 Commissioner Gonzalez, we are ready to begin. I'm going to wear that nine o'clock. I'll just give a little time for anybody that needs to jump on board. Well, first of all, I'd like to welcome all the commissioners today. This Thursday, May the sixth. 2021 meeting of the RTC, the regional transportation commission. Thank you for all your hard work and dedication to the community. First, I'd like to make a note that access for people with disabilities and translation services and the meeting broadcast, you can go to the last page, page six. And for Espanol, so for the services, para la tradición al Espanol, the leaders have the última página, and that would be page seven. The agendas are online. You'd receive email notifications with the RTC meeting agenda packet is posted on your website. So with that, I'd like to commence the meeting today. We are going to do a two minutes communications public and for the agenda items. And I also want to, before I start, have to do some little clarifications here. Item 25 is a informational item only just for the public to know the commissioners will not be taking or these making discussion on that item. But I will be allowing anybody that would like to speak on the business plan. That opportunity on that agenda item 25 to speak. With that said, Roba. Commissioner Bertrand. I'm here. Commissioner Brown. Here. Commissioner Johnson. Here. Commissioner Montecino. Here. Commissioner Caput. Here. Commissioner Coonerty. Commissioner alternate Mulher. Here. Commissioner Koenig. Here. Commissioner McPherson. Here. Commissioner Peterson. Here. Commissioner Gonzalez. Commissioner Rockin. Here. And commissioner Scott eats. Present. Okay, we're going to go ahead. Thank you. Thank you. I would like to move on to item number two, which is oral communication communications from the public. Is the opportunity for public to speak on any item that is not on the agenda. You have two minutes. Before we get started, I'd like to make some changes to the agenda. I think it's important to do that for oral communications. If that's okay with you. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. So, yes, there are. There are handouts replacement pages for items 25 and 26. And that said, I would like to pull item 26, which was an item to amend the Kimmel, horn contract. For the high. Second project. Earlier this week. Staff issued Kimmel, horn, a notice of intent to terminate the agreement. Commission staff will return. I would like to make a request to approve the formal termination of the agreement. We have also issued a request for proposals as the first step of procuring. For the TAD component of the project. That's all I have. Thank you. Did everybody receive those handouts? Yeah, we got them. Okay. Good. Okay. So we go ahead back onto item number two, oral communications for the public. Mr. Carrie Pico and then Mr. Freeman. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You acknowledged. Yes, I had done mute myself. I wasn't going to speak today. Can everybody hear me by the way? Yes. I was going to speak today because I hate to say there's so much sniping going back over this. Very expensive. Train project. And then I decided just as a fluke to look into the cost of the trail. Based on, and I wish my screen wasn't so big. I'm not going to talk about the cost of the trail. I'm not going to talk about the cost of the trail. The contract that you actually have versus what is estimated. On your site for what the cost of the, like the segments, eight, nine, 12 and five and seven. And 18. Anyway. Watsonville put in. 1500 feet. Instead of the 1.2 miles. And they have a contract with. And I don't have the exact contract in front of me, but it comes out to actually, I probably do. The cost comes up to. When you have the overhead, 11 million dollars per mile. And. That is 500% over. The original NBSS T estimate now getting back to the other segments that are estimated by mostly the county. Their estimates are closer to twice the NBSS T estimate, which tells me that it's way, way below. What I'm trying to say is here's the red flag of. The cost of the trail as you plan on going is going to be way, way higher than you expect. That's it. Have fun sniping over more money. That's it. Thank you, Mr. Vico. Mr. Graham Freeman. Go ahead, Mr. Freeman. Are you muted, Mr. Freeman? For me. Can you hear me now? Yes. Okay. Hi. Thank you. My name is Graham Freeman. I work in software engineering security at a large solar energy company. I live on the west side of Santa Cruz County. I consider myself very privileged and I see the rail-trail combination of both emphasis on rail as a matter of fundamental socioeconomic equity as well as just the right thing to do. I'm speaking strongly in favor of the rail component and I ask that you vote accordingly. We are in a climate crisis. The children who are alive today will not too far in the future look back on those of us who are active in politics today and see how we acted. So I urge you to act in climate-sensible, climate-solution manner. Thank you. That's all. Thank you, Freeman. We have Brett Garrett and then Ryan. Mr. Garrett, you have the floor recognizes you. Good morning. Can you hear me? Yes. This is Brett Garrett. This is Brett Garrett from Santa Cruz. Mr. Garrett, you have feedback. Yeah, man. I'll check my audio if you want to come back to me. Yes. We can come back to you, Mr. Garrett. Ryan and then Rebecca Downey. Yes. Ryan. Start the clock again. There we go. Ryan. All right. Can you hear me now? Yes. All right. Fantastic. I sent a little note out yesterday. I don't know if it's in your packet or not. I'm going to read it. And it has to do with segment seven phase two. I'll read what I had. And then if I have a couple of the seconds, I'll make some comments. In light of the increased probability of rail banking, the corridor, I urge you to reconsider beginning construction on this segment of the trail, which was recently awarded a Caltrans grant. The artist renditions blown there. I included pictures from your web, from the city website taken from the Santa Cruz city website. And I'm going to go back to that. I'm going to go back to the city website. It shows in graphics, the graphic details, the shortcomings of a plan, which keeps the tracks in place. Santa Cruz has the choice between a versatile pastoral sweep around near Riga Lagoon. Or a limited urban path. The construction. Choice is between gently working with the existing environment. Or significant ecological damage into greenhouse gas emissions. The plan is many times above what it would be with a more ecologically sensitive implementation. Please note retaining walls are taller than two-story buildings and will require a massive amount of moving. Earth moving and building materials. A narrow single trail is shown forcing markers and riders together instead of a wider dual trail. Google Earth photo shows the huge amount of foliage that will be needed to be removed. And if a train is run on this segment, the renditions are really not accurate because there's going to be a much taller and substantial barrier. And I think what I'm saying here is that if you look at this from the point of view of the future, 50 years out, people are going to look back and they're going to say, look at what we've got instead of look at what we had. We had something natural. And we're going to have 20 foot retaining walls. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Miss Rebecca Downing and then we'll go back to Brett. Yeah. Yes. Good morning commissioners. I live on North Avenue along the corridor. In segment 12 and C. Cliff. And I just wanted to let the commissioners know how much. I appreciate the maintenance crew that you have taking care of the corridor right now. I used to spend a lot of time taking pictures of graffiti and reporting it. And I don't have to do that anymore because almost as soon as we see it along the coastlines wall and the fences, the maintenance crew comes and takes care of it and paints over it. It's a bit of a whack-a-mole job, but I still really appreciate it because this segment between State Park Drive and this part of the segment that between State Park Drive and Aptos Village is a very popular route to Aptos Village, even though people are trespassing, especially during the pandemic because it's the safest way to reach Aptos Village. The crew is also very responsive when we report trash on the corridor. So I just wanted to thank them and let you know how much we appreciate their work. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, Mr. Brett Garrett and then Barry Scott. Yes, can you hear me? I think it's, is there still an echo? No, you're good to go. Sounds good. Okay. I hope I, I hope you'll, thank you. Yeah, this is Brett Garrett from Santa Cruz, urging you to take a very close look at a project that is starting in, in the San Francisco East Bay. The company is Glideways, G-L-Y-D-W-A-Y-S. Glideways with a Y. The details and feasibility study are readily available through the city council records, city of Pittsburgh, just this past Monday, three days ago. This awesome system will run 25, 28 miles through the cities of Brentwood, Oakley and Pittsburgh with stations every half mile. I've been coming to you for years advocating personal rapid transit, and I think this is the project that shows without a doubt how well this concept could work here in Santa Cruz County. It encompasses everything I've ever said about personal rapid transit, it's on demand service, little or no rate waiting, and it's an efficient direct ride from starting point to destination without starting, without stopping. Test rides will be available next month, at least for Pittsburgh city council members and probably for all of you as well. They plan to have an operational system very soon by 2025. I haven't seen any controversy about this project. The Pittsburgh city council approved it unanimously and enthusiastically with support from the local bus agency, Tri Delta transit, which is deeply involved. It's a high capacity system that could scale up to 10,000 passengers per hour. The cost is lower than your business plan for light rail transit with plans to use private or public funding at no cost to the cities. And they plan to build the city, the vehicles locally in Pittsburgh, California. You are the ones that can make something like this happen in Santa Cruz County. Please do it soon. This may be a very short window of opportunity when the technology is proven and the builders are not yet overwhelmed with demand. And there's other possibilities besides Glideway, Skytran, river, and goodWill. And this one will be fixed in early April or early August. And we'll be sure to serve downtown Santa Cruz. Cabrillo college. UCSC and the entire city of Washington. Thank you, Mr. Gary. Could you wrap it up. Thank you. All right. We have Mr. Barry Scott and then Fort zoom host. Mr. Scott, you have the floor. Thank you. Chair Gonzalez and thank you, RTC. I have a question. First place for the chair. So we have a discussion for you. I do understand that we'll have a chance to speak to that later. And do we know if that'll be one minute or two minutes worth of time? That'll be two minutes and you'll be allowed to speak on an item 25. Thank you so much for that. Then for this short session, I would do want to bring something up. I have a question for. Either RTC council or staff. I live in Aptos and district two. And I have this question. as mine has on. We lost you, Mr. Scott. Barry Scott, we lost you. You're not, your audio is not working. Let's come back to them. Yes, sir. Can we come back to Mr. Scott? Okay, so next is the name Fort Zoom host and then Bud Colligan. Chair acknowledges is the Fort Zoom host at two minutes. If you guys, are you guys hearing me, is that me? Yes, that's you. Okay, I apologize. I was logged in, I guess as my, not on my personal account, I didn't realize that. But my name is Jessica Evans and I'm not speaking as the representative for the rail and trail right now. I'm just speaking for myself as a resident of the West Side in Santa Cruz. And I just wanted to say how much I appreciate the progress that's being made on the rail trail. I'm really excited to be using it every day here. It's a real benefit to the community. And I'm really looking forward to the last, to the next piece of it being built and for kids to be able to get back and forth from the West Side and, you know, going to school. Everybody will be able to access from downtown. It's gonna be really great. And I really appreciate the set aside for a future transportation facility alongside the path. So thank you for that work. That's all I have to say. Thank you. You said no. Okay, Mr. Bud Colligan. Mr. Colligan, you have the floor, you have two minutes. Mr. Colligan, are you there? It's Colligan with an hour. Colligan, or Mr. Bud? Yes. Okay, great. Thank you, Chair Gonzales and good morning, commissioners. Since the previous speaker brought up social equity, I'd like to ask you all the following questions about which of the following things support social equity, train fairs that low wage workers can't afford, a regressive sales tax to pay for a train that falls disproportionately on South County, which is already at its maximum sales tax rate, ridership forecast that 88% of the passengers will be from North and Mid County, crowding out metro investment with a major new transit system we can't afford, pushing a train solution 25 years from now, which will contribute to large greenhouse gas emissions in the intervening years, detouring the South County trail onto busy streets for five miles. So Watsonville gets no trail through its beautiful areas and also has no beach access and creating a path to gentrification of South County with higher income commuters. We think that the issues outlined above are exactly the opposite of social equity. A much more equitable plan includes, build segment 17 from Buena Vista through Harkin Slough before North and Mid County segments, providing safe access to sloughs and beaches. Do not increase taxes on families already stretched by the pandemic and use existing measure defunds to build the coastal trail from Lee Road to the San Lorenzo Bridge. Invest in Metro and Lifeline to modernize all electric buses and vans with Wi-Fi, app-based geolocation, better interiors, more frequent service, including free bus passes, bus on shoulder on Highway One and adaptive signal control on Soquel and Freedom for better reliability. Build a network of protected bike lanes to tie into the coastal corridor, backbone including Pogro River Levy and the slough trails. Do not gentrify Watsonville and accomplish the above in five years. Time is a very important element of social equity. Thank you. Thank you. Can we go back to Mr. Barry Scott? You can hear me? Yes. Scott, go ahead. I don't know why that happened. I will speak to you a couple of things since Mr. Collin brought up. What? I'm sorry. Your time has started. Oh, thank you. Okay. I'll respond to Mr. Collin's observation that if the tracks were gone, the trail might go through the sloughs and I think that is utterly not the case. The environmental constraints around the construction and human activity up and down through all of the sloughs, it makes it not only impractical but unlikely to ever happen. So when Greenway says that only the trail with rail with trail diverts the trail to San Andreas Road, I think that's unsupportable. But the other thing that I wanted to bring up and I do it somewhat reluctantly but I think it's an important procedural question is I live in district two and my supervisor who I voted for recused himself on rail corridor issues. My question for staff or council when this happens, is there alternate permitted to vote or must they abstain? It seems to me and in all other matters the alternate is there to fill in for the commissioner when they can't appear for one reason or another but if there's a self-recusal on a particular matter it seems to me that it's possibly that alternate might also be prevented from voting. That's a question for staff or council and that concludes my comments. Thank you, Mr. Scott. Is there anyone else? You're muted. Mr. Michael St. then Ms. Segal. Mr. St. Chair acknowledges you have two minutes. Mr. St. you there? Okay, can you hear me now? Yes, yes. All right, thank you Chair Gonzales. Good morning commissioners. I wanted to say and appreciate all the hard work everyone's doing because I went through the agenda, almost 300 pages. I don't know how you do it. I'm sure you have staff that helps out but a lot of information. That's a joke I have to say, right? Sorry about that. I'd like to support Mr. Freeman's comments earlier and the oral communications about climate change. He's absolutely correct. We need something on that corridor, whatever it's gonna be. Hopefully it'll really reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Also supporting Brett Garrett's consistent inputs on public PRT personal rapid transit. I think he's actually going in the right direction on this. I've been vacillating back and forth, not convinced that a train is the appropriate surface transportation. You start doing things on the surface cars, trains, buses, you're running out of real estate and it gets congested. An example of the rail and train, I think it's gonna be obsolete by the time this county gets around to putting a train in. Example, that's the high speed rail. That's probably about 40 to 50 years obsolete that goes through the Fresno area. My observation through these RTC meetings is the public wants something sooner rather than later. And I think the idea of an alternate trail type surface to get everybody at least biking and walking before we decide what's gonna go as a commuter transportation is an ideal and a great idea. Thank you for your time. Thank you, Mr. Stain. Mr. Galth and Mr. Buzz Anderson. Mr. Galth, chair recognizes you, you have two minutes. Good morning. I would like to make a comment on social equity here. I have spent the past 72 hours reading through the public comments and I didn't get through them all. I had to stop when I was about 700 in favor of rail versus 100 opposed. And I have to comment about what I read in all of those amazing letters that the County has sent in on this project. The comments in favor come from students, teachers, people who actually commute, people who take metro. The comments opposed, a large majority suspiciously came from La Selva Beach where most people have second homes only. Surprisingly, a surprising amount of venture capitalists wrote in against public transportation. Gosh, what a surprising future. People who will never have to take public transportation don't want it. That's all I have to say there. Thanks. Thank you, Fein, for your comments. Mr. Buzz Anderson and then Bill Cook. Mr. Anderson, the chair recognizes you, you have two minutes. Yeah, thank you, chair. I'd like to urge all the RTC commissioners and staff to watch the YouTube clip from the Simpsons monorail episode. The town of Springfield has awarded some free money and the city leaders can't decide what to do with it. After plans for upgrading the nuclear power plant fail, a lobbyist urges Homer and the citizenry to spend the money on a monorail system. The parallels to the Santa Cruz County train debate are striking and wildly humorous. All kidding aside, the best possible way to move forward is to vastly improve our metro system. A fleet of non-pluting buses that have the flexibility to gather residents in neighborhoods and deposit them close to their destinations quickly and efficiently offers the best outcomes across the board. Our mantra should be a better metro, rail bank and build a trail. Please note that when commuter trains are built, sprawling suburbs are constructed, displacing lower income people. Agricultural fields get paved over with housing tracks and has happened with the smart train in Sonoma Marin, rich people end up commuting by train, which is ironically subsidized by a regressive sales tax that unduly burdens low income people. Social equity is about closing the digital divide, improving access to better education, keeping housing costs affordable and providing all residents with open space and access to parks, beaches and waterways, not a train that would be used by a privileged few. And as Marge put it so succinctly in the Simpsons episode, I still think we should have fixed the Pockels on Main Street rather than spending on money on an expensive monorail that no one will ride. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Anderson. Hey, Mr. Bill Cook, then Peter Emmanuelle. Chair recognizes Mr. Cook. You have two minutes. Mr. Cook, are you there? Can you hear me now? Yes, Mr. Bill Cook. You have to apologize. Thank you so much for this time. As we all know, the surface transportation board has near absolute control of all rail corridors and that includes ours. That's under a concept called preemption. No state, local or other governing agency in the nation has any independent agency or activities in rail corridors, except as the surface transportation board may approve. That includes the environmental protection agency. That also includes any activities that might be prescribed or prevented by the California Environmental Quality Act. There essentially are no environmental controls in rail corridors. So just wanted to make that point. Beyond that, all dollar bills carry a carbon load of about one pound of CO2 per dollar. When we purchase things with tax dollars, that amount doubles since taxation is about a rate generally of 50%. So we're talking about two pounds of CO2 per dollar spent. So I'm just emphasizing how important it is that we make good decisions when we spend our tax dollars. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Cook for those comments. Peter, Emmanuel, and then Steve, Ben Schaefer. Mr. Emmanuel, Chair Recognizer, you have two minutes. Is he there? Can we, we can move on to Stephen Schaefer. Mr. Stephen Schaefer. Yes, I'm here. Mr. Schaefer, Chair Recognizer, you have two minutes. Thank you. Yeah, I was just listening with interest to Mr. Kudin's remarks regarding this issue. And what I want to say is I think this idea of running a rubber tire bus along the shoulder of the freeway is quite simply a non-starter. I mean, if you're sitting in gridlock and you see one lane open, those people are gonna just jump in on that. And it's gonna kind of self destruct the whole idea. And I think that, you know, getting rid of rubber tire rigs and cars is very environmentally correct. And a train would do that or a trolley. You know, steel wheels is much more efficient than rubber tires. So basically that's what I wanted to say. I think the train when it comes and it should eventually come. This is for the future. You know, I'm old, I'll probably never see it, but I recognize what the future needs are gonna be. And I think multi modes of travel is the way to go. The freeway is car transits. That's really inefficient. So that's what I wanted to say. And thanks for your time. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Schieffer. Chief, sorry about that. I have a name there. I'd like to stop the meeting here, the oral communications, because we do have a public hearing that's set for 9.30. And so we're gonna go and move now on to item 21, the public hearing. Once that, I will, once we're done with public hearing, I'll ask the commissioners for consent to allow the public comments to continue. Is that okay? Yes. Okay. So let's go ahead and let's go to item 21, the public hearing. That was unmet paired transit and transit needs. Staff report. Great, thank you. Good morning. My name is Amanda Marino and I am a transportation planner for the RTC and currently staffed for the elderly and disabled transportation advisory committee, ENDTAC. For the regional transportation and commissions consideration is the 2021 final draft unmet paired transit and transit needs list with changes since the 2020 unmet needs list shown in underline and strike gap. TDA statutes require transportation planning agencies that use TDA funds for local streets and road projects to implement a public process, including a public hearing to identify unmet transit needs of transit dependent or disadvantaged persons and determine if unmet transit needs can be reasonably met. Although the RTC does not allocate TDA funds to local streets and road projects and therefore is not required to performance analysis, the RTC endeavors to solicit regular input on the unmet transit and paired transit needs list to provide a useful tool to assess and prioritize needs in the region. Serving as a social services transportation advisory council per TDA statutes, the ENDTAC regularly hears and considers unmet paired transit and transit needs in Santa Cruz County. Unmet paired transit and transit needs are those transportation needs which are not being met by the current public transit system, have community support and do not duplicate transit services provided publicly or privately. The unmet needs are prioritized using high, medium and low rate gains. High priority items are those items that fill a gap or absence of an ongoing service. Medium priority items are those that supplement existing service. Low priority items are still an unmet need but is assigned low priority because the need identified maybe general in nature requires more specific planning to identify strategies or may not address a basic need such as transportation for medical appointment, shopping or to access other services. Within each category, there are three levels indicating to what extent the needs if addressed would advance regional transportation plan goals with one being a project that is expected to improve safety, economic vitality and cost effectiveness. The items on the list reflects input from a variety of sources including members of the public, partner agencies and is primarily a document worked on by the RTC's E&D TAC which includes Santa Cruz Metro, the Volunteer Center and the Coordinated Transportation Services Agency staff. Some updates to the unmet needs list from last year include a need for more access to paratransit services on all holidays, support increased specialized transportation services to low income and disabled individuals for education and work opportunities at higher education institutions including UCSC and Cabrillo. Increase need for specialized transportation for same day low cost medical trips. Remove the need to acquire and develop permanent operation and maintenance facilities for consolidated transportation services agency due to community bridges lifeline serving as the coordinated transportation service agencies new permanent operation and maintenance facility. Increase need of electric vehicle charging stations as well as emergency preparedness facilities incorporate needs that are consistent with the transit corridor alternatives analysis expand on the importance of safe bus stop facilities with increased lighting at bus stops and connecting crosswalks and the increased need for multimodal connections to transit. This list is frequently used to identify projects to be considered in the preparation of both grant applications and funding requests. So RTC staff recommends that the RTC adopt the 2021 unmet paratransit and transit needs list with amendments as appropriate following a public hearing and consider the unmet paratransit and transit needs as funding is available. Thank you. Thank you, Amanda for the report. We're gonna go ahead and move on to the public comments on this item. Give me one second. We are making sure that we got different ones. So I currently have, okay. Jessica Evans. Just reminder for the public that this is the public hearing on item 21. So keep your comments to this item. Thank you. Do you have two minutes? Thank you, chair and commissioners. I'd like to thank the RTC for doing this kind of planning and forward-looking project to look at the unmet needs in the community. And I'd like to call your attention to item 30 on the list of unmet needs, which is characterized as H1, highest priority and highest grade unmet need, which calls for adding real transit to the original transportation network. There are a bunch of reasons why having an addition of rail transit would benefit the community. And that's why it is listed as H1, highest priority and highest graduated scale. Regional ADA accessible transit between Santa Cruz County, Monterey County and points beyond and through benefits people who can't drive, level platform boarding, benefits people who need assistive technology, more space for mobility assistive devices such as wheelchairs as well as bikes and walkers and strollers serve everybody in the community. Not having to get stuck in traffic is really important for people who get tired easily. Sitting and waiting is not a good time for anyone. So I just wanna say, please take a look at this high priority unmet need and consider funding it. Thank you, that's all I have to say. Thank you, Mrs. Evans. Veronica Elsie and then Barry Scott. Chair recognizes Veronica Elsie. You have two minutes. Veronica. There we go. That should have done it. It did, we hear you. Okay, good. It just took three tries. I am currently serving as chair of your elderly and disabled transportation advisory committee. And I'd like to let all of you know just how seriously we take this and how much time we actually devote both between meetings and during the meeting at going through this document and looking at what needs to be added, what needs to be removed. I also would like to say that we've had really good cooperation from Metro and the other agencies which we advise. This year, I want you to know that we focused a lot in our discussion on several things. One of them was the safety at bus stops and the lighting and that for many people, if they want to work, if they wanna come back and forth, they might be sitting at a bus stop early morning and late at night. And while some lighting has been added at shelters, it is a real major concern. So that was why it was one of the things that came up in the rankings. We also did get quite a few comments on not being able to visit family on holidays and that for some people, they may only have a public transit option to get there because family members may not be able to transmit or transport their mobility devices in their cars. So it's been a real hardship for people on Christmas and Thanksgiving not to be able to do that. We also had a lot of discussion about the ability to go to other counties. We've talked about inexpensive transportation to the airport and good public transit to the airport for years. It's been on the list, but the ability to go to Monterey County or connect easily to other types of stores, to other inexpensive shopping outlets that we may not have here in Santa Cruz. How else could you wrap it up? Maybe 20 seconds more. Oh, you cut her off. Okay, I worry about that. Okay, we have a phone number ending in 3660. And then Brian Peoples. Good morning, Chair Gonzalez and fellow commissioners. My name is Martin Masidi Miller and the resident of Santa Cruz County for about 38 years now. Many people don't know this, but about one third of the county's population doesn't drive or can't drive. Improving mobility should be a priority for everyone in our community. As mentioned by previous callers, adding rail transit is a high priority. It will dramatically improve the mobility of everyone in our county, especially those who can't or don't drive. We all recognize that meeting these unmet transit needs requires additional funding. I would encourage all of the commissioners to roll up your sleeves and join with the others in the community who wanna raise the money and improve mobility for everyone. