, but let me open it up to my colleagues first. Are any of my colleagues have any questions or comments regarding this item? Supervisors are coming. Thanks for that presentation. And the service seems like it's gonna be a real improvement to the current services we have, which is great. One question I had is, I'm just wondering, is this an opt-in type of communication system or is there a way that the county can add residents and then they can opt out? And so I'm just kind of curious because it sounds like we had a lot of people who signed up for Code Red during these past disaster events. And so just making sure that people are gonna be signed up who signed up previously, just wondering how that can be handled and how we can get more people signed up. Yeah, we're definitely gonna be doing everything and expect to be able to preserve our initial Code Red subscribership. We're not gonna lose those every indication with conversations with partners and providers in this industry. We're confident that we can retain those and we are exploring other databases of information that may be able to be added in. And then obviously it is generally speaking an opt-in for additional members as they come online. So once we implement this, we'll be doing some notifications and education opportunities and having folks who haven't registered try and get them to opt in. By opting in, we can also add additional information. So some of the Code Red folks that have signed up early on may not have language preferences. So we wanna make sure to get people to give us the most accurate information so that we can push out in their native language. And with this new system, they'll be able to get the tailored alert specific to their language of preference. So we wanna refine and improve our data as well. And then the second question I had was, I was wondering in terms of coordination with the cities, if you can speak to maybe what's being done so that county residents are getting calls from or notifications from this service, but are the cities using the same service so that we're all kind of on the same platform versus having competing platforms across the county? Yeah, I mean, Zone Haven is our best example of how that works. So the county-wide adopted Zone Haven and became integrated into the cities. And what we hope by choosing a product that integrates really effectively with Zone Haven in something that the county is partnering with Netcom on and that Netcom is using, that there's an opportunity that the cities recognize that maybe we all move to the same platform. So certainly this platform would support city communications at whatever level they want, whether they be informational or emergency-based. And our hope is that we all move towards that similar platforms that we're all in one technology solution. Great, thank you. Supervisor Koenig. Thank you, Chair. Supervisor Koenig, I'm glad we're thinking the same things. I would definitely be in support of an opt-out process if we do identify a database that we could add a lot of people to. I mean, we get so much random spam and messages of all kinds as everyday people today. I think this would qualify as highly relevant where to evacuate to or how your county is dealing with an at-hand emergency. So there's always texting stop if you really don't want to hear it. I want to commend this team for the improved communications over this past weekend. I think one of the silver linings of constantly being in a state of emergency or dealing with just these traumatic weather events is that it does provide the opportunity for rapid iteration and improvement. So I noticed a big difference this past weekend compared to the January storms and praise as well deserved here. So also I'm really glad that you're looking at this in terms of more holistically, excuse me, in terms of procedures, staffing as well as the tools, I think we could have easily missed the mark here and just, excuse me, thought that, hey, if we just upgrade the tool, that'll fix all our problems. Question, do you recognize that that's not the case? I'm glad. And I think the handbook will be really a welcome addition to this entire update. Yeah, no questions since Supervisor Cummings asked them, but good work. Thank you, Supervisor Koenig. Any other, Supervisor McPherson? Yeah, just I do want to repeat, thank you for the prompt response. Yeah, government can really respond quickly and you've done a great job at doing this. It's going to be a tremendous improvement to have these effective tools and to respond to these disasters and we've had enough of them, but I do remember some time before the months before the CZU fire, my office worked with Cal Fire to establish Zone Haven to see how we can bring communications, emergency communications through the, this is a tremendous step above and beyond that. And the result was, it was really amazing in that fire that how many people were evacuated and there's no loss of life and no accidents at all. It was phenomenal and this is going to make it this much better. The big problem that I still have with my district in Santa Rosa Valley is that during disasters, telecommunications breaks down and they often do that. How do we plan to address this plan? I mean, it's just try to expand further or give more options open. I think you've done, you've reached out very well. So I just know for a fact that communications break down in disasters up in Santa Rosa Valley and do you think that there's more steps that need to be taken still in that regard? Certainly the CAO's office in OR3 is working with ISD on the NextGen Radio Upgrade Project. So that's going to be a significant tool that helps us from our first responder dispatching and communication standpoint. But one thing even over this past weekend that we recognize is the co-location of equipment is important and where we can expand our capacity. As an example, Boulder Creek Fire had some communication constraints, but what we're trying to do is co-locate some of that cellular technology on some of