 Welcome to our 7 PM session of the March 20th, 2018 public safety study session. I'd like to ask the clerk at this time to please call roll. Thank you, Mayor, Council Member, it's Crone. Present. Matthews? Sure. Chase? Here. Brown? Here. Naroyan? Here. Vice Mayor Watkins? Here. And Mayor Teresas? Here. Tonight, we only have one item on our agenda, which will be the public safety study session. And this was one, the last time we had a comprehensive study session was about, I'd say it's been about four years ago. And so I'm really thankful for all those of you that are present. We'll have a staff presentation, followed by questions from the council. And we'll have been the opportunity for public comment and deliberation. So at this time, I'd like to turn it over to Police Chief Andy Mills to kick off the meeting. Well, good evening. Good evening, Mr. Mayor and Council Members. Thank you so much for taking the time to go through these 250 slides with me. Actually, it's only 40 some, so we want to make you feel better about how long this is going to last. This is a wonderful opportunity for us to be able to show you and discuss with you what direction we're headed, what challenges we see, and how do we get to the end game. And so we'll go through these slides with you. I would like to acknowledge that several of my senior staff members are here. And acknowledge them for their hard work. So we have Deputy Chief Martinez and Deputy Chief Filippo with us. Just can't say enough good things about the quality of work that they've been doing in helping with this whole process. And we also have three over four lieutenants. One lieutenant is currently at a meeting down in Los Angeles. But we have lieutenants Jose Garcia. Might help if I move my glasses. Lieutenant Warren Berry and then Lieutenant Christian LaMosse. And as well, several other staff members who have come to take part in this. So as you're aware, staff and staff. You got one more there, Arnold. Well, that's to teach him to sit down. And then Lieutenant Arnold Vazquez, our newest lieutenant and just doing a marvelous job also. So as you're aware, in 2016 there was discussion amongst city council about a staffing study and what that might be able to do for the city in terms of understanding the problems and the difficulties with crime and disorder in our city. And prior to my arrival, a contract was agreed to with CPSM to conduct this analysis. And they did so, and that was completed in November of 2017. Just so you understand who they are, it's an experienced group and team of former command staff members, one former city manager and one former city chief of police. As well as technical advisors to come in and really scour a police department from top to bottom. And really take a good look at who we are, what we're doing. Literally they left no stone unturned. So the Center for Public Safety Management came in and under the auspices of the umbrella of the International City and County Management Association. And took a look at us and interviewed most of our staff. And did a good, thorough job. And as a result, they gave us some feedback that I'll go over in a few minutes. Just the background of the staffing study, if I might. So it was an analysis of the operational efficiencies of our department. And the configurations that might improve officer availability and productivity. I think that's the key element that we're trying to drive at is our effectiveness. And there were three phases of the study. The data collection occurred first, and they did a great job pouring over that data. And then they did a site visit and then construction of the recommendations which you see in front of you. There's 103 recommendations to both the SCPD and Parks and Rec. Of those, there are 13 categories for police and seven different categories for rangers. And we'll again get into all of this. And the full report is posted online for anybody from the community to see as well. The executive summary states that in congratulations to SCPD, overall they've provided very high quality of law enforcement service to the city of Santa Cruz. And I think that's something to take a look at and appreciate and understand how hard the men and women of this department work on a daily basis, as well as the Parks and Rec staff. The staff is professional and dedicated, they're also well educated. The analysis was conducted to understand our strengths, but also the opportunities that we have to make it better. And we want to take a good, hard look at that. And then one thing that jumped out at me immediately was that many of the recommendations can be accomplished by realigning our workload. And when you take a look at that, I think that one phrase sums up much of this investment that we did. And then also, and I'm quoting here, recognize this process takes time. Not just weeks or months, but perhaps years. And I think that's an important caution. So the police department had 80 recommendations. I have to report that we've jumped on it with both the, and 37 are done. And then there's another 20 that are currently underway, and then 23 that we are going to have to take a little bit longer. Look at, study, and figure out whether or not we can do those in terms of cost and effort and time. But many of these, again, will take a long period of time to implement. Parks and Recs had 23 recommendations. Most of those centered around or were solved by movement to SCPD. And again, we'll get into that. So of the recommendations by assignment, 13 primary categories comprising the recommendations, administrative recommendations for the chief's office. Two are done, one is underway. And you can go into the front part of the report and see what each of these individual recommendations are. There are three done, one underway, and we're going to have to study one, and then downtown unit, one is done. And that team, two are done. Now, having said that, the downtown unit and the net team no longer exist. That's why they're done. They're now being merged into the neighborhood policing teams. And that's a significant movement for us. I can go through all these individually and report out two done, one done. But I think that you can read these for yourself. The point is that we've really taken this seriously. We've worked very hard to implement some of these recommendations. And took great care to study them. And again, you can see that there's some for the facilities, some for transportation and booking. There's a variety of things and recommendations they made. Some, to be frank, won't just work here. But we're going to look at them anyway and make sure that we study them to understand whether or not these would work and what reasons they may not work. On line from implementation, we're committed to implementing these as fast as possible, as long as they're operationally and fiscally reasonable. A five-year time frame is what they suggested is to have most of these done, which fits nicely with our leadership plan that we've already completed. And so we were happy about that. 16 of the recommendations are directly related to the records management system that is critical. And I'm happy to report that I met on that today with Netcom and the sheriff's office is strongly considering also jumping into this RFP with us. So that would put almost every major police agency in the county on the same system. That would be huge in terms of the ability to collect information, share it with one another, take a look at crime stats. I mean, we take a hard look at jurisdictions and location, crooks don't. They don't care about crossing over into Live Oak or past 7th Street, which the sheriff's area. So this will be good information, it would be a great way to do this. They will also shoulder some of the cost and the burden of that system, so that will be important as well. Some of these do include capital improvement project money, which we will again merge in to see what the city's priorities are and figure those out as we go. Develop a mission statement. Well, we were already underway and so we've got that completed and this is the mission statement. And just to remind council, the mission statement came from meeting with the communities, meeting individually with community members, taking all that data and then giving it to our sergeants to turn into a mission statement, which went to patrol who highlighted the words that they felt were really important to them. And then that went to the command staff, which penciled this out and made sure that it was something that everybody could understand and agree to, and it was very well received. I was very impressed by the amount of attention and detail and care that each of our employees took. I figured that 50% of our employees would stand back with their arms crossed saying why do I have to do this, I'd rather be out working. What I found was exactly the opposite, they were thirsty for it, they were hungry for it, and they all pitched in and I think the result is we have a great product. Secession planning was very important in the study as well as to the department that was identified ahead of time by many of our employees. And so we need to ensure that employees are trained and mentored to serve as future leaders. That was recommendation number two. Well, took that seriously. We already have a spot secured for the FBI National Academy in 2019, 2019 as quick as we could get it. And one of the purposes of us redistricting and doing this neighborhood policing is so that these lieutenants who are fairly young and will probably outlast many of us in the department will be the future leaders. And so they are acting as the chief of police for the section of the city. And allowing them to handle the crime control, handle the personnel, handle the complaints from community members and balance all of those things. And so I think that all of them are rising to that level and are just doing a fantastic job. And then we're also offered other schools for the mid-management and the senior management of our department to make sure that they can go and receive some of the best training in the country. And that's one of the reasons Bernie is down in Los Angeles right now. To develop a strategic plan, part of the strategic plan that was developed, and there's a copy of the front page for you. This was underway, but we agreed with everything they said about that. And so we called the leadership plan instead of a strategic plan, it's just a semantical thing. But for us, it's more of a direction of where are we going and how are we getting there. And we're the milestones we want to accomplish, and certainly anybody can avail themselves of that copy, which is also on the web. So, but what's the priority of policing? The priority of policing is to prevent and control crime, pure and simple. Unfortunately, you can look at these crime rates and see that it's an area that we need to do a lot better in. Even if you adjust our crime rates to include the university, us as a county, see the center of tourism, and all of that, we're still too high. And this is something we have to deal with, and we have to accept responsibility for as a police agency and as a city and as a county government. It's not just us, it's everybody. And really work on these numbers because each one of those numbers represent a citizen. And so we need to work on that. So our goal through this process is to be more effective in how we control crime. You look at the trend line, how we've done over the last several years. This is through 2015, and it's fairly close to that currently. The red line represents just the average of what you take all those numbers and divide it out. So it stays fairly consistent. And I asked a couple people who were here long before me what was the big dip in property crime in 2008, and we don't know. There could have been a variety of things that affected that, but that seems to be the aberration that goes outside of standard deviation. But for the most part, it stayed fairly consistent over that time frame. Violent crime as well, down in the green line at the bottom. But the point of this is, it's something that we have to work on. And we want to see us dipping below that imaginary red line rather than above it. This is a hotspot map of the city of where crime and calls for service occur, and you can see that clusters in five areas of the city. And so these are the areas that we need to spend the most time and effort and energy on working and reducing those calls so we can get at the crime that's associated with it. Obviously, the brighter red, the location, the more calls for service we have. This is typical of what a crime analysis report might look like. This came from the study itself. These are some of the locations where we have the highest calls for service and crime locations in the city. And you can see that it is, other than the police department, we don't have that much crime occurring there, but we have a lot of crime reported there. And so people come into the front counter and say, I've been a victim of crime, so we go and take the reports, obviously. So you can see that crime clusters in locations, and we'll get into a little bit more of that later. So one of the selected recommendations, I'm not going to go through all the recommendations, they should take forever in a day, but one of the selected recommendations is, they say, is to consider other strategies. And I think that that is important. So in the chart that you see here, here are some of the strategies. And if you could take that bar and scroll down, it's just a screenshot, so you won't be able to do that. But if you could take that bar and scroll down, you'd see a variety of strategies to reduce crime. On the right side is what happened with crime through neighborhood policing, a strategy that we have chosen as well as a Comstat model and departments throughout the nation. Now, these are obviously much larger cities. This is also coming on the end of the crack cocaine epidemic. So it's probably disproportionately a reduction. However, the point is there's two main strategies in policing that have been used. And one is this Comstat model, the other is neighborhood policing and problem solving. We have chosen for our department to move towards neighborhood policing and problem solving for a variety of reasons, which we'll get into. But our goal with this is to let our heroes, the guys and women in blue, to do their job. And right now they seem stymied and calls for service, crowding out the opportunity to police. And again, we'll get that further. Excuse me. So the focus of how we police is important. And if you look at the data, it would suggest that 61% of crime occurs in 10% of locations. So the theory then would be to police the problems that are the most problematic. The location is the most problematic. 54% of crime approximately is committed by 10% of criminals. Rather than focusing on everybody, you focus on those who are most problematic. I just got this, the next bullet down here, 3.4 miles of the streets of Santa Cruz account for most of our fatal and serious injury collisions. And that came from Vision Zero, and it's being done through the county, and as well as her Smart Streets program. So rather than randomly running traffic on streets that we don't have problems, it makes a lot more sense to focus on where the problems are. And you do that through either finding the right handler to control the offender, bringing the right manager to control the place, or their guardian to protect the victims. So overall, I know it's a pretty small font. But CompStat model versus Neighborhood Policing model, I think down at the bottom is the most salient point. CompStat model is kind of viewed as an occupational force where a stop and frisk and zero tolerance policing was the cry, and it wound up in federal lawsuits. Whereas the other side, it was Neighborhood Policing is more of a relational responsibility between the police and the community, working together to solve community problems. We cannot solve these problems without the community, it's as simple as that. And so our choice has been to move forward with this, in a problem or in a policing model where we look at crime, we analyze why it's occurring at a specific location and solve those problems. It's like when you have a neighborhood and you get a dope house in that neighborhood. What starts happening in the neighborhood, that cancer metastasizes throughout the community. And then you start getting car burglaries, and then you get noise complaints, and you get all these other things. So if you can take out that cancer, that node, it can bring that community back to normalcy, and that's the purpose of problem-oriented policing. We get a lot of people who are addicted to alcohol hanging out at front and SoCal, where we have a lot of calls for service. So we're working with that business on making sure that they secure the alcohol there so that they can't get it and steal it. That just makes a little bit of sense. And you watch, if we're able to successfully do that, the calls for service, the crime in that neighborhood will drop significantly. That diffusion of benefit is what we want to get in each of these neighborhoods. And it's going to be addressing those problems one by one. What we've asked our lieutenants to do is to be thoughtful about prioritizing the calls, prioritizing the problems, excuse me, in each neighborhood, be responsible for that and figure out how to drive those crimes down in that neighborhood. And so when they focus and prioritize those, the bigger problems first, we can stay on top of those and start having that benefit of other crimes being addressed just because we dealt with that one cancer cell, if you will. Neighborhood policing is decentralized. We also have redeployed every staff member to the field that we could possibly redeploy. There's a couple of people that we didn't. One is a staff sergeant to help the lieutenants and the sergeants run the organization. The other is our school resource officer, which right now we think is really important. And then the third person is our gang officer who is just doing a stellar job and keeping on top of the gang problems as part of the countywide gang task force, which is Watsonville, CHP, Capitol and ourselves. And then we want to make sure that we're doing two other things that are important to me. One is that we're accountable for our crime control. Is crime going up or down in the neighborhood and how does the community know? We want to make sure that we're posting that in a location where every community member can come on and see what's going on in their neighborhood, more than just dots, but looking at heat maps, looking at crime percentage totals, looking at the incidents of crime before the application of our response. And then the last one is community engagement. We want to make sure that we're getting feedback from the community as well as building that relationship with the public where we can employ their help to deal with many of these problems. For instance, we're having a car brokely problem in the Upper West neighborhood. Community members can help us by walking in the neighborhood with flashlights at a certain time at night if we can analyze that deep into the data. I know of one city, for instance, that got flashing collars for all their dogs. I read in blue flashing collars. And they took the dogs out for a walk at nighttime when they were most likely to have car brokely problems in the neighborhood. Didn't confront people. It's just that visual presence of a community that cared and people outside. So there's many things and innovative ideas that we can do. So what gets in our way? Why can't the police do this? And if you look to the left side of the screen here, this came directly from CPSM. Departments averaged between 400 and 1,000 calls per 1,000 residents. The lower the number suggests a better policy on triaging non-emergency calls for service. On the top of the page, you can see what Santa Cruz is. We're above the highest they've ever seen. So we're averaging almost 1,100 calls per 1,000 residents. And in my opinion, coming in from the outside and just taking a look at this, it's far too much. And we can get into the specifics of that. But the question is, then how do we triage better? And that becomes a discussion point in a policy matter. So this is kind of tongue-in-cheek. But if you remember seeing this Lucy episode where the chocolate's going down the conveyor belt, and at first it's, oh, that's fine. She eats one, and then packages two. And then the conveyor belt gets going faster and faster and faster. And then she's stuffing them in her hat and her mouth. And then the lady comes in and yells, speed it up. That's what our officers feel like right now, that the chocolate is on the calls for service around a high-speed conveyor belt. And then somebody yells, speed it up. And it's to the point where many of them feel like they're at the water level. And so this is something that my responsibility is to help them fix. So our mantra has been, for many years, no call too small. You call us will come. And according to CPSM, that this is characteristic of a small-town mentality, of a small-town thought process. Now, Santa Cruz is not a San Francisco, but we are an urban area, and certainly an area with urban problems. And so somehow we have to take a look at this and figure out what can we do to provide them the opportunity to actually police. Because in that margin between proactivity and reactivity is where we can find the greatest crime control. And I think that's what's important. Some quotes from the thing. It's an enormous misuse of emergency personnel is what these experts were telling us. And here's just some of the areas that they took a look at and the frequency of calls. So we can't certainly not avoid taking reports on 1,500 crashes every year. But there are some that we shouldn't go to. Ordnance violations takes us, on average, 130 minutes to get there. And the reason for that is there's so many calls stacked up of those kind. So rather than just saying, we're not going to go to them, the question becomes, well, how do we manage them and how do we deal with them in a thoughtful way? And then you can see the other ones for yourself. So we respond physically to about 68,000 calls a year. And a couple of you had asked me, well, wait a second. I thought the number was over 100,000. And we took a good hard look at the data. And what we found out is that a lot of those calls are information-only calls. In other words, fires running code 3-2 through town. There's a person who's wanted from San Jose, might be in the area, Abolo, be on the lookout. So the calls we're actually responding to are 68,000. CPSM estimates that we could reduce up to 22,000 of those calls. I don't think we can reduce that many from looking at the information. But if we can reduce several calls a day, that gives our officers that margin, that time to be proactive. So calls for service are kind of a domino effect. The average wait time for non-emergency calls for service, the benchmark that CPSM says is acceptable is 15 minutes. We're at 25 minutes on average. And then dispatch hold times are 16 minutes in and of themselves. So the dispatchers are sitting on that call for 16 minutes. The reason they're sitting on that call is there's no units available. So what I hear frequently is the dispatcher telling the officers or the sergeant, we just sent you to a burglary of progress by also holding a camping call, a disturbance at such and such location, this location and that location. And it's kind of like when your mother tells you to clean your room and sweep the garage and wash the car. And it's just so overwhelming that sometimes you just give up. And I don't want to put our officers in that position. And we're dealing with them broadcasting too much at once. However, these numbers, the more backed up it gets is that domino effect of it continues to elongate. And then people just get, again, fatigued listening to that. Priority calls for service, the benchmark is five minutes. We're at almost seven minutes. And dispatch hold time is 2.3 minutes. So if we can get rid of that hold time, because we're more efficient, we can get pretty close to those numbers without really making too much of a stretch. And I think that's something we certainly want to head towards. Columns management. So it slows response times and stacks more calls. It shortens the benchmark time of calls when officers are there. What this means is when officers