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Brian Peoples, and then we have a phone number ending in 932-5. Just a reminder that we're on item 21, the public hearing for unmet transit and transit needs. Go ahead, Mr. Peoples. Hi, this is Brian from Trail now. Thank you for taking the time. Metro transit, paratransit is vital. We absolutely need to invest in it. My mother, 83-year-old mother who's disabled and in a wheelchair uses this service. And what's great about it is it picks her up at her house and drops her off at the location she needs to go. There's no middle ground. It's been a life-safe for her. She uses it regularly. The main issue was getting it started. I convinced her to call him and now she's using it. So it's a great thing. And as a trail advocate, I want to encourage us to save on the spending of the trail so that we can divert the money to the paratransit metro. We need to reduce how much we're spending on this construction of the trail. Look at segment 7A and segments 18 in Watsonville. When we're spending $10 million a mile for this trail, that's a waste of money. You need to focus more on spending less on the trail and diverting it to essential services like paratransit. So that's coming from the trail person. We want you to be more effective at spending our money on the trail so that we have the resources. It's terrible that we have to have the shortcomings. Look at segment 7B that's coming up. That's going to be over $20 million a mile. We can't afford an expensive trail when we have the need for the disabled and the handicapped. So please stop wasting money on a substandard, narrow, expensive trail and let's invest in the paratransit and lifeline. It really is a great program and I congratulate Metro and Alex on that program. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Peeples. Okay, so we have a phone number ending at 9-3-2-5 and then Michael St. Chair recognizes the phone number, 9-3-2-5. 9-3-2-5. 9-3-2-5. Hi, this is Rick Longinati. I'm the co-chair of the campaign for sustainable transportation. And a couple of years ago, the commission invited Jared Walker from Portland who's the transit planner there. And he presented to the commission. I just wanted to remind you one thing of what he said. He said, for a community of your size and your density, let alone the degree of progressive values that operate in this community, you did not have very much transit. And he recommended, he said, he said, we know that simply a higher level of service would be useful to a lot more people and would be having a lot more benefit, particularly in the Santa Cruz Watsonville Corridor. I want to suggest to you that there's a missing debate in the community right now, which is whether or not to have a bus-only lane on the shoulder of Highway 1, or to go ahead with the plan that the RTC has currently approved, which is auxiliary lane expansion and to run buses in the auxiliary lanes, primarily in the auxiliary lanes, the only bus-only portion of that would be at the overpasses. The RTC has never debated that question, but you can think to yourself right now what you would rather be in a bus that has its own lane dedicated to its own lane or a bus that's stuck in traffic in auxiliary lanes. So I would urge you, as soon as possible, to schedule that debate. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, we have Michael St. then Rebecca Gummy. Chair recognizes Mr. St. Yes. Thank you, Chair Gonzalez, commissioners. I'd like to actually support Brian Peoples comments. We're not always on the same page, but I think what he had to say was very informative and more money does need to go to places like Community Bridges and Terra Transit. The only thing I will quickly add that appreciate you supporting us, looking into the issues, but also to emphasize that these Terra Transit vehicles are electrified. I see a lot of these parked outside my elderly home areas here in Aptos and the vehicle is basically just idling waiting for their customer. And I think minimum, it should be a hybrid, but the best thing would be a fully electrified Terra Transits. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. St. for your comments. We have Rebecca Downing and then Lowell Hurst. Mrs. Downing, Chair recognizes you have two minutes. Thank you, commissioners. My brother was a lifelong wheelchair user and actually chose the town of Chico to move to because it was flat enough for him to be able to use his motorized wheelchair to get around. They had pretty decent bus service that did accommodate wheelchairs. So that's what he used, but there were many times when his transportation needs weren't met because he had to go somewhere that the bus couldn't take him or during a time the bus wasn't running. And if it was raining really hard and he was at a bus stop, he's stuck in his wheelchair, getting poured on, waiting for the bus. So anything you can do to support the unmet needs of these folks where they live with the transit options that you have would be most welcome. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Downing. Hey, Mr. Lowell Hurst. Chair recognizes Mr. Lowell Hurst. Thank you very much, Chairman and commissioners. Lowell Hurst here in Watsonville. You know, I'm really glad to hear that you talk about the least abled and the elderly and disabled and the folks that can't really walk or drive or can't sit for a long period of time either. And so this does need some focus. And many of these folks are living in South County due to the economic advantages that they find in South County. So I'm glad to hear folks with some resources and some wealth talk about the disabled and the need in the community and the social and economic justice in the community for that population as well. So let's put the R in the RTC, the regionalness of it. And let's make sure that we're inclusive of the disabled and the elderly and their unique needs. And those are poor people too. So, hey, let's get, I don't know all you're going to do today or what you're going to be doing in the future, but many, many people need help. And so let's get Santa Cruz moving. That's it for me. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Hurst. We have Judy and then Barry Scott. Chair recognizes Judy. Hi, good morning. Thank you, commissioners. I'm Judy Giddelson and I'm a Watsonville resident. And I read this poem to Patrick Mulhern, but I will treat you all to it. Light rail gets riders. Judy, let me interrupt you. But we're on the public hearing for unmet paratransit and transit needs. Is this tied into that poem? I believe it does. I believe so. Wait until after, if it's not on the unmet paratransit for public comment, would that be better? I can do that. Thank you, Mr. Hurst. Thank you. Okay, we have Barry Scott. Mr. Scott, chair recognizes Barry Scott. Thank you, chair. You know, I was raised by my mom and my grandma. My mom suffered polio at age six. She wore braces and drove a three speed on the tree car to her job 25 miles each way every day. I have the fondest memories when I was in college in New York of taking her around. And it wasn't the transit served every purpose because subways didn't all have elevators. But I am really sensitive and toward the needs of the disabled, the needs of people who are not able to get around with really equity. And I support in the hugest way possible, Metro expanded Metro expanded lift line and paratransit. However, nothing could be better for people going between say the boardwalk and Seabright or Watsonville if they can do a level boarding onto, and this is true for bikes too, the streetcar option, especially with a low floor 11 inches off the pavement, level boarding capability, combined with expanded Metro, combined with paratransit and lift line and a sort of all of the above approach to creating a robust transit network is the best thing that this county can do. And it should be the highest priority. And that's all I have to say. And I thank you for all of the work you're doing toward equity and inclusion for our seniors and our elderly and disabled. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Scott. We have Stephanie Wells. Mr. Stephanie Wells, chair, you have two minutes. Mrs. Wells. Hi, thank you. Can you hear me? Yes. Okay. Hi, my name is Stephanie Wells. Thank you, commissioners. I am a resident of Santa Cruz County. This is my first time speaking at an RTC meeting. So thank you for having me. I'm a bit nervous. But I wanted to speak to this item because I have friends and members of my community who I see the need for expanded ADA accessible regional transit between Santa Cruz County, Monterey County and points beyond. And I see through conversations with them, the best way to do this is through the addition of rail service, really seeing the need for an interconnected transportation system with both metro and rail. I don't think simply adding more wheels to the road in a county that's already congested is going to really meet the regional transportation needs of our fellow community members. So thank you. Thank you. We have Sylvia Luna. Chair Crane recognizes Mrs. Sylvia Luna. Hi, good morning everybody. Thank you all for your hard work that you've been doing. I am from South County in Watsonville and I'm here to state my support for the unmet transit and transit needs that are on the agenda as well as the overall business plan which will connect and benefit all our county residents and especially Watsonville residents which will be connected to more than part of our county. I like to also say that at this time, yes, the county does face a lot of unmet needs, especially in transportation because we have residents who use public transportation but they are not only facing barriers to our precious sites in the county but they're also being locked out of job opportunities because of time and location restrictions. As for myself, there are locations here in Watsonville that I'm not even able to go to and especially like Coralitos, Gistis Ranch, there's just so many areas in our city that are beautiful and I'm not able to go because Metro Paracruz has unlimited restriction and they have restrictions during the holidays. In addition, I'd also like to say that we are having a lot of increase in housing developments here and we are gonna have a big impact in our highways because of the increase in population as well. So with that being said, we need to listen to our people, to our residents, listen to your constituents. We need to look into the future and take action now in modernizing our county rail transportation system by approving the business plan. Thank you. We have Peter Scott. Mr. Scott, Chair recognizes that you have two minutes. Mr. Peter Scott. Okay. Is that better? Yes, we hear you. We got you. Okay. Yeah, I'm a resident of district three in Santa Cruz County and I just like to register my support for using the rail corridor for public transportation. I hate to interrupt you, but right now we're on item 21. It's a public hearing for the unmet paratransit and transit needs. Oh, okay. Okay. We're gonna come back to our communication. That would be on item 25. Thank you. You're welcome. Okay. I don't have any other hands up, but I do have a very quick comment. If you are on the attendees and you are logged in in multiple devices, if you can, please remove the multiple devices as we have reached our limit and we are unable to accept any new community members coming in to speak. So if you're on your phone and laptop, just choose one of them and empty one of those spots, please. Mr. Chair. Yes, commissioner. I just wanna make a really brief comment. A number of the speakers, I think it was three or four of them made comments about if we could take money from the trail and move it to paratransit, they would think that was a great idea. I just wanted to point out whatever your views are on the trail one way or the other, it's not always possible in any way legally to move money from one pot to the other. As much as that might be a choice we would make if we had that freedom, but the much of the money is kind of restricted. And so, even if you could find a way to save money on the trail and have extra money left over, which is unlikely in any of the proposals for the trail, that money cannot be moved into a paratransit service, for example. So it's unfortunate, but a lot of times that's not understood by the public and these sort of have these ideas that you can just move all the money around and make the highest priority, get the funding from something less. Sometimes those funds are restricted. I just wanted to make that comment. Thank you, commissioner. Is there any other members from the public that would like to speak on this item? Do we recognize anybody else? No. Seeing none. I'd like to move approval of the staff recommendation on the item 21, which is to accept this plan that the record, the list of priorities for un-transit needs. Mr. Caput has his hands up. Commissioner Caput. I recognize that. Higher, higher, really. Thank you. I think we had a motion, right? I'll second it. Okay, we have a motion, we have a second. Okay, Mr. Caput. Anyway, I want to introduce Felipe Hernandez. We'll be the alternate for district four. And he's the former councilman and mayor of Watsonville. So anyway, he'll be able to vote today too. Okay. Well, thank you. Thank you for that. Mr. Chair? Yes, Mr. Commissioner McPherson. Yeah, I don't know who said, I tried to second Commissioner Rodkin's motion. And I think I want to make sure that we appreciate the presentation. We have identified needs. And I think Mr. Rodkin's points about, it's not easy to transfer one segment to another in the transportation world of budgeting. But I just, I think it needs to be mentioned how appreciative we are with the cooperative efforts of Santa Cruz Metro and Community Bridges. And we think that that services is going to be enhanced metros, looking at a place to put a new facility across from Dominican hospitals, so-called Avenue. But I appreciate their cooperative efforts in this as they have done as many other things along with Community Bridges. So the need, we know we recognize the high need there. And I think when we can do it, I look forward to approving additional services in this area. Thank you, Commissioner McClellan. Is there any other commissioner that'd like to comment? Commissioner Brown, I recognize Commissioner Brown. Thanks. Yeah, I just wanted to thank the members of the elderly and disabled committee. I know that you spend a lot of time and do a lot of work in the community trying to assess needs. And I just wanted to say, I hear you and want to continue to work with you moving forward so we can expand those services and in particular, around holidays, that seems like it's something we ought to really be thinking about. And I want to thank the Metro and Community Bridges and the Volunteer Center for providing these services and the gaps in our regular transit system or in people who live in areas that are not served by public transit in general. So you just, it's really good to see that we are able to fund some of these needs and we are improving over time. And I just want to thank you all for your work. Thanks, Sandy. Commissioner Brown. Chair recognizes Commissioner Randy Johnson. Thank you, Chair. So listening to some of the comments with respect to the efficacy, I should say, of paratransit for elderly, I lived that, of course, with my mom and dad who lived in Watsonville for 15 years. We spent many, many times in Scotts Valley making one trip to pick them up, coming back, then the other trip to take them home and us driving back. And finally, we convinced them to use paratransit and to Brian People's point, it was a lifesaver because my mom used it all the way till she passed away at age 97. I guess I don't see a rail system as a panacea for meeting unmet needs simply because having a level platform doesn't compensate for the numerous extra trips that you would need to actually access rail. With paratransit, whether you're going to a doctor's office or to visit family members or what have you, there's basically in your trip, there's two connection points, but with this rail thing, you would have to take paratransit to the rail, then ride the rail, then take paratransit to your destination and then reverse that instead of two contact points, there's now four. And also, if I'm not mistaken, I think my mom paid somewhere in the neighborhood of $4 for each trip, or maybe it was just one. And maybe Metro people can help me with that. But it's... It's twice the average regular fare on buses. So you're right, it's not four bucks, depending on the ride, but yes. But adding those two connections, that obviously makes it more expensive for that. So I just want to say, I'm sensitive to the needs of the elderly. And also for that matter, my brother had polio as well as a handicap person. And there was no Metro. He used a, actually a cab to get to high school because the school district provided one for him to kind of... So because he couldn't walk. But I just think that a paratransit is a lifesaver. I think they do a good job and anything we can do to kind of help support that availability is tremendously important. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Commissioner Johnson. As you know, the fellow commissioners, I'd like to make a comment. I don't see everybody on my screen. Let me see if I can... I don't see any hands. I don't see no hands either on the list. So with that, I'd just like to make a quick comment. Paratransit is an essential service that our community needs. Paratransit also at the same time, Metro's continuously looking at ways to improve their system. And so being a Metro director, that's one of the important things. And also, you know, as an RTC, we support Metro. And this is just indicated of how we wanna continue moving forward with Metro and the paratransit crews services for our communities and meet their needs. With that, I'm gonna go ahead and ask for roll call. Oh wait a minute, Mr. Commissioner alternate Andy Schifrin. Thank you. We're all talking, a number of us are talking about our moms. My mom used the bus system for years and tried to get the bus system to do all sorts of things she thought it should do. She also used paratransit. And there's no question that these are essential services in the community. I just wanna point out because so many speakers have talked about the cost of the various options that paratransit is extremely expensive for the transit district as is Metro. And without the subsidies that are provided from federal and state government and this commission, the services that are provided would be much, much, much, much less adequate. So I think it's important to remember that these services don't come free. That $4 charge does not support paratransit. It's probably a relatively small percentage of what that paratransit ride actually costs. It's about $36 on average. Sorry. That doesn't mean paratransit shouldn't be supported. It just means that when we're talking about services that support the public, whether it's a passenger rail service, whether it's a trail, whether it's a highway project, they are subsidized services and they're highly subsidized services. Thank you. Thank you, commissioner. Did you wanna make a quick comment, commissioner? Yeah, I just wanna first apologize, Danny, for interrupting, but the rides actually cost around an average of $36 for what people are paying $4 for. That's it. Okay, thank you. Thank you, commissioners. Can we have a real call, please? Commissioner Rotkin. Hi. Commissioner Gonzales. Hi. Commissioner Peterson. Hi. Commissioner McPherson. Hi. Commissioner Koenig. Hi. Commission Alternate Mulhern. Hi. Commission Alternate Schifrin. Hi. Commissioner Caput. Hi. Commissioner Montesino. Yes. Commissioner Johnson. Right. Commissioner Brown. Hi. Commissioner Bertrand. Agreed. Unanimous. Thank you. Thank you, commissioners. We're gonna go ahead and move on to item number 22, which is another public hearing. And it's the immediately following the unmet public hearing. It is the Measure D, the five-year program of projects for community. Good morning, commissioners. Rachel Marconi of your staff. In 2016, more than two thirds of Santa Cruz County voters approved Measure D, which is a half-cent sales tax which provides critical funding to maintain and expand transit and paratransit services for seniors and people with disabilities, as well as funding to maintain and improve local roads, highways, rail, bicycle, and pedestrian facilities in our community. Before you today is the Measure D, five-year program of projects for community bridges lifeline, showing its planned use of 4% of the Measure D revenues for fiscal year 2021-22 through fiscal year 25-26 for paratransit services. It's also included as exhibit A to the resolution, which is shown on page 22-7 of the packet or page 216 if you're looking at a PDF. The Measure D ordinance approved by voters requires each agency that receives Measure D revenues to prayer and annually hold a public hearing on the program of projects showing how they plan to use Measure D funds in the upcoming five years. Lifeline serves as the consolidated transportation services agency for Santa Cruz County and provides paratransit services for people with limited mobility in seniors. Because Lifeline is the only agency receiving direct allocations of Measure D funds that is not a public agency, the Regional Transportation Commission serves as the agency that provides the input, the opportunity for the public and approves the plan. The Lifeline five-year plan that is before you today includes additional drivers training and outreach and administration funding for expanded services that are possible because of Measure D and funding for its new operations facility in Watsonville. And they also propose to use Measure D funds exactly as we had intended, which is to leverage other grants and be able to replace some of their vehicles, some of their worn shop equipment and upgrade its maintenance and operations facility. Staff recommends that you receive an update from Community Bridges Lifeline Paratransit Services program director, Kirk Anst today. And he'll also provide a little bit more detail on their plan Measure D fund uses. Then we recommend you hold a public hearing to give the public the opportunity to provide input on their proposed use of these public funds and adopt by resolution the Measure D five-year plan. The commission's elderly and disabled transportation advisory committee did review Lifeline's proposed use of these funds at its April meeting and they recommend approval as well. With that, I'll hand it over to Kirk Anst. Thank you, Rachel. And thank you for the opportunity to speak on behalf of Lifeline and Community Bridges. And when I thank everyone, I heard a lot of compliments for Community Bridges and the Lifeline Paratransit Services we provide as well as those, I hear a lot of compliments for Metro and Paracruz. So happy to hear all those and thank everybody for that. I'd like to give a little bit of history about Lifeline. Community Bridges Lifeline, as Rachel stated, is the designated consolidated transportation service agency for Santa Cruz County and Lifeline's been in operation since 1977 and the Santa Cruz County RTC designated Community Bridges as the CTSA about 40 years ago. And as the CTSA, we implement and coordinate and consolidate transportation services with the goal in mind not to duplicate services and to enhance and compliment the fixed route services. And I kind of like to not only talk about major D, but also I believe, Rachel, we have the TDA claim. Yes, which the commission did approve or actually has not yet approved because you have not taken the consent agenda quite yet, but it's on your consent agenda. So I'll go ahead and discuss a little bit of that funding to kind of what we do with all the funding together. So one of the tools that we use to find out what the needs are in the community is the on-met needs list that the RTC puts together. And again, I think the RTC for doing that in the community input to all that, it's not a requirement for the RTC to do that