our critical infrastructure. And we certainly do need to expand the locations of cell towers in the county to improve communication and make sure that they have redundant power as well. I would just add, Dave, can you talk a little bit about the emergency weather radio program that you had introduced already? Because I think this addresses a lower tech solution to that gap of people basically, there's no power to their phone. Yeah, so as a reminder and for Supervisor Cummings and Hernandez, we do have the ability, both with our existing tool and with this new tool to be able to push out non-weather emergency messages. So that's through the NOAA weather radio system. And the nice thing about those is that they're generally, it can be battery powered. And so folks can have those as a supplemental piece of communication and receive messages from us. So it's a tool for those instances where the valley or different parts of your districts may be without power for a prolonged period of time where those devices may not have the battery life for those. And so we'll be using that, as I said, as one of our tools in a disaster where we've seen kind of that prolonged power outage. Supervisor Hernandez. I don't have any questions, just kudos to you guys to bringing this to the board today. I think it's really gonna help people in times of emergencies to have access to this information and allowing them to be prepared for these situations if they have a suite of information, not just one form of information, whether it's television, radio, infographics on social media and of course the text alerts and phone alerts, right? Reverse phone. But we need all that in times of emergencies because sometimes people are out and about and they don't have their phone, they don't have their phone or they don't have their laptop. So we need all forms of media. I think that we can help out, put out this, once it's up and running, my suggestion is that we put it on social media once it's up and running so we can promote the new system. Maybe we can put it out in our constituent newsletters as well. If there's a QR code for it too, we can promote a QR code for it as well. That's it. Thank you, Supervisor Hernandez. I'll just make some brief comments before we open it up for the community. Again, appreciation that there was action taken on the item that I brought forward and the board supported. What did precipitate it was were challenges around communications in both of our previous major disasters, meaning CZU and this. However, as the previous board letter stated and the board had adopted, we were looking for something that was broader than just on the emergency basis. I recognize that the letter that came forward to us today says that it focuses on sort of a phase one and lack of better terms on the emergency outline and then on the information side. But I don't think that the latter should be deprioritized. I think that generally speaking, I think from a 30,000 foot view, the county needs to prioritize communications period and it shouldn't be an ancillary function. We have an outstanding PIO. When we get into an emergency situation, we, you know, the EOC structure does rely on those that aren't traditionally in a communications field to now take over that role. And that's actually, it relies on a lot of people with a lot of secondary roles to take over emergency communications or emergency response. So I think that the county in general needs to look at having an additional person that has an expertise in modern communications to help supplement our current outstanding PIO, whether that's in the social media realm or whatever it may be. But I think that I can already sense, especially once we start creating toolbox and playbooks that this will be an underutilized or high bar to access tool and that is not my goal. And I don't think that's the point of the board. I think the point is that we would like to over communicate with our constituents, both on an information side and an emergency side and let people make a determination of what information is relevant to them. And to supervisor Cummings point about integration, the reality is, is that a city resident can sign up for the county alerts all the same. There's, it's agnostic to location. There are many county residents to sign up for say Santa Cruz police outreach now. And I think that that's a good point that we have that component. But I think that the county does a lot of things that it'd be nice to be able to communicate with the community about or even non-storm related. There are special events that may block traffic or whatever it may be that we should be able to communicate about. So I would like to encourage the working group. I recognize the goal was May for fire season, but I would like to see that we are willing and comfortable with implementing a tool well before then without necessarily a vetted playbook by a number of people because I think that it's going to be an evolving process of usage that we're going to try it out and get feedback and the playbook may need to evolve. I'm just concerned that there needs to be something very prescriptive in place. And I just don't want to prevent communication as a result of that. I also don't need to only prioritize emergency communications. This should be a broader tool. So that is sort of just my general feedback on the item that it isn't to, it's not a critique even of what came forward because I think that what's being proposed today is a significant step forward in communications for the County in general. I just want to provide additional guidance that it not be limited to or exclusively focused on. And as a result, we're not skewing our evaluation of the various tools just to emergencies when we need it to be a broader tool. I don't know if Ms. Bezos had any thoughts on those comments. No, I think that's a doable add to our objectives for the 90 day sprint. And there's an aspect where just off the top of my head implementing, testing the tool with lower risk communications non-emergency