is on scene in most departments, they're there for almost 30 minutes, 28.7 minutes. Here, we're there for 25 minutes. Because you're constantly thinking, I got to get to the next call. The next call, citizens waiting, the next call is holding. And so we want them to do a slow down a little bit, take their time to actually talk to people and do a little bit more thorough investigations when you have the opportunity. It's also a little bit dangerous. Because on average, the average city sends 1.7 officers to a call, we send 1.6. Which means that often we're not sending enough officers to these calls. And that's more dangerous for the citizens. It's also more dangerous for our officers. So they came up with a policy many cities use called the rule of 60. And that is 60% of your officers should be in patrol. And that 60% of their day should be consumed by calls for service. In other words, 40% of the day should be available for proactive policing, for handle administrative duties, for having lunch, for if this isn't a take a break thing. Right now, most of our officers don't take lunch during the day, and they certainly don't get breaks. So this is called the saturation index. And you can see the numbers as it speaks here. And very frequently, we're well above those numbers. Again, this is what we need to fix. When officers experience a workload of greater than 60%, as that middle box says, they become increasingly reactive, waiting for the next call. And through much of the day, our SI surpassed the threshold. So 60% of our officers should be designated to patrol. So here's our current numbers. We have 94 funded positions. However, the city manager has approved us to look to 99 positions if we could fulfill these numbers, and we're not there right now. Right now, we have seven vacancies. This has been tough to hang on to people. And when we're interviewing people, I'll get into that in a second. But one of the things we're hearing is that, why do I want to do this here for the same or less money than somewhere else? I can work literally half as hard and understand that. But I'm thankful for the ones who want to be here because they want to work hard. And that's what most of our department is. We have five currently in training. We have five unable to work because of injuries. That's actually risen in the last couple days to seven, so we can take away from that. But they'll be back shortly, we hope. 47 in patrol, that includes sergeants and lieutenants. And then if we have 14 in neighborhood policing teams, that can augment patrol if the need be. And then five administrative assignments, such as the chiefs, IA sergeant and a staff sergeant. We have 10 investigators and nine CSOs. One officer there is not correct. So that's where our current staffing is. We also have a lot of civilian, not a lot of civilian staff. We have, I think, 15 additional civilian staff working at different functions in the department, such as records and property and so forth. We've also extended three job offers in the last week to new people who are going to go to the academy. But we're also trying to find people who are lateral transfers because they can hit the ground running. And I think that's kind of important. This is a spattle representation of officer-initiated calls for service. You can see where the officers spend their time being proactive in the city and where they're calling out that they're contacting people. Almost mirrors exactly what you saw in the Crimes for Service. And this is where they're at. The central question becomes, the levels of service in Santa Cruz desires. Do you desire greater crime control by allowing officers time to be proactive? Then how do we do it? We can do it one of a couple ways. Add officers or first try to reconfigure the staffing that we have in the current calls for service to meet those numbers. And I think that's as we're going to push forward here. So this is, again, a look at the current budget as it stands right now. And then as we move forward. Now, one of the things that staffing comparison that we need to take a look at is over the last decade, we've added about 9,000 residents to the city. We've not added more officers. That'd be like taking a city the size of Scotts Valley and not having any officers to patrol it. So we're currently at 1.46 officers per 1,000 residents with council approval and the over hire if we could fill those positions, we'd be at 1.52. That would be a huge blessing if we could get up to that level and get all those positions filled. I mean, that would be a gigantic relief. Available for duty because of injuries, we're down in the 1.3 area. The national target, which CPSM talks about is 2.0 officers per 1,000. But I want to be honest with that. California is normally much lower. Most cities in California are not at the 2 per 1,000 level. But that doesn't mean that that's not a goal to achieve someday. So what are our staffing concerns? About three out of 100 are hired. For every 100 people that take the test, we wind up going through the funnel and hiring three. It's tough. And then attrition is high. Burnout is a substantial risk for injury rates. I think that's one of the reasons we have several people on light duty. So here's the tough part. Of the last nine hired, Dan Filippo has been doing a great job getting people through the door. And he's really worked in a marketing campaign and we've been finding the bodies. But of the last nine we've hired, two failed the academy, one quit during the academy, three quit during training. And the X interviews where this is too busy, I can't keep up with the workload. And then for now the other three are doing well. So there's three wronged approach. One is reduce the demand, eliminate some of the calls for service through differential response. That doesn't mean we won't respond to them. We have to find different ways to respond to them. Increase patrol resources by reconfiguring the patrol schedule, which we're currently working on or hire more police officers to get fully staffed. And all three of those are underway. So we've impaneled a committee inside the department to look at calls for service and how to reduce those unnecessary calls to be more in line with what other police agencies are doing around the country and around the state. I can go into a lot of examples of this, but for the sake of time I think we'll hold off on that. Consider different staffing configurations such as 12-hour shifts or 10-hour shifts with more squads. And so Arnold Vasquez under the direction of Deputy Chief Martinez has been working on that diligently. This, it's important for us to take a look at these and we're heading down that road. Deputy Chief Filippo has been doing the calls for service. They've already met with members of the department. Now the next step is to meet with members of the community to make sure that we're in line with what the community expects. And then leverage all department resources to address these hotspots and these hotspot locations as they come up, including the hot people. One of the things we've implemented as a program, we're using one of our CSOs as a crime analyst to discuss some of the most people who are most problematic in the city. So we've identified top people, 10 top people who are getting arrested the most or causing the most problems, focusing on them and really working with the DA's office, the sheriff and the chief of probation to solve the problems with those people. I met with them, had lunch with them, we all discussed it, we agreed. And then the very next week, I just wanna give credit to the DA, sends me an email, hey, this is one of your guys, I want you to know we're taking this to the mat. And so one individual has been arrested over 200 times, is on probation multiple times. And then he threatened to kill some of our officers. And it was a real threat. So long story short, the DA took that seriously, we're working together, focusing on those things. And I think that we can hopefully have some impact on that. Examining staffing levels, I think we've covered this, this whole idea of no call too small, but the point is we gotta think a little bit differently. So I think it becomes a choice, a political choice to be very honest. Do we continue to provide police services as they are now or take steps to restructure how to respond to the demand? And this is gonna be a tough thing to walk through. But I think it's important for us to understand what CPSM said, what their ideas are, what others are doing so that we can push forward in this vein. The re-engineering process, we went through the talk with our staff, the community, the city leadership, and then boiled it down to get our mission statement. And that was what was reflected earlier. The mission statement went for our sergeants, the officers, and then ultimately the command staff to come up with this document. I would again encourage any community member to read it so they know what we're about. And this all came from them at those meetings that we did initially for the first several months. And then look for the diffusion of benefit as we march through these problems and make sure that we're solving them. We're examining the staffing formulas, as I mentioned earlier. I think this is an important point. For every 1,700 calls we manage better, it's the equivalent of adding one additional police officer. And this is a cost savings measure as much as a better way to police. Especially when you take a look at the cost of a fully benefited officer is 183,000 and a fully benefited sergeant is 208,000. So if you're adding a dozen officers, you're talking an enormous amount of money. And then lastly, this is what our new neighborhood map looks like. This is the community and each lieutenant is noted up in the upper left corner in the proper color coded part of the map. And any community member can click on the map on our website and find out who the lieutenant is and shoot them an email or get them information about what's happening in their neighborhood. And Lieutenant will respond pretty quickly. So I submit to you this report and I certainly answer any questions that you might have at your leisure. Well, at this point, is there any council member would like to ask any questions regarding the report? I'll ask one before we go to public comment. And that she mentioned that their external forces that hinder the police from doing their job. You know, it looks like when I saw that statistic over the last eight years that our crime rate has been relatively constant. So what are those things other than the fact that the council has directed overfilling police staffing and resources? What are those external factors that we as a council can help address to help influence that aside from the recommendations today? I think there are several things that council can take a look at and help us with. One is that for many years, we have sold to the community to pick up the phone and dial 911 on everything. So unfortunately, the expectation of the community becomes, I pick up the phone, I call 911, I want to cop right now. Well, it may not be an emergency call for service and we're not going to be there for two hours. Well, all that does is set us up for failure, that the city up for failure and the community member up for failure. So we've got to retrain and rethink that of using the non-emergency number when it's not an emergency. The second thing is we certainly understand the dynamic of the court system, the justice system here in Santa Cruz as well as California. And for crime control to be effective, it has to be certain, swift and fair. I don't think we can reach those two numbers, the certain and swift. And the reason for that is when we put people on probation for five times over, they didn't learn the first time. I doubt they're going to learn the second or third time. So this really has to become a public policy matter for our entire community of how do we deal with that? And this lays, you know, the courts have to help us and understand, and I think the courts are willing to understand if the community lets them know what the desire of this community is, is to, whether it's to be a little bit tougher on sentencing, when we arrest a gang member or a felon with a firearm multiple times, that person at some point needs to go to prison to learn the lesson, to be rehabilitated because of that. The third thing I think is important is much of the homeless thing has been thrust on the shoulders of the police department as a solution. I think we've really come to the realization this is not a solution and that we need to work and we are working in concert with the rest of city government to really work on solving these problems and I couldn't be more proud of the other department has the manager's office of how we've all taken this task on together but this also has to come from the county. This is a county responsibility. They have the budget and the funding for it. They also have the legislative mandate and we could really use their assistance in helping drive the policy forward on how we collectively deal with these problems as a city. So those are just some really quick things that might be able to be done from a legislative perspective. Thank you. Council Member Brown and then Council Member Cron. Thank you for being here this evening and for all the work you do and I appreciate the report. It's helpful to, and I read through the report in detail so many of the things that you have been talking about resonate with the statistics that I have seen. I am wondering about a couple of things. One, in terms of the recommendations that are coming to us, just a little, if you could talk a little bit about the community service officer model versus the role of the Rangers and just to help us and others in the room have a better understanding of why we've increased our, and again, some of you have been involved in these discussions over the years that I haven't been on the council previously but just a little bit about that and then a second question is, I really appreciate the direction to move into neighborhood policing and setting up the regions and teams and I've been to a couple of the events where lieutenants have spoken to very energetic audiences and so I think it's great to be moving in this direction. I do wonder if you've considered a model that includes some kind of satellite. I'm just thinking about places in different parts of the city that people can go to either be part, just communicate their concerns, maybe having some satellite offices might reduce some of the calls that go in through central dispatch. I don't know, but I just would be interested to hear if you can thought about that at all. Sure, first of all, the community service officer model, that has been done in many police departments to relieve the workload that is experienced by officers taking reports, some accident reports, some minor theft reports and so forth. It's been used effectively here and I think it's an important model. We also have them in positions in the, inside the department where we don't want to have sworn officers doing that because a person who's sworn and fully trained, post certified, all that kind of thing really can only do things that nobody else can do. And so we really want to save them for the stuff they need to be used for. So it has been effective in doing that. I think also some of the city's thinking in the past has been it's pretty difficult to hire and find police officers and this is a little bit less expensive model, the CSO. So they're hardworking employees so maybe we've gone towards that. And I think that was, in my opinion, a very proper thing to do. The Rangers, I think fulfill a fantastic role and done a great job in this city. And I think that we can't speak highly enough of the people that have done that. Again, they can't do the full scope of things. And so part of the problem becomes if they tell somebody, hey, you gotta leave the park, no, I'm not, there's nobody to stand behind them. Part of the idea to bring them over to the police department is they have somebody, a team of officers standing behind them now in each area of the city. And working with that team and being embedded in that team allows them to do their jobs, will be a little bit more effective. And then as you saw from the report, there's a lot of back story information stuff that has to take place with people who are 832 PC certified, which would mean that the police department is really in the best position to do that. And so we think that the Rangers can continue to do a stellar job, providing a great high level of service throughout the city, but mostly focused on the parks. I wanna ask, just in the second question on satellite offices or some kind of place? Well, yes. Outside of the downtown. Yeah, one of the things we have discussed is having maybe some of the libraries, for instance, have a spot where the officers can go and write reports. And so we have discussed that. We've also discussed fire stations. I know they've tried that in the past, but we've also, the lieutenants have been pretty committed to making sure that they're meeting with community members on a regular basis so that they can have face to face contact in each neighborhood with community members. And I know that they've been responsive. I've already been to several meetings with several lieutenants, meeting with community groups. And so they've been doing a fantastic job. And I know that I'm hearing from community members, had I spoke with Lieutenant Lamasse and he did a fantastic job. Thank you so much. So I know that they're doing it on their own as well. And so that's, I think that's the step in the right direction. Council Member Crown, then Council Member Chase. Yeah, I wanted to follow up on Council Member Brown's question, because it's still not clear to me. When a CSO tells somebody to leave the park, are they gonna leave the park or do they also need backup? Well, CSOs normally aren't in that position. They can write some citations like rangers, but CSOs are also embedded on those teams. So I was looking at this, the differences. There's a little bit more for CSOs, it seems like as far as pay goes. So I was looking at city manager, but different pay ranges. And I'm just wondering, do you see a future at all of going, say we had 30 or 40 CSOs and would that cut down on the number of sworn officers? I don't see us being able to go that direction because you still have a lot of crimes that need to be responded to. We do see a path, however, for rangers, should they choose to go into the CSO or sworn side or a staff position inside the department that this is a career path that they could take should they want to. I don't see us changing the ratio a whole lot because again, it takes a sworn officer to do much of the workload that we're tasked with. Could you talk a little bit about the use of force? And I'm looking at page seven of the recommendations, but also page 77. And then there's also some recommendations on use of force for park rangers on page 105. And I'm just wondering, one is begin tracking all uses of force by officers as defined by department policy, begin tracking use of force proactive data by individual officer and not only by incident. I was just wondering, have we been doing this already or is this all new, these recommendations from 57 to 61? Yeah, most of what we've been doing already. And we were kind of puzzled when we saw this because we actually do report this out as you know on our website as well as to the Public Safety Committee. I think what they were looking for is a review process of a use of force expert on all of these cases. Well, most of our sergeants are use of force experts and every sergeant reads every single use, not every sergeant reads everyone, but a sergeant reads every single use of force that we do in the city. What they suggested is that go into IEPRO where we can track that use of force. We certainly can do that. My thought process on that is there's been some recent research that would suggest that the EIS system, early warning systems are not that effective that we should look more at trauma that the officers experience rather than the number of citations or that kind of thing that the officers are involved in. So the greater chance of a complaint or a systemic problem with the officer is more related to the trauma that they've experienced as part of their duties. As far as the rangers are concerned, if you're 832PC certified, which they are, you have to report that out to the state every year. And so we have to report out every use of force that results in injury to the state. And there is no mechanism in place to do those kinds of things currently for the rangers. And that will take place under us because that's something we understand that we just do regularly. Thanks. And also just the use of force for the rangers, it says that there's been three incidences in the past 18 months. Is that what you know of to be true as well? And I was under the impression that maybe park rangers don't get into use of force issues that they're calling for backup. I know of, I know one for sure, but if they say three, then I would suggest that that probably is the case. Actually, I know of two. One was a ranger did a stellar job, officer was fighting a guy, the same guy that went into the school with the machete. As we're fighting him downtown, the officer was in a tough fight and the ranger helped our officer out and had a use force in the process. Another one that I'm aware of a ranger was punched in the face and in the rangers foot pursuit and tackle the guy. So those are considered uses of force. I don't know what the other one is because it might have happened before I got here, but so they can use force. They have been trained to do arrest and control to use. But now at the police department are, what we want to make sure is that we use the minimal amounts of force possible to overcome the resistance that they're facing. And that is in house training that we will provide on an ongoing basis to the rangers to make sure that they're in line with what's common throughout policing. Last question is about complaints on page six of the recommendations, professional standards. Or have these been implemented too because they develop a protocol for at least monthly contact with complainants to advise them of the status of the investigation of their complaint. This would come as great news to many people who have filed complaints and then it sort of falls into a black hole and they never heard, even when they ask a year later, there is no response. And how are we doing now? We are going to be notifying people every month. We'll have a, make sure that a letter is written to them that they will have some type of documentation in their hand. I think some of the issue is sometimes people want more information than we can give them by law, but we'll still make contact with them and make sure that they're informed of what's, whether they're a complaint lies. Yeah, a lot of times people just want to know that somebody cares and taken seriously. Yeah, and I can tell you these are taken seriously. One of the other suggestions with the IA Sergeant meets with the Chief regularly. Well, his office is about 20 feet from mine. So he walks in there literally three times a week. So we're working on those suggestions. Thank you. And I'll just say as someone who's a member and been on the public safety committee for the, I think since the time I've been on the council, I can guarantee you that these complaints are taken with the utmost of seriousness and investigated thoroughly. There's reports to take place annually and the officers that are in charge and assigned to investigate those through internal affairs, they are available to take calls and will respond upon request by any constituent, any member of the public that submits a concern or even wants to follow up. So, I mean, on that point, I would say, maybe it's a matter of having some information if someone's sent, made a comment to you, that information is available and I think those people can readily follow up. So I'm not sure if you were speaking to something in particular. Yeah, it hasn't happened in several cases, but we can follow up. He's assuring us that monthly reports will be taken place because I know folks who have made complaints and it's been a year. And I just want to add, I just want to add too on the public safety committee. We do get a list of, you know, accounting of use as a force too. So it is taken, you know, taken