on-met needs list, but they do it as a very helpful tool for us. And so as a CTSA allows community bridges left line to receive funding through the RTC, such as what's being proposed, the major D funding as well as the TDA funding and other types of funding such as STA, which is also on our TDA claim and LC top. And it also helps us bring in other funds through like the federal transit administration in other grant opportunities, such as the California Air Resource Board. And most of our services provide transportation to medical appointments and several trips also to social service programs. And a lot of people ask kind of, what's the difference between lift line and Metropare crews? I don't really want to speak that much for Metropare crews, but I can identify some of the differences. Paracruz is mandated by ADA and they have certain standards and regulations that they follow. And one example is they mirror the Metro fixed route and they're required to go three quarters of a mile from a bus stop. And I know in the past that Metro has gone beyond that three quarter mile with some of the major D funding they got. There's a qualifying process for both services and Paracruz has a bit different qualification than lift line uses. Lift line has an application process where we ask for income because generally it's low income that qualifies in individual and a lot of times we're looking at 200% below the poverty level. We also look at age and any disabilities. So that's the qualifying process. Some of our clients crossover so they'll qualify both for Metropare crews and they'll also qualify for a lift line but not all of them. And some of the services that we provide with the funding both from major D and TDA and STA is we lift line provides door to door service and it's free to the clients and some of the partners and types of transportation we provide is with elder day meals on wheels, the alliance, we run the taxi script program. We have what's called our medical TDA which is just the medical transportation with TDA funds. We provide service to the veterans clinic on 41st as well as the veterans hauling downtown Santa Cruz and we provide transportation out of county to those veteran hospitals in both Santa Clara and I think it's a seaside or marina now maybe perhaps it's in marina. We also coordinate with the Sutter hospital currently to provide transportation for vaccinations for the COVID and we partnering with Teen Kitchen currently which we started doing that with the Great Plates program which provides mill deliveries to some of the most vulnerable senior population. We have extended that through October and we leveraged some additional funding to provide that transportation through Kaiser as well as using some TDA funds and we partner with Monterey Peninsula Foundation which was one of the unmet needs is to try to provide transportation across counties. So they've provided some funding to us that will pick up some North Monterey County residents while those residents come into Santa Cruz County for medical appointments. Some of them do stay within the county. So our goals is to try to develop and meet some of those unmet needs of going across the county borders which needs a lot of work still. There's a lot of opportunity there is just trying to look for those identify opportunities and ways to make those happen. Same day transportation and our Otta County transportation used to be funded through FTA. We have lost that funding it ends at the end of this fiscal year. So going into next fiscal year the STA funding through the RTC will fund the Otta County operations which generally takes the clients to locations such as Kaiser. These services go as far as San Francisco County. So they're generally specialized medical appointments that require specialists that are not in Santa Cruz County. So they're, and also Lucille Packard for children will transport families with low income families that have children to special appointments at Lucille Packard. Some of our past partnerships I'll talk about a little bit was we partnered with Metro and Lifeline did provide the ADA services for Metro for several years. And we also helped out with Santa Cruz Lightning fires we partnered with restaurants in the county to provide transportation from the restaurants to the displaced individuals because of the fires. We used to transport also the homeless with the ISSP program and Lauda Nelson Center we were providing transportation for seniors for senior activities down there and COVID came along. We partnered with the Museum of Art and History to provide transportation for seniors to see the senior display that was at the museum there. Another saying great thing is Rachel mentioned is leveraging fund funding and we just signed an agreement contract last month with California Air Resource Board and we'll use matching funds about 33,000 from major D for a new electric bus. And then the rest of that will be funded through CARB and we are just sending in a down payment for that new electric bus which will be the fourth electric bus in lifelines fleet. These are fully electric paratransit buses. The smallest one will do six ambulatory and two wheelchairs with the largest ones doing 16 which includes two wheelchairs. So we're quite happy to be doing that and to be able to meet some of the RTC's goals and the state's goals and the requirements to be going emissions free in the county. The fourth bus will put us at about 25% of our fleet being zero emissions. Also with funding, we're putting in infrastructure. We're putting chargers. We'll be a mountain community resource center where we've got an application in with PG&E to do a service upgrade. It's a long process but we'll be doing that and there'll be a level three charger at the mountain community resource center that will be available even if say Metro Paracruz wanted to use it or any other transit agencies are welcome to use it. Lifeline can expand its capacity to be able to operate the electric buses as they might only operate 80 miles on a charge right now. And I think I would like to ask for any questions if there's any specific questions or you'd like more details about the major defunding. We did purchase the facility and are making improvements with that now. So thank you and I'd like to answer any questions. Thank you, Mr. Kirk. How do you see anything, Agnes? Yes, that's good. Sorry. Is there any quick questions from the questioners? Thanks for the report. That was very useful. Commissioner Caput and Johnson have their hands up. Commissioner, chair recognizes commissioner Randy Johnson. Thank you, chair. And just I'll keep it very short. Wait, just really seems like we're getting our money's worth with this agency. So tip of the hat. Yeah, well thanks for all the partners and support as well. Chair recognizes commissioner Greg Caput. Yeah, thank you. I want to personally thank Lifeline and community bridges. We had a 92 year old Korean War veteran down here in Watsonville needed transportation to get his vaccine shot and even veterans services didn't offer anything. It was very difficult for him to get in and out of the, you know, a car or anything like that. But community bridges, we called them and we got Lifeline came to his house, picked him up, lifted the wheelchair up into the Lifeline bus, took him and he got his vaccine. He didn't even have to get out. They came out and gave him the shot. So anyway, that was a personal thing and that happened just a week ago. And I want to thank community bridges and Lifeline. Thanks. Yeah, you're welcome. Thank you. Thank you, commissioner. Commissioner Beltran, you're muted. You're muted, Jack. He's working on it. I am working on it. You're right, you've seen that. Oh, my hand shakes a little bit. So I'm one of those seniors with that issue. Thank you Kirk for your presentation. I really appreciate all the different services and options that you've been available and taking advantage of in terms of funding. Very impressive. I always considered this a great partnership with the Metro and partnership with all the agencies that you service. But I do have one question. It's amazing to me how you're able to take so many different requests for service and do it efficiently. And I'm wondering how that is managed. I mean, it's usually a very difficult thing to manage so many requests, do it efficiently and within budget, as most of our agency know, staying in budget is critical. So if you could comment on that, I'd really appreciate it. Thank you. Yeah, I think it's just over the years, having so much, many years of experience doing it and not everything comes at once. So that's helpful if everything come at once. I don't think we could handle it. So it's just kind of years of building different programs and adapting equipment such as we have, now yesterday, two days ago, we went live with Ecolane, which is our scheduling software. So that's gonna be, we're going through a little transition, but before that it was Trappy. So we just, we get reservations, they call them in and then they get assigned to whatever, we call it fair types, but we don't charge fairs, but it's ride type. So whether it be out of county or same day or medical ride or meals on wheels or elder day, whatever it is, we just schedule them for that ride. Most of our clients know what our time limits are. We have expanded for weekends, we're for many years after the transition of the ADA going back to, we're going to Metro in-house, we were closed on weekends. So something the last few years with major D were able to expand the weekends. So it's really that software and database that helps us out a lot, helps us coordinate the rides and schedule the rides. One follow up question if I may. So you're going out of county, are you getting support from Monterey also or is this a natural extension of the funding we have here from this county? It's both a good question. So for Monterey Peninsula Foundation, they are funding some of the residents of Monterey County, which are North Monterey County. So they're funding those and then it's funding through STA now through the RTC, which is going to be funding the out of county to the North. So that'd be Santa Clara all the way through to San Francisco. And we only have one dedicated driver. So the funding will provide transportation for one driver daily to do out of county transportation. And generally there's so distant, we try to do the pickups in the morning and then we'll just wait for the client to get done with their appointment and then return them. And then that driver will get back, say by one o'clock, generally to provide other same day transportation. So, and sometimes we'll schedule North County to go to the veterans clinic or we'll schedule that out of county to do North County. And in the past, we used FTA funding for that transportation, which I said at the end of this fiscal year will land. So July 1st, we'll start using more of the STA funding. Thank you very much, Kirk. It was a wonderful presentation. I think it gave all us a rather expanded view of the services you provide for Santa Cruz and the senior citizens and all those who have difficulties getting to various types of appointments. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You have a question, Commissioner Lutkin? I was gonna make a motion on the resolution. Yeah, that's what I was gonna ask the Nevada. So I'll move that we approve the resolution, recognizing the five year program of projects for community religious lifeline. I'll second that. Just a reminder to also hold the public hearing. Right. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm a little premature then. Yeah, sorry. What did you see, Rachel? Open it to the public. Yeah, open the public hearing now and see if there's any members of the public that would like to testify or put input. Yeah, but we had a motion and did I get a second? Yes, Commissioner Bertrand. Okay, now we're gonna go ahead and go to the public and for public comment. Mr. Brian Peoples and then Michael St. Chair recognizes Mr. Peoples. Hi, this is Brian from Trail now. We absolutely support this. I'm gonna throw our RTC staff around of the bus a little bit, Rachel. I think most of you all know I got involved in transportation as a result of working with Rachel. So she's at fault for bringing me into the RTC conversation almost 23 years ago. So you can hold your applause to her but I thank her for bringing me in and being active in this. I do wanna comment about the color of money that Commissioner Rotkin commented about and totally get it, totally understand capital grants and all that. But I wanna challenge the organization here to understand that Measure D is a little bit different. There's actually a mechanism where you can readjust your money. And so I encourage you to go and research that and see if there's a way for that to bring more money towards the essential services. So I do wanna encourage that. And then finally, I just wanna kinda give you a real life example of how people move. My mother has progressive lateral sclerosis. It's a form of LS, ALS. And so what happens is you progress and she lives on a two-story house. And I'm trying to convince her that we can't have our transitioning from first and second floor because you have those multiple intersections. And the same thing is with transit. You want transit to be from point A to point B, right? That's the most efficient. And that's why Lifeline is such a great program and Paratransit is such a great program. We need to continue to have point A, point B in order to build our customer base that truly is the way you're gonna do it. Again, I thank you for your time and your work. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Peeples. Mr. Michael St. then Veronica Elsie. Chair recognizes Mr. St. Thank you, Chair Gonzalez. Mr. Ants, great presentation. And definitely appreciate all the hard work you do for the community. I have a question about the electric vehicles. That's really awesome that you have four of these. My question would be the additional vehicles you have presently, would they be replaced on a schedule of them getting to their full useful life or would they be replaced on getting more funding for electric vehicles? So that's my question for you, Mr. Ants. Thank you again. Yeah, that's a good question. They do have to serve their useful life, which is a requirement of the FTA funding for a large vehicle that's seven years or 150,000 miles, whichever comes first. And for a minivan, it's five years or 100,000 miles. So we will have to run those through their cycle. We currently have five buses that are still haven't meant their useful life and we have five minivans. So out of our fleet of 25, we have 10 that have to meet their useful life. And as far as replacing them with electrical, it's, I think it's kind of challenging to find electrical. So we're kind of very fortunate that we've had the opportunity to use LC-TOP funding as well as CARB funding to acquire these vehicles. We're not sure how often these programs will be out there to continue to fund electric vehicles. They are very expensive. They're about three times the cost of a gasoline bus engine. So I'm trying, I'm encouraging folks and as well as Caltrans to work with FTA to bring them in on the grant process, which as far as I know, they're not yet part of the grant process. So it could be challenging with the cost and availability to replace them as fast as we would like to see that happen. So. Thank you. Just a reminder for the public, this is public comments. So if you can just make a comment and then if you have any questions, you can submit them in and I'm pretty sure Bridges, community Bridges will respond to you. If not, the staff will. Okay. So- We have Veronica Elsie. Staff, chair recognizes- Hello, thank you. As chair of END TAC, I just really wanted everyone to know that whenever community Bridges does one of these presentations to our committee, we really grill them. We spend a lot of time looking at their budgets, looking at their tables and comparing numbers of rides. I mean, we really grill them. And not only do I want to publicly commend Lifeline Community Bridges for the services they perform, but everyone should really get what good stewards of your money they are. And I really appreciate that. Thank you. So I urge the commission to really recognize and support this five-year plan. Thank you. Thank you, Veronica. Commissioner, I do not see any other hands up. Okay, I'll bring it back to the commission. We had a motion. We have a second. Is there any other short comment that a commission would like to- Commissioner McPherson. Yeah, I make this often. We, in many of us do, I can't go on and said though, I want to thank the people of Santa Cruz County, more than two thirds of them who approved Measure D. Without that, we wouldn't have so many of these projects that we're even considering, you know, for the last, that have been done for the last, within the last five years. It was really, really a big hurdle to get over. And I think the reason that it made it to City because it was all inclusive of all modes of transportation that made it work. And I think it's working and we're doing an excellent job. Everybody, for the transportation needs of seniors and the disabilities from just on down to highways and bikeways, wherever you want to put it, I think we've addressed those needs. And I just want to compliment the voters and the people who have carried out the projects in really quick time. There's always more to do in our transportation network. But we're getting there. And it's because of Measure D, we're able to do so many of these projects. So again, I appreciate their support. And it's a work in progress, but it's a work that's being done literally. So thank you very much. Thank you, Commissioner. You're welcome. The big card. Commissioner Motocino, would you like a comment? No. Well, okay. If I heard you speak, that's why it's on. Is there any other fellow commissioner that'd like to make a brief comment? Seeing none, did we have roll call? Commissioner Bertrand. I agree. Commissioner Brown. Hi. Commissioner Johnson. Hi. Commissioner Montecino. Yes. Commissioner Caput. Perhaps Felipe. Hi. Commissioner Alternate Schifrin. That was good. I had mine. Commissioner Alternate Schifrin. You're muted, Andy. Sorry. Is that an hi? Hi. Commissioner Alternate Mulher. Hi. Commissioner Koenig. Hi. Commissioner McPherson. Hi. Commissioner Peterson. Hi. Commissioner Gonzales. Hi. Commissioner Rotkin. Hi. Thank you, commissioners. If we look toward the community bridges and left line and fair cruising areas, we'll move forward and continue servicing our community in the most needy. Let's go ahead now. We're done with our public hearings, and we're going to go back to our consent agenda items. And that's right, right? Yep. And I want to go back to public comment to all commissioners. That's what I'm going to bring back to the commissioners. In consensus, are we in agreement to allow, continue back to public comments? Yes. Follow your lead. Okay. Let's go ahead back and bring it back to the public comments for items that are not on the agenda. Okay. So we have three hands up before we moved. And those were Michael Wol, Saltine Sale, and Faulkner. So we'll start with Michael Wol. Also, I just wanted to comment. I know that Judy might fit in here. And so allow her. She's still with us. So let's go ahead and start with the first one. And chair recognizes Michael Wol. Let's see. Yeah, he's still on. Mr. Michael Wol. Mr. Michael. I was just making a general comment about the capacity limit on the Zoom meeting because there's a lot of people who are very interested in being at this Zoom meeting who unfortunately can't attend due to the capacity limit. And I was just like going to say we should definitely not have a 100 person capacity limit for future Zoom meetings, considering the fact that this is a great way to increase public input at these meetings. And it definitely is discouraging people from coming because, you know, they can't get in. I have like four people I know who can't get on to this meeting due to the capacity limit. And it's very frustrating to hear this considering, you know, the big things on the agenda today. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Wol. Faulkner Sale. Chair recognizes Faulkner Sale. Two minutes. Ms. Sale. She's there. Can we move on to the next one? We can come back. Okay. Faulkner Sale. Can you hear me? Thank you. Chair recognizes you have two minutes. Good morning, commissioners. My name is Solidine Sale. I've lived in Santa Cruz County for over 50 years. My house is located in Santa Cruz. And I'm a retired professional risk manager. I urge you to approve the business plan for electric passenger rail transit. Professional drivers trained in defensive driving learned to monitor developments in what are called the near intermediate and far time zones ahead of the vehicle they're driving. As stewards of the county's transportation infrastructure, you similarly have to manage opportunities and risks in terms of various intervals of years ahead, three to five, eight to 10, and 15 to 20. Final decisions about rail are still a number of years off. Other matters such as painting additional bike lanes and adjusting bus schedules naturally fall within a more immediate time frame. We need you to keep making the near term decisions about rail, like approving the business plan so we can identify and plan to apply for outside funds to design and build the system. Then we can begin construction when conditions are right. The Biden administration is committed to building passenger rail. A rail spine anchoring a north-south transit corridor is the optional transit solution for Santa Cruz County. We need to continue working the plan so we can complete the entire system when all the pieces are in place. I urge you to approve the business plan now. Thank you for your work. Thank you, Sarah. Here we have. Yes, good. Let me come to the public. Just a reminder, if you want to speak on the business map, could you, if you could hold on to item 25. Right now it's just anything, any item that's not on the agenda. And you have two minutes. Thank you. Falkner for rail and then Judy. Chair recognizes Falkner. You're on mute. Oh, there you go. Hi. This was a general approval of the plan. Should I hold off? Yeah, if you would, to item 25. Okay. Thanks. Thank you. Hey, Judy, and then Linda Wilcherson. Chair recognizes Judy. Thank you, commissioners. And I'm just going to squeeze in here. This is a poem that I wrote to encourage you to accept the business plan, but I do have to take off. So it's one minute. Light rail gets riders away from traffic. There is no backup. Give us a quick trip where buses are still stuck. Preliminary engineering will help with the steering toward a finer budget, then better judge it. Diligence do and inspect 68% or more say accept for free from the government for the people's betterment. My name is Judy. And it's our civic duty to build passenger rail post haste without fail. For our children's future, this earth yes to nurture and not leave to ruin or leave in a lurch or let drivers screw or gas guzzlers burn or home builders barrier right. Earth so bitchy or let's paint a better picture with trains carrying creatures like rail housing corridors. Take trains to corner stores. People enjoying earth some more go again. 20 years and four score. Yes to earth and rail on core. Thank you. Thank you, Judy. Linda Wilson and then Jessica Evans. Linda Wilson. Chair recognizes you. Hello. Hello. I hear you. You hear you. Thank you. This is Linda Wilson. I'm speaking to item 26 that I understand was moved from the agenda. And I wanted to clarify that commissioners received a memo about this item prior to the meeting. Is that correct? I'd like to request that that memo be posted on the RTC website as an additional item to this meeting agenda. Thank you. Thank you, Linda. Ms. Jessica Evans. Chair recognizes Mrs. Evans. Hi, thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak. I actually am just here to ask you right now whether you have the capacity to increase the meeting capacity because I'm extraordinarily upset and offended that the RTC doesn't have the capacity to allow everybody who wants to participate in this public hearing. This is really bad. It's very distressing. People want to participate. This is a democracy. This is supposed to be an open hearing. And, you know, Michael spoke to this issue and no one answered it. No one addressed it. And so I'm just calling back to say, please can someone address this issue of the fact that there are many people who want to participate, who want their voices to be heard, who are locked out of the meeting because the RTC hasn't created the infrastructure to allow people to be able to participate. So, you know, I'm the big fan of you guys and of your work. And I know everyone is trying to do the best they can. And these are difficult circumstances. But the pandemic has been going on for a long time. And, you know, I feel like it's time for, you know, us to kind of step it up and really let people participate. It's really hard for people to carve time out of their day and get the technology together and figure out how to do this and figure out how to come. And then to be turned away is just, it's just really a bad, it's a bad way to run a public meeting. So I apologize for bringing the negativity. But I just need, I want you guys to address this. Thank you. Thank you, Mrs. Evans. You know, with technology nowadays, it's hard to really tell how many folks are going to be attending your meeting since we usually don't have a place to meet. And we would be able to physically see people and the amount of people that would be attending at that time. And due to technology, once you set your meeting up, I think it's difficult to midstream to expand it without creating more havoc. So I apologize to all those that haven't been able to connect with us. We will be looking it into the future and other meetings on that issue. But I think currently right now we have to just proceed what we have and continue the meeting. So we apologize for that, not being able to foresee. And it's difficult, like I said, to say how many folks are going to be actually attending a Zoom meeting. Okay, thank you. Pat, D-Roe. This is my first time coming to your meeting. And I hate to add on here, but I just know so many people have planned so hard and so long to attend this meeting. And I'm going to have to get off so people that know more than I can speak. But there's really no excuse. I have to look at it as something that was a decision. It was a decision to only allow 100 people in. And I'm wondering if your tech isn't good enough to right now increase the amount of people. Because this really is anti-democracy. And this is such an important county decision. I just don't see any excuse. Can you please open it to 500 now? Take the time during the meeting to make this a democratic meeting. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Rowe. Commissioner Rutkin. I just want to reinforce what our chair said. The only way we could, I know enough about Zoom technology to tell you that the only way you could expand this meeting would have to come up with a new link. And everybody on this call would be dumped off of it. We'd have to find a way to get everybody's emails. It's simply impossible. And there was not a plan. Nobody was trying to restrict access. And we simply had no idea that there were going to be this, see our capacity in this way. We've had large crowds, but it hadn't been above this capacity. So I didn't respond when the issue was raised earlier because I thought it was obvious we would do our best to see that it didn't happen again and didn't require a response. But it apparently does. I'm sure we will be finding a way to make our next meeting a larger one that people can attend. But there's no way to change it now without making it way worse than it is right now. Kick off the people that have found their way onto our call. Anyway, thank you. Yusenia, you had a comment? Yeah, Commissioner Gonzalez. So we have been working on allowing more capacity. So you may have noticed that our panelist view is more crowded. And so we have been trying to open spots as we go along. So currently I see only 96 people. So if you're out there or you know someone, we do have a few spots. So we have been working on the background to try and allow more folks in. Thank you. So we're going to continue on with the public comments on items that are not on the agenda. Is there any other one? I do not see any other hands up. Okay, with that, I'll give it a second. I'm going to go ahead and close the public comments. And we're going to go ahead and move on to the consent agenda. items. Do we have a motion or questions or anything? We'll wait to see if the public want to pull things, but I'm prepared to offer a general motion, which I'll amend if we have people who want to pull things. Let me know when you want. We have a motion to a second. I heard a second, but I didn't. I got to remember, I got to start learning voices. I'm going to go and take this out to the public. Now anybody in the public, they'd like to request. An item be pulled or make a comment? I do not see any hands up as of yet. No. No hands up. Okay. So we have a motion. We have a second commissioners. Is there anybody that wanted to make a comment or anybody want to pull an item from the consent agenda? I just like to make a comment on item number nine, the flap grant. I want to thank Steph for pursuing this. It's actually very exciting project for the trail on the North Coast that if it's approved, we'll provide the funding from the federal government, most of the funding from the federal government to go from Laguna Creek to all the way to Davenport and would complete the trail from Wilder to Davenport. It, you know, we're hoping that it will be possible to accelerate the timing of it. And the overall plan that Steph is taking to the Coastal Commission in the near future for approval. So I think Steph deserves thanks for, you know, working on putting this grant together and working with the federal agencies and state agencies to get support for it. Thank you, commissioner. I just want to clarify some as commissioner Eduardo Montesino is still with us or is his alternate commissioner, little harsh. Commissioner Montesino is here. Okay, that's because I lost him on my screens. So can we have, is there any other fellow commissioner that want to pull a comment on an item? I do have a member of the public who just raised their hand. We're already in the process. I apologize. Can we have roll call please? Commissioner Bertrand. I agree. Commissioner Brown. Hi. Commissioner Johnson. Hi. Commissioner Montesino. Hi. Commissioner Caput. Hi. Commissioner Schifrin. Hi. Can we back up? Yeah, I'm sorry, it's Felipe. Are you coming in for commissioner Caput? You step in now. Officially. Yes. Okay. All right. So then commission alternate Hernandez. Hi. Commissioner Schifrin. Hi. Commission alternate Mulhern. Hi. Commissioner Koenig. Hi. Commissioner McPherson. Hi. Commissioner Peterson. Hi. Commissioner Gonzalez. Hi. And commissioner Rockett. Hi. Thank you for that. And we're going to go ahead and move on to item now. We got to jump. Let me try my page here. You're up to 23. I think 18. Sorry, we went out of order here. Item 18 correct? Correct. We're on item 18. Commissioners report. I like to start out really quick and briefly. You know, as a chair, it's been an experience chairing these meetings. But also part of my responsibility involves and try to help guide the decision making process on this. And you know, on our last meeting in April 6th, we came into an impulse. Basically, we didn't do anything. We didn't approve nor disapprove because it was a split vote on that decision of the business plan and the EIR and the directing staff to seek grant funding. You know, it's important to start looking at these as they come to us. And I'm taking this in the sense of our rail and our trail process. You know, I'm a true believer. If it's affordable to make a trail, we should follow through with that. If it's not affordable to make a trail, we should start looking at how we're going to fund our funding to our surface roads, improve that for our people that are commuting already on bikes on surface roads. I think it's important versus putting millions of dollars into a trail system that will be limited use for folks. Also, I'd like to try to clarify a little bit on, you know, there's been a lot of saying that there's going to be extra tax on the rail. And the opponents will sometimes forget to say that there's going to be also a tax, a required tax if there's only a trail. And that'll also be a regressive tax because the most needy will be paying for something they really won't be utilizing. So it works both ways to the tax issue. So I just wanted to make sure I put that out there that, you know, either which way, and as Andy said, a lot of this gets subsidized and it's for the best of the community overall and how we proceed as a commission. Because we have to think about it as regional. We're supporting everybody. I support folks from Davenport to Watsonville. I think that's our responsibility to ensure that we're looking at overall needs for our community in transportation. So with that said, I'll leave that there. And if any commissioner wishes and desires to bring that, I've been back to the agenda. Since it was a split vote 6-6 and there's no one in favor, any commissioner has that right to make a motion. Um, commission. Commissioner Montesino. With that, that's a perfect sideway for me to make a motion to direct staff to agenda is the business plan EIR and direct staff to seek the federal and state funding to complete the preliminary engineering environmental document for the rail passenger rail. Hopefully I can get a second. Mr. Chair, I'll wait for the second. But maybe I won't if you call me. I'll see you. Commissioner Ruckin. I would make a really strong suggestion that we not bring that item back until somebody on this commission is prepared to change their vote on either side one way or the other. I don't see the point of bringing back an item in which we'll hear two hours of testimony from the public, each in their own mind supporting what they think is the obvious solution to what ought to happen. And then we once again have a tie vote when we're done. So unless you're prepared, I don't believe you are prepared to move to the other side on this question. I don't think it's productive to have this on our agenda as a vote on to change the outcome. That's my thoughts. You obviously you have a legal right to put it on the agenda for a vote, but I'm urging you not do that because I don't believe it's productive. Chair recognizes alternate out. Commissioner Andy different. Yeah, I have a procedural concern here. In fact, the item is on the agenda. It's item number 25. While it's supposedly an information item, anybody can make a motion during that item to do whatever they want. And I think Commissioner Montesino's motion is more appropriate during that item than during commissioner reports because usually commissioner reports are just commissioners telling us what they think about something if they feel the need or reporting on the conference they've gone to. But and particularly since this item is on the agenda, we're going to get there. We're going to hear from all sorts of people. I'd rather just hear from them once at that item rather than have to hear from them now in response to Commissioner Montesino's motion and then hear from them again when we get to item number 25. So I would just request Commissioner Montesino to withdraw his motion at this time and consider when we get to item number 25, we can have that conversation. And it will be, you know, that we'll hear from the public and then the commission can decide if it wants to do anything or if it doesn't want to do anything. It seems to me that's the appropriate time to do it. Thank you. Hi. Commissioner McPherson. I agree with Rotkin and Schiffer. I will pull my motion and wait for the appropriate time then. Can I also raise a question? Go ahead, Mr. Commissioner Rotkin. I believe any of the staff will correct me if I'm wrong. People cannot make any motion. They might like when we get to item 25, they could make a procedural motion. For example, the one that Eduardo was considering, that's legal and appropriate if the commission supports it, but it's listed as an information item which suggests that we are not legally allowed under the Brown Act to make an actual substantive motion on that item because the public has not been informed. We're having a discussion that would lead to an actual action by the commission, other than, again, to schedule a future meeting or ask staff for information and so forth. Am I not correct about that? I'm asking our legal staff. And Mr. Chair, First and Commissioner, that is correct. Item 25 is an informational item. Commissioner Montesino's motion, which he's now withdrawn, was only direction for staff to place an item on the agenda. The Brown Act does allow the commission to direct that an item be placed on the agenda, but you cannot substantively decide the issue as part of item 25 today. Thank you. I have a problem with that. I'm looking at the agenda and it says report regarding grant requirements, compliance, and context of the tie vote by the commission in relations to the transit corridor, turn to analysis and rail network integration study, business plan for electric passenger rail and the Santa Cruz line. That doesn't say it's for information only and we can't vote on it. And I really, and certainly the hundreds of people who have contacted us, asking us either to deny the business plan or to move forward with the business plan, we're not thinking that the commission couldn't act on it. They're asking us to act on it. So to say that somehow with that introduction isn't providing the public with the understanding that the commission may be voting on this, doesn't make any sense to me. Councilor Uriwana. Yeah, now the title speaks to the report regarding the grant requirement, compliance in the context of the tie votes and the staff report itself very specifically says that staff has consulted with Caltrans as identified that the grant requirements have already been satisfied by the adoption of the TCA and recommends the item as essentially a receipt and file item as an informational item. It doesn't fully advise the public that the commission would be taking a substantive motion on whether or not to adopt the business plan. That issue was voted a few times at the last meeting. And then there was a motion to continue the item and to report back on the issues that were raised by the commission. It wasn't direction to reset the vote on the business plan at the last meeting. Thank you. Commissioner Alternate Felipe Hernandez. So my question is, so we are going to have to hear this item twice and the comments twice again, right? If, well, that depends on whether the commission directs, the commission has the right to direct that the business plan be placed back on the agenda for further consideration by the commission. That can happen by majority vote of the commission. And so if the commission does decide, receives that motion and decides to do that, and there is the potential that you will have people speak to the issue today as well as speak to the issue at a subsequent meeting, if that plays out that way. If the desire of the commission, and I want to be very clear, I'm just speaking about an option. If the commission approves a motion to place actual consideration of business plan back on the agenda, then the commission could consider that, frankly, at the beginning of your discussion of item 25 today and then decide whether or not you would want to have that agendized for the commission to take action at a subsequent meeting. Can you answer your question? So do we want to take this motion to item 25? Let me suggest we at least finish the discussion on this on item 25 and not resolve it here. Yeah, no, item 25 is still going to be spoken on. So you rescinded your motion. So is there any other... So I have a question. So am I going to be able to make the motion on 25? Yes, you can. It's a procedural motion and it's legal. You can make it as you made it. Yours was a procedural motion to direct staff to place an item on the agenda. That would be an appropriate motion. I was on the way for 25. Thank you. Is there any other commissioner reports? Seeing none, go ahead. We're going to move on to item 19, the director's report. And I'm told he has like a 30-second report. I'll try to keep it as short as I can. Thank you, Chair Gonzales and commissioners. I have three short reports on funding and two informational items on our traffic man programs. There's been various discussions using the state budget surplus for transportation. California is expecting a roughly $15 billion budget surplus next fiscal year, which starts July 1st. The surplus is primarily the result of income taxes on capital gains from the soaring stock market. Many transportation groups are pushing the state to make significant portion of funds available for one-time transportation infrastructure investments. The California Transportation Commission has asked the governor and legislature to make the active transportation program an increase by $2 billion in order to fund projects that were not able to be funded in cycle five of the ATP. The CCC was able to fund less than 20% of the requests they received for ATP funds earlier this year. The statewide coalition has also submitted a request to boost funding for SB1 competitive grant programs, the state transportation improvement program, electric vehicle infrastructure, sustainable community strategy implementation, and other programs. Governor Newsom is scheduled to release the May revised budget proposal on May 14th with the legislature expected to approve a new budget in June. RTC staff will be monitoring the budget for any additional funding directed to transportation programs. Regarding federal infrastructure proposals, President Biden has proposed a $2.3 trillion American jobs plan, including $621 billion for transportation, roads, bridges, public transit, rail, ports, waterways, airports, and electric vehicles. In response, GOP senators countered with a $568 billion infrastructure plan that includes spending on roads, airport transit, water resources, and a broadband internet over five years and very specifically provides a narrower definition of infrastructure than President Biden's proposal. The GOP proposal calls for collecting user fees for electric vehicles and repurposing unused federal funding. The President's proposal will make changes to the 2017 tax law to increase corporate income taxes to 28% to pay for his plan. Negotiations may also be combined with discussions around the multi-year federal transportation reauthorization, which House and Senate committees are currently drafting. Regarding COVID relief funding for transportation, as previously reported, the Federal Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2021, approved by Congress at the end of 2020 included $14 billion for transit projects nationwide with approximately $13.5 million to Santa Cruz Metro and $911.8 million to California for surface transportation purposes, and that's $10 billion nationwide. For the surface transportation funds, the CTC has decided to distribute 60% to state programs that's the shop and the ITIP and 40% to regional programs, also STIP and a newer program. The CTC is expected to approve guidelines for these COVID relief funds at its May 12th, 2021 meeting. RTC will be responsible for selecting projects to receive approximately $1.3 million available through a mid-cycle state transportation improvement program and $1.26 million through a new program. State will be meeting with the ITAC this month to discuss state and federally defined eligible uses and options for programming these funds. GO! Santa Cruz County. In an effort to serve commuters countywide, the RTC is expanding the city of Santa Cruz's GO! Santa Cruz program to a countywide program. This new program will be titled GO! Santa Cruz County. GO! Santa Cruz County rewards local commuters with incentives to rethink their ride and choose a more sustainable commute. The program is for all communities in Santa Cruz County from Watsonville to the south to San Lorenzo Valley in the north and everywhere in between. GO! Santa Cruz County is a key part of RTC's ongoing effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and play an active role in addressing climate change. The program is partially funded by voter approved measure D, which provides a balanced vision to improve, operate, and maintain Santa Cruz County's transportation network. GO! Santa Cruz County features an online commute management tool that is available to all employees who live or work in Santa Cruz County community. Members can create a commuter profile by visiting the RTC website and joining the GO! Santa Cruz County network. This program is free to participate in. May is bike month. May is Santa Cruz bike month, which encourages biking as a form of transportation for everyone, regardless of whether someone is new to biking or rides every day. Ecology Action has a Santa Cruz bike challenge running all month long with rate prizes to local bike shops, a $1,000 individual prize, and a special $2,000 ground prize for a local employer. They also have some awesome virtual and social distance events throughout May. Visit the Ecology Action website to see a list of events and to register for challenges, events, and prizes. That concludes my report. Thank you, Executive Director Guy Preston. Is there any questions from the commissioners to the Executive Director? Commissioner Patrick Malfer. Thank you, Chair. I just quickly, I was wondering if you might have more information on the RFP we're releasing for the fence on the Rio del Mar train trestle. I thought we were releasing it sometime in the spring and I didn't know whether that had gone out or when we might maybe expect a new timeline for the project. I know we've been waiting on an encroachment permit from Caltrans. Apparently there's been some logistical issues within Caltrans in getting this permit issued, but that's the only thing we need to put that contract out to bid. Sarah Christensen is on the line and may have more information. I think we were thinking about putting it out at risk because it's been so long trying to get this permit from Caltrans. Commissioner Randy Johnson. Thank you, Chair. So the program of trying to induce people to travel and commute in different modes I think is an important one. I did want to bring up a name from the past who had a program called Commute Solutions. His name was Paul McGrath. He had a program that was efficacious and very positive until it was kind of extracted from him by the RTC. And then I have to say that there was something of a failure when they tried to replicate what he had been doing in a private way. So just a reminder that even though the best of intentions not always the easiest thing to do when you're trying to change people's behavior. Thank you. Thank you, Commissioner. Is there any other fellow commissioners? Do you have any questions for the Executive Director? There's a report? No. I'm going to go ahead and now take it out to the public for public comments on the Executive Director's Report. If you have any questions in regards to his report you can email him to the RTC and I'm sure that the Executive Director will respond to you. Yeah. Michael Wolk? Chair recognizes Michael Wolk. He has two minutes. Michael, you there? Unmute yourself. This wasn't for Item 25, was it? No. No. I had my hand raised for the wrong one, sorry. Okay. Ms. Jessica Evans? Ms. Evans, do you have any comments? Hi. Hi, Commissioner. Thank you for the opportunity to speak. Mr. Preston, thank you so much for bringing this. Really, actually, kind of wonderful news. I guess there is a little bit of a silver lining to the pandemic. It's been an incredibly difficult year for me and for many people in the community and it's nice to know that we do have the opportunity to create a more just and equitable transportation infrastructure for our county with some funds. I mean, it's been tough to see Metro starving and having Metro's funds get reduced and reduced and reduced over the years to the point where our public transportation system doesn't really serve the needs of the people in Santa Cruz County. So let's try to get shovel ready and take advantage of some of these funding opportunities to expand our public transportation infrastructure. Thank you so much. That's all I have to say. Thank you, Ms. Evans. Is there any other one for the public that'd like to comment on the Executive Director's Report? I do not see any other hands up. Thank you, Mr. Guy, Preston, for that report. We're going to go ahead and move on now to Item 20, Caltrans Report. And I know Scott- Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Mr. Chair, members of the board. Scott Eads here again with Caltrans. I just have a couple items. One is I just wanted to announce that we're excited that we now have Highway 1 open all the way between Monterey and the city of San Luis Obispo and points beyond. So as most of you are probably aware, we had a major washout that occurred in January at Rat Creek. Since that time, we worked seven days a week with much help from contractors. And then on April 23rd, we were able to open it up two months ahead of schedule. The roadway is open now. There is work that's continuing at that location, a permanent culverts being put in still, as well as some other work on the side of the road. So there will be some closures here and there with one-way traffic control, but the roadway is open. It was a big effort and the weather cooperated and we're happy to have that happen now. And then the second thing that I wanted to highlight is just some FHWA news, Federal Highway Administration, that based on data from 2019, the work zone fatalities are the highest since 2006 in 2019. 842 people died on highway-related work zone crashes compared to 757 the year before. That's an 11.2% increase. And oftentimes what we're seeing is that these are related to distracted driving. Folks that are looking at their phone or really not paying attention to the road are not slowing down in these work zones. So these are our workers and fellow humans that are out there trying to get these jobs done. So just an appeal to everyone watching this to really pay attention when you're in work zones and slow down. That concludes my report. Happy to take any questions. Thank you, Scott. Is there any questions from the commissioners to Kelton's representative? Dean, I just want to make a quick comment. You know, I retired from the construction trade and I experienced a work on the highways and the roadways and it's very dangerous with distracted drivers. I was very close to a few times where vehicles would hit me as I was flagging or we were putting closing down parts of the highways where folks were... I literally had the cone just taken away from my hand as I was placing it because the car just wanted to go by before the closure was done. So we need to look out for our fellow man all they're trying to do is earn a living for their family. So when you're driving out there, pay attention, slow down for the cones. As they say, it saves lives. Thank you. So with that, we're going to go ahead and move on to item... We have a member of the public commissioner. I'm sorry, folks. Any... But if it's from the public, they'd like to make a comment on the Caltrans report. Brian Peoples. Hi, this is Brian from Trail Now. Scott, thank you for raising that flag again about the dangers associated with our Caltran workers. I personally will promote that more awareness through our Trail Now effort. I absolutely want to raise that. So thank you for reminding us of that. And it's terrible that that stat has gone up. I'm hoping with the autonomous cars, and I know with more autonomous vehicles that the roads will become safer. I often will tell people, one day driving a motorcycle, it's going to be a lot safer because the likelihood of getting killed on the motorcycle are going to be a lot less. Having said that, there was a couple of months ago at a meeting here, you talked about reaching out to the public about the Caltrans outreach on long-term planning. And we promoted that. But there is a specific area that I'm hoping we could get an answer on or get some driving towards. We're really advocating for a protected pedestrian and bike lane between Soquel Drive and Highway 1. When you widen Highway 1 to Freedom Boulevard, if we could get a protected Soquel bike lane between Soquel Drive and Highway 1 from Freedom Boulevard, all the way to Aptos Village. I'm hopeful we're hopeful that that can be part of the long-term plan that would go directly to Aptos Junior High. We go to Aptos High School. And since you're widening the highway, we think that that is a great opportunity for our community to have a protected bike lane through the heart of our community. So again, I appreciate you pointing out the dangers associated with Caltrans that we will promote it. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Riegelz. Is there anybody else in the public that would like to comment on the Caltrans report? I do not see any other hands, Commissioner Gonzalez. Thank you, Eugenia. I'll wait a second. Okay, we're going to go ahead and move on to Item 23 and then it's received update on Santa Cruz Metropolitan Transit District Metro Projects. Rachel or John Urgo? I think I can just jump in. So good morning, commissioners. John Urgo, Planning and Development Director, Santa Cruz Metro. There's a bit of construction noise outside my office. I apologize for that. But I'm happy to be here to provide an update on Metro's RTC funded operating at Capital Assistance Projects. Metro, of course, operates and maintains accounting by bus system. And in the coming fiscal year, we plan to use TDA and state transit assistance funding to support our fixed through public transit operations, which required 94 vehicles and serve 24 routes throughout Santa Cruz County. And our Paracruz operations, which of course is Metro's complimentary paratransit service operated on 32 accessible vans on demand for persons who just due to disability cannot access the fixed route system. Metro's RTC funded operating assistance projects provide $10.8 million for fixed route public transit and ADA complimentary paratransit operations. Measure D specifically provides revenues for operating assistance for transit and paratransit service for seniors and people with disabilities. And specific to the coming fiscal year, Metro plans to use FY21 low carbon transit operations program or LC topic expenditures for a zero emission Watsonville circulator operating projects. This project will deploy new battery electric buses on a new circulator route in downtown Watsonville that will start in the fall, this fall, 2021. We're projecting 3.8 million fixed route passenger trips in FY22 and 62,000 Paracruz trips. This is about 25% below pre-COVID levels. So below basically the FY 2019-2020 year, or I should say FY 2019. Currently ridership remains about 80% below pre-COVID levels. But as the county progresses through its tiers of reopening and with UCSC students planning to return in greater numbers this fall, we expect ridership also across our system to return in greater numbers. And in support of that, the operating systems we received has enabled us to restore service essentially fully to pre-COVID levels with the exception of our express commuter routes Highway 17 and the 91X. And we're doing this not because ridership is there, but so that when riders are ready to return the services there. The operating assistance has also enabled us to implement reduced and free fare programs and free rides for vaccine appointments, not for COVID-19 vaccines. And this summer, we're actually, besides returning to pre-COVID levels, we're going to be piloting some service or service that's beyond pre-COVID. So we're piloting a new route on the west side that will connect Mission to downtown Santa Cruz and UCSC. And we're also going to be extending evening and weekend service throughout the San Lorenzo Valley, LIVO, Capitola, and Aptos. On the capital side, MetrosRTC-funded capital projects include the zero-emission buses that will supply the service on the Watsonville circulator. So we now have four zero-emission electric buses on the property. These were funded through LCTOP and a CTC FY18 local partnership program funding. Also on the capital side, we've been able to refurbish four buses and replace three para-cruise vans. And a major project that will be closing this coming year is our automatic vehicle locator system, which will not only provide better running and schedule time so that we can actually tune our schedules to traffic conditions, but will also enable customers to have real-time transit information so that they can know when the buses will actually be arriving based on current traffic conditions. To wrap up, I'll highlight some other major initiatives coming this year. So we're working closely with City of Santa Cruz staff on an application for affordable housing and sustainable communities grant funding for Pacific Station joint redevelopment projects. We're also progressing on our new para-cruise facility. We recently launched a new service called Cruise On Demand, which takes advantage of more capacity that we currently have within our para-cruise operations due to lower ridership and basically allows the general public to book on-demand trips anywhere within the county through our para-cruise service. These are same-day trips. We book all para-cruise trips, prioritize all para-cruise trips booking first, and then on the day of travel, it's open up to the general public for on-demand trips. We limit the distance to three miles. These are meant for shorter neighborhood trips or to connect into the fixed route system for longer journeys, but the service launched about two weeks ago. And lastly, we have our mobile fare payment pilot. I'll say our original idea for this was just to pilot it on Highway 17, but due to COVID and concerns about contactless or moving towards contactless payment, we've opened this up county-wide on any route, local Highway 17, all service for customers to use a mobile device. So that concludes my update. I'd be happy to take any questions from the question, and thanks again for allowing us to present. Thank you, John. Is there any questions from the commissioners? Our Metro representative, Commissioner Alternate Patrick Mulher. Thank you, Mr. Ergo. Could you briefly describe, please, the extent of the project you're applying for funding for a study for for bus rapid transit, $350,000 to the state? I was just curious what the scope or if you had any idea of what that project might look like. Sure. So in the last cycle, we applied for a CalTrans planning grant for a bus speed and reliability study on what we call the SoCal corridor, but basically it was meant to analyze all of our service that connects Santa Cruz and Watsonville. And the idea was to, you know, seeing that, seeing the investment that's coming on Highway 1 and SoCal to really analyze bus speed and reliability on the local streets and roads that are connecting into Highway 1 and into SoCal. And whether it's improved bus stops to pull on bus rapid transit, the idea was to study what makes sense for the corridor in terms of improving bus speed and reliability between Watsonville and Santa Cruz. So we don't know yet the outcome of that. I think we'll know in the fall whether that study will progress, but we're hopeful that it will. Okay. Thank you. It seems like a small amount of money. So hopefully you get it. Good luck. That's a plan exciting. Thanks. Chair recognizes Commissioner Mike. So I just wanted to say two things. First, that people should recognize that the pilot project on this on demand service that John described. And thank you, John, for your report is limited in time in the sense that it's only happening because we have excess capacity on our paratransit vans while our ridership is down because of COVID. We don't have a funding source to continue that that when people actually come back and start using the paratransit service. So I don't want people to have unreasonable expectations that somehow we're going to have on demand service into the future unless we'd love to have it, unless we can get a new source of funding to continue that program. I also want to just highlight that in the middle of the COVID crisis and all the other crises this county has faced, the transit district has not just been sitting there or sort of sliding back or having problems. We've really introducing a lot of new programs. It's going to be so great to be able to look at a phone and know when the next bus is coming and not sort of wonder, did I miss it? I got here right on time, but the buses in here that we don't, our buses are never supposed to leave before the scheduled departure time. But people are nervous about that. They don't know how far the buses weigh, how long are they going to have to wait, and now you'll be able to actually tell by looking at your phone exactly when the next bus will arrive at your bus stop. I think it's going to really be helpful. And I also want to end by just saying, letting the public know that the metro buses are really safe to ride at this point. We have spent a fair amount of money, again, some of this coming from the federal government to help with the COVID expenses, but to have plastic shields between each of the seats on the buses. We're riding with less than full capacity on the buses so that there's space between people. People ride, the drivers and the riders are all wearing masks on the buses. We do fogging every night on every bus to disinfect them. We disinfect every bus that pulls into the metro stations in Watsonville or Santa Cruz. And so there's a lot of work being done to make sure that if you get on a metro bus, you're going to be safe and you're not going to catch COVID from riding on our buses. And I think the public should be aware of that. Thanks for your report, John. Thank you. Is there any other fellow commissioner? Commissioner Eduardo Mozzino. Yeah, thanks for the report, Mr. Errol. And I do want to piggyback on what Commissioner Rockin said, you know, you're doing a very good job in trying to protect the not only employees but the public for during this pandemic. And I think they've done their best here to just what we're dealing with. But also where I had a question about, you know, attractability. How do we get back on tractors? And you pointed out that we're down in passengers, how are we, aside from what you said, putting more services or keeping the services back? Are we, you know, thinking about putting up on buses? Are we, you know, just looking towards the future? If you're going to be able to track where your bus is at, are you going to be able to, you know, log into, you know, the Wi-Fi component? Thanks for the question, Commissioner Mozzino. So, yeah, the Wi-Fi bus project is still in progress. I don't have a particular update on that, but I know our IT department is still working on that project and it's in process. You know, the main thing that we're doing is to make sure the service is out there. And so even though it perhaps hasn't quite made sense throughout this pandemic to be providing as much service as we've had, it's been important for the people in our community that still rely on it, that it be out there, and that it be there when riders return. And so we've been working to make sure that, number one, that the service is out there and like I mentioned this summer, that there's some additional service out there to try to get more people riding transit. And we're being strategic. So, Commissioner Rockin mentioned the cruise on demand project is temporary. It's going to last as long as we have that capacity within our system. But it was a strategic way to try to get more people into our on demand para-cruise vehicles that are already out there and to the fixed route system. And then access. So, the mobile fare payment project makes it really easy for anyone that has access to a smartphone to board any of our buses. And we have a new marketing person on board that came on late last year that has been really attuned to upgrading our, the presentation of Metro in the community. So our advertisements, our website, our brochures, our customer outreach has been improving as well. Thank you. Thank you, Commissioner McPherson. Yeah, I'd just like to reiterate some of the comments by Commissioner Rockin, who was also on the Metro board. Just thank you for the Metro staff, the drivers and all who really made a lot of adjustments and improvements. And our ridership is down 80% understandably under the circumstances. But I think what they've done and to implement some of these new programs to try to get the ridership back as soon as possible is worth a lot of applause. And I really think that Metro should be commended for what it's doing under some of these trying circumstances that we're facing. Thank you, Commissioner. Is there any other fellow Commissioner that has any questions or comments? Seeing none. Thank you, John, for the report. Metro is doing a lot. And moving forward and trying to get back ridership. And they're doing a good job. The operators and staff are also doing a commendable job. So I thank you for your service. Well, I'm going to take this out to the public for any public comments. If you have any questions, I'm sure John, you take them. You can send them these email or Metro email, and they will respond to you. Veronica Elsie and then Brian Peoples. Chair recognizes Veronica Elsie. Thank you. I hope that unmute work this time. Good. I just want to say first off that, you know, thank you to Metro. I realize this has really been a tough year and they've done an awful lot to handle it and adjust. And the main reason that I haven't really ridden the buses during COVID is combined with the fact that the buses don't come as often and that all the restrooms are closed. And I would just like to say there was a great discussion at the Metro board meeting about it, but the public didn't participate. But I just really want to urge Metro that if you want writers to come back, especially from these longer rides, if you're on the 17 and then you transfer to the 71, please open your restrooms. It's a basic human need. Thank you so much. Thank you, Veronica. We heard you. Is there any Brian's Peoples? Chair recognizes Brian's Peoples. Hi, it's Brian from Trail Now. Absolutely support Metro and support Wi-Fi on Metro. You know, not a lot of people know this, but you know, the Google buses that go over to the valley, at least prior to time, when an employee gets on a Google bus, they begin work. That is their office. So can you imagine a Watsonville resident getting on a Metro bus and they get start getting paid on the bus? That's the transition we need to get to is people need to start to realize when I get on that bus, I'm going to start getting paid. And we need to start communicating that to the employers. And everybody says, well, not everybody does IT work. Well, no, everybody does do emails. Everybody does do work on the computer related to their job. And so I think it would be important for Metro to start communicating that to our local businesses to say, hey, we have Wi-Fi on Metro. Hey, if you have an employee riding on it, hey, they should be getting paid for that time. So rather than considered traffic, they're riding on the bus on Highway 1 and it's their office, it's their virtual office. And that's where you need to transition to is start thinking about Metro as not just a form of transportation, but as a living space where we live and we operate and we work. So absolutely, let's get Metro Wi-Fi on there. And if you don't have the money, let's go out to the private sector and find it. I'd be more than willing to help promote that to get Wi-Fi on those buses. We need to get Wi-Fi on all of the buses. Thanks again for your time. Thank you, Mr. Peeples. Excuse me. Is there anyone else from the public that would like to make comments on the Metro report? I do not see any other hands up, Commissioner Gonzales. Okay, I'll wait just for a second. With that, we're going to go ahead and close that item. Thank you for that report. And we're going to move on to item 24, receive update on Capitola projects. Rachel? Good morning, commissioners. Before you today is a presentation from City of Capitola engineer, Kailash Mazumdar. And I'll hand it over to him. All right. Thank you, Rachel. And Yasinia, is the slides that I sent over, are those available to me? Let me just pull those up real quick here. Oh, there you go. Perfect. And then will I just ask to advance slides or do I have control? Ian, can he cap control or do you want to advance them? It's pretty simple. I can just say next slide if that's easy. Okay, that would be great. Okay, perfect. Thank you. Well, thank you. Thank you, commissioners and Chair Gonzales for the opportunity to speak to you guys today. I think we had a gap in the years from reporting. So we have a few extra projects that didn't get reported to you last year. So I'll start with the next slide. And this is a recap of what we're going to go through today. So first we'll run through the completed projects that have been done through coordination with the RTC, both through technical input from the E&D TAC and other groups as well as funding. And then we'll go through the future projects that we have planned. Next slide, please. So the first project I wanted to highlight was our 2018 slurry seal project that was funded through Measure D that allowed us to address 12 city streets and was completed in the fall of 2018. Next slide, please. Next project we wanted to have you look at was our 38th Avenue sidewalk project. This was an important project for us because it allowed a continuation of sidewalk on the west side, the 38th Avenue that connected to the mall. There was a gap in the sidewalk there that didn't allow pedestrians to complete that walking path. So that was an important gap that we were able to fulfill and did that with the coordination with RTC and funding through the RSTPX exchange. And we can move on to the next slide. Here we have the Park Avenue sidewalks project. This was a long-term project that the city has had on the books for quite a long time. It took us, we did need to bank some of our funding. So we used a few years of Measure D SB1 and then also made use of our TDA funds through the RTC to complete this project. This was another project similar to the 38th Avenue where there was no pedestrian access or safe path of travel along Park Avenue that connects down to the village and also connects to New Brighton Middle School and then the community of Cliffwood Heights. So this was an important project for the city. It was very, we were happy to have it completed and it's been in great use since then. So we're happy to get this one finished. We can move on to the next slide. This was also a project we finished last year. It was our first full-depth reclamation project where we had to address one of our poor city streets as far as the pavement index went. And as well, we had a gap in sidewalk on the north side of Bromer Street that prevented pedestrians from being able to travel east and west along this route. So we completed that project and enhanced the bike lane safety and had the opportunity to work with the Bicycle Technical Advisory Committee and they provided some useful input for us on final design for this project. So that was a great partnership with RTC to get this job completed. And we can move on to the next slide. Here we have a project recently completed just this spring. This was a short section of a new sidewalk for the city of Capitola updating the curb and gutter and curb ramps and it kind of adds to our city streetscape in the village. Then we can move on to the next slide. Now we're moving on to the projects that are in design or for future use, right? The first project we wanted to highlight is our plans for a new pavement management project that we have in design currently. This project will be utilizing both SB1 and Measure D funding as well as our TIP funding through the RTC. We're currently reviewing the streets that are going to be addressed with this and we'll hopefully have a nice project coming out in the near future. And next slide, please. This is a pretty exciting project that I'm happy that we're getting underway with. So this is the 31st Avenue Adaptive System. I'm sorry the slides turned sideways. I wanted to be able to show you the extent of the whole project. So what we're planning to move forward with this year is the blue section, which is signalizing all the signals on the intersections from 41st and Bromer up to Clare Street. Those are all the city controlled intersections that we have funding through Monterey Bay Air Resource District to complete. The green sections on the right or the north are actually what the county is going forward with. The county is actually out to bid on that project right now and we'll be going out to bid on the blue intersections in the next month or two. And then the gap that we're really helping to get completed are the three Caltrans controlled intersections. We've had a little bit of a challenge getting approval with the Caltrans encroachment permit to install the infrastructure on their signals. We've made some good progress, but we're hopeful that in the next handful of months we can get buy-in from Caltrans and then that would ultimately allow both our adaptive system and the county's adaptive system to meet together and create much more efficiency for ridership and decreased wait times on 41st Avenue that many of you know is our largest street, widest street in the county and gets fairly congested in both morning and afternoon peak travel times. And we can move to the next slide. Here we have the Bay Avenue, Bay and Capital Avenue under grounding and roundabout project. Currently we're working with PG&E to utilize our Rule 20A funding to underground all the utilities in that intersection. And then after completion of that under grounding effort which we're currently out to bid now, we will then move into designing and finalizing a roundabout for this intersection that would then kind of start to enhance our upper village area of Capitola. And we can go to the next slide. Another project that we've had on the books for a little while that we're looking forward to moving forward with right now is the Clair Street traffic calming project. We're currently developing our public workshops so that we can form similar to what we're doing here today with RTC to reach out to our community and seek input. We've already had a cursory involvement with RTC with the ND attack weighing in on some of the components that we're looking at for enhanced pedestrian safety and are reviewing the different options that we may have that could help us kind of decrease traffic speeds but also increase the opportunity for pedestrians to cross Clairs because right now there are only places to cross Clair Street at the intersection of 41st and Worf and with the completion of our new library at the corner of Worf and Clairs, we envision seeing a lot more use of this area by the pedestrians and so we're really trying to enhance this area to make it safer and easier for everybody to utilize. Next slide please. And this is the last project I wanted to highlight. This is part of the Monterey Bay Scenic Trail Network where the city of Capitola is planning to do a pedestrian trail that feeds to our upper village parking lot which is one of the fairly large parking lot that then would allow visitors to both access the village and the coastline here in Capitola but also then also be able to tie into Monterey Bay Trail that runs east and west here along Park Avenue and so that's our last project that I wanted to show to you guys and with that we can move to the next slide. And I just want to take this opportunity to thank the RTC again being a small jurisdiction here in Capitola it's very helpful for us to have the opportunity to work with the staff at the RTC as kind of an extension of staff it makes us feel like we have more resources available to us and we can seek a lot of input by working with RTC and our partner jurisdictions to hear about just approaches that they're taking on projects or learning about different grant funding opportunities and things of that nature that they really do contribute to our ability to provide more infrastructure to our community so I wanted to thank the RTC for that. Without that, that concludes my report today. Thank you for that report. Is there any questions or comments? Who's the commissioners? I see Commissioner Jock's hand was up. And then I'll go with Patrick Malhern and then Commissioner Kristin Peterson. Yeah, thank you, Chair. I don't know. Oh, okay, Kristin is back. She was offline for a bit and I was going to make some comments for her so she'll make her own comments. I do want to thank our Public Works Department for a particular aspect of how they do the programs with our citizens in Capitola. So two projects in particular, Park Avenue and the 38th Avenue Reconstruction and also the Bromer Street Reconstruction. So our Public Works Director in concert with his staff has worked extensively with the citizens to get their input. And also there was a mention of the bike committee especially on Bromer. And I know from the bike community that that was a particular problem. If any of you bike and went on that street, you know that it was absolutely horrible. But we had a lot of input from that committee and also from the residents there. In particular on Park Avenue at night, which a lot of people walked that street, it was very unsafe at night. The speeds are rather high and most people try to avoid that street. Now when you walk there at night, you see a lot of pedestrians actually walking because the sidewalk is great. And also the bike trail is four feet wide which is really good. It's part of the bicentennial bike route. So a lot of people still have those old maps. I did a cross-country bike trip using those old maps too. So they may still have them and still use them. The 38th Avenue Reconstruction was particularly important because there's a lot of mobile home parks there, a lot of people using bikes, a lot of mothers and parents in particular using their strollers. Very unsafe. Now it's much safer. So really appreciate that. Another project that is important and thanks for the RTC for the funding is the Claire Street. You know, for the longest time we've been worrying about that because there was no crossings unless you get the 41st and this was explained in Warfamilio. So imagine a lot of people on either side not being able to cross many emails about how that was so unsafe. I haven't heard of any accidents but this should address that. So thanks again for the funding and thanks again for the public work staff capital working with residents and other interested groups to make sure these projects turn out even better. Thank you. Thank you new commissioner, Jacques. I hope we didn't take too many words from your commissioner, Christian Peterson, but you have the floor. Christian Peterson. Thank you. Yeah, I lost it for a second there and Jacques was going to step in for me but I'm glad that I'm back and thank you Jacques for your willingness to do so if it had been needed. I just wanted to take a moment also to thank Kailash and all of our public works staff for all the hard work that they do. As mentioned, we're a small city but the projects are no less critical to our residents and to the region and so I just want to again take a moment to thank him and all of our staff for all the hard work that they do. Thank you. Thank you, commissioner Peterson. Commissioner alternate Patrick Melvin. Thank you chair. I have a I guess it's more of a process question. For the second time this morning we've heard that some of our projects are held up in Caltrans for encroachment permits. The the fence over highway one at Rio del Mar and now we hear that the the adaptive the 41st Avenue adaptive signal project is held up in Caltrans encroachment permitting. Can Mr. Eads that and explain why our projects aren't clearing encroachment? If I can respond to that Mr. Chair, be happy to. So unfortunately our our permit staff are just completely stretched right now. We're we're understaffed and they're a little bit overwhelmed. They're doing what they can. They have been working in the previous example working closely with Sarah Christiansen on the over crossing structure and doing what they can to get those permits out. I'm not super familiar with this particular location but I'm sure it's a similar issue in terms of there's a lot of internal processing when we're looking at adaptive signal control and making sure that our system will continue to function. We're not going to back vehicles up onto the main line which is a primary concern for us of course because of the safety implications but I'm sure that our permitting staff will continue to work with the city on this and I'll touch base after the meeting just to see how they're doing. But I'm you know that's the right place for the for the process to occur. Unfortunately we're a bit over understaffed right now. Thank you very much. Thank you. Commissioner is that all Commissioner? Commissioner Manu? Thank you chair and thank you Mr. Muzumdar for the report. It's really exciting projects to hear about whether it's the bike improvements on Bromer or the roundabout on Bay and Capitol Avenue. I'm really excited to hear about the traffic calming on Clare Street. I have a lot of constituents in the area as well who've pointed out how dangerous Clare Street is today and so it'll be great to have that as a more biking and walking friendly environment. And I just want to point out you know a lot of people don't know where the city of Capitola ends and where the unincorporated county begins so I'm particularly excited to work with you on you know whether it's roads like Bromer or Capitola Road or even Forty First Avenue that you know these major major thoroughfares that go between the city and the county and working on the bike and pedestrian connections between both our jurisdictions. I just had a couple questions for you. You know you mentioned the Forty First Avenue intersection improvements. Have you considered doing any roundabouts on any of those major intersections? So with that project really the focus was on the adaptive system deployment and so we didn't look at any geometry changes to any of those intersections. Yeah I would say no that that hasn't been that hasn't been looked into. Okay I mean is that something that you will ever look into or have you in the past for one reason or another will doze out? I guess I wouldn't say that as far as my knowledge goes I don't think we've looked into roundabouts on the Forty First Avenue corridor. I think more recently there have been some studies that the RTC has been looking at to evaluate better throughput at the intersection with gross and Forty First because of the frontage roads that intersect there that are causing a lot of challenge. There's you know there are a few long-term designs that have been I think are on the book somewhere for what may improve that intersection but it's a challenge there mainly because the on-ramps don't have the length to have signal