communications is in some ways an easier, you don't need to go through all of the role definition and responsibilities. So that's something we can look at in terms of our migration strategy. I can report back. If I could make a point, Chair Friend. One of the things the board did in last year's budget was to add three public information officer positions in three different County departments. So we have one PIO in the CAO's office, that's Jason Hoppin, but we added three new positions and one of them is in what is now CDI, Community Development and Infrastructure. Another position is in the Health Services Agency and another position is the Human Services Department. Those three positions are in the process of getting filled. They will be housed in those different departments and their primary function will be in those departments, but they will also report partly to Mr. Hoppin and a matrix management supervision style so that there will be the ability to use those, so the three PIOs to do the exact thing that you're talking about, getting other information that we would like. And also in the event of emergency, they will be in the EOC. So we'll have three new positions to supplement our current PIO person. Thank you, Mr. Plosius. As you remember, I was very supportive of that. I mean, it's taken a long time to get that. I mean, those positions aren't filled yet and so I was just trying to emphasize the need to have broader communications. I think that those three roles will be very important. It'll take a time for them to get trained up. But how about this? As we take an eye toward the hiring of those roles, we should look for people that have skills and modern communications in a way that communicates looking forward with all these new platforms as one of our criteria and not the PIO of the past, which was me, for example, at Santa Cruz Police. I mean, my skill set is not the skill set of what modern communications, I think, would require. And so I just want to make sure that as we go through that hiring process as well, that we look to that eye to the future. We'll open it up for the community. Are there any members of the community that would like to address this on this item? We do have one speaker walking up to the podium right now, Chair. Thank you. Yeah, hello, my name is James Udak-Rubin. Anybody can look online to page 493 of this session's binder. So emergency communication on page 493, emergency communication principles and guidelines. Follow these basic principles and guidelines from Crisis Emergency Risk Communication published by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Centers for Disease Control and Prevention can help establish a sense of order and consistency. These principles are applicable to any incident, disaster or emergency. So you guys, I'm kind of repeating some information. I'm going to say be first. Crisis is our time sensitive communicating. Information quickly is critical for members of the public. The first source of information often becomes the preferred source. I like to say that over some recent research, I've found three areas where for whatever reason, information that I've shared and other people have shared in these publicly recorded sessions has been censored. We could go on more specifically to what people spoke about. You know, there's a physician that in 1996 wrote a book after being a physician for 25 years called Medical Mafia. She describes Western medicine as petrochemical finance, sickness over health, profits over cures. She did some lists about, she asked her patients questions. One of the questions was what percentage of you trust your politicians? 6%. She asked what percentage of you trust your doctors? 76%. You politicians are controlled by lobbyists and the lobbyists control, you politicians are controlled by lobbyists and you guys are influencing the doctors and I think there's a lot of misinformation. So I made a kind of a list of things. It would just be once again, I'm only here because I actually care. And when something really happens, what are you guys gonna do? Thank you. Is there anybody else? Madam Clerk, there's nobody online? Correct, we have no further speakers here. Great, we'll bring it back to the board for action out on this item then. Is there a motion? I'll move the recommended actions. We have a motion from Supervisor Koenig and a second from Supervisor McPherson. Supervisor Cummings. I just had one last comment to make before we voted on this item, which was, I was really focused on the kind of the zone haven and the shift to this new platform, but just given the conversation around communications broadly, I think that one thing to take into consideration is really whether there's an opportunity for the county to partner with some of our local radio stations that under the event of an emergency, that radio station could be one of the primary outlets where they operate their function is to just get that information out. And there's an opportunity for us if there's a contract with them, maybe we can have FEMA funding help reimburse us to cover those costs of getting that communications out. But to some points that have been brought up by Supervisor McPherson and also Supervisor Friend, when people have lost power for multiple days, we're encouraging residents to have some kind of FMAM radio that they could use. We know that this has been historically used to get information out. There's coverage throughout the entire county. And so it's a really good low tech way of being able to make sure that people are staying informed. Obviously they can't communicate back to us, but it's at least an opportunity for them to get information that's low cost, low tech, and really effective at getting communications out. Thank you Supervisor Cummings. If we could have a roll call vote please. Absolutely. Supervisor Koenig. Aye. Cummings. Aye. Hernandez. Aye. McPherson. Aye. And friend. Aye. And that concludes this item. Aye. Our next regular meeting is on March 14th at 9 a.m. Thank you everybody.