seriously. There is a tally and those of us on that committee do see those detailed reports. Is there any manager? The other layer of oversight that we have just to point out is the independent police auditor who also reviews the complaints and provides recommendations to the police department and to the public safety committee related to those complaints as well and also is available to the public as well. Chris, are you done? Don't go. Just if I can just finish. And if you have somebody that has not heard from us, if you can give me their name, I'll make sure when they hear from us. Okay, thanks. Appreciate it. Is that it? Council Member Chase. Yeah, I wanted to thank you for the report which is data driven. And I really appreciate that. And I think what's interesting about that is that 16 of the recommendations mentioned the RMS system and the records management system, which is what provides a lot of the data and is incredibly problematic. So I know that that is a big budget request. And so I think it would be helpful to let Council knows what we can anticipate in terms of what you think that would be, what your requests would be and the timeline of that so that we can consider that. Cause I think it's incredibly important if we want to continue to see this type of analysis and these types of improvements. Sure. Please take this with a grain of salt because we haven't done the RFP. So we can't really know for sure what it's going to cost. The systems will range about a million dollars. But again, we're dividing that between multiple agencies. And if you stretch it out over a multi-year period, it becomes very reasonable. And so what we heard today was that our annual costs for running the system, the maintenance, upkeep and all that kind of thing, including servers in the future and so forth should be around $70,000, maybe a little bit more. And then the actual cost of the system is about $200,000 for everybody per year. So we should be able to do this for around $100, $150,000 a year. I appreciate that. That actually isn't very much considering the improvement and what we would get for it. And to be connected with the other law enforcement agencies or at least one of them, I think is critical as well. Yeah, all four are in. Yeah, that's great. And just correct me if I'm wrong, but it's been in our Capital Improvement Program budget for some time now, right? Yes. Okay, Council Member. I just had one last comment. I just wanted to also thank you for just mentioning in response to Council Member Cron's question, the impact of trauma and how that impacts, well, really everybody involved in public safety. So I'm interested to hear more about that. One of the recommendations just to go on to that is officer wellness. And so one of our strategies in our leadership plan is really working on officer wellness and employee improvement. And so including the succession planning and all that. And I just really, again, Dan Filippo, well before I got here, had already started a mentoring program. And so we're really trying to mentor our people, keep an eye on things like abuses of substances because there's so much trauma in the job. So I just want to, you know, we want to have that direction, but it had even more so there. Council Member Narayan and then Council Member Mathews. Oh, I can't help but, you know, be just completely stunned about the level of crime that really jumped out at me at the report. You know, we've all had numbers, we see different numbers in terms of where Santa Cruz is in comparison. And it doesn't really matter what scale, whether it's the FBI or somebody else collecting data, we are always end up being on the top in an area that I'd rather like to be average. And so, you know, you look at those numbers and you know, you're doing these different plans, but are there plans to go after specific types of crimes? Like when I look at property crime, it's so high. Is there a strategy aside from looking at it, you know, piecemeal through the city, but to have an overall, I guess, strategy in how to lower that number? Well, that's very important. Just let me throw a word of caution in when you look at crime data. One is you have to take a look at our city, the reality of our city. Again, as a county seat, the center of this region, a tourist attraction, I mean, three to four million people a year go through the boardwalk. All that really affects the amount of people and the amount of crime in a city, including the jail being here and all these things. So you can't compare this to, for instance, Lincoln, California, you know, it's a bedroom community. It's completely different. Now, having said that, it's still too high and we need to figure out how to get that down. So if you took a look at this and actually figured this was a city of 100,000, probably be a little bit more realistic in terms of the crime rate. However, it's not what we have, so we're gonna fix that. So the strategy is this. Each community told us what their priorities were, theft, theft and theft in many of these communities. And so each lieutenant has set their priorities for their communities. And their job is to figure out, based on the micro problem solving side, how to fix each of those problems. So I'm studying an overall department-wide philosophy of policing, which is neighborhood policing and problem solving. Now, their job is to drill down for each of those communities and figure out what specific tactic are they gonna use to reduce those problems. So for instance, just go back to CVS, 189 thefts or crimes at that location in one year. That's unacceptable. And so what we need to do is we can drive the crime down there, it frees up officers to be more proactive. So what he did is he looked at the environmental conditions that are allowing that crime to take place at that location, talked to the owners or the managers, worked with them. They're gonna go through a stage of, and Carter Jones is here, Carter was with him doing this, going through the stage of locking up the alcohol first, if that doesn't work, putting a security guard at the front door, demanding backpacks be left at the front. Let me see your receipt before you get out like Eric Costco. So the more they do that, the more that impacts that crime and drops it down. And that's the goal that we're after. So I can't give you the specific overall strategy other than we're focusing on the constant criminals that we're dealing with and really trying to, if we have to give them 365 days in jail one day at a time then we're gonna do it with those 10. But 10 is a pretty small number. And when you take a look at the amount of thieving that we have in the city, but we have to start someplace. And the first 10 we put out, I asked my crime analysts today, all 10 were contacted, all 10 were arrested. And then the first group. So we wanna make sure that we're gonna hold them accountable at some level. If probation can't do it, because they're overwhelmed, then we'll do it as best we can. And so taking this, employing these strategies, do you have an estimate on when you think we might see a difference? I might see crime drop or these figures improve. I understand we're an outlier as a city and it's hard to compare ourselves to anybody else. We're a town of 65,000 that has a university and a major tourist attraction. There aren't a lot of other cities to be able to look at that and compare. But I still do think it's important, and you point that out, to acknowledge at our crime rate is pretty high. And so I'm glad you do acknowledge that. But if these things we're putting in place and we're successful, how long does it take to see a difference? Well, it's gonna take some time. I would hope that as we get our teams in place and I was just looking at the statistics of what they were doing already and they've just been nailing it. I mean, they've been all over it. They've made a lot of arrests, taken a lot of guns off the street already. Those things are going to have an effect. And I can't give you a percentage of decrease. Can't prognosticate that. However, I can tell you that if they continue to do their jobs, focused on the major problems first and take care of those problems, you will see a reduction at some point city-wide and that people can look at. Now, I think what we wanted to be able to do is say, okay, look, we took care of this problem. Therefore, this problem, we can know for sure that this problem was taken care of. This was 100 crimes. And then the community can look at that. There are so many things that influence the actual crime rate. If the economy takes a left-hand turn, we could see more problems at the heroin addiction level. More thefts. These are all things that influence the crime rate that we may or may not have control over. But we can take a look at these problems and say, we solved this problem. Here's how we know that. And here's what we did to do that. And then be accountable to the public for that. And you mentioned several ways we could address improving staffing. You were saying that possibly hiring more officers. Do you have an actual number of officers that you think we should hire? Like when you look at those rates of like the average of California cities, how many more would that mean? Well, I would like to just get up to what the city manager's already approved. And my thinking on that council member is once we manage the resources that we've already been given well and it's not working, then I don't have any problem coming back to council and saying I need more officers and figuring that piece out. But I want to get up to full staffing first and then use those extra five bodies that we've been graciously given. Get those folks running on all cylinders and then we can take a look at that, reduce the attrition levels and get people healthy, which is another significant issue for us. There's two officers I've never met. They've been off that long. And it's your workman's comp issues. I mean, there's all kinds of things boiled into this that are very complex. So once we get that done and finish up to that 99 level that we've already been authorized, then I have no problem coming back to council and saying I need more. Okay, and then can you give examples of the types of calls for service that we can handle differently? I know you've mentioned a few in some of the community meetings. I heard one time someone call from a restaurant demanding the police show up to make the restaurant, give them their food for free because they had bad service. So I was at a table, I'm like, oh my dear God, they're calling 911 for this. So what types of calls do you think? I mean, that was a ridiculous one, which I hope isn't very common. But how would you take some of the more common calls that are coming and redirect them? So I think, yeah. So there's a lot of, I'd rather look at bigger categories. I mean, I can go into a lot of antidotal stories that I have in the past and you've all heard those. But we do follow up phone calls. Somebody calls and then we'll call them back and the people are sometimes like, why are you calling me? I've just handled the problem. Well, that takes time. A lot of information stuff, let's have an officer go to this location just to provide information. Non-injury collisions, that's really a civil matter. It's not a police matter. It's between two insurance companies. And so frequently what happens is people say, I want a cop to come anyway and then we send them. And sometimes we'll send two officers. So these are, and frequently when we write those reports, the insurance companies will now call us back and say, I don't like how you wrote this report. I want it changed to have this person be responsible and try to put us in the middle of it. We do, there's a lot of those types of calls. Again, I don't want to say we're just gonna not respond to them, but somebody, we can manage it better how it's responded to. Like for instance, maybe it's gonna have to wait for the neighborhood policing team when they come in on their Monday rather than having patrol respond to it if it's not an emergency. So let's let patrol do the emergency stuff. Let's let neighborhood policing and the teams or other city members handle the other things that maybe don't need to be handled by a police officer. Just before I came, I talked to Chief Raleigh about medical responses. So if a person's laying on the front yard someplace, they may be having a seizure. They may be high. They could be a variety of things. And we send two police officers to handle that a thousand times a year. And so why isn't paramedics doing that? Because what we're gonna do is look at them and say, yep, they need paramedics. So those are the kind of things I think that we can be a little bit more thoughtful about. And Jim agreed completely, Chief Raleigh did. And but now the devil's in the details. How do you work that out? We don't want to send an engine of four, you know, four firefighters to do that. So this becomes a conversation. Great, I do have other questions, but I, this is fascinating. Right. Yeah, there'll be time afterwards also. So maybe council member Matthews will be the final question before we open it up for public comment. And it may be covered later, but you had these kind of broad sections here. And kind of those are pulled from the big report. Your priority. You're talking to Mike. Oh, the priority tasks you set before you. Those seem to be some of them internal operation changes, but some of them are either, some of them involve significant changes in the way we operate with our partners, whether it's the courts or the county or whatever. And some of them are capital. And what triggered this question was your referral to the records management and technology. So at what point will you be telling us, aside from the internal stuff, where you need maybe some more assistance from us, whether it's budget or engagement? Sure. I think that's an ongoing dialogue to have with each of you and into the council in general. My way of trying to handle these things is to try to do it myself and sit down, for instance, and work things out with the chief of probation, the DA, the sheriff, and have those conversations. If I reach a wall that I can't overcome, I have no problem going to the city manager and working with council to say, I really need your help on this. Now it's time to throw it down. If I could just respond to that as this evolves, and I always consider this a process of evolution, but it's helpful for us to know where you are, because those are a lot of the complaints we get. Why, we did a little email exchange today on this. What's going on? Why is this happening? And to the extent we know progress is being made or not, that just helps us respond to the public. Sure, I appreciate that. And we can certainly do better in that area, making sure council's fully informed of what we're doing and why. Just like that conversation we had this morning about the gun thing. Those are the things that really need to be focused on here locally. At what point, we're gonna allow certain people who are dangerous to society continue to walk around. And that does become a pinch point. Part of this is education, because I get a lot of complaints from people that, why'd you let this guy out of jail? And I'm like, well, I don't control the jail. And the sheriff, if he had a choice, he wouldn't let him out either. So those are the things. Education can be a hugely important matter that the council could help us with. Okay, do you have a follow-up? Yeah, to that, I was just going to ask, are you going to be sharing this report with your colleagues at the county level? Will the city manager, I guess, be showing this report as well to your colleagues? I think that, you know, they're a community partner. We really need their help in this. And so I hope that there'll be meetings about this report with our county officials. Yeah, certainly we could do that. I know you've already shared it with the sheriff at least, because there's some recommendations related to the sheriff's in here as it relates to the processing of prisoners and that sort of thing. So, yes. Okay, and that's an area where city council members could help too. We could go talk to our elected colleagues at the county level as well. Sure. I'll just say before we open up to public comment, I thought those neighborhood meetings were outstanding in terms of like bringing out a category had one of the West Side residents, Nathaniel, told me that he said it was the best public meeting he'd ever attended in terms of having the number of folks that were engaged in participating in the process. So I thought it was a good rollout and it's nice to see this more kind of more robust discussion about how we're moving forward. So before we have any further questions from council, I'd like to make this opportunity to open it up to the public for comment. And the first speaker is a representative of Huff who wanted to take some additional time. So you have four minutes, Mr. Norse. And then anyone else who wishes to speak on this matter, please line up to my left and we'll allow it to begin. So Mr. Norse, you have the floor. Members of the community, mayor, city council. First of all, David Silva, I'm sure if he could be here today would like to maybe join in some of my comments, maybe make some different ones. As most of you may know, he died about a week and a half ago in Maputo Mozambique, probably of pneumonia and he was buried there a few days ago. The problem with this report for me is that is what it doesn't say. Although I'll talk a bit about what it does say and my concerns about that. I mean, I'm really speaking to people who want to see some fundamental changes in how the priorities of mass incarceration, policing, the drug war, treatment of the homeless take place, not sort of shifting around the deck chairs or even making substantive changes in a focus which is not necessarily bad. But if you have criminalization of the homeless as a priority, this is the group I'm concerned about, then no matter how you change it, you don't really change it at all. Folks outside who were forced away from the San Lorenzo campground by its closing on February 28th who had no real place to go, the River Street campground, that is to say the barbed wire locked boneyard campground with fewer spaces that are where tents are shoved cheek by jowl with each other and you can't leave freely is not in any way equivalent to even replacing what the San Lorenzo campground provided. So if you're then gonna go after people with increased citations masquerading as a census or doing this more intensely than before, you're simply reverting to the old policies. I asked Andy who has been occasionally responsive to my questions, not always and not recently really, but a number of questions. We had a dialogue, huge amounts of money have become from this council and prior councils and have gone into harassing the poor to the ordinances that you have created. Will the money you save by cutting back on massive infraction enforcement of sleeping ban and nighttime park bans go into real social services? Or we hear more, oh, I wonder why the county isn't helping us with this kind of stuff as we usually do. Drug war money, the asset seizure money is being used by the police department, Andy writes me. Why is that? I thought we're beyond this asset seizure stuff. You can use all kinds of rhetoric. This is a lawful byproduct of criminal activity. There's nothing about that in this report. How much money has been seized from folks accused of what crimes? What are the records here? Now, as of use of force, which was discussed here, and it's good to hear that people are interested in knowing when are the police doing the chokeholds, the tasers, the drawing of the baton, the drawing of the weapon. These are important issues, but the public doesn't really get to know about this. I asked Andy for stats on this. He didn't give me specifics about when these things were done. And this is discretionary. The police department decides to keep these stats under wraps. So I don't see any of this changing either. What about the issues of, well, quality of life downtown? That means, of course, don't sit next to my business even if it's closed. If you're sitting outside a closed store, like Alpha Graphics and three individuals were doing in the rain about a week ago, you'll get forced out into the rain by police officers from Andy's police force. Or at least that was their account. And I don't necessarily discount it. We have the unconstitutional stay-away laws. Will they continue to be enforced? And I see that I'm out of time already. Do you want to finish your sentence? I need to finish more than that. You can just hand it out and we'll be happy to take a look at it. Next speaker. I may send it in to you. Hello, my name is Jane Becker. I have lived and worked in Santa Cruz for 35 years. What has struck me about what is going on with the Public Safety Committee and City Council is that no one seems to really be addressing what is the elephant in the room. And the elephant in the room is the fact that we have over 1,000 homeless people in Santa Cruz, people that come with no money, no savings, no place to live, no job. And they come here to live on the streets. Many of them are doing drugs. And as much as I feel for these people, the reality is that many of these people are stealing to support habits. They're breaking into cars. They're stealing bikes and chopping the parts. They are committing home burglaries. They are walking into businesses. I see this downtown quite a bit and taking what they want to take and leading. What I'm going to suggest is that the city make a shift from anybody that wants to come here can come here to, if you come here with no money, no job, no place to live, we will give you immediate food, attention to any immediate medical condition. And the next question is, how do we get you home? How do we get you bus fare? How do we get you airfare? There is no housing here for you, not realistically. There are very few jobs here. Santa Cruz is not a place just to come just to hang out because you're going to be living on the streets. We need to have, and a shift says, this is where we stop as a town. And then perhaps we will see the lessening of service calls to the police because we've eliminated a source, a causation of crime. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker please. Hi, thank you for the presentation. I was very informative and I appreciate all the work that was put into it. I have, I think maybe four questions and maybe one observation. And I don't, you know, much more than I do and maybe most of you do, but I know in some communities there's non-emergency number is a 411 number that people can call, which seems like a very simple way. And that may not be possible here. I don't know, but that seems like that could be a possible easy fix to the police department getting or 9-1-1 getting, having to field a lot more calls than they are. So I guess I just have a question regarding that. I don't know if there's been any consideration. Again, just cost and expense reduction and increased community policing in terms of having more police on bicycles. Santa Cruz I've been here since the late 70s and it, you know, probably like 15 years ago it seemed like we did have a number of police on bikes, but that has, doesn't seem like that's happening much. And I see police on ATVs and that type of thing, but that's not, you know, it's hard to talk to somebody when their ATV is running and they've got the helmet on and that's the whole nine yards. So that's just another question of mine. I know you were, you said in your presentation that I think you, I don't know how many community forums we had in different parts of Santa Cruz. I was curious if there was any community forum in beach flats, whether there was, did you have, I feel like I guess, because you said as part of that you said that each community sort of forum told you what the issue was, which is theft, theft, theft. I guess my concern is that isn't the whole community. Those are people who feel comfortable coming to a community forum with the police. There are people who don't feel comfortable with that. You know, that's, it's just, it's a problem. You know that. But I feel like if the only people you're speaking, responding to are the people that, they come to the forum, that's not the entire community. Thanks, Grant. Okay, I have one last thing to say. You're wrapped up. Okay, well, thank you. And I noticed, and this is just a broader question, but I noticed that often when we have these things there's like at the moment there's seven uniformed officers here. I never know when that's going on. Are those officers on pay right now? They're in uniform. So there's, and there's ununiformed officers and staff here from the police department. So that's another question. Thank you. Thank you, Grant. Thank you. Okay, is there any member of the public that would like to speak on this after the report prior to bringing it back to council? Okay, sir, you're up next. Hi guys. My name is Gary Taylor. I've been living in Sanctuary County for 30 years. You speaking to the Mike, please. My name is Gary Taylor. I've been living in the county for about 30 years. I got into an automobile accident about two years ago. And I'm just gonna tell you a little bit about the background. I was homeless in this city for about a year. Almost a year and a half. So I know what it's like out there. I know exactly what it's like. Also without any help, no one got out of it. Work took a lot of hard work. I have some suggestions that you guys might be interested in. I don't really know. I'm not familiar with the system works. You might see me in the future here. I hope that you do. Anyone that has any advice, you'll have to talk to me. You can speak directly to Mike and face us, please. Anyone that wants to help me out or give me advice, the procedures and policies, how things work. Totally open to that. Please do let me know. Now in the streets, there's a lot of violence going around people stealing people's things. I think that anyone, hold on nervous, excuse me. Anyone that has the motivation to get up and get a job and get themselves out of the situation, I think we should provide some resources so they can do that. The easiest way is the, and I look at the homeless population is all the same, but see the ones that got put there by a situation that are working to get out of it, and the ones that's just kind of idling, stealing and drug use. I know that one issue I had, I lost multiple jobs over this, was a place to put my things when I got up to go to work where there would be when I got to come back to have clothing, to have shelter, to have warmth, to have hygiene things. These are the things you have to have succeed other than that unique communication you must have. There's challenges there. Businesses don't want you in their business, not spending any money in charging your phone. You can't even get your phone on. You could have 10 people calling you to give you a job, and you can't get on your phone. But there are people too, where are they gonna charge a phone at, where are they? You know, that's not a huge deal. You know, one little idea I have is gonna run up by you. I'm not very organized. You could just wrap it up, you say last sentence please. Yeah, the two ideas that they basically have is one of them is a day storage. People that are motivated can come to store the things for the day so they can progress and get out of there and not be homeless anymore. The other is an outdoor low budget structure where qualified homeless can enter to live. And yeah. Thank you, sir. Thank you for your comments. I appreciate you being here. And if you wanna put your name and write down. Okay, thank you, sir. Next speaker. Thanks, Greg, for speaking. And I'm sure you don't need to hear this, but many of the people living on the street were born and raised here or lived here for decades. And it's not actually statistically according to a point in time survey magnet for people living on the streets. And whenever I offer a free bus ticket out of here, the response is usually I was born here. I don't need a free bus to get home. The thing that I found most interesting in the presentation was the unusual drop in property crimes in 2008. And I think that highlights our definition of property crimes because we know that that was the year of the most property crimes. But those property crimes were actually committed by Wells Fargo, Chase, Bank of America, where they stole literally dozens and dozens of people that I personally knows their homes. And so there is a direct correlation between the lack of enforcement against the theft of our community by bankers and outside interests that come here and steal people's property and the amount of people living on the streets. Because I know a lot of people who had a place to live, but the banks stole their landlord's house and now they live outside. And you know many of those people too. You probably are your friends. So I think the definition of crime is one of the issues that we could face as a community. And there's a well-respected professor named Alex Vitale who is just, I just saw he gave a presentation about his book in Wales about three days ago. And his book is called The End of Policing and he has done decades of research in changing the policing ideas and how it impacts the community. And I certainly encourage you to invite him to come here and speak. Thank you. Thank you. This is the final speaker unless someone else steps up. So final speaker and we'll bring it back to council. Thank you mayor and council members and chief mills. Thank you so much. I really appreciate the ongoing work that you and your department have been doing to meet with a variety of community members and kind of I see it as sort of coming out of some sort of a shell. So I'm wondering and hoping that this is gonna bring a lot of reassurance to the community that you're accessible, that you're easy to talk to. It felt in my experience that maybe the prior police department was meeting with a couple of community groups and not a wide variety of people. So, and something that you said sort of setting your department up to fail it sort of resonated with me is I'm wondering if referring to your officers as heroes and I have a love for the Santa Cruz Police Department. My uncle was a police officer a hundred years ago but I think that that could possibly set up the community for disappointment because maybe they're also expecting that and I personally like to have coffee with a real person. I wanna have a beer with a police officer. I wanna really relate to them on a one-on-one level and I don't want to have you feel like you have to be my rescuer, my hero. And I'm just wondering if that's sort of a cultural misunderstanding that could be addressed. I really appreciate your addressing some of the complex issues that feed crime like the economic disparity that we're experiencing, public health crises, climate weather, freeway interchanges, it's all very complex. It's not as simple as we sometimes like to think and lifting a variety of people up in the community that aren't in this room would do us all a lot better and I really appreciate you mentioning that. And just in closing, I'd like to say that the website is amazing. There's so much more information for people that can't meet with you or can't come to a meeting. I look forward to seeing stop data. I look forward to seeing more information from the Rangers. I look forward to seeing that the Rangers are getting some de-escalation training because they're dealing with a troubled population that needs assistance and I just wanna thank you and I wanna thank all the officers here in this room that I find very accessible and easy to talk to and let's continue to build relationships in the community and hopefully ease some of the balloon that you feel is sort of- Thank you. Thank you. Okay, this will be the final speaker unless the person in the back of the room standing wants to speak. This is the final speaker of the evening before it goes back to council. Good evening, I'm Damon Bruder, a concerned citizen. Thank you, Chief Mills for being here. I have heard through the grapevine, the rumblings underground that your officers are upsetting people because your officers are starting to do their job. These are law-abiding people or generally law-abiding people that have gotten tickets for various things. Yay, I'm glad. If I deserve a ticket, write one to me. If anybody deserves a ticket, write one. Catch and release, I know that's the situation right now, your hands are tied. Please keep catching. As far as the release part, well, that's up to the laws that govern the judges. There is an initiative going around right now, the Keep California Safe Initiative. It closes the loopholes in Prop 47 and 57 to help you do your job. If you want to sign that petition or hear about it, see my wife after the meeting. And I do want to applaud the Rangers and the SCPD for the way that they handle situations that could quickly escalate. I saw a situation on Pacific Avenue last week where a ranger talked to a gentleman and actually ended up getting him at that moment a bus ticket home to San Francisco to get out here because that's what he wanted. Even though the person was on to deal with the Rangers, they handled it very professionally and very patiently. And that's what I see when I see the Rangers and I see the SCPD when they deal with people like that. They deal with them compassionately, professionally and patiently. And I thank you for that. Thank you. Okay, I'll bring it back to council. I know there was someone who mentioned the issue of the charging and storage and he's left. And so those of you either Cynthia or Rochelle who are on the homeless coordinating committee can email him and talk about what that work's done. I'd appreciate it. And I think I'd just like to say, this is an opportunity for comments but also questions if there are still that come after the public speakers. I want to say that this is the first time we've ever had a comprehensive report since I've been on council that went into the staff and organizational issues that I feel are just essential to say how we can move forward. I mean, we have what I feel is a public safety kind of crisis when you look at the statistics that we've seen over the past 10 years. The report that you've showed us goes up through 2015 but it looks like we've had just a consistently high level of crime that's existed in this town. And we cannot just continue to tolerate the way things have been, it's got to change. And so by having a restructured department that looks at how we manage those, I think is essential for our city's future. One of the things that I really want to speak to is the fact that how we're measuring what constitutes safety in this town also has to change. If we're taking information that comes through where we're treating all crimes the same way, everything becomes an urgency. And I know you're speaking to that in your comments but when this consolidation of all the 911 non-emergency and emergency calls took place, it was about in 2007 and it was a means to track that. And the number you shared as the one that's kind of more of the emergency level is kind of consistent what it was at the time that they merged them then. And so when we look at whether or not officers are responding at this time, it seems as though we're kind of at that same place and there's been kind of a static. So I want to just make sure that one, when we look forward that we're measuring how we are going to be making improvements. If it's by neighborhood then I think we should be looking at the types of reporting that comes back to us, not the reports that we've seen recently but what are the types of crimes that are taking place in the beach flats area or the downtown or in the Upper West side or East side so that we're seeing where we can go from there because they're not, right now, I don't know how we as a city can say to invest more, will we get that result? If it's not a monetary thing in my mind, I think there's some other policy issues at play that we need to really focus on. And I read the report thoroughly and I thought that their comments that they had about having the police department advocate with the electeds on where those are was for me like a critical thing. And I don't think we hear enough as far as, what are those barriers that we have that go beyond our staffing levels that we need to focus on as a city? Those are just some initial comments but I'd love to hear from the council as far as how we can better prioritize these safety issues that are outlined in the report as well as kind of the ultimate staffing recommendations that are included. Council Member Cronin. Yeah, I'd like to first run through really quickly and I know you're a big guy as we've talked about these questions. I noticed five questions came up from the public. Police on bikes? We have them. And in fact, Brandon Lima, you're still here. How many miles you put it in a week? Ah, come on. No. Reaching out to Beach Flats residents, there was no forum. I know one of them I guess was included in the, was it Bayview? No, it was Galt School, both of them. But how do we reach out to Beach Flats residents? Well, we frequently are down there on foot talking with residents. Leo, we have several Spanish speakers who go door to door down there on a regular basis and work with people. We did not break it down to every single small neighborhood in the city. That had just been way too many meetings. It was a push as it was. So they were included in several of those meeting areas. Seven uniformed officers here tonight. Are they all on duty? I'm open mark because I've asked my deputy chiefs and my lieutenants to be here as managers who are representing their service areas in case you had questions for them. So yeah, they're most of them are on duty. And just to respond to the hero's comment. They are heroes. Okay, we'll leave it at that. And but they can't drink beer on duty. And maybe this is, I know that the city manager and I talked about this. Two questions came up, a non-emergency number and the bus ticket home and how do we get people home? With respect to the non-emergency number, there is one that the Netcom has in place. And I think part of the change might be to, I think before the rationale was it goes to the same place. But however, the distinction here though is the response needs to be different. So it does matter. So I think we'll start work with Netcom to make that change. The other thing that I've mentioned to you too that we're working on is we are looking at implementing a 311 system, an app where people can, with their phones, submit complaints. And so that's gearing up here to get going pretty soon. So hopefully by the fall, we should have that up and running to make it easier for people to report crimes. And related to that too is as we look at this data and we look at alternatives to responding to calls, I think working with all the other city staff, we can, for example, there are areas where it makes more sense to have public works, for example, respond to certain calls of a certain variety will make that change as appropriate. So we'll be looking at all of that. And the bus ticket home? Oh, we do have a homeward bound program that an individual alluded to that is offered to individuals. And actually, we do make quite a use of that. We actually expanded the budget for that. So people do regularly choose to go home through that program. And the last question for chief is the ticketing of homeless campers. Is that continuing? Is it any different than before the bench lands took place? No, my policy still stands from a nine at night to six in the morning. If people are sleeping, we don't issue a ticket when there's not a complaint. And if there is a complaint, then we take care of business. But during the daytime, it's still legal to camp. Thank you, mayor. Council member Chase. Yeah, I just really appreciated the approach that the report took basically talking about realigning resources. And I think that's really smart looking at what we have and utilizing it better. The way I describe it to people often is putting the right response to the right situation at the right time. And I think referencing actually the conversation with chief Frawley is really important too is how much time officers are going out to respond to public health issues when it's really a public health response that's needed. And I think that's a huge part of what we see in this community and was referenced many times tonight whether it be really relating to homelessness or substance abuse or behavioral health. Those are really public health issues. And so I just appreciate the approach you're taking and I'm looking forward to see what it does to realign the resources that you have now and continue to encourage every possible creative way to get more staff and know that I think council has consistently been behind that doing whatever we can to support that. Absolutely, you have it. Thank you. Vice Mayor Watkins. Thank you for your presentation tonight and for all the folks that are here in the audience. I just wanna say how much respect I have for the work that you do in our community and having worked alongside a number of the officers in my other capacity in education. I know how dedicated you are to our community and we feel that and we know it. I really wanna say how much I appreciate that this report is data-driven and is looking at how our systems are functioning and how they can improve. And I think systems change is challenging and it takes time, but I believe it's necessary. And I think law enforcement and criminalization and there's a place for that and also a bigger sort of picture of the health and well-being of our community and the health and well-being of your officers are tied to that. I think, bless you. One of the components that I just really appreciate you bringing up and what I feel really passionate about is prevention. I think we foster what we feed and if we feed more preventative activities and preventative strategies, then we will see results. And so I'm really all for that and supportive of that. I believe that this is a bigger community conversation and I really look forward to more partnerships and collaborations, communities, strategies, diversions, neighborhood accountability boards, whatever it may be to start saying how can we as a community rise up to be supportive of the health and well-being of all of our community and that and then results in less criminal activity often. I am interested in workforce development and I know I've mentioned that too also. I think we can build our own and I think there's a lot of beauty in that and the connections and ties to the local community and then also just the sort of logistics of how expensive it is to live in this community and so if we can work on workforce development and trying to recruit and engage and create that pipeline, that would be fantastic in a consideration for succession planning. And then just really the alignment of resources I think is a really incredible takeaway. I think when we know information, we have to do something about that and the takeaway in terms of how to more proactively look at what we have and how to best utilize that is incredibly important. So I have a number of observations as somebody who really appreciates criminal justice and public safety and health and well-being of our community but I'll leave it at that and just really thank you for the work and I look forward to periodically hearing updates on where we are so we can measure our success and sort of check in and see where we can go in the right direction from there. Council Member Naroyan. I know in your goal of getting more officers out on patrol that you're looking at some changes and when Vice Mayor Watkins mentioned the prevention side of things which I believe we're all very passionate about. I know that you do, you know, we have the Citizens Police Academy which is an education component of the community and something I went through several years ago I just find invaluable in terms of bringing that here to Council Member and also the Pride Program which gets involved with at-risk youth that are at the mission or junior high, oh, junior high just dated myself, middle school age level. So I'm wondering, will those programs still exist and if so, how, if most of the officers are gonna be out in the field? Well the person running those programs was Leo Gomez who everybody just raves about and I rave about him as well. I've redeployed him to the field. However, today I met with a group of volunteers and to try to transfer much of the responsibility to a cadre of volunteers who can run these same programs with the help and the assistance of sworn personnel. Now that's a huge lift to ask of volunteers. This is a very robust program, a lot of time commitment. So what we're probably going to do is continue these programs as much as we can, tailoring them back just a little bit so that we can continue with the programs, however, move it forward. Council Vice Mayor Watkins gave me a grant the other day to deal with tobacco and so we see this as a way to work with the Pride Program and so I've got a person writing that grant, it's due I think at the end of this week so we're pushing a deadline and we think we might be able to bring that person on as should we be successful in that grant application to run the program completely. So we're trying to find ways to push forward, continue these programs. We see them as hugely beneficial to the department, to the city. I'm not interested in backing away from those. We just have to figure out what's a reasonable balance because I need every boot on the ground right now to deal with the crime issues. All right and I know what's great and I know what the Pride Program because I'm involved with my other hat on. Our interns wanna continue, our UC Santa Cruz interns who work with Pride definitely wanna continue helping so look to that as a resource as well and maybe there's an opportunity to step it up from that end as well. Great, thank you. That's one brown. I would just echo the comments from my colleagues about the tremendous respect that I also have for the work that you all do. Understanding it's very difficult. I mean, I guess I would just highlight my appreciation for a couple of the ways that you've talked this evening and have been engaging with the public around this question of one, police officers being kind of tasked with the job of social services within our city and the challenges and the frustrations that I imagine officers face. I really appreciate the data-driven, the report but it doesn't necessarily give you the picture of what people experience on the ground and so I think it's really important for all of us to stay in touch with that and I'll be talking with you about ride-alongs in the very near future. I haven't done one in quite a while but I think just really being mindful of that and I appreciate that you are and that you really are supporting a team of officers and personnel who have the best interests of our city at heart and also your position on enforcement of our camping ordinance or sleeping ban and I hope that that has taken some of the pressure off of officers but I don't really know so if you want to say anything about that now that would be great but otherwise we can talk about that in the future so thank you for everything you're doing and I'm really excited. I think a lot of people in the community are excited. I know at my neighborhood meeting at Galt School I saw people who live on my street who were really inspired and want to get involved in community policing in a way and feel really, they feel that the police department is becoming more accessible and so I just appreciate that and thank you to our deputy chiefs who are here as well. I know you're committed to that too. Thanks. You know, I just would follow up on something that was included in the report. There was a recommendation that the consultants made about considering the establishment of a dedicated team that dealt with the social services issues that are really being handled by the police department. I know we've seen in the city of San Jose where they have groups that are assembled to deal with some of the issues that come up so they're signed directly and they're budgeted. We as part of our work plan have set up a group that's one tasked with issues of homelessness and others. Have you thought about why that wasn't in their recommendation, the final recommendation to have that type of group assigned to deal this so that we are kind of furthering that realignment to have maybe non-officers handle those types of tasks? Well, I think that is an important issue to look at and one of the things I'm really proud of of the city is that our neighborhood services team and the entire city is kind of unified in dealing with these problems