metering on them and so effectively metering happens on the city streets and so the it's kind of trying to find a good compromise to find you know better throughput for the street but then not flooding the freeway with too many cars all in volumes of big chunks that kind of create more of a challenge for them. So I think that's the main reason why we've had a little bit of a challenge with getting our encroachment permit figured out with Caltrans but as far as the addressing your question about different orientation for those intersections I don't believe we have anything right now that we're looking into other than that intersection at gross with the RTC that has been looking into that a little bit more heavily and I think that's more looking at you know opening up or closing down different entrances and exits rather than you know creating a large roundabout in that intersection. Got it yeah because one of the things we're looking at in the county of course is with the future plans for the mall how to improve throughput on Capitola Road you know one suggestion has been to widen into two lanes in both direction I'm not particularly sure that's the best plan since in the past we reduced it and put it on a road diet and so in an alternative we're looking at is putting in roundabouts that at some of the major intersections along Capitola Road and interesting to see if we can continue that into the city and then the other question I had is if with those signal improvements you're planning any pavement management on 41st Avenue I know particularly at that Capitola Road 41st Avenue intersection of pavements in pretty bad shape and can be a little bit dicey for especially for bikers. Yes no that's definitely an intersection that we know needs addressing it's you know being one of our largest arterial streets in the county and for sure the largest street in Capitola it is in need of some additional pavement management but right now that you know to bite off a section of 41st costs quite a bit because it's such a wide road and so oftentimes our funding limits don't know you know we're happy to get a million dollar project out usually and that you know addressing all of 41st would be a multi-million dollar project so at this point I don't think we've got the funding to do a full to look at that that would be more of a long-term plan that we would need to stockpile some money over over the years and have a plan for that in the future. Okay thank you very much. Commissioner Mike Ratkin. I just wanted to quickly point out that it's not just citizens of Capitola that are served by these projects and somebody who rides a bike around the county it's really those they really made a difference on a couple of these projects to the improvements for bike bikeways thank you. Thank you. Thank you commissioner. Is there any other fellow commissioners they have any questions or comments on the capitol report? Seeing none I want to go and take this out to the public now for public comments again if you have any questions you can email them to the city of Capitola and I'm pretty sure they could respond back to you. Is that correct? Yes. All right we have Jessica Evans. Hi commissioners um thank you so much I just want to express some appreciation for the work that you guys are doing in Capitola to make it more bike and pedestrian friendly um like Mr. Ratkin I spend a lot of time riding my bike around town and I do live on the west side of Santa Cruz but my family and I regularly ride our bikes into Capitola and through Capitola and I just want to um one one item I would like to share with you is there's an organization called the National Association of City Transportation Officials that produces design guidelines that are complete streets design guidelines they're nationally recognized as the producer of the sort of best practices for design guidelines for um complete streets with bicycle pedestrian and automobile infrastructure combined into one um you know design that really serves everyone um there's a specific document called uh don't give up at the intersection that has great very clear guidance for designing intersections and um I just you know maybe you already know about this but you know you probably do because you're professionals but I want to you know urge you to maybe target intersections on 41st avenue and and use this document to make those intersections better because intersections is where people get run over you know we see it again and again um and all the intersections in Santa Cruz county and especially those big busy streets in Capitola could really use some intersection specific some spot treatment um to make those intersections safer thank you so much thank you Mrs. Owens James Wheeler Chair for recognizing Mr. Wheeler are you unmuted okay okay I'm on I want to say as a longtime resident of Capitola um thank you very much for uh finally fixing Bromer between 31st 38th and 41st I'm a a senior citizen who rides a recumbent tricycle with no suspension and uh that sucker uh was just terrible so I'm very appreciative I didn't like it uh Mr. Ben Varnasa yes uh talking about intersections I want to remind everybody that between the old depot at Monterey and Park Drive all the way to La Selva beach uh there are only six streets to cross on the coastal trail Marvista State Park Drive two in Aptos village which are controlled now with signals one at the clubhouse drive and one going into seascape tremendous tremendous and I just want to remind you that to get to the hillside of Aptos and Soquel we have the Marvista overpass is being built so that's that for mid-county it's a wonderful transportation system when you put that all together thank you thank you Mr. Ben Varnasa is there anybody else in the public would you like to come in I do not see any other hands up commissioner okay well well thank you uh thank you the city of Kepitola for that report thank you for your time I'd like to go ahead and move on uh item 25 which is the report regarding grant requirements compliance in the context of the tie vote for the commission related to the transit corridor alternative analysis in rail network integrated study business plan for electric passenger rail and the Santa Cruz branch rail line ginger morning chair commissioners and members of the public i'm ginger die car i'm senior transportation planner on the rtc staff the item before you today is regarding the caltrans grant require compliance requirements in relation to the business plan for electric passenger rail on the Santa Cruz branch rail line just the final component of the transit corridor alternatives analysis and rail network integration study as you know at the rtc meeting in February and 2021 rtc accepted the transit corridor alternatives analysis and the rail network integration study which selects electric passenger rail as the locally preferred alternative the project team then developed a business plan for rail transit as the locally preferred alternative at the rtc meeting on April 4th 2021 rtc staff presented the draft tcaa rail network integration study business plan and recommended that the rtc adopt a resolution accepting the business plan for electric passenger rail on the Santa Cruz branch rail line as a guide for implementation and to direct staff to seek federal and or state funding to complete the preliminary engineering and environmental documentation for electric passenger rail in motion to accept the staff recommendation failed with the tie vote of six to six staff expressed concern at that time that the caltrans grant requirements for the rail network integration study section of the project may not be met if components of the draft business plan were not accepted rtc the commission requested staff to come back to this meeting to provide information on options for meeting the caltrans grant requirements rtc staff has since discussed the grant requirements with caltrans staff and caltrans has determined that the grant requirements have been met with rtc acceptance of the alternatives analysis and rail network integration study report at the February 4th rtc meeting thus no action is necessary to assure grant requirements have been met with that that's the end of my presentation we'll have you to answer any questions thank you ginger i i would like to make some additional comments regarding this item um a business plan is not a requirement by any agency including rtc moving forward with drafting a business plan was a staff recommendation in order to provide commissioners with information on potential funding for transit on the corridor acceptance would not have meant that passenger rail is definitely coming to santa craze county staff acknowledges the six six the commissioners and plans to continue researching funding for delivering all projects that have been identified in our various programs and planning documents including measure d the unified corridor investment study and the regional transportation plan which is in the process of being updated the rtp that's the regional transportation plan has both a constrained and an unconstrained list of projects for the county the commission recently approved those project lists which include passenger rail on the unconstrained list it was not placed on the constrained list because we could not identify enough funding for the project without a local new revenue source at this time passenger rail will continue to be included in the rtp unconstrained list for santa craze county the project will also continue to be identified in the state rail plan which is an ambitious plan consisting of both projects to enhance existing rail service and various projects for new service both now and into the future in developing the business plan our biggest challenge was identifying a potential funding source for the next step which would have been preliminary engineering and an environmental document historically state and federal funding has not been made available to fund this component of the work and certainly not without a significant local match staff met with caltrans division of mass rail and discussed how hard it is for local jurisdictions to fund this early stage of such a large project to fund this early stage of the project locals often need to direct several years of regional discretionary funding or this component of work unless they have a dedicated funding source since it is not advisable to ask citizens to tax themselves without having the knowledge of the project impact and cost it is almost impossible to move forward with a project of this magnitude without the help of the state caltrans staff explained that the state understood this problem and was seeking a way to make more money available to local jurisdictions for this work caltrans staff identified one possible funding source the emerging corridor fund within the state rail assistance program this is a small account and RTC project would be eligible there would be no guarantee of funding and in fact a subsequent meeting with caltrans staff indicated that the fund would not be able to fully fund RTC's project with the state rail assistance money even though a local match is not necessarily required caltrans staff thought that over time some caltrans planning money may be able to be diverted to rail projects to help close the gap in summary RTC has not turned down any funding that has been made available for a rail transit project in Santa Cruz county in summary RTC staff is responsible for seeking funding RTC projects I plan to continue to investigate the likelihood of any funding for any of our projects and advising the commission and seeking direction moving forward thank you thank you there any questions from the commissioners commissioner latkin it's not a question it's a just brief comment I'm like not making an argument I just want to highlight that what our executive director just told us is that the information that we got many of it all of us got and I myself believe for some time was that there is not 17 million dollars from the state that's available for us if we just ask for it with no local match a lot of the emails that I got in phone calls from people had that assumption I had that assumption when I frankly when I thought we had 17 million dollars for free from the state it's not free it's our tax money but money from the state that we'd be crazy to stop you know moving ahead to the if we're going to stop we'd stop after we made the next step that it was misinformation that we had and that's really important to understand that that's not to I'm not trying to suggest what anybody's position should be after that but you'd have to have that information and thinking about where we go next thank you thank you any other comments commission Eduardo yeah so like I said thank you thank you Mr. Preston for for that report but you know I still encourage the I want to make a motion to agendize the item for the business planning our art and direct staff to seek federal and state funding to complete the preliminary engineering and environmental document for passing the rail point of order commission what's your point of order I believe that this is essentially a motion to reconsider since this is not a motion to reconsider it's a motion to put a place on the agenda future agenda item that that said is not the exact same text of the motion that was already considered we didn't we didn't know he's asking for it to be brought back as an agenda item well I would just say that in general you know one of the purposes of parliamentary procedure and Rosenberg's rules of order which we follow is is finality and to prevent a body like ours from continually looking at the same question over and over and over again I mean I'll just point out these meetings are very expensive our staff time alone not to mention the commissioners time but our RTC staff time is about $150 that's before an hour before you consider the building and the electricity and other utilities $250 an hour I believe once you take all that into consideration so it would be extremely wasteful for our for our commission to continue to consider the same question over and over again and that's why whether or not technically or not this is a motion to reconsider Rosenberg's rules which we follow make it very clear that really only someone who voted against the motion in the first place should be able to put it out for consideration again and if that it occurs that you know again if it there needs to be a two-thirds vote by the body to reconsider it so I just think that this is really out of order if not technically then practically because we don't have the time to consider this question over and over again Council would you want to address that or could I comment on that so they there is a process for a motion to reconsider that's a motion that's been made by somebody who's in the majority there was no majority at the last meeting that the commission split six six on the substantive vote so this is the the motion that is being proposed and which I would note hasn't been seconded yet is effectively a new motion commissioner conic's point about the fact that the commission would be talking about an issue that you talked about before is correct that's true but the commission isn't prevented from considering an issue that you are not at some point in the future when you are not able to reach majority position in your prior actions and so I do think that the motion that's proposed by commissioner Montesino is is is a proper motion it is not a motion for reconsideration thank you is there a second to commissioner could I think commissioner Hernandez is trying to speak commissioner Hernandez well given council's opinion I'll second the motion we have a motion we have a second do we have any commissioners comments commissioner McPherson yeah I'm going to vote against the motion at times you know the misinformation regarding the business business plan has only served to further to really divide our community at this term the volume up on some really posted online stuff this commission does not need to formally accept the business plan for the train to remain an option for the future although I would like to point out that I voted on April 1st to accept the business plan a motion that failed the commission accepted the transit corridor alternative analysis study in February which I voted for the recommended preferred alternative of the train remains an option as part of that study in terms of the next step which is a 17 million dollar EIR is the executive director's job to seek funding for projects that are well positioned to qualify and complete and compete for that money if really if a realistic funding source came across this desk he could bring that opportunity forward to the commission for a discussion he doesn't need to be directed by us to do that we do not need to take any further action to comply with the Caltrans grant that funded the TCA study so I think it's now the time for the head to take a rest I hope it calms down the unproductive campaigns with much at times disinformation going on our community I can see we can talk about this now this motion for the next two hours and there's probably people lined up to do it we've got we all have received hundreds of emails to foreign against this from people on both sides who I have a tremendous amount of respect for their their thoughts but I think that the call I would just assume call for the motion now I always want public discussion but I can tell you we're going to end up with a six to six vote on this motion I well I don't want to get it unless you want to prove me wrong I think we have a call for the motion and move on Commissioner Christensen Peterson thank you yeah I would like to echo what Supervisor McPherson just said I think it's he makes some really important points I'd also like to to thank Guy for clarifying some of the misinformation and misconceptions specifically surrounding the idea that the state will will fully fund any kind of EIR moving forward I have also spoken with many people on both sides of this issue people who I greatly respect and appreciate their opinions and and insight and input on this and with that in mind I also want to encourage those on both sides to consider toning down some of the incendiary rhetoric that is on both sides right now that really goes to attack those whose opinions we don't agree with or who is not on our side it's not productive it's damaging to this conversation and to the ability for for us as a body to make decisions in a way that that we can do so without the concern that there will be either personal attacks or attacks of a nature that aren't related to sticking to facts and and information that can be proven and so with that I'd like to just also share that I will also not be supporting this motion to return this business plan for future consideration as already mentioned this can come back you know at another time if additional funding is is identified I had someone call me yesterday indicating that they received information that this could never come back to us again my understanding is that is not the case but I don't see the point in moving forward with it right now when we're already as as previously mentioned at a six six tie it would be unproductive and so I will also not be supporting the motion to return this to us at a future meeting at this time thank you commissioner commissioner andy shifrin yes it is unfortunate how contentious this issue has has been for the commission I do appreciate the clarification that guy gave that in fact the business to accept the business plan or not accept the business plan is not a particularly meaningful action the commission I think the thing to focus on is that the commission did accept the tcaa recommendation that rail is the preferred alternative that to my mind is the last action that a majority of the commission supported but what I understand the executive director to say and what was echoed by uh commissioners macpherson and peterson is that what that means is that if there is funding available for moving forward with the next step there is no need to direct the staff to look for it they will be looking for it and if it is available they will bring it back to us and then we can have hopefully a productive discussion of whether it's worth pursuing or not but at that at this point when there isn't a full funding available I'm not sure really is productive to end up with a split that has symbolic value of pro and con but doesn't really help move the process forward so I don't want to vote against the motion I don't think it will be productive to have a 6-6 vote and then have the opponents of rail say yeah we killed rail again I would ask the maker and the seconder to consider that in fact what they want to happen has happened it doesn't need a vote of the commission to accept the business plan the business plan is not the determinative document the determinative document was a tcaa and that was uh you know the accepted that document with rail as the locally preferred alternative I want to say something I want to thank all the people who contacted me and I know what the commission is as well on both sides and particularly those who wrote long explanations of their point of view many of those people talked about the community agreeing with their point with their perspective I think it's it really made me realize that we're not really talking about a community when we talk about transportation we're talking about a bunch of communities and those communities have different priorities there's the rail priority there's the highway priorities there's a trail priority there's a bus priority there's local roads priority and all those priorities led to the passage of measure d because they all agreed that the deal that provided for all of them is was worth supporting measure d didn't pass by much it needed all of those communities to support it and the commission I think has been moving forward with the various uh various components of measure d we've gotten a lot of highway money we've gotten a lot of outside trail money where you know there millions of dollars have gone to local roads and a great deal of money has gone to the transit district and I think we've been you know trying to move forward with rail as well because that was what was part of the deal with measure d and I think what staff is saying is it's still part of measure d but we don't know what the funding is going to be we don't know when or whether it's going to be available but should it be available the commitment that measure d made is going to be carried out so I really feel that this sort of contentiousness and having people be angry on both sides um and feeling that this is the knockdown drag out decision on whether we're going to deal with rail or not is really not what's going on so I would request um the maker and the and the maker of the motion and the commissioners seconded it to accept what the uh executive director said that we're going to move forward with rail if funding be if and when funding becomes available and we don't need to have this vote today thank you commissioner commissioner sandy brown and then commissioner rockins and then uh commissioner john yeah I'll just add that I um I agree with uh commissioner shifrin's comments and others that have been made about the uh concerns around the contentiousness and the the real purpose of uh accepting a business plan it you know I'm I'm confounded that this has become uh this pivot point that you know people are so upset about and being the city Santa Cruz city council representative to this body I'm quite used to um contentious emotional input and in large scale input from the public and I appreciate that people have their you know they have these feelings about it people do feel strongly and you know if that people want to share that is is not so much my concern it's it seems to be the the perception or the understanding of what we're actually doing accepting a business plan means that we are accepting that uh some uh that we had people who studied this who um you know use the best information available at the time who uh you know came to some estimate of what the potential cost might be and tried to evaluate funding sources so to reject it does not mean that we're rejecting rail to accept it does not mean that we're accepting rail and this is going to happen right um right away this is about steps in a process that um you know will get us the information we need I I just reject the idea that um you know we're wasting money studying this I you know I I read this is this is something that um you know we we should be taking very seriously and the voters did in measure D so I just want to say um you know I I'm not um with respect to the motion I I would like to see this resolved um I unfortunately don't see that it will get resolved in any meeting coming up soon and that continuing to have uh tie votes won't be productive I appreciate uh uh Mr Preston's uh comments that um a lot of these things that we're concerned about not happening as a result of this vote um that's not the case that that staff will continue to do what they do and um and do that in uh you know in accordance with the preview with prior direction um so I I don't want to vote no on this because I do support moving forward and I do support having uh the continuing to have the conversation I I would like to see that conversation happen when um you know we've when folks have have really um you know dug deep and feel prepared to um you know figure out how we're going to move forward uh with uh um some you know with a with a majority of the of the commission so I um you know I don't want to not support this um and I also agree with a commissioner Schifrin that um where it's I'm not sure it's going to get us anywhere um by doing it right now Commissioner Hopkins so um I really can be brief here I I want to associate myself with Andy Schifrin's comments I want to first appreciate Guy Preston's clarification of what's going to happen if we don't take this back up again and I want to definitely appreciate the fact that people on both sides of this question are urging the makers of the motion not to put this in front of us because uh this is not a the decision not to put it on the ballot on the uh meeting agenda for the next meeting does not mean that either one side of the other has somehow won this battle or that we have a something new or definitive happening so beyond that I'll simply associate my myself with Andy's comments thank you thank you Commissioner Commissioner Jack you're muted thank you chair so I'd like to um associate with Bruce's comments and as expanded by Kristen and you know there is a lot of acrimony in this community and this is not going to get us anywhere at all to some extent um expanding on what Guy said you know we are going to be uh approaching um the effort to get more funding for the incremental steps forward but the reality is these are incremental steps the larger question is because we don't really understand the perspectives of the various user groups as Andy started talking about the various groups that are either supporting or not supporting we're never going to come to a consensus and a countywide vote which is actually going to be what's necessary to me to actually pay for the final project whatever it may be so this to me is a timeout this gives us some time to think about what this whole project really means for the various elements in the Santa Cruz County community and what are their needs that may be or may not be met and as Patrick mentioned the other day and I've expanded on in the past what needs are we being asked to meet in reference to other needs of this of the county of Santa Cruz so from a policy standpoint where do we want to spend our money to better the lives of the residents of Santa Cruz County within all the different groups of Santa Cruz County and this is something I think we have a timeout now to try to understand