together. And it's one group of people all pushing the same direction and that's so important for us to be successful that way. We have, as you know, mental health liaisons who ride with their officers in the cars and from the county and they do a great job dealing with some of these bigger mental health issues. But I would be very in favor of a team that is a county-wide team that assesses this that works with city employees as well as county employees, mostly county employees. This is the responsibility. I just don't think that should be a police responsibility. We got to dig ourselves out of this problem rather than get further entrenched. And now having said that, we're the only game in town right now and that becomes kind of tough until, let's say we, the city is the only game in town. Well, I mean, I'll just say we have funded programs to kind of address that in a comprehensive way. And we do have some council members on various committees that kind of are looking at those. I would like maybe our public safety committee to look at that very issue about how we can kind of continue to shift some of those responsibilities to non-PD assignments so that they can be freed up even further. Sure. We did that earlier in the year with some of the public works and doing traffic enforcement. I don't know if that's still continuing, like in terms of the parking in different parts of the city. And I think there's opportunities for other areas to deal with that and other kind of programs that maybe could be peeled off to further free up officers. And I'd like to hear from the PD and city manager's office on where those might be. The other thing is I feel like there should be realignment with results. That's important that we say that, hey, we are doing this and there's a reason why we're moving forward is to see a positive change. And you outlined a five year kind of period of time that you see these results taking place, I think it would be good to at least indicate what kind of expectations the community would be seeing in each of those periods over time. So we know exactly the direction we're going and we can have the opportunity to comment on it. But the realignments with results, I think is a strategy to make our community safer. And I like the idea of making sure that we're identifying where in our neighborhoods we're able to prioritize to make our city safer. Agreed, one of the things that I'm having my lieutenants do is meet with the deputy chiefs and myself monthly to give us an update on what they're doing, what their priorities are in their neighbor policing areas and how we're doing in terms of the data associated with that. Now creating that data at this point is a little bit rough. I have to be honest because of the RMS system. However, we're going to do the best we can and move forward. I would hope that community members would start to see relief. And it shouldn't take five years to see that kind of relief. We need to, as I said before, listening time is over. Now it's time to get at it and we're getting at it. Just one final comment and that is, I know Carol Scourge from Parks and Recs is here. We, it would be good if the Parks and Rec Commission were able to hear the recommendations on the ranger issues that came up. We've got an email on that. I'd like to make sure that's rolled out. I haven't heard any feedback from the parks, but I think the program's been very successful in terms of prioritizing some of the park safety issues and keeping them well maintained in parts of the city. And I think having something that's reorganized might even kind of expand it to new parks and other areas. So it'd be good to get their feedback on what this proposal means to the parks department from one of our subcommittees as well. So I hope you'll plan to do that. Sure. Council Member Cron. Three quick issues that are kind of leftovers that have been part of our community discussions and then a couple of comments, but HSI, they have a desk no longer at the police department and what's our relationship there? Homeland security investigations. Yeah, no, I know who is. Okay, for the public. They do not have a desk in the police department. They are completing that large case where you would hopefully we'll see indictments in the near future, but there's no activity in terms of immigration enforcement period. Okay. And exclamation point from the Santa Cruz Police Department. Thank you. And ICE, what's our relationship right now with them? Well, it's kind of ICE's division of HSI. And there's the relationship as if you have information that we need intelligence on terrorism or something, we'll take it, but we're not working with them. And crisis intervention training. There was a goal to get all the officers trained. Has that been realized? It has. We gave a de-escalation training to our entire department. Had members of the community come and watch it to make sure that it was something that was in line with what they were thinking was and it was successful. And I think we can chalk up a save from the other day just with that. Okay, I just want to say that I really appreciate all of your efforts that what you've been doing reaching out the first day when I met you going to Cafe Pergolese for a coffee, and just your jumping in my leaf and taking a tour of places around Santa Cruz. I want to say thank you to the deputy chiefs too. I saw those, though I was at three of those meetings recently. I thought you, Lieutenant Garcia as well. I thought you guys did a stellar job reaching out to people. And I think that's what it really is about. It's that contact people want of voice. We don't have all the answers and we're looking into the public for some answers, but I really thought you all did just a bang up job at those meetings. You stayed for a while for every question to be answered as people left and stuff. This report, I read a lot of reports and this is a better report and it's much more professional, but it's also sort of in your face. It's pointing out the warts as well as what you do well. So a lot of reports are written for people who pay for the report to be written and there's a little bit of that in here, but there's also some criticism and some like, hey, this is how to do better. And I really appreciate seeing that in print as well. Lastly, just to underline what Councilman Joaquin said about public health issues, really important that we pursue that line of with the public and everything's not a police intervention, there's a lot of public health interventions going on and we need to make that happen and I really appreciate teaming up with Chief Frawley and anybody at the county too who wants to be part of that to address those issues. So thanks a lot, appreciate it. Okay, do you have any comments? No, okay, there's action that's on the floor that we need, so can I get a motion? I'll move that we accept the recommendation as written in the report. Second. Councilor vice mayor. Vice Mayor Joaquin, I'll do the chair of the public safety committee, Councilmember Norrion. So that's a motion and a second. And also I hope that we have a referral kind of to the public safety committee to go into more detail in terms of some of the discussion points that we had today and also kind of continue to follow up on this. I appreciate that not only the format of the presentation but the reporting as Councilmember Cron mentioned that was provided and I could see how this would be beneficial in other parts of the city to see stuff like this to know, hey, how we can move the needle on our public safety needs in the city. So thank you. Okay, there's a motion, a second on the floor. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Those opposed, say no. That passes unanimously. Have a good evening. The meeting is adjourned. Bonnie, by looking over at you, the external, okay, we're gonna have the audio broadcast out here under the eaves. So if someone wanted to be out there, it's not too bad enough to stand under the eaves where you can listen to this and watch through the window. We also have areas outside in the front there that you could wait until we get to the point of public comment where you could speak. Again, I appreciate everyone's presence here today and also the ability to be patient as we wade through this item. I haven't opened up the meeting, but I will do so. I wanted just to make sure everybody had that information that there is available space across at the Civic Auditorium, Tony Hill Room, and those of you that are willing to go over there, you'll have much more room to spread out and make yourself comfortable. So with that being said, good evening and welcome to our 7 p.m. session of the November 27th, 2018 meeting of the city council. I'd now like to ask the clerk to please say the roll. Thank you, Mayor. Council member, it's Cron. Present. Matthews. Here. Chase is absent. Brown. Here. Narayan is currently absent. Vice Mayor Watkins. Here. Mayor Tarazzo. Here. Again, reiterating from the script, we have available space at the Tony Hill Room across the street. It's televised and we also have access to the clerk for those of you who want to speak that when it gets up to the item of your interest. We have two items on tonight's agenda. There's the first item is a item in regards to the relocation assistance for displaced tenants and ordinance amendment and update. This is an item that came before the council in June and then came back again in September. It was something that had been reviewed by our housing committee. There was a public meeting that took place earlier in the year. So some of the information that's included in there is not new, but it is one what we're still going to have the presentation and then allow public comment to come forward. So I'd like at this point to turn it over to planning director Lee Butler to open up this item. Thank you and good evening, Mayor and council members. Lee Butler, I'm planning director and thanks for that introduction of the item before you this evening. Everyone is aware that housing is a very significant issue here in Santa Cruz and in the region and in the state. And here locally, we've been doing a lot of things to address the housing challenges that we have. Late last year, led by then mayor Chase, there was a significant community outreach effort and that effort resulted in a housing voices report where 99 recommendations were set forth in three different categories, housing production, housing protection and community vitality. And this evening, later this evening with the accessory dwelling unit considerations we'll be focusing more on production with the relocation assistance item before you now were focused on the housing protection. And as the mayor mentioned on June 12th, the council provided direction related to the recommendations from that, the subcommittee. Hold on one second, Mr. Well, if you would please, Mr. Norse, you could ask Bonnie. Okay, so what I would like to do is first check and I guess what the the audios and being broadcast outside. If you just put his face a little closer to the mic it'd be fine. Okay, well I won't put him, but if you'd actually speak a little closer to the mic, I appreciate that. And so based on the recommendations, thank you Bonnie. Based on the recommendations from the housing blueprint subcommittee, the council provided direction on June 12th to bring back a relocation assistance ordinance that would provide some measures of protections for renters should measure him the rent control and just cause eviction measure fail. And so staff brought that back on September the 11th of this year and we had a significant amount of community interest in it. The community and the council all weighed in and the council asked that we do that. The council asked that we delay the consideration of this item until after the election. This particular ordinance would only be in effect should measure him fail and should the council adopt it. And it does appear that measure him is not going to pass and therefore we have brought this item back before the council for your consideration this evening. The ordinance is almost identical to what was presented to you on September 11th with a couple of minor exceptions in terms of clarification on the timing of when relocation payments would be due as well as some allowances for the city council to change certain aspects of the ordinance through resolution, just making it easier for the council in the future to change certain components. And with that, I will turn it over to our team, Scott Harriman and Sarah Fleming can provide some details on the ordinance itself and we're available for any questions following this brief presentation from Scott. Thank you. Thank you very much. Good evening Mayor Tarasas and members of the city council. My name is Scott Harriman. The item before you this evening is proposed amendments to chapter 2103, relocation assistance for displaced tenants by way of some history, chapter 2103 as it currently exists in the Muni Code requires relocation assistance for tenants who are required to vacate a unit due to unsafe, hazardous living conditions or illegal use of a structure as a residence. The ordinance amendments before you expands 2103 to add additional tenant protections requiring the landlord to pay relocation assistance if a tenant relocates due to a large rent increase. The amendment defines a large rent increase and establishes the payment amount and the timeline for a landlord to pay the relocation assistance to the tenant or tenants. This ordinance amendment is not rent control. It does not include just cause eviction because it is not rent control. The provisions of this would apply to all rental units in the city of Santa Cruz and is not subject to limitations contained in the state law that cost the Hawkins law. This ordinance amendment is a tenant protection measure that was identified in the housing blueprint subcommittee report that was adopted earlier this year. As well as this evening and throughout this process, staff has met with and reached out to various community groups prior to the September council meeting and prior to this meeting. A community workshop was held on this item July 17th which included this topic in the workshop session. Staff and city council have and continued to receive public comments on the item. The item was previously heard at the September 11th council meeting at which time extensive public comments were received. The item was continued pending the results of the election although the vote is not certified tabulations as Mr. Butler indicated indicate that the measure will not pass. At the September hearing city council provided direction to consider comments that were provided by the city excuse me that were provided through the public process including defining authorized tenants, clarify the timeline for paying relocation assistance and to consider language from the Los Gatos municipal code which prohibited evictions to avoid the payment of relocation assistance. The city council at that time also requested that the city attorney look into the possibility of having tenant protections apply retroactively to prevent a time gap from this ordinance adoption and certifying the results of the election. This slide provides a summary of the key components that the ordinance amendments contain. Other revisions have been made since the September hearing. They include comments received by the public and recommendations from the city council. The ordinance amendment specifies that relocation assistance would be required from a landlord to tenants to leave a unit due to a large rent increase. A large rent increase as it's proposed now is defined as more than 10% in one year or 15.5% in any two consecutive years. The city attorney has recommended language that allows the city council to modify this percentage or amount by resolution. The ordinance before you this evening includes that language and that provision. Landlords must pay relocation assistance equal the two months of the actual rent pre-increase. The city attorney has also included language that allows the city council to modify this amount by resolution. The ordinance before you this evening includes that provision. Payments must be made within 21 days of the tenant giving notice of their intent to vacate. This timeline for paying relocation assistance has been revised from the September council meeting. There was an anomaly that was pointed out by a citizen. We've corrected it through that public input and we appreciate the input. Tenants have 60 days following the start of the large rent increase to state their intent to vacate. As requested by the city council, the city attorney has provided language that obligates a landlord to pay relocation assistance retroactively for a large rent increase that has an effective date on or after the council certifies that election. The provision, this provision has been added in response to the council concern regarding the time gap and it is in the ordinance before you this evening. Other suggestions that were received in the September meeting include to define authorized tenant. However, when we looked at chapter 2103, the term tenant is used throughout the ordinance and it's specified and it requires protections for those who are forced to relocate due to unsafe, unhealthy living conditions or illegal use of a structure as a residence. These unsafe, unhealthy conditions are different circumstances than those that involve large rent increase. And so as an alternative to that, so the Los Gatos ordinance doesn't necessarily apply. As an alternative to that staff is included text in the draft ordinance that clarifies that relocation assistance is paid in the same manner and to the same individual from whom the payment is received. Staff believes that this revision responds appropriately to the intent of the comment that was received. We also received a request to consider a public comment to review the Los Gatos language. And now as I previously said, the Los Gatos rent has a rent control ordinance and the language from the Los Gatos rent control ordinance doesn't directly apply to the city of Santa Cruz. We don't have a rent control ordinance. Los Gatos does, their ordinance limits the amount a rent can be raised, our ordinance does not do that. So therefore they don't reply. It doesn't comply or doesn't relate to our city. Staff has prepared draft language as a potential option for city council to review as an option this evening. So the options for city council consideration tonight is to adopt the amendment as proposed before you. You may take no action on the item. You may modify the ordinance and for example, you can revise this evening the 10 to 15.5% thresholds and you can also revise the relocation assistant amount which currently shows us two months. I will point out that those two provisions, the council may modify at any time into the future by resolution. So you may do it this evening or you may do it at any time in the future. The alternate language that we have come up with which prohibits evictions as a means of avoiding paying the relocation, for example, would read, if an eviction is found to be or has been predominantly motivated by a landlord's desire to raise rents above the thresholds established herein, then the tenants are entitled to relocation assistant payments as well as associated attorney's fees. With that, the staff recommends that the city council approve amendments to the municipal code relocation assistance for displaced tenants as they're presented this evening. That concludes my staff report and I am happy to take questions. Thank you. What do you think? We'll go to the public first or do you have initial questions you wanna ask? I'd like to hear from Mr. Herman. Why does the staff support this? And is it just a staff inspired initiative recommendation or have council members worked with you on putting this together? Maybe I could say this before we go into it. I mean, the agenda report was pretty clear. This was something that had been referred to the housing subcommittee after council direction. There was a unanimous council vote that referred it to the housing subcommittee for review. There was also a public meeting that took place sometime in June where we invited members of the public to review the proposal before it came back and then a staff just reported this was brought forward September 11th of this year for review by the council and there was a determination made by the council that it wouldn't be acted upon until after the election. I'd like anybody from the housing subcommittee wanna weigh in on that? Well, I can say that in the subcommittee we did have conversations about wanting to have something that we could potentially put in place should measure M not pass. And the idea of relocation assistance came up. It was discussed, my recollection is it was discussed in relatively general terms. So this was not something that we as a committee crafted this language, but we did say that we were interested as a group in ensuring that we wouldn't leave people hanging should measure M not pass. So the discussion was pretty open-ended, I'd say. That's my recollection. No percentages put on it, like a large increase is not 15.5%. At the time we didn't discuss numbers, no. No? Okay, I just have one quick question. I know it was something that came up afterwards but the idea that something could be changed by resolution. How is the public notified when something like that happens if you're not doing the readings and publicizing what the changes are? Sure, so that would be through the public hearing process. So it would be noticed as any other public hearing would be, just like this meeting was noticed today, we had a legal ad in the paper and notifying people that a city-wide ordinance change would be happening or via resolution. But is there a different requirement? Because I don't recall that we do postings for resolutions. We wouldn't have to, but I think as a matter of practice, we would. Okay. Okay, so that was my initial question. Any other members? Council, we wish to ask anything at this time because if not, I think what I'd do is like to just open it up for public comment first so that we can hear from the public before we deliberate and take action. There were four members of the public that requested additional time. They were Cynthia Berger, formerly Santa Cruz Tennis Association, now Power Surge Tenants Rights. Jessica Chiduyen, excuse me, and Rachela might ask you to. That's a terrible pronunciation. Tell me, how would you say that? Do I have it in front of me? Maybe not. What is it? Chiduyen, thank you. Ingersoll, students united with renters and Lynn Renshaw with Santa Cruz together. And then we also had, I believe, Mr. Norse from Huff, is that right? Yes. So those are the four, so we'll take them in order. Oh, excuse me, before we begin, I'd like to also ask the city attorney to provide an update to not only the council, but to the public on an email that he sent out that described what action we're taking today and also what deliberations will happen in regards to this agenda item that's posted. So city attorney Tony Condati. Yes. Thank you. I'm leaning into the mic. I want to clarify one point first. And that is that while I did provide the language regarding the retroactive application of the ordinance, the portion or the modification that allows the council to adjust the different percentages and whatnot, by resolution is not a recommendation of my office. I reviewed that language, but that's purely a policy decision for the council to make. And I don't have a recommendation on that. Second thing is that under the Brown Act, each agenda item that the council is going to consider in a public meeting for each, there has to be a brief general description of the business to be transacted or the item to be considered on the agenda. And there's been a fair bit of public discussion already about the idea of the council taking action this evening on an extension of the rent-freeze ordinance that was adopted by the council last February. The Brown Act would not allow the council to take that action at this evening's meeting because that is not the subject matter of this agenda item. The council could direct that an item be considered or direct that an item be agendized for consideration at a future meeting, but you will not be able tonight to take action on an extension of the rent-freeze ordinance. Should that be the council's inclination to do so? Thank you. Okay. Well, what I'd like to do then is open it up and ask for those that request for organizational time to speak first. The first up is Cynthia Berger from Power Surge Tenants Rights. Power Surge, but my PowerPoint doesn't work. Oh, we're on. So good evening, council members. I'm Cynthia and thank you for the opportunity to speak on this proposed relocation law amendments. As I understand, it's an amendment to the already law. And so there's an amendment Yeah, I didn't get in on the planning discussion for this law, but the problem with the relocation laws already is that there's really no way to enforce them without the will to do so. And they're also just tricky to enforce. So you can make relocation laws up the hall and back, but that doesn't mean they're going to be enforced. In fact, I just got off the phone with one of the six UCSE students who was evicted last year from an illegal dwelling and they never got their full relocation payments, even with the assistance of the Code Compliance Department. So that's just a caveat about relocation laws. So the other issue with this law that I think is pretty terrible is that it gives the message that a 9% rent raise is not a real high rent raise. When a 3% rent raise in Santa Cruz is the same as the average median wage raise, which is 3% annually. But of course we know in Santa Cruz that we have very low wages. So there already is a disparity between what a 3% rent raise is compared to what people's actual 3% wage raise is in Santa Cruz. For example, the average wage in Santa Cruz is $970 a week. And the average wage in Santa Clara County is $2,570 a week. Now, what I see happening is that you're going for those people. You're not going to help the people here who are making in our local economy $970 a week. What you'd like to really do in the Economic Development Department or somebody who keeps approving all these market rate apartments is get rid of all these people who can't afford that. That is the effect of what's going on. And when you build these market rate apartments, that doesn't bring down any of the rents. So as the Federal Reserve recently showed that if you build 5% more housing, the housing at the very top end of the rentals might go down 0.05%. So that's not going to be the full answer. And as far as relocation, well, the relocation is out of line with the actual prices today. So there are a lot of different indexes of prices, but on Zillow, the actual prices are well-recorded and the relocation that you're offering is going to cause people, we don't want them to move, if they're relocated, we don't want them to move to Fresno. We want them to move and stay in our community. They're our friends. So they need to have higher amount of money for relocation in Santa Cruz, much higher because of that wage disparity that's been going on for so many years, and you're well aware that we can't be aiming, housing for Santa Clara County salaries here, and that's what's happening. And also like people on social security and disability, they didn't get any cost of living adjustment in 2016-0. Thank you. Okay. Thanks. Okay, and Jessica with the Students United with Renters, you're up and again, forgive me what police, your last name is? My name's Jessica Chouidian-Ingersal. Chouidian-Ingersal, thank you. Key of four minutes. Okay, great. So yeah, I'm an organizer with Students United with Renters. We are an autonomous group of student and non-student renters, which spent nearly a year organizing for rent control and counseling tenants about their rights under the rent freeze that we have. A rent freeze which has protected and untold thousands of renters from excessive rent increases and no-fall evictions. A rent freeze which the media publicized several times when veterans were protected from no-fall evictions on California Street. When enforced, we know that the rent freeze works. So now is not the time for rushed compromises. The proposed ordinance from September falls short in several ways. Let's address this 10% a year trigger and apply it to actual rents that people are paying. One landlord that I know charges $1,326 a month for one room and another landlord charges a similar rate for a garage. 10% on that is $132 more a month. Would the employer of that renter then give 30-day notice of a wage increase? Unlikely. Two people that I know personally currently pay $2,800 for a two-bedroom apartment. A 10% increase on that is $280 more a month. How does one suddenly acquire almost $300 more a month, especially if you're already working full-time with an average renter wage of $14 an hour? 10% cap wouldn't even be enough. In addition, this new proposal's provision that the rent caps be unbinding and on the backs of tenants to prove is too excessive is a slap in the face to those who would rather struggle to stay in their home than take a check and leave. Lots of renters truly want to stay in their home and they will work another job or sacrifice yet another necessity to make rent. This new proposal says that you're okay with that. And worse, perhaps the biggest loophole of them all is that this new proposal doesn't have just cause. We include a just cause in the rent freeze because without it, a landlord only has to evict a tenant to get around the rent stabilization protections. This is a matter of upholding a tenant's right to stability in a time of crisis. A landlord should have to prove that the reason they're displacing a tenant is for reasonable cause, of which there are many listed because we don't live in a city where there are available and affordable housing options for tenants. This completely dismantles the stabilization plan, all for a lukewarm gesture of compromise. But it's too late for that. This is a crisis and it's time to really think about how our community is struggling with poverty, homelessness, mental illness and violence and how it's all connected to this problem of unaffordability and displacement. Please remember that the rent freeze will expire in December. If we don't keep the rent freeze, which will keep more people in their homes than this new proposal, more people are at risk of becoming homeless in the winter time. And we've already seen several members of our houseless community get harassed for sleeping outside or even worse, die on the streets. Our weather patterns are becoming more and more extreme and it's becoming dangerous to be living outside. Whether it's from being exposed to freezing temperatures or having to inhale toxic chemicals from the wildfires. It's also important to keep in mind that this December expiration date means that many families will be receiving rent increases or eviction notices just before the Christmas holidays. A child's present will be going toward a 10% rent increase. And I'm not a big fan of mindless consumerism during Christmas time, but I do believe that struggling renters deserve nice things too. Just by saying that rent control is something that most people in Santa Cruz want, even if it wasn't measure M. Prop 10, the statewide rent control measure, which strengthened local rent control, actually passed in Santa Cruz with 13,747 votes. We've shown you that this new proposal can't work, so please take time to create something that actually will. What we have here, a moratorium, and you only stay in place for another month or two until the new city council has time to sit down and create something that will work for all of us. Thank you, thank you. Okay, next up is Lynn Renshaw, Santa Cruz Together. So again, Lynn Renshaw, SantaCruiseTogether.com. The Santa Cruz Together Coalition acknowledges the difficult and complicated affordable housing shortage. We advocate for solutions that do not make this bad problem worse. Our coalition generally supports the relocation ordinance for additional tenant protections. It is a reasonable alternative to measure M, which was just rejected by a very wide margin. There are rumors, and I guess speakers, talking about how this council or the new council may try to extend the temporary tenant protections put in place when this issue first came about. The public should remember that these temporary measures are based on measure M and largely share the same language. For practical purposes, the temporary ordinances are measure M. There are also rumors that the new council may simply try to adopt measure M. Regarding this, I'd like to share the following. Our community has spent the last year debating the merits of this proposal. The city council invited a conversation. People understand the implications and the practices of things like just cause evictions. We have the final results from voters in the city of Santa Cruz in an election with a record turnout. By nearly a two to one margin, the vast majority have indicated the following. 64% of voters find it unfair and problematic that just cause evictions cause people to lose control of their property, even single family homes where the intent is to rent temporarily. 64% of voters don't think renters should be able to move in other renters beyond the numbers specified on a lease. Voters object to additional renters being able to move into rentals without owner permission. 64% of renters do not want to pay for an expensive endoconian rent board whose purpose is enforcing flawed and overreaching laws in Santa Monica and Berkeley Rent Board Directors. Compensation exceeds 300,000. 60, it's a fact out there. I have my citations. 64% of voters would like to continue. Can I put you on pause for a second? Can I put you on pause? Hey, I'm gonna ask you, and thanks everyone. I think in the room everybody's been very respectful. I appreciate that. Everybody has a chance to speak during this process. And in those outside, I ask that anyone who's speaking give each person respect for their viewpoints and we can move forward for the discussion, okay? Thank you very much. Yes, please go ahead. 64% of voters would like to continue with normal contract laws where lease end dates are enforceable. 64% of voters disapproved of charging people up to $20,000 to move back into homes they owned after they temporarily rented them. The relocation assistance being considered tonight is a reasonable and balanced approach to address the most extreme examples of rent spikes and the impact it can have on local renters. Voters have spoken loudly that they do not support the emergency rent freeze currently in place. The extreme just cause eviction laws and then we'll leave rent board. The city council should respect the will of the voters and limit any action to the proposed relocation ordinance. If- Hey, can we pause for a second? Let's close the door. If you would please shut the door so that we can hold that and then anybody who's outside, you know, again, I'm gonna ask whoever's out there, if we have anyone who's monitoring out there to please keep it down and let each speaker have their opportunity to have their peace here. Thanks. Wait a second before Brent gets back so you can start. Yeah, where was I? Whenever you're ready. So the city council should respect the will of the voters. I think that's where I was and limit any action to the proposed relocation ordinance. It focuses on rent increases without imposing additional laws that the vast majority of Santa Cruz voters oppose. The renters should realize that the city council has its arms tied in terms of what it can do for the people, the 75% of people that live in rental houses and condos where their rent cannot be limited by state law, which supersedes anything the city council can do. Voters have spoken loud and clear. The results were not a fluke city council members present and future should respect the voice of voters. Thank you. Okay, okay, okay, okay, thank you. Let's, let's, let's, let's continue again. Let's go. Mr. Norse, you're speaking on behalf of Huff. You have four minutes. So obviously this whole issue has a very direct connection with homeless people as been mentioned by previous speakers. This is going to create every time the rents go up, it creates a lot of noise. Every time the rents go up, it creates a more homeless and in Santa Cruz and or elsewhere where people have to flee. What's been the, what the enforcement and the just cause absence provisions have already been mentioned. They're either obvious. What you have here, of course, with the major M election is essentially a purchased victory with huge amounts of money, huge amounts of money. I need you to pause for a second. I'm fine. Mr. Norse pause. No, pause for a second. Hey everybody, he also I'd like to speak. I know everybody's got their viewpoints and support or oppose something. Just let him speak and if you want at the end you could say something or, but just finish up your comments. And if you want, you can say whatever you feel like. This is a public gathering. All right, and what's the history of enforcement of the previous rental inspection ordinance? I did some research on this many years ago and this was billed as some way to help tenants. It didn't help tenants. There's still a long backlog of unresolved complaints. So it's unclear how much rental inspection ordinance that we had previously has actually responded to the backlog of tenant complaints. I think you should look into that and find out what's going on with that before pretending that you're gonna be helping tenants with this ordinance. Now the real issue of course is why is an emergency freeze not on the agenda? That seems to be because the mayor and the city council doesn't want it on the agenda. Now this is important because it tells the people in this room who are tenants or concerned about tenants that they have to take action independently of the city council. They already did once, trying to fight a 10 to one or 20 to one financial disadvantage with huge out of city corporations funding the anti-M measure. How many renters have actually had to relocate in the last five years? Let's have the council look into this. I haven't heard anything or any research done on this, but what can the community do? That's really our issue. I think tenants associations, student associations, elderly people in groups, disabled groups, all the people who are impacted by this but do not have the power of Santa Cruz together or their allied associations in the state with huge amounts of money. They have to use the people power they have. My suggestion is this, since there's likely to be a massive number of rent increases after this, that people shine the spotlight on every single landlord who raises other rent and evicts a tenant in the next two months. This has to be done independently of this council. It has to be done by organizations that are struggling, often held together by only a few people who are working other jobs. What I'm saying is it is up to us, the community, that part of this audience and the television audience that actually wants to support tenants and not just play along with this council's latest showcase piece to do what they need to do. The landlord is evicting people. You go to that person's house, you pick at their house, you pick at their business, you pick at the real estate associations that are doing this. You have to go out and take active action or I'm afraid you'll be left behind. And thanks to the audience for listening to me and I wish the city council had put this in the civic auditorium as they should have done, floors or no floors. They have not put anything in the civic auditorium recently. Boy, those floors have a long time being a disabled mayor, Therazus. So maybe the new mayor, though I'm not terribly hopeful, will do something better. Let's hope so. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Norse. The floors are gonna look outstanding though, I can guarantee you. Okay, that is the end of our organizational comment. I wanted to first say that I'd like a show of hands and if some of you can help me up here, how many of you would like to speak to this item? Keep your hands up. And we're gonna get a count so we can just figure timing on it. There's people outside too. Yeah, those outside, just get a count in the room. Like 30? And Bonnie, are there any people over here you're checking? Okay. You can hold down for a second, sir. Third-ish, yeah, third-ish inside. Okay, what do you got out there? And then you always add more people one at a time. Okay, we're gonna start, okay. We're gonna start right here in the front row, but any, and then we'll go in the line in the back. You have two minutes and you can begin. Hello, my name is Henry Joseph. Hold on one second. Make an announcement that we'll get through this and then that's Tony Hill people because they're wondering when they can come. Okay, let me just say this. We have again speakers in the Tony Hill room. We're gonna finish with those that are here in this room as well as the outside and then those that are watching from the Tony Hill room will be invited over to speak afterwards, okay. So, okay, Bonnie, if you could start us time. I'm a non-profit organization. As president of the homeless committee, I've decided to base my environmental Lincoln log studies to the human race. While studying plants, insects and arachnids, mixtures of biochemistry, there has been a civil conflict between the county's legal understanding of state and federal respect of our allegiance. The first time I spoke, I noticed sidetracked minds with your devices in front of you until I stood up and had all of you front and center. Thankfully, plenty of ironic occurrences within our nation's way of frowned upon homelessness and non-taxable survival funds has brought to my attention this land is my land and their land and our land. I slept on Pacific sidewalk last night with some of my closest brothers, provided a tarp and thankfully received a blanket and slept. We were woken up by rangers. We have the respect and we're informed by them our survival is necessary to the point of living in the parks, our forest. My first time sleeping on Pacific Avenue was proven to relinquish most of my rest time's energy. I've gotten together a building crew, a bit of my 1033 friends and plan on being donated tools, materials and have other community support here in Santa Cruz. I have laborers, roofers, drywallers, sawsmen's, farmers, patio and deck constructors, landscapers, painters. Also a 1,628 member group here in Santa Cruz. We don't want national security breach but supreme actions will be made if the homeless feel like this is a war. Then you can contact my secretary next meeting about that. Okay, we're gonna start on the first row. Is any members of the public here that wish to speak please? And then we'll go over there. Looking down, can you ask her if she wants to speak too? Go ahead. You have two minutes. Hello, my name is Shelly Keneep. Measure M was defeated by a two thirds majority. It is my understanding that some council members want to pass an ordinance to control how much of an increase can be taken on rental properties. I'm really quite baffled by this. In a true democracy, the majority rules. The majority of voters by a margin of two to one voted no on the rent control measure. According to the multi-listing statistics by the realtors, the emergency rent control ordinance you all passed last February caused approximately 90 rental houses to be put on the market and sold. These homes are now owner occupied single family homes. Over 200 renters have been displaced by your actions and at that, this is a very conservative estimate. There are three things that I want to ask of this council and the future council as well. Honor the will of the people. We spoke and the answer was a resounding no. The people do not want rent control. Think about what these long-term consequences will be if you take actions to make this measure a reality again. It is a given that more rental properties will be lost creating an even further housing crisis. Once rental properties are gone, you can't get them back. The city government is constantly telling people who live in Santa Cruz that they don't have enough money to run the city government. I really don't think that local taxpayers are gonna be happy if your actions end up in a lawsuit needlessly costing the taxpayers a lot of money. Please do not defy the democratic vote and try to install rent control, instill rent control. Councilman Crone and Cummings and Brown, no means no. Your time is up. Okay, next on the front row, is there someone who wants to speak? Okay, okay, please go ahead. Go ahead, two minutes, you go. Okay, again, shut the door please. Hi, my name is Donna and I had debated of whether or not to speak up tonight. But we are, I am part of the renters that was evicted as the moratorium was in place without cause. We did things in order for the eviction to be rescinded. However, now that we have no protection, what's gonna happen to us? Where are we going to be? Are they gonna put us out in the street? What are you gonna do for people like me and others that can't afford the increases, that have no protection, that I'm not speaking only about rent control, it's just human beings, human rights. Everyone has the right to stay in the home that they are in. And for us to be evicted for no reason at all, no reason except for the jack up threats. That's the only reason why we were being evicted. We went to the press, we went to the TV, we went to everywhere that we could in order for our eviction to not go through. And it was rescinded because what he was doing was wrong. However, if you guys don't do anything about it, he's going to evict us again. He's going to kick us out on the street. He doesn't care. They don't care if we have a place to live. I beg on you, don't you care? Don't you wonder where we're going to be when our landlords kick us out or raise the rent beyond what it is right now? We're paying 1,800 in January 1st, we're going to be paying 2,300. We agreed to a $400 increase and you know what? That's more than your 10% that you guys want and you know what? There's nothing to protect us that says he can't do that. And I just want you to consider us who are living it. Thank you. Roe, next speaker. Okay. Hi, I'm Carol Paul Hamas and I've written you a couple of times so I'm not going to repeat what I've already written but thank you for listening to me. I believe measure M failed because of the just cause eviction clauses. I think that a lot of people, I walked a lot of precincts this fall for the Women's Democratic Club and talked to a lot of people and rent control was really a dominant issue in the selection as you know. And so a lot of people wanted to talk about it. And what I found the overwhelming majority saying is that they're not opposed to rent ceilings or some kind of actual rent maximum increase such as you've proposed here. But they were violently opposed to the just cause eviction clauses because they felt it would impact their ability to control or move into their own properties. I am a landlord. I've had the same tenant for five years. Before that I had somebody else for five years. I have not raised my tenants rent in five years. I care a lot about them. He's part of the family. He had Thanksgiving dinner with us. I think most people who are single landlords feel that way about their tenants. They care about them. They're not out to hurt them. They're not out to gouge them. Yes, there are people who do. Most people don't. So I would like to just request that you think about the just cause eviction piece as the cause of the defeat of Measure M and don't try to replicate that. But rather try to put in place something that is sympathetic to people having to deal with large rent increases and something that we can all live with. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, next speaker. I thank you very much honorable council members and people in the audience. My name is Michael Cox. I work as a maintenance guy in the city for properties. I live in Soquel. I want to speak to the agenda item because I know you cannot take comments on things that are off the agenda. So the proposal tonight is an alternative approach to maybe try to ferret out some rent gougers. I think, I don't know, I think the proposal might be okay. My big concern is not causing rent gouging or rent increases to accelerate. I think there's a genuine issue around a speed limit, a straight percentage sending an inadvertent signal that the government is now sort of blessing 9%, 10%, 5%. And if people stay just under the speed limit they won't get a ticket. I really think three changes would be beneficial. But I don't have a super amount of experience compared to the amount of work that staff has probably done on this. I think a better rent increase trigger is one tied to the annual rate of inflation. That way it floats. And in negative inflation, there's less there's pressure on a landlord to keep the rent stable when people are really hurting financially. Also, if we have hyperinflation, the owner can keep up. Whereas the inflation might go crazy and exceed any kind of speed limit. And lastly, I think the ordinance does confer some additional rights to tenants. So I felt that could it state specifically that an owner does have the right of appeal to the building official if they do have a hardship situation. Thank you very much. Thank you. Okay, Curtis. My name Curtis Relaford, 831-246-4242. 