try to understand what's the efficiency of a rail system as opposed to expanding bar excuse me not bar but the metro you know what is the efficiency of looking at bikes and getting our signals you know in sync and stuff like that and having you know so many other ways that we can improve traffic flow at a much less cost so we need to understand these things but first off let's take advantage of this time to actually have some we're the commissioners we it's our responsibility to try to I have to understand what's going on in Watsonville I have to understand what's going on in Santa Cruz you know we're in the middle of the county I take that on freely as an obligation and so getting back to Andy and others this vote and I asked Eduardo and I asked Felipe to withdraw your motion and the reason why is because I think this continues the contention if you take this action I think you're recognizing that we don't want that to continue we want to have a conversation to continue to start listening to each other and with that I'd also like to say I appreciate all the people who have given their emails a lot of the comments are great I appreciate the I mean I realize that there's a lot more to this than you know then I think most of us realize and so this is a time out for me and I hope it's a time out for the rest of the board and you know hopefully we do it as possible as commissioners to realize what would be a possible consensus moving forward for the county of Santa Cruz and all the needs of its population and yes I'm definitely not going to vote for this thank you very much thank you commissioners uh thank you very quickly your voice is muted or something wrong with your audio I wanted to thank CalTrans for flexible and requirements for their grant funding it's pretty big I mean they're a huge partner to us in this county so it's nice it's nice to work with them so thank you okay before I go on to anybody else I'm gonna make a comment here I'd like to thank staff for their clarification but you know I'm a little confused here at the same time you know staff came before us asking that we approved the business plan so they can have a guidance some of the guidance to the future it wasn't an immediate action thing also they asked us to give staff direction to be able to go seek grant funding again this is seek grant funding it's not immediately but look for it if it's there go after it and I think that's what was the purpose of the business plan and directing staff to go that way and again it wasn't an immediately let's do it tomorrow it's it's a how they're going to work their process but at least staff had direction fund us as commissioners and giving them guidance on that but you know now that the the executive director has clarified that he really doesn't need our vote on this to seek forward funding or procedures it was kind of I'm kind of throwing back because it's kind of like a you know supervisor a criminal that I'll waste money and funding and resources because you know staff brought us this to us so we could help them so they could move forward into the future and now they're taking steps back and saying well you know we really don't need your vote we can move forward and so I'm kind of thrown back at that prospect and this is an important subject for a community overall it's important not to close out the community I know you guys don't want to have this brought back but I think it's important that the community have their voice you know we heard just there's over 500 people they want to get in on this meeting shows a significance of importance to our community and then we put this back on the agenda so we just give the community an opportunity to continue to voice their opinions and really start learning more of what's going on and so I'll support the motion still because I think it's important to allow the community to continue to voice themselves and that we don't shut that door on them and because they are they are they are the taxpayers they are the ones that we're using their fundings and as far as funding goes in resources as a supervisor man who said you know they are spending money actually me it's costing me money because the little that I get compensated for this does not compensate me for the amount of time that I spent on this I'm not compensated that they equal as a county supervisor is it's way way much less and so I understand that you know energy and time is important but I think it's important that the community have the opportunity to feel a continue to voice themselves and by not allowing them the next meeting to continue to voice I think we're just going to shut the door on them so and that's the reason I'll support this to bring it back to the agenda to give the community an opportunity to continue to speak thank you and so with that Andy I know you who spoke already once commissioner alternate but commissioner Eduardo motocino would you like to step in yeah please thank you thank you for giving me the time to recognize you know seeing all of you all of your comments and I'm you know and especially you know commissioner serfence um uh point of everything you know you you swayed me to uh uh put that uh put my uh put my motion out of consideration um the second one is is willing to consider polina sir chair i suggest you call in the second next commissioner alternate Hernandez I'll wait for a second okay motion has been withdrawn um i'm going to go ahead now and take it back to out to the public mr chair commissioner uh randy johnson also had his hand up oh I didn't see him he's not on my screen sorry I apologize right commissioner randy johnson that's okay uh chair I the motion has been withdrawn and I what i'm looking for is I think everybody on this commission is looking for alternatives kind of a consensus that's best for our community and so being open I think I saw felt at least a sense of that and you know I I don't always agree with commissioner rotkin but um I've always respected him and I think initially his very first comments were you know unless people are going to change their minds it's kind of redundant and I do believe that people have had a chance to speak on this uh they did in April so um thank you uh chair thank you commissioner johnson commissioner rotkin um I'm not going to do this as a motion I just would like to make a suggestion to the really or the our chair that we not uh unless our legal staff over rules me that this is a procedural motion and I don't know that we need under the brown act to take comments from the public on it if you just either he'd suggest that we do or that you decide that we should all leave that to your judgment um I would suggest that you give people one minute each because I do not believe hearing these comments will in any way advance our conversations people still have many opportunities to reach all of us with their views to try and persuade us to change our minds about variety of things and so forth but I don't think it's productive for us to sit and listen to two two minutes each or three minutes each let's say two is what you were going to do uh from everybody so please either you know find out whether we don't we have to actually take these comments at this point and if we do please limit them to one minute each that's just I'm not a motion but a plea to you as the chair commissioner just just for clarification before this motion can be for us to allow the community to speak on the business plan on this item on the agenda on 25 and so I'm going to go ahead and proceed with that and respect them it's not going to be on the procedural motion that was made um okay just going to be on item 25 thank you sir judge I would just be comments and uh so they can keep them as brief as possible we greatly appreciate it because there's a lot of folks that do want to make those comments and uh engage and so it's important that we allow the community to continue to engage with us is that all from the commissioners commissioner Andy Schifrin you still have your hand up yes I just want to thank uh commissioners Montesino and Hernandez for withdrawing the motion I think it is helpful and I did want to respond to you as the chair regarding your concern about public comment I think um I certainly agree and I I I think probably all the commissioners would agree that public comment is critical I don't remember I've been on this commission for as an alternate for many many years and I don't remember any item that has induced more public comment than this than this issue has and on both sides and you know to the extent that this isn't the end of the discussion this is just a pause in the discussion while staff and the state and federal government decide what they're going to do there will be many other opportunities for the public to let us know what they think and hopefully we'll be around something when we're actually taking uh making a decision that is meaningful unfortunately at this point there isn't I don't think the decision that was before isn't meaningful I wish the two groups could work it out so that it wasn't as contentious but given how strongly people feel about the issue on both sides I don't think this is really possible but I did want to just thank the um the maker and the seconder for their for withdrawing it and to you know you know appreciate your desire for public comment um it makes a lot of sense we need to hear it we've heard a lot of it and I'm sure as we move forward we're going to hear a lot more of it thank you with that I'm going to take it out to the public now giving them the opportunity okay Mr. Lowell Hearst Mr. Hearst you're recognized by the chair you have two minutes is that me you're talking to yes yeah we've lost a minute oh thank you thank you I'm in the doctor's office trying to copy on his email his wi-fi you know I hate to see Watson they'll get left behind I hate to see South County and all the commuters and all the elderly and the disabled folks be left behind and so you know moving forward is something that we've been trying to do for 30 or 40 years here and so why can't we find some way to move forward instead of getting boxed out all the time and so I would just urge the commission if they can't do anything today let's do something tomorrow or the next day or a week from today we need some relief we need action we need real solutions not just stone rolling and passing the buck and saying we can't do it we all agree that there's many many problems and that's what we need to work on is solutions to many problems and it's never easy and it's not cheap but if we if we have a little more compassion and a little more understanding of what the real needs are I would hope that we could move forward that's the job of the RTC is to move forward so hey can't we all get moving that's it for me thank you city councilman little hers back to the doctor's office at Trina Kaufman Gomez yes thank you my again this is Trina Kaufman Gomez I've been involved with the TCA process here prior to my finishing up of the the council and I continue to support the RTC looking at all avenues of moving Santa Cruz County around and making sure that it is an equitable choice I was prepared to say something in support of this plan which I would still continue to do because it is a pathway in which to achieve many goals and accomplishments and we do need this this fraction of the two size and the decisiveness has been very very difficult and this isn't a win or lose situation this is a situation where we need to come together and there will be things that we don't agree that we agree that that need to move forward but we need to work with this Watsonville's paid dearly for many things at the north end and we need to be able to reciprocate this when we do move forward with planning getting funding and getting projects that this county needs completely for the entire community and the divisiveness needs to stop and if it means taking things slowly and incrementally we need to do it but this needs to also happen in our lifetime and we we don't have the public here because they don't have the ability to wait five hours to get through a meeting and that's unfortunate as well and having two sides we need to figure out what we could do what we can we have to take the steps on what we have the ability to agree on and move forward with those steps and so that way we're coming to the point of consensus to the middle ground here because we do need to make sure that we're acknowledging and recognizing all of the community not just a segment of the community and not for recreational purposes but we we need this corridor and these plans to recognize all of us that are moving that are getting to work that are providing services for the north end of the county as well and needed the quality of life so again I'm sorry that this is paused out but I believe that there are still components of this RTC can use to still move forward on things that can be gained consensus with it thank you thank you Mrs. Kaufman no miss we have Sophia Sophia Hague and then Matt Ferrell Sophia Chair recognizes you can you unmute yourself hello sorry my name is Sophia Hague I'm a Cabrera college student I'm urging the RTC to end the delay in implementing passenger rail service in Santa Cruz county as an environmentalist I'm deeply concerned with the prospect of catastrophic climate change affecting our beautiful community our car dependency contributes significantly to greenhouse gas emissions and as much as I want to use green methods of transportation that is just simply not possible with my heavy work and school schedule yesterday it took me over an hour to get from Aptos to my home in Ben Lomond and if I could take a bus that has that had pulse transfers to light rail I would most definitely utilize that for my commute considering the large segment of Santa Cruz county that will be impacted by rising sea levels the county owes future generations investment and clean public transportation thank you that's all thank you Miss Hay Mr. Matt Ferrell and then Michael Wohl Mr. Matt Ferrell chair recognizes you good afternoon commissioners I just wanted to thank executive director Preston for clarifying the intention of staff to move forward with seeking funding for continuing work on rail and the preferred local transportation alternative and I also believe that that is what the majority people in our county support thank you thank you Mr. Ferrell for those comments Michael Wohl and then Mark my city miller sir chair recognizes Mark Wohl we have two minutes hi my name is Michael Wohl I'm a UCSC student and I'm urging the RTC to stop delaying progress with passenger rail as our climate and economy cannot wait the people I've met from around California and around the world at UCSC are shocked at how disconnected our public transportation system is and since the majority of first and second year students do not have a car we rely on our transit system to get anywhere off campus for at least two years a common trip for UCSC students is from campus to 41st avenue to get essential supplies for college life at Target and other big box stores near the Capitola Mall right now a trip from Quarry Plaza to Target takes over an hour if you make your transfer on time that travel time should be an embarrassment to the county as one could literally drive over the hill to San Jose in the same time it would take a student to take the bus a few miles across town I could go on with more horror stories about how disconnected our current system is and how it affects students who significantly contribute to our economy instead I urge the RTC to end the bureaucracy and move forward with passenger rail delaying rail is against the will of the voter against smart economic growth against an equitable county-wide transportation system and against environmental sustainability thank you for your time thank you mr. wool mark miss city miller and then jessica evans chair recognizes mark missy miller mark you unmuted that's a phone number 3660 no we're going to move on to the next one okay okay I can I think I just unmuted can you hear me now yes okay greetings chair gondolas and commissioners I guess you know my name is mark you city miller I've been a resident of santa cruz for 38 years I know you have been inundated with an avalanche of support for accepting the business plan and moving forward with a long range planning of rail service I hope you paid special attention to the resolutions of support unanimously adopted by both the city councils of Watsonville and santa cruz the two largest cities in our county in case you missed it both resolutions have the following language in common quote whereas according to the US Census Bureau the population of Watsonville of which many commute to santa cruz for work and school is over 80% majority latinx and the per capita income of Watsonville is less than half per capita income of the majority white population of the three north county cities of santa cruz capitol and scott valley whereas developing operating and maintaining passenger rail service between north and south santa cruz county and connecting to Monterey county and the rest of the state and national rail network will facilitate a decrease in the long standing and substantial per capita income gap between the majority latinx Watsonville residents and the majority white north county cities of santa cruz capitol and scott valley end quote recognizing that many folks seem focused on the almighty dollar at the end of the day your vote on this matter is also and perhaps most importantly about equity equity and equity I trust that your position reflects where your conscience has led you thank you thank you mr miller Jessica Evans and then Faulkner Jessica hi commission thank you for the opportunity to speak I'm speaking now as a representative of the santa cruz county friends of the rail and trail so this is the official rail and trail statement first I'd like to say that our policy is to always stay positive and courteous to the commissioners and to the members of the public with that said I'd like to point out to the commission that there has been a huge outpouring of public support for rail transit in santa cruz county since your six six vote last month including many people in organizations who have not voiced an opinion in the past here are some of the new organizations who sent letters after last month's vote to ask you to move forward with the long-term plan for rail transit the santa cruz county democratic central committee the power of valley says our shaves democratic committee the sandlands of valley women's club the monterey and santa cruz counties building and constructions trade council the ucsc lobby core and ucsc college democrats youth for climate action in addition to the agencies and organizations who have expressed support for rail transit six hundred and seventy nine unique individual members of the community have sent email to the rc rtc using the friends of the rail and trail email links or forms this does not include other members of the community who have used their personal email to send comments we roughly estimate around a thousand individual members of the community have expressed support for rail transit we have made a rough estimate of two hundred to three hundred individual members of the community who have expressed opposition to planning for rail on average public comments have been seventy percent in favor of rail throughout the public process in april alone there were one hundred and twenty three letters in support of rail transit and only twelve opposed momentum has been is now and will continue to build for adding rail transit to our public transportation system public transportation supporters are not going to give up and disappear the community wants the rtc to move forward with long range planning and implementation of rail transit in consideration of this public mandate the friends of the rail and trail request that all of the commissioners give their full support to expanding the public transportation system in santa criss county by planning for rail public transportation implementation in santa criss county you'll also find a slightly longer version of these comments in your packet thank you so much good day thank you Mrs. Evans a minute you're saying just you know I see Veronica else's hand she's on them she's on the list okay just wanted to know what's great um if I have Faulkner and then Emily trexel and then Veronica chair recognizes mr. Faulkner I uh thanks for taking my statement can you hear me yes great my name is Lonnie Faulkner and I've lived in santa criss for decades in live oak since 2005 and I support the business plan for clean quiet electric rail that runs through Watsonville from Watsonville to Davenport and a trail in 1990 with prop 116 the voting majority entrusted our representatives to move forward with investing in rail along the north south corridor and the unified corridor study completed in 2019 best use of this rail corridor was to implement both rail and trail not trail alone high speed e-bike lanes serve more affluent sectors of our community a rail system serves our elderly disabled students working commuters health care professionals day laborers many locals who cannot or do not drive or bike trail only serves a smaller primarily physically active sector California is now investing billions to connect our cities within the state by rail and biden and us transport secretary Buddha just recognize America is decades behind other countries like Europe Japan China and India and they are continuing to plan and commit 165 billion in this country to support rail and in city transit rail is the answer to a greener future our neighbor Monterey is building a rail system that connects them to Watsonville our rail system would allow us to take rail from Davenport to Monterey as well as rail to San Francisco Reno Denver and cities across California and the country rail is our future not providing rail to members of this community cuts us off from being able to connect by rail with the rest of the state and the country we do not need more cars on the roads or self-driving Teslas or polluting gas vehicles young people today are moving to cities which offer high quality light rail light rail in Santa Cruz County would serve people well into the future and community members would use rail the most who cannot attend this meeting today to speak for themselves due to work and school Emily Trexel and then Veronica Elsie Emily Chair recognizes Emily Trexel Hi there Can you hear me? Yes Are you able to hear me? Okay Yes Hi Okay so the first thing you know it's been stated that I know the chair originally said well nothing happened at the last meeting but it did the reality was the 6-6-0 was a tie that means it wasn't it was decided that it wasn't feasible and it didn't you didn't approve the the business plan and I think that was the correct decision I think I support you and I think that it would be not another revote for the same result determined to not be financially feasible I don't think that the people who don't support this project at the moment say that we don't want greener options of course we do absolutely 100% but I always have to wonder when we hear the commentary about the wave of the future greener reducing gas emissions the reality is I have to wonder if they read any of the 200 page agendas and information and business plans that appear the reality is it was estimated that this would reduce about 3% of the cars on highway 1 that is not a greener option the connections I have plenty of people that I know who are my friends family that work in Watson or that live in Watsonville and commute but the reality is this is not set to be a commute train as in New York or San Francisco so I think it's the correct decision that we also don't have the funding to move forward this isn't going to come from nowhere it's not governmentally funded there was a whole host of unidentified income I think that Commissioner Randy Johnson framed it well at the last meeting by saying that this really sucks out the oxygen of all other projects or things we could do we need to enhance our bus system if we ever have a rail we need to have infrastructure in place to get places enhance roads and I think that this was an ironic foreshadowing what just happened today the RTC is inability to forecast the level of public participation to open that Zoom meeting to more than 100 people makes me question the ability to forecast what really the cost of this train would be when compared to ridership given that the metro ridership is down 80 to 85 percent I just don't Veronica Elsie and then Bud Colligan greetings in in light of the comments from this morning I would just like to call to your attention the letter that is in your packet from your elderly and disabled advisory committee so that you understand how important this issue is and how important following measure D and actually really studying rail should be because some of us do need transportation and it does mention commuter rail options my concern is that using words like timeout means we don't have to address it for a while and it's going to be left to members of the public to continue to push you to follow through with what we thought we voted for in measure D so please do not drop this please do not be afraid of getting information which is what these next steps are I encourage you please don't stop thank you thank you this is Elsie Mr. Butt Colligan and then phone number 1884 last four digits can I recognize Mr. Butt Colligan thank you can you hear me yes thank you Chair Gonzalez and commissioners I just want to step back a little bit in history to 2018 and at that time we had a vote on the Progressive Rail contract and there was ample information provided to the commissioners about the unwise choice of going forward with Progressive Rail and a number of the folks that did not want to that voted to reject the business plan voted against that it was an eight to four vote but for those votes were from commissioners who did not go for the business plan and since that there have been two elections actually a lot of people talk about support but there have been two elections measure L in Capitola and the first district supervisors election where the train was a central issue I think that those folks who voted against it and then two more commissioners were added that joined that six person group that voted against the business plan so I think that history tells us something Winston Churchill said if you don't learn from history you're condemned to repeat it that they were right and that we wasted a lot of time and money on something that we shouldn't have after Progressive Rail canceled after two years and all the same people that are talking on this call today in favor of passenger rail were the same ones that said we should vote for Progressive Rail so let's learn from history Greenway has been signed by 10,000 people the Fort Petition has been signed by 1,475 there's a large difference of support between the three petitions okay last four digits of the phone number 1884 and then Tina A Chair recognizes 1884 you're on there you go Chair Gonzales and commissioners my name is Tina Cole I'm with bike Santa Cruz County I'm also a resident of Watsonville bike Santa Cruz County appreciates everyone's advocacy throughout the years for the rail trail to continue and I I really took to heart all of the comments that the commissioners made today I feel like with new information that we can continue to move forward we will do so with more purpose to quote my friend Nancy Falstich from Rihanna Racion in Watsonville now it's the time to be both brave and bold and I encourage you all to be brave and bold time equals money time also we can't take back as far as climate change is concerned I know that many folks have concerns about the future of rail in the county and I'm sure that many many other folks have offered you the facts and figures that support the multiple facets of this complex project just dismissing the business plan as folly however is not going to result in a win for anyone it was a well thought out plan I know it's off the table but I feel like we can still abide by some of its guidelines we all understand that reaching the goal of completing the rail coastal rail trail is not going to be quick easy or cheap we understand that funding for the entire cost will not fall from the sky will not be available in one grant opportunity will instead be pieced together from different buckets from multiple funding streams over several years we also understand that times and trends change the county residents of 2031 or 2041 may not have the luxury of living in a house with a yard away from the density of our city's downtown centers they may not have space to park more than one car they may intentionally choose not to drive but rather take public transportation across the county we have Tina A and then David Van Brink chair recognizes Tina A two minutes hi this is Tina thank you for taking my call firstly I want to address the measure L there were paid staff can you hear me yes okay so I think the delay is a tactic by a small group of very influential and wealthy people when the entire community supports really rail and trail Watsonville 86 percent look at the support from during April the city council of Watsonville unanimously backs five years of coastal rail of supporting the coastal rail trail and I think we should support them also I think metro if we link that with the rail it will be very beneficial it will be a great partnership it will effortlessly produce a greater good if they're both linked together I definitely feel that we need to support like I said Watsonville so I'm a little nervous and the delay tactic of the anti rail this has been going on for a long time a number of years ago Greenway actually sued as part of the section south of Aptos and fortunately the federal the judge ruled in favor of the RTC so their tactic is let's do more delays let's cost more money their delay is let's not move this forward then they bring to the public look it's more delays and more cost when they're not really telling the general public the full truth they're the ones that are delaying it they represent the folks that aren't driving every day to Watson from Watsonville to work they have the privilege of sitting at home in their beautiful homes and they're not exposed to the horrific traffic jams your comments we have David Van Brink and then Joseph Haleen Mr. Van Brink Joe recognizes you have two minutes hello can you hear me okay yes hi I'm David Van Brink thank you for the clarification from director Preston I'm very pleased to hear that we've sort of you know officially acknowledged that indeed it is worth staff hourly time to continue to pursue funding sources I do hope that under this light all future planning continues to respect the future of mass transit within the corridor aligning with the TCA a locally preferred alternative outcome and all other processes up to now to be clear despite the minority obstruction most citizens are in favor of the RTC's stated official long-term direction please keep moving forward thank you thank you Mr. Van Joseph Haleen and then Brian Peoples chair recognizes is it Joseph Joseph hi yes thank you for the opportunity to speak I just want to share some of the organizations who have asked you move forward with rail transportation on the Santa Cruz branch line the transportation agency of Monterey County the Democratic Women's Club of Santa Cruz County the Santa Cruz group of the Sierra Club bike Santa Cruz County Regeneracion Bajaro Valley Climate Action Ecology Action their campaign for sustainable transportation bike friendly Watsonville the California Coastal Commission the Caltrans Division of Rail and Mass Transportation the City Council of Watsonville the City Council of Santa Cruz the Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission Elderling Disabled Transportation Advisory Committee the RTC Interagency Technical Advisory Committee the RTC Bicycle Advisory Committee in the Santa Cruz Area Chamber of Commerce there's a clear mandate from the public to plan for rail transit in Santa Cruz County I ask that you place the rail business plan back on the RTC agenda please take a new vote accept the business plan and move forward with planning rail transit for the future of Santa Cruz County thank you for your consideration thank you Joseph see your comments Brian Peoples and then Jack Brown chair recognizes Brian Peoples hi this is Brian from Trail Now the debate really isn't between a train or trail actually the debate is over when are we going to open up the coastal corridor that corridor has sat there for 10 years under our taxpayer owned property and it's a valuable transportation resource we now know that we can rail bank it and we also know that those old railroad tracks have to come out we also know that it's those tracks are actually worth a lot of money they actually recycle value will pay for the interim coastal trail so we've studied a lot but now we need to realize that the key here is we need to start using that property so we need staff to start looking at how can we use that coastal corridor now what can we do to move forward and we know what we need to do we don't have to reinvent the wheel it's well known so we need to rail bank that property now and we need to start building the interim coastal trail and I'm hopeful that there is no more delay of this because when construction of highway one begins and when Murray bridge retrofitting begins you think traffic is bad now you wait till those contract construction begins so it's very very important for our community to open up the coastal corridor now thank you for your time thank you mr. people's Jack brown then Barry Scott Mr. Jack Brown I'll mute yourself you have two minutes yeah thank you first I'd like to say I'm just really impressed by the commission and how you guys acted before this I think you've recognized a lot of key issues here of the contention not only in the public but within your own commission here and so I really appreciate that but I think we have to take a look at you know this the public comment here and really on both sides there's claims of special interests being involved on the other and you know we kind of see it especially with Fort where you know they put petitions out where you know there's signers on there from Nebraska and Maine and across the country and they're they're filling the inboxes with non-durifiable email accounts stating that they've got the majority and there's people on the trail side that say they have the majority but the big elephant in the room really is that there's never really been a vote by the public for rail or trail and how to get through with this and I think that was a big misconception that Schifrin and Brown made earlier measure D did not account for rail it made for lots of things it allowed for a study and maintenance of the corridor but it wasn't a vote on rail so I really would like to have the board of supervisor members of the commission or their alternates are here to really go back and say you know you really need to take this to the public because it's always going to be a stalemate in the commission and it's always going to be a lot of misinformation going back and forth until we really have that vote so I look forward to a good positive action here and that the commission can start moving forward on some real transportation issues here in the county thank you thank you Mr. Brown Barry Scott and then Maria Solis Kennedy chair recognizes Mr. Barry Scott oh thank you thank you chair Gonzalez and thank you RTC and Mr. Preston for the clarifying comments the division concerns me too and I see a lot of misstatements on all sides it's not just two sides and I see a lot of logical fallacies use these these binary arguments like it's rail or it's trail you can't have both or it's rail versus metro and you can't have both and I'm of the I'm of the opinion that you can have it all we really in fact when you put things together you get a remarkable network but more than anything else I'd like to speak to the development of these the train technologies the rail vehicle technologies that are possible here in 2015 we looked at exclusively diesel fossil fuel trains the unified corridors then came together and looked at rail and trail and found the trail only wasn't wasn't a useful option but rail with trail was the best use of corridor but still we're looking at diesel technologies the TCAA looked at 18 different options including a hyper loop underground and came back again and said rail transit it's the best return on investment but the prices were still based on large and expensive commuter rail systems only this year fortunately the business plan identifies electric power as a requirement not fossil fuels and for the first time ever small light street cars are included as possibilities but the costs still apply to the larger systems clean quiet street cars like the Tig M shown on page 13 of the business plan are right-sized and far more affordable than the larger systems that cost so much and that have been the subject of the disagreement so I hope staff will clarify the potential savings of a street car option and that and share this with with commissioners because I think we might all agree that geez something like a small light electric street car could really make a lot of people happy not for your comments Maria Solis Kennedy and then Brett Garrett Chair recognizes Maria Solis Kennedy hi can you hear me great thank you so my name is Maria Solis Kennedy I live here in Santa Cruz and I wanted to urge you all to move forward on a public transportation option and specifically the commuter rail I wanted to share a little bit about what this commuter rail would have meant to me or would mean to me up until a month ago I was a nanny to a wonderful two-year-old boy but when his family moved to Watsonville I had to quit the job that I really loved because I could no longer make the commute work I have problems with my eyesight so I'm not able to do the drive especially in inclement weather and with all the traffic and then the bus timetable just didn't allow me enough wiggle room to get to my second job as a barista on the west side on time so when I heard about the coast connect vision I was like wow this would have been exactly what I needed to be able to stay at my nanny job the electric light rail would open up so many possibilities for Santa Cruz residents like myself and is also an important step in the right direction in combating climate change I want to urge you all to end the delay and bureaucracy and support rail and then I also just wanted to quickly speak to the importance of making these meetings accessible to the public I mean this is obviously in the middle of a work day and it's now been like five hours and so I think that if you want to hear from working people and not just people who are able to be on a meeting like this long then it's important to make these meetings at times that are more accessible and also to not have any sort of cap on the number of people allowed in as you all said you've been getting tons of feedback from the community you know this is a really hot issue so I just encourage future meetings on this subject to be planned to be a little bit more accessible for the community thanks so much thank you Mrs. Kennedy Brett Garrett and then Sally Arnold Gary recognizes Brett Garrett two minutes hi can you hear me yes hi there is a technical difficulty on this meeting I did not hear the comments from Mark Mercedes Miller nor from the phone number 1884 the zoom was completely silent when those two people spoke which is very odd because I got the impression that you were hearing them anyway back on topic I keep hearing a wish that the two sides might find a compromise so I'm here with a possible way I urge both sides everyone to look very deeply into personal rapid transit PRT is a paradigm shift better transit without a train it's the possible consensus option currently not well understood by many people even some consultants don't understand it but I've researched it deeply and PRT will provide better transit on the rail corridor and beyond the glideways project in the east bay will prove viability just please look at the city council meeting just from a few days ago in Pittsburgh, California it shows a feasibility study and there's a wonderful presentation about how glideways will work in the east bay and by extension it could work here and there's other providers I'm not saying that's the only company but it's the one that is showing viability right now thank you thank you Mr. Garrett Kelly Arnold and then Peter Scott Chair recognizes Mr. Kelly Arnold hi this is Sally Arnold can you hear me all right yes okay great thank you well you know as many people have mentioned this is yet another marathon meeting I'm so ambivalent about that because like so many of us I have things to do too and on the other hand it's wonderful that we have such an engaged community to care so deeply that they are willing to spend their time you know expressing their concerns and their interests and their ideas about how to make this community better and I appreciate all of your patients I want to just speak for friends of the rail and trail for a moment we are really pleased to hear from the executive director Preston that the staff can continue to seek funding for the locally preferred alternative rail without the commission approval of the business plan just because the commission is deadlocked doesn't mean that they cannot continue doing the work needed and that and given that and the fact that now once the commissioners understood that I thought I wanted to commend commissioners Montecino and Hernandez for withdrawing their motion I appreciate their flexibility in the light of new information and I just really want to encourage the staff to continue their excellent work to bring clean light rail to our county as you can see it's a very popular thing you know people have listed all the organizations that are in favor and the hundreds of people that write and attend these meetings that are in favor I know there's a desire for a hundred percent consensus we're not going to get that but we are pretty darn close here in terms of the number of organizations and individuals who support clean light rail for our county there will always be a small minority of people who will object we can't stop that but really we're darn close to consensus right now thank you thank you Mrs. Erlund Mr. Peter Scott Peter Scott then Keith Otto yeah Mr. Peter Scott chair recognizes you you have two minutes you okay can you hear me yes yeah I would just like to point out that FM3 apparently has done polling in Santa Cruz County and has found outstanding favorable opinions from each of the five Santa Cruz County Supervisorial districts over 70 percent in favor of rail I'm not sure where Mr. Colligan gets his statistics from but I would urge you to do your own polling and see whether those polls that you do agree with the previous polling done by FM3 so I would urge you support for either commuter rail or other options on the rail tracks in the rail corridor we are very fortunate to have that rail corridor available to us and fortunate to have it owned by our local RTC and thank you so much commissioners for all your hard work thanks bye thank you Mr. Peter Scott and then Jeremiah Daniels here Mr. Otto you have two minutes yeah can the commissioners hear me okay yes excellent last month there was a vote on the TCAA business plan the outcome was to not move forward with passenger rail that was a decision one of the components of that vote was direct staff to seek federal and state funding that was voted down today one commissioner said something like staff will do what they will do in reference to continuing to seek rail funding and then said that staff actions will align with direction from the commission so my ask of the commission is to do just that and provide clear direction to staff do you really want staff and the director to pursue funding for rail I hope not if we're serious about evaluating public support let's have a county-wide vote this month just like last month the underlying facts remain a train north of Watsonville does not make sense for Santa Cruz County let's move on from this train idea and focus on real plans that move Santa Cruz County forward thank you thank you Mr. Otto Jeremiah Daniels and then Ryan chair recognizes Jeremiah Daniels you have two minutes hello this is Jeremiah Daniels I'm red as an of Santa Cruz I am I wanted to correct one of the incorrect statements made by Mr. Colligan earlier about hearing the same voices over and over again I was not part of this debate I became part of this I became very distraught with the situation when I saw how much outside money was being put into the anti rail campaign and it seemed very dubious and devious to see that this is a new voice and I plan to stay in Santa Cruz County for a long time and I want to urge you to accept the business plan and and to move forward with light rail using our rail corridor for the people is clearly the most equitable and most environmental solution and it'll help strengthen all of our other public transportation options it'll help improve everyone's electric bicycle movements and their personal rapid transport solutions that they choose but none of those are actually public transportation options whereas a rail is a public transportation option for everybody accessible to everybody and yeah please supervisors make the right decision and and move forward with the the the rail thank you Jeremiah you have Ryan and then Doug chair recognizes Ryan yeah two minutes Ryan you there you can unmute yourself or you're unmuted Ryan okay thank you sorry about that I want to follow Mike Rockins lead and saying you got to come up with something that's going to move one out of six commissioners or you know somebody and I think that probably the way to do that is public opinion and because the commissioners seem to be pretty well set on their in their opinions and the way to do that is to have a common set of facts and I think the place from which a common set of facts could emerge that would be useful to everybody would be the RTC staff and the way to do it would be to boil down some of the key issues to basically a one page document that could explain in simple terms what the alternatives are and the fact of the matter is that there's all the support for the rail but it's based on misconceptions it's based on the misconception that you can have it all and I think that it's really important for the RTC to be able to put out in the public what are the what's the cost of a rail versus a trail what's the timeline of a rail versus a trail what's the effect on freeway traffic of a rail versus a trail what's what's the environmental impact what about the vulnerability of a train to sea level rise versus the vulnerability of a trail the environmental damage as I talked about earlier in terms of what's happening in section seven phase two and then of course the big monster about well if there's not enough money where's that money going to come from and whether that whether the sources of that money is equitable or not equitable I think there's a really a lot to be laid out here and if it was really clear what is going on a lot of people who say oh yeah I'm for the train I want the train you know whether it's the Sierra Clover Bike Santa Cruz County their members are going to wait a minute that doesn't add up so please let's get some objective information out in the front of the public in an easily digestible form thank you Mr. Ryan Doug Doug chair this is Doug and Ryan's comments are a great segue to my comments in 2012 UC Berkeley prepared a transportation study that says the most successful light rail projects are 50 times more successful than the worst so we talk about not being divisive and not being emotional but I think this is a very divisive and a very emotional decision to be made also in that study it said that heavy rail works better than light rail heavy rail works because there's higher transit numbers light rail with low transit numbers is not cost effective and that's exactly what we're discussing now is light rail low transit numbers very unsuccessful 50 times more unsuccessful than the best the business plan that was published by the staff underestimates the operating expenses per year by a factor of two to three based upon my analysis of existing light rail operating expenses per mile shows that that's that's grossly underestimated so if we're going to create a fact sheet let's make sure the facts are right we do not want to agree on facts that are wrong please stop this I congratulate you on not approving the business plan and I look forward to a nice beautiful path through Santa Cruz County thank you Mr. Bernasso Sharon is Mr. Ben Bernasso give me a minute okay I've got you now I think this suggestion do you need anything else of being compromised in each other for a while makes a lot of sense actually even the trail are the rail people the trail and rail rail or trail whatever I call it they know that that's not going to be done until the mid 30s that's 14 years from now so my compromise suggestion is rail bank do a basic coastal trail so we've got this transportation system and then keep studying to see how you can put a trail and rail together but in the meantime let's use what we have and let's not forget metro metro is a great asset in fact it can use part of the trail part of the time especially from 41st avenue to the boardwalk and then up to the UCSC or to bringing people from Watsonville and Mid County that are government employees working in Santa Cruz or they're jurors trying to get to a jury duty special bus starts with Watsonville 20 minutes it leaves the Cabrillo college and then 20 minutes later it's at UCSC or the other bus in 20 minutes is at the center the government center there's all kinds of flexibility that a bus system a metro system has and I really like the efficiency studies that are going on that we heard today and not only metro but in the other areas so that's my suggestion rail bank plan for what you want to do and then unbank it if you need to bye bye thank you Mr. Ben I do not see any other hands commissioner Gonzalez see no other hands I'm going to go ahead and close this item now and move on I just had somebody jump on I don't know what you want to do but he will take the last person Stefan Wells is that correct correct this will be the last individual Stephanie thank you so much I thought I had raised my hand earlier my name is Stephanie Wells I am a resident of Santa Cruz and I just wanted to to say like Jeremiah who spoke earlier I'm also a new voice I was not in this conversation in the last meeting but I've been encouraged as so many in our community have to join this conversation because it means a lot to me I encourage you to keep moving forward to seek funding for passenger rail we need an interconnected public transportation option for our whole county our population is growing and highway congestion as I've seen between here between Santa Cruz and Watsonville is terrible even with the pandemic keeping people home and relying on Highway 1 is for the commuting needs of our residents between north and south county just isn't feasible and nor is the trail only I am an avid bicyclist myself and I've been enjoying the open trail on the west side so thank you but post pandemic I'll need to commute across the county and biking from one side of the county to the other is just not a real a realistic option for me and certainly it's not a realistic option for our community members who are trying to get to different parts of the county for second or third jobs as one of our community members Maria spoke about I'm trying to get her to her nanny job in Watsonville and having to to leave that so that's reality for so many of us and for the more facing a climate emergency we just can't keep delaying the Biden administration's committed to expanding passenger rail and dramatically increasing funding for passenger rail so just seems like now is the time to to be forward thinking and to to seek some of that funding to bring passenger rail to Santa Cruz County so thank you for letting me speak again I apologize I didn't have my hand raised earlier thank you for your time okay thank you we're gonna go ahead and I'll officially close that we're gonna go ahead and move on now to item 28 closed sessions Mr. Chair we do have one closed session items today regarding real property negotiations we're not anticipating a report out of closed session okay I guess my question here is to the commissioners do you guys want to continue on or would you like to make a special meeting next week just for closed session let's do it now and get it done that's my view just do it now and get it done okay is that a forward move forward move forward okay we're gonna move forward I think you have some comments for closed session from the public okay so we're gonna go ahead and get back to the public for the closed session comments any anyone that wants to comment on the closed session item only motion I apologize if I'm mispronouncing your name motion and Brian yes can you hear me yes yes just regarding the rail trail I live in live oak and my wife works at live this is on the conference of the real the closed session on real property I don't have anything for that I raised my hand for the previous I've just been on for the rail trail I need to apologize that we had closed that already that's up to you guys that's fine I mean I raised my hand but whatever you guys decided to do yeah we had only moved on so I apologize for that okay Brian people's hi this is Brian from trail now not sure of the closed session negotiations however rumor has it that roaring camp is going to take over the freight operations in Watsonville and I want to say we support that I think it's great with some conditions we want to make sure that roaring camp will not have we'll have no legal rights to prevent rail banking from Watsonville to Davenport or the construction of the Santa Cruz coastal trail no public funds will be used to subsidize roaring camp freight operations in Watsonville roaring camp will financially be responsible for the infrastructure of the railroad tracks including part route river trestle and they shall not operate excursion trains outside of their current private operations and we hope you support the rail banking and construction of the interim trail by 2023 now as a side note we want to suggest that you think outside the box the UP yard is about a half a mile or so from the customers in Watsonville and an alternative could be the loading offloading could exist in the UP yard right next to it and then the trucking could service the local customers and what the opportunity here is now Watsonville could have the Pajaro River trestle converted into a trail and open up the neighborhoods so we want to encourage you to think outside the box there and look how that could benefit the local Watsonville community so please keep in mind that look at space x you don't have to think that you need the big big trains running through the Watsonville neighborhoods thank you thank you there are no other hands up commissioner okay so everybody got the link for the closed session it was sent this morning and I just find it so with that going to close the meeting and we're going to adjourn into the closed session did I get that right I don't think I've ever gotten this correct okay sorry I apologize for that so I guess we'll see each other in the closed session okay bye thank you thank you is this or comments or everybody's going to closed session hi Ian so our legal counsel noted there will be no report out so we can go ahead and close this meeting