831-246-4242. What I'm witnessing here in this town, y'all we face a more crisis as a people as a country. Those who do nothing invite shame and violence. And those who act boldly, recognize the day rights as well as reality. I recognize my rights and when I speak up and you come down here. I'm not coming down here to pull a bullshit. If you ain't got no money, get your broadcast on. That's what I'm witnessing here. And my bro behind is down here trying to feed these people, care about these people, show my compassion and love and empathy for all people. But I'm getting harassed left and right from the still owners, from the people who just don't like music, from the people who just don't like peace. Somebody promoting peace, love, compassion. God, what do you want in this town? I don't see no black folks in this town. If you're lifting on that TV, you need to bring your broke ass down here and speak up for your rights. Hey man, we face a more crisis and hate is not gonna drive out it with hate. Only love can do that. And this is love. This is not anger is what I'm talking about. It's passion behind what I have discovered in this 33 years of being clean and sober. And some of you people up there, speak to the people who walk down the street. Dude, you look down here every time I look at you to try to say hello, brother, good morning. Ma'am, hello. All I'm doing is promoting love in this town. You gave it to me. I respect Santa Cruz. I'm not done yet. All right, thank you. All right, so now those of you that are lined up, are you going to speak, are you lined up to speak? Okay, anybody here? Please, whoever's lined up to speak first, go right ahead. Go ahead. Good evening, I feel very honored to be here. I'm Albert Brett and recently I became a California citizen again by voting in our election. I carry an Idaho ID and have been an Idaho citizen because of the association I have with the good Senator from Idaho. In any event, I'm a resident here and my wife just spoke and we have a landlord who came over in July from Los Gatos and offered Doug Cox, a wonderful citizen of our community who had owned the property with his father for 30 years, I know times of in essence, but this man came over and kicked out the veterans and the cancer patients out of his place and gave us 90 days, just hit the streets and went and said, well, he offered other people money to move. And then he started, he's retrofitting the place and luckily our building department has gotten him in line. I know I'm rambling, but on the 12th this man, Dan Decker, is going to come in from Los Gatos and probably throw us back on the street. So I mean we can go to the Los Baños and find a wonderful place there to live. I'm a 100% disabled Vietnam veteran with pancreatic cancer active in my hip right now. And I'm a five year survivor. I'm here because I use cannabis to fight that cancer and I'm winning, I think. I'll know from a pet scan on Thursday. I've got a lot on my plate and getting kicked out. I came here to dance in the portals of the western sky and watch my son set in a town with a big heart. And thanks to your building department, I'm able to stay because he's stopped work on his place right now. Because the guy's trying to do a flip, I don't know. But the billionaires are coming over the hill and they're going to chase the millionaires out and there's nothing we can do about it. Thank you. Next speaker please. City Council Mayor Tarazas. My name is Tom Powers, I'm a local resident. I was a long time renter for 20 years from moving out from home to renting, to becoming a property owner, to becoming purchasing a rental property and being a rental property owner. I try to do it very responsibly, maintain a good, healthy, safe place to live for my tenants. It's also an integral part of our retirement and we would like to be able to lease something to our kids when we work very hard for it. The just cause eviction, I find to be very, very onerous where you completely lose control of the property that you've worked very hard. To be able to purchase number one and provide responsible, be a good landlord and a good provider for local housing having been a renter myself previously for an extended period of time. So the just cause eviction, it really strips all your rights as a landlord. And also as a responsible property owner, I have no intention of ever jacking up rents dramatically, nothing beyond reasonable cost of living raises. I'm not opposed to rent control, just like Carol Paul Hamas had just stated. The just cause eviction is extremely onerous. And if something like that came to pass, we would sell our rental property. We have a two unit and then there's another two units that have gone away. And like I say, we need good landlords, responsible ones. And we appreciate good tenants and want to have it work for everybody. So, thank you. I'm going to ask, is there anyone in the second row that was interested in speaking? Why don't you guys go up and speak? Who's next in line behind the person who's kneeling down? If you're not going to speak, I think move away from that side of the line. Okay, I'm going to have a few of the folks from this row come up and then we'll go back to the line. Go ahead, step right up. Hi there, my name is Stacy Falls. I'm a renter in the city of Santa Cruz. And I hear these landlords coming up and saying that they're good landlords and their tenants are like family and they won't raise their rent. And I believe that there's a number of landlords who do not do that. But people in this room need to hear that the life for renters is hell right now because there's a vast majority of landlords or at least a vast percentage of landlords who have no qualms about raising people's rent in an exorbitant way. My neighbor of eight years had her rent doubled over the course of two years. Another friend of mine has experienced 100% rent increase in five years. I met people while I was campaigning for Measure M who lost their housing because of two $800 rent increases in the course of one year and have become homeless since then. It's ridiculous what is happening to renters in this town and we need some kind of protection. In an ideal world, the city council would extend the rent freeze that's currently in place. I understand from the city attorney that that's not an option tonight. I hope you take that up at a later date. In the meantime, I think this current ordinance is being discussed, has some potential, but a 15% and a half percent increase over two years is crazy. If you do the math with compound interest, it works out to be 48% over four years. That is status quo. Seriously, that doesn't help anybody. That cap needs to be lowered, maybe 3%, maybe 5%. And I really, really think you need to adopt the suggested language of saying that you can't evict somebody for the purpose of raising the rent. Because what's going to happen, I'm telling you, I promise. If you do not include that language, people are just going to evict their tenants to get around this having to pay the relocation fee. I would not be surprised if you literally help zero people. Because everybody who would otherwise be supported, they're just going to get kicked out so that their landlord can raise the rent. This won't work unless you lower the cap and include that kind of eviction protection. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Good evening. My name is Steve Schnarr. One thing just to correct the point that Stacey made. If you run the math over five years under the current proposed numbers that were shared earlier, the rent would increase 48%, which is barely any better than a lot of us have already experienced and certainly not affordable, certainly not going to keep people in their homes, even to the extent that it might limit some rent increases and not just have people not have their lease renewed so someone could charge more to the next person. In this town, we all know there's a rental housing crisis. Average rents went up 50% in the last five years. A lot of people have lost their homes. And then these debates about what should we do and should there be rent control or just cost and what not. A lot of people who oppose rent control, they just say we just need to build more. All we need to do is build more. That's the only thing that's going to help. Well, as Cynthia Berger mentioned earlier, there was a Federal Reserve study that came out this year. The Federal Reserve looked at what is the impact of increasing market rate housing in expensive areas and we're definitely an expensive area. And you can increase the total housing stock 5% and it only reduces the cost one half of a percent. And we're never going to build enough to bring rental prices down or stop them from going up in the short term. It's going to take years. Any housing policy, including, must include that. And if you actually care about the lower income and middle income people in the community, there has to be some kind of protection. And what's offered here tonight, I appreciate something is better than nothing, I guess, but it's not that much better than nothing. It's very minimal. It's not going to help very many people. So I hope that if you pass that, that it will include a substantial reduction in the number, the percentage, which is considered extreme. And I hope that you will include some language as is legally allowable to say that you can't remove a person from the house just to raise the rent for the next person. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Hi, my name is Paula LaRoyantacchi. I've had to move six times in ten years as a single mom with two daughters. And I'll let you know that with that ordinance, most of us don't get evicted. It's just whenever the lease ends, and I'll bet most of us are on a month to month. I know right now I'm in a very precarious situation. And the other thing about the ordinance is to relocate, we need to have some place to relocate into. And if you look and through Craigslist or whatever, everything's that much higher than the last place. And then you add all your moving costs and everything like that. That most landlords just will let the lease end. And I want to talk a little bit about this will of the people. Because it was very clear that the no one M campaign was promoting lies that were not in M, okay? And this was, as we've heard, as we know, with outside money and also very illegal techniques, they had them like in the center median of public property. They're signs. Most of us who are renters could not put signs on. My landlord's around like a bee all the time. So we couldn't promote. So the things that were not right, that were lies, and many of you maybe read actually Measure M, had to do with the amount of money that they would have to put up, have to do with how they could put so many more people inside that would go against the lease. A lease is, it doesn't undercut the lease. That Measure M, they kept talking about you could put 40 people in a room and all these subletters and all this kind of stuff. So they were basically promoting lies and also that it was going to pay for itself. It wasn't going to start a new bureaucracy. So as far as the will of the people saying that they didn't want M or rank control, I don't think the people really knew what they were voting for half of the time. So I'd like you, there's my time. Okay, next. Sure someone will cover the next comment. Be taught, Mr. Powers, who's the gentleman behind Mr. Powers? You, you're going to speak? You're up. All right. Good evening, City Council. My name is Mickey Larson. And I would like to address the issue of extending the current emergency rent freeze. Would you pause for a second? That's currently not on the agenda? I know, but people have been leading into it. So I don't see why I can't address it. Continue. So I would like to address the issue of extending the current emergency rent freeze and just cause initiative. Three words, the people have voted. The just cause, which was anything but just and the current rent freeze mirrors measure M's extreme values. The vote has rejected those values and the city council needs to end the current emergency measure the day the last vote is counted or else democracy becomes a sham. There is no imperial data that suggests landlords will raise rents and evict tenants in the wake of measure M's defeat. Show me the empirical evidence. We don't know that's going to happen. Let the democratic process guide the council's decision. The voters have spoken. Thank you. Okay, next speaker please, Mr. Christie. Next one, Mr. Christie. Good evening, City Council. Mayor. Thanks for taking the time. I'm born and raised in Santa Cruz. I'm saddened by the divisiveness of this subject. It really seems like something we could come together on. There are solutions I'm sure, but unfortunately the solutions that have been presented haven't been reasonable and the voters have voted. And I think that should be clear to everyone here and that is the democracy we live in. I do urge you to put into place the exorbitant rent increase measure as it's passed or the amendment to the current. The current amendment that's proposed. I believe that we need an in-depth study. I'd like to be part of that study. There are a lot of people in this room that would like to be part of that study. I'd like to be part of a solution that actually helps housing. I've personally witnessed properties coming off the market. Tenants getting kicked out because of what measure M was proposing. And the temporary rent increase was, I realize a stop gap to see how the vote went. I don't think that changing that or going against what the voters said would be helpful. But I do think your attention should be focused on something that does work. Providing new housing, providing subsidies, helping people that need the help. Thank you. Next speaker, are you lined up and black sir, are you going to speak? No, next speaker please stand or come forward. Hi, my name is William Robb and I'd just like to go over a couple of things that's already been said. One of which is I think the voters knew exactly what they were voting for. I really think they do. I think they were very educated. Voters just plain rejected Major M nearly on a two-thirds margin. So I think that speaks for itself. And over 60% of the voters do not want to live in a community where it just caused evictions and just caused people to lose control of their own property. I think that's very important. Over 60% of voters disapproved of charging people high relocation fees to move back into their own homes, homes that they already own. Over 60% of voters do not want an expensive or decorority and rent control board in the city just plain can't afford that. I don't see how they could possibly do that. Over 60% of voters want lease and dates to continue to be enforceable. Most responsible landlords believe that and even tenants know that you must have an enforceable lease. So I would say the city council should respect the will of the voters. The emergency rent freeze and emergency just cause eviction laws are derived from Major M and are largely share the same language. So please do not impose the laws that the vast majority of Santa Cruz people voted against. Thank you very much. Thank you. Next speaker please. Good evening. My name is Mike Krogan. I've lived in Santa Cruz most of my life, went to school here. Started out in low income housing, Villa San Carlos. And I started out in a small rental that was 80 bucks a month and it was full of cockroaches and we moved out of there quickly and then we moved to Villa San Carlos and now I'm a homeowner. And I think this last vote on Measure M showed what the people of Santa Cruz want. Everyone I know in Santa Cruz and I know a lot of landlords are good landlords and they have fair rents usually below market rent. I think that the city does not have any business being in rent control personally. I do not think that it worked out real well and I think it was in the 90s when we had mobile home rent control. And we got the city got sued over and over and over again and they ended up breaking rent control and that turned out to be disaster for the city. I don't believe they belong in rent control. I believe in the free market system. Most landlords are good landlords and I think that the Measure M passed for a reason. Everyone I know was against Measure M and I think that the city should just be cautious about going into this whole arena. I actually don't agree with any of this stuff. We should just forget about it, move on and forget about Measure M. Thank you. Next speaker please. Next speaker. Next speaker. Next speaker please. Thank you. Hello. My name is Sarah Albertson and I am a homeowner but I think that housing is a human right. And just like medical care is and that housing should not be a big money making proposition that everybody thinks oh this is how I will, this is how I'll retire, this is how I'll earn my living. There are too many people that need housing for that to be. I'd like to just suggest that this proposal that I just learned about, it doesn't work in the sense that I think landowners know that oh well if that's on I'll just not renew the lease as someone mentioned and then I'll jack up the rent or I'll evict them and not talk about raising the rent and then I'll raise the rent so I don't see how it really could be affected that way. I have a friend who is not only being evicted from her home of 16 years around this period of time with Measure M but also she's being evicted from her business location and not to raise, with the claim that it's not to raise the rent but I'm going to watch closely and I'll bet the rent gets raised a great deal after she is out of there and I don't know where she's going to go and she doesn't know where she's going to go. But anyway I think housing needs to be considered more a human right than a money making proposition. Thank you. Okay, next speaker and then after Mr. Cummings, is there anyone in the third row who wishes to speak? Third row, third row. If you could line up, if you can move over so we can get that. If ma'am you're up, yep. You guys all, no one else in this place I'm starting right there so go right ahead. Hi there, good evening council. My name is Tanya Schweitzer. I'm here today as the mother of Santa, that lives in Santa Cruz and I want to say that this is not only for the families that are renters, I'm a renter, it's also for our community. So what we're trying, what we try to do with Measure M and what we are really trying to do now is to preserve the economic diversity of our community. So I have a daughter now in fifth grade, every year of her life that she's been in elementary school in Santa Cruz, a child has moved away. One of our friends has moved away every single time, it's because they cannot afford rent anymore. Is that what we want? Do we want a community where our children can't live? I heard somebody here say before that they wanted to have a rental property so they could pass it on to their children. These children are growing up without long-time relationships because families can't afford to live here. This is important. I also work in non-profit. We can't hire people because people can't afford living here. And this is the people that take care of our seniors, they take care of our children, they are our lowest paid workers and they cannot afford living here. We're hiring people from Salinas and Hollister because people cannot afford to live in this community. I propose to cap the rent at 3% or the CPA as was suggested under measure M until actually democracy gets to speak and we get a new council that puts this on the forefront of their agenda. Thank you very much. Thank you. Mr. Cummings, you speak and then the two, please go ahead. You're up next. Yep. And then the two from the row three. I'm in City Council and people of Santa Cruz. Let's get a pause. You get your shot out there. My name is Justin Cummings and currently I'm in the top three for being on the incoming Santa Cruz City Council. First of all I want to say that I want to thank you all for your hard work and I really want to give you all the respect you deserve for all that you've done to help all the renters in Santa Cruz by pushing forward the freeze. I was going to speak towards Albert Brett's situation but then he was here and got to speak for himself. But it's like him and many other people, families, veterans, seniors who are looking at being put on the street if we don't put something in place that's similar to the freeze. Just to dispel some myths that have been flying around. I don't plan on pushing through measure M but what I do think is that we need to make sure that we have tenant protections in terms of just cause for eviction and whatever gets passed whether it's temporary or permanent. And I also think that we need to make sure that the rent increases are not exorbitant. And going to five and ten percent is actually hitting those marks because when we look at the rate of inflation, the consumer price index and how much the prices of things are going up within our communities, ten percent is well above what things are going up to. As someone who works at the university, my yearly increases for raises can only go up by three percent max. And so when we're talking about ten percent and fifteen percent over two year periods, that's way more than most people can afford, especially our working class and the people who live in this town. When I was on the campaign trail and I was knocking on doors, many of the people said that the things that they were against were the six month relocation fees and the owner move in, like owners not being able to move back into their homes. And but aside from that, most of the people whose doors I knocked on said that they were for rent control and they think that there needs to be tenant protections. And so I want to encourage all of you tonight to consider those things when you're thinking about the freeze that you're going to push forward. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker. Please go ahead. Hi, I'm Costas Cara Cristo, so I was born and raised. Hold on a second. By the way, congratulations on your win. Got some fans out there. Okay. Please go ahead. Costas Cara Cristo, so I was born and raised in Santa Cruz. I just wanted to address the caps that you want to put on rental properties. If you look at the standard pours, there's other investments people can move into. If you cap the rate of return on investments, they'll just move their money to other investments, whether the stock market, they'll sell their rental units. You know, there's a misconception here, Santa Cruz is a bedroom community for Silicon Valley. And if we limit the amount of ROI that people can make on their investment properties, they'll just sell them. They'll sell them to Silicon Valley stock option people and they'll become residents. Then the rental units will become less and it'll cause upward pressures on rental units. And this has been proven by economists on both on the left and the right. So you've got to be careful on what types of limits that you can do. Entity tax increases are slated at 2% a year. Then you have CPI at 2.5 and we're getting into inflationary period. What happens if we get into hyperinflation? What happened, you know, the stock market's returning 22% last year. Why would I invest in rental property if I can make a bigger ROI somewhere else? So I have no skin in the game, I don't have a rental unit. So you just got to be careful on what you do because there's unintended consequences by your actions that you take. We had a vote, you know, the yes on M group could go back. They could write another ordinance. They could get on the ballot. That's the way your democracy works. So I just hope that you guys don't take any action, let the new council come in place. Let the yes guys go back and write any ordinance and let the people vote on it. That's democracy in action. Okay, thank you. Hi, my name is Harry Dong. I wanted to remind the council that Sancre's vote in the election that rank control and just cause eviction was not wanted. I ask the council to respect the wishes of voters. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker. My name is Deborah Wallace, and I feel it's important to remind you that just cause eviction, unfettered subletting, and a rent board were resoundingly rejected by the electorate. Should any of these components be implemented contrary to the election results, rentals will continue to be sold, withdrawn, used by family, or left vacant. No one is required to provide a rental, and the more onerous the restrictions, the less inclined anyone will be to do so. Investors have been demonized, but without them, there would be no rentals at all. As evidenced by the defeat of Measure M and the ongoing ad nauseam discussion since February 13th, owners do not want to lose control of who resides on their property and for how long, nor do neighbors want owners to lose control of rental properties near them. This loss of control is particularly terrifying for ADU and duplex owners. The votes are in and the community strongly agrees that owners should have control over who is residing on their property and for how long. Thank you for your consideration and efforts on behalf of our city. This is clearly a complex issue, but the more restrictions you impose on rentals, the fewer rentals you will have to restrict. Thank you. Next speaker. Hold on, ma'am. Hey, sir, with the black sweatshirt, if you could please, that's a warning. Thanks, please go ahead. Last February, City Council called for a conversation about Measure M and suggested the vote would be used to determine public interest in Measure M. Now we know the majority of voters oppose Measure M and its onerous and punitive provisions. There is a high awareness of the flaws of Measure M, including the following. A cumbersome and punitive rent board, 64% voters would continue with normal contract laws where lease end dates are enforceable. Just cause evictions that cause people to lose control of their property. Rules that allow renters to move in other renters beyond the number on a lease. Renters should not be able to move into rentals without owner permission. People should not have to pay nearly 20,000 to move back into homes they own. The city council should respect voters. Emergency rent freeze and emergency just cause eviction laws are derived from Measure M and largely share the same language. Any extension of those laws is breaking from what the majority of the community wants. Please do not consider laws that the vast majority of Santa Cruz voted against. The relocation ordinance for additional tenant protections is a better alternative since it avoids all these deep flaws. Thank you, next speaker please. Hello, my name is Elena Cohen and I strongly support city council action that responsibly addresses the affordable housing crisis. Including creating disincentives for significant rent increases and creating incentives for increasing the affordable housing stock. I urge however the city council not impose just cause evictions that make unenforceable termination dates and lease provisions. Not impose any new restrictions on ADU rentals and not create a costly and unaccountable rent board. I'm an ADU owner who decided to rent our ADU in part to increase the affordable housing stock. When we bought our house we intended to use the ADU as part of our own living space. I don't object to the city council action that limits rent increases even more limited than the 10% and the 15% discussed here. But any additional restrictions about who lives with us on our property and for how long will likely result in us taking our property off the rental market. This local election season and I also have to say some of the responses in this room to people's statements included disheartening attacks on so many important components of our community including landlords and students and renters. In a time when the national leadership spews falsehood and hatred while making policy decisions unsupported by facts. I urge the city council to craft solutions that are supported by research and most of the voters. To create further restrictions on rentals and to refuse to support smart growth will hurt the very people the emergency provisions were designed to help. Thank you very much. Thank you Mr. Nathanson, you're up Mr. Nathanson. Before you begin, does anybody have space next to you? You raise your hand, someone could sit down, if anyone wants to move in, those are some open spaces. Okay, please go ahead. Good evening members of the city council. My name is Matt Nathanson, not the musician. And I'm here today, I am the elected vice president of SEIU Local 521 for this region. During our approach on affordable housing during this election was not sort of an either or approach. It was really a both and approach. And the reason is we are in a crisis that I got maybe the one place that we all have unanimity on is that housing in this community is to borrow somebody else's language. The cost of housing is too extreme and too expensive. So we supported Propositions 1 and 2 which passed which put more money in the state to build affordable housing. We have to do that. We supported Measure H which didn't pass. We supported Proposition 10 and Measure M because rent control really is an emergency lifeline measure to keep renters in their homes while these other things that take more time can happen. The current measure that you're looking at right now, the current amendment ordinance, I'm sorry, I'm probably getting the language wrong. I think it actually literally was at one point called the exorbitant rent increase measure. And unfortunately, I think it really does sort of sanction exorbitant rent increases. I mean the number 46 or 48% when you do the math would be permitted over five years. I can tell you as a union that goes to the bargaining table, if you want to propose a 46% rent increase over five years, my guess is our members would vote on that pretty easily. And I've been getting calls from our members who work for the city who are concerned about what is going to happen now that the rent control measure didn't pass. I was speaking with somebody tonight who asked not to have their name used because they were concerned about their landlord. They're looking at a 30% rent increase that they've already been given notice of. And you'll be hearing from us at the bargaining table that it is too expensive to live here and that we need to address it one way or the other. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Yeah, how many people? Hold on for a second. Please, your time's up. Hi, Susan Caron. I've lived in Santa Cruz for 44 years. The first half of my time here was spent caring for people as a nurse in the healthcare profession. The second half caring for people as a housing provider. I'm going to be short tonight. I'm born short. Top five reasons to institute rent control parameters without any reference to the so-called just cause eviction or anything resembling a rent board. Number one, 64% of Santa Cruz voters soundly rejected measure M by an almost two to one margin. The vast majority of voters have spoken. Measure M was voted down largely because there was understandable criticism of just cause evictions and the rent board. Three, people should have private property rights, including control over the properties they own. Elements of the just cause eviction does not allow for that. Four, the end of lease date should absolutely be enforceable. A lease by definition is a contract conveying property to another for a specified period or a contractual arrangement agreed upon by both provider and renter at the outset of the lease agreement. And five, in casting your voice and your vote on this issue, keep in mind that the vast majority of voters were against measure M. And for most, it was not the rent control portion, but rather just cause evictions and the rent board issues. It would be irresponsible to throw these back in the face of your constituents. Thank you. Thank you, next speaker please. Good evening, City Council. My name is Kiernan and I'm a renter living in Santa Cruz. And I want to first thank y'all for taking the time to at least functionally address the housing crisis in Santa Cruz. But I want to be honest and say that a 10% rent increase is not something that a single tenant in this town can afford. And I think if you actually go out and you talk to people who live in this city, who are social workers in this city, who are nurses in this city, who are garbage collectors in this city, they'll tell you, I can't afford a 10% increase. I think to be frank, the language in this ordinance needs to be amended to say 2% is the maximum renter increase allowed, or the CPI, whichever one is lower. And the other thing I want to add is that without just cause provisions, there can be no protections really for tenants. Because what we will see happen, and we have seen this happen already, is that landlords will find any loophole they can to evict tenants so they can just raise the rent for the next person who comes in. And that is a crime, and that is a shame, and that is something that this city council needs to do something about. Thank you. Last thing I'll say, it looks like I have a little man left. Last thing I'll say, I keep hearing the Santa Cruz together folks, they've got their little talking points all written out saying, the voters have given them a mandate, the votes have given them a mandate. Well, to be frank, Santa Cruz together and their allies raised almost a million dollars in a town with only 60,000 people. And so, of course, with a million dollars, they can buy their way into scaring and intimidating the voters, and causing confusion with people. And I think that's a disgrace, and this city needs to pass an ordinance that limits how much money can come into this town and into elections from outside sources. So maintain rent control, maintain Just-Covos, maintain the red freeze. Thank you. Next speaker please. Next speaker. I'm Rob Stone, I'm a landlord with one property with three units on it, and I support this proposal as it's written. As a landlord, I don't mind reasonable regulations, but I do mind regulations that would incentivize me to just get out of the rental business and remove that rental from the market. That's all I have to say. Thank you. Next speaker. My name is Chelsea Wagner. I'm an apartment complex owner. I've been moderating an online blog that has been working on a community-supported rent control plan, which has 8,300. I'm sorry, I'm not. You can move the mic. Yeah, there you go. How's that? Okay, so do you guys want me to repeat that? If you could pause for a second. If you'd like to, you have two minutes to speak, so you can use the duration of your time to do whatever you'd like. Well, so basically, I'm moderating a blog of just people and Santa Cruz that have 8,384 participants. Our plan provides for use of an existing process for dispute resolution that is already in place in lieu of a rental board. It provides rich people, prevents rich people from holding on to units for friends, family, especially if they don't live here, and prevents gentrification. It provides targeted housing for those who are at most at risk. It includes provisions with incentives for large-scale complex-wide rent reductions. It provides for eviction assistance without downsides of a just cause eviction mechanism. It maintains the ability to provide ad or near CPI rent increases without interfering with investment incentive. So what you need to consider is that any rent control measure that is forced to the market now will jeopardize the future of any proposed, all-encompassing rent control measure. As well, it inevitably dilute the vote. It will also polarize the community at a time we need to forget and work together, putting both sides, again, on war funding, and adversely affect any efforts to come to a compromise solution. Landlords have indicated that it is a logical to act in a retaliatory manner when weighed against the turnover cost involved in getting an empty unit ready for rent. So in conclusion, the consensus of the block, and that's both renters and landowners, do not want the city council to mandate rent control. They want the city council to work with both sides to come up with an alternative for the next election. What they're saying is they don't want you to vote yes on this. Okay, thank you. Next speaker, please. Sir, you're up. Right here. You can move the mic also. Okay, thanks. Namaste. Key word for tonight for me is predictions. God bless America, God bless the CI, and the Pentagon, God bless Call of Duty Black Ops with zombies. Agent Orange predicts exploding sales of mushroom powder with morning coffee. Agent Orange and Lieutenant Polknip invite the following to spend 30 to 90 days surfing in world-class Santa Cruz County by 2025. The list includes Angelica Houston, Anne Hathaway, Gina Gershine, Kim Bassenger, Madonna Ray of Light, Liz Fair, Gwen Stefani, Gina Haspel, Kirsten Nielsen, Ambassador Nikki Haley, Courtney Love and Hall, Garbidge L7, Luchas Jackson, Lisa Kudrow, Lisa Ann, Christina Aguilera, Cher, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Hart and Olivia Mon in Concrete Blonde. Mary Busey, Steven Segal, Nick Cusack, Will Ferrell, Seth Rogen, Robert De Niro, Robert Redford, Clint Eastwood, Robert DeVal, Green Day, Stone Temple Pilot Soundgarden, Chris Cornell, AI Hologram, Nickelback, Larry Flint, Family Son DCI, Colby, Star Lord, Christian Bale, Michael Keaton, Agent Orange, William Elson, Twisted Sister, Ray Rawlings, William Devane, Denzel Washington, Tommy Lee Jones, Rolling Thunder, and Killing Joke. This is by Candy Corn Productions. Our final question is, can a ball run, or smoking in the bandit, which one was funnier? Agent Orange also predicts that flatulence now will have a greater impact in the Francis Ford Coppola Masterpiece Apocalypse Now, with Lawrence Fishburne. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, speaker. I assume that was rhetorical. OK. That was awesome. Jeez. Hi, my name is Tom Donahue. I am a renter and a business owner here in the city. Can you pause for one second? Can you? I know everybody outside. Thank you. Go ahead. So my name is Tom Donahue. I am a renter and a small business owner here in the city of Santa Cruz. And I'm here to say that the proposed changes to relocation assistance for displaced tenants ordinance would do nothing at all to protect tenants. It would likely incentivize landlords to issue higher rent increases than they would have otherwise. And because it contains no just cause eviction protections, rather than having to risk paying relocation expenses for raising rent for more than 10%, landlords will simply evict a current tenant in order to raise the rent to the unit at a higher price to rent it to somebody else. And this would not only drastically increase the number of tenants displaced due to arbitrary evictions, but it would also incentivize landlords to repeatedly raise rents every year to the maximum amount possible by essentially enshrining the exorbitant rent increases over the past five years into law. Not only would this change the law to not help tenants one bit, but it would in fact end up causing tenants to be further burdened by the most rapacious and exploitative landlords who operate here in Santa Cruz. The only way the city council can actually assist renters would be by creating a new ordinance to extend the freeze by several months, which would give the new city council a chance to craft a new permanent ordinance that is agreeable to a majority of the city. Please do the right thing for tenants for our community and for the local economy by extending these moratoriums to keep renters in their homes so that we can work together on a long term solution to this aspect of the housing crisis. Thank you. Thank you. Before the next speaker, is there anyone who's in the fourth row wishes to speak? Yeah, we had, you started here earlier. So if you want, okay, well, you just walked in late, so I'll get you in just a minute, okay? Thank you. Go ahead, sir. All right, okay. Good evening, city council. My name is Ron Cabot. My wife and I own some property in Santa Cruz. Our children no longer live here or where we live because they couldn't afford to live where we live. So they moved. One lives in another state and another one lives in Northern California. They have family, they have good jobs, and they can pay their bills. They don't have to worry about rents. I don't agree with your proposed ordinance. I do know that 65% of the voters voted against measure M. And for you to propose what you're proposing, I believe it is a form of rent control. And I believe a few years from now you will lower the percentage that we will be allowed to increase our rents by. One of the issues I'd like to take into consideration is what if you have a rental that has their rents that are substantially below HUD rents at this point? Is there any way for that consideration? So other than the bad faith, depending upon what you actually pass, I would suggest that the city and all the property owners in the city, be they landlords or be they single family dwelling owners or condo owners, do a mass real estate tax appeal. Because you may wind up passing something that will reduce the values of the property and therefore the real estate taxes should go down with that. I'd also like you to look into consideration to do a study to see how many UCSC students actually live in the city and rent. And how many units would be opened up to the remaining people if the students were put back up on the hill where they should be. Lastly, I would like before you vote on anything this time. Pause for a second, hold on. Okay, please go ahead. Okay, you're done. Before your time's up, actually. You took my time. Okay, go ahead and finish your sentence. This is my last point. Go ahead. My last point is transparency. I would like the city council to be as transparent as possible before they vote on this next measure to let us know whether they own property in the city or they had anything to do with measure M or anything. Okay, thank you, sir. Your time's up. Thank you, your primary importance. Next speaker, please. If you can move out there so we can get you integrated, that'd be great. And you'll go after this speaker. Hold on. You want me to go? Yeah, actually, go right ahead. Nobody, they weren't, they weren't paying attention. First, before my time starts, I'd like to address the city attorney. He left something out. You know what, you're going to need time to start. An emergency ordinance could be passed tonight. You could agendize something on an emergency level. He didn't tell you that. Okay, as far as this makeover goes, 10% is way too high. That's part of the problem is that people's rent's been going up 10% a year for the last four or five, six years. The other thing is, is this doing anything to the evictions of people that the city's effecting for being in non permitted housing? Because right now, a landlord has to pay three months rent. Is this lowering that down to two? And also, when the city kicks people out of the house, they should be responsible for finding that person a new house before they make them leave the house they're in. Because the tenant is okay living there. Why should the city violate their rights to privacy, come in and kick them out of a unit? That doesn't seem fair. And I think that you should address that if you're redoing this law, that you should redo some of that too. And make the city partially responsible for the three months relocation fee. Because right now it's all on the landlord, and the city's the one evicting people. So if the city's evicting them, they should at least pay half of their relocation fee for people that are living in non permitted dwellings. And also, once again, I'd like to say you gotta reduce this cap from 10% down to about three or whatever the inflation rate is, and whatever actual cost are to landlords, like an increase in trash or sewer, whatever. But it should be realistic, not a bonus. Thanks, next speaker please. Next speaker, sir, you're up. Yeah. Hi, my name's John McKelvie, I've spoken here a few times. But just my opinion, but M failed because of the just cause eviction and rent board components. Again, just my opinion, but I encourage you to adopt the relocation ordinance as written and without these are similar components. I believe the percentages that are proposed could be lower. But if the community really considers this situation to be an emergency, I think that you should pass two more emergency ordinances. First, temporarily allow the placement of RVs and tiny homes on existing parcels, say, as a measure that would sunset in two years. During the two years pass another, then pass a second ordinance that during that two years you would streamline and the approval and construction of new homes of all kinds. But especially means tested, de-districted affordable homes. I don't think we've even scratched the surface of different ideas for creating affordable homes in our community. There are a million ways to do it. I think Measure M was a terrible way. I think that the extension of the emergency ordinance is not the right answer either. But let's get to work. Thank you. Next speaker. Hi, my name is Mike Capose, and I'm with Landlords for Rent Control. So here we are, the largest income disparity in 80 years of the United States. And the way it plays out here is that we have two classes of people in Santa Cruz, those of us that own homes and those that don't. And the problem with what you have before you right now is that it doesn't help with that. It doesn't help in a realistic matter because landlords can just throw people out and triple the rent, so it doesn't really help stabilize renters. And renters are in a press group in Santa Cruz right now. The other problem with it is that the renters know it's not going to help them, and so it doesn't help with the terrible class struggle we've got going on in this town. Which is no one's fault, but it's bad, and this doesn't help to solve it. So the most important relationship I have is my marriage. And I know that sometimes when you have a problem that's injectable, you have to sit with it for a while and work until you make it better. What that looks like is at your next meeting, extending the temporary rent control measure, setting up a complicated, sophisticated committee of landlords, renters, everyone else to try to do something to reduce the tension we have around this issue. And that's the important thing, and that's what you guys need to do because you have this power to try to slowly make things better. So whatever you do tonight doesn't really matter, as you've heard everyone else say. What you need to do is extend that and set up a process by which we stabilize the lives of renters. Thank you, next speaker. Good evening, city council leaders. My rent went up 100 bucks per month to renew my lease for 18 months, or the minimum possible increase of rent that that landlord is allowing. Who knows what they will try to swindle me out of next renewal when they are notorious for borrowing my rent money on excessive gardening, poor infrastructure that justified two water shutoffs last year, lease managers who refused to abide by their office hours, deciding to lock themselves in the office during the last hour when I needed to get my laundry done before my next round of school and work tomorrow. So much for that. Regardless, I'm hoping tonight as the night city leaders put a check on landlords with lackluster intentions. Leaders, this is your chance to establish a check and some balance. I understand that certain members of this council enjoyed getting their portraits featured on local measures this election against such a chance. But tonight is a night for redemption. That 10% figure mentioned tonight is too gratuitous. A 6% figured deemed as large rent, or about double the annual inflation, in my eyes, would allow citizens to reasonably adapt and not become priced out. At least let me get a chance to know my neighbors for once. Regarding Capitola Councilman Bertrand, we are not San Francisco. Please support this measure or this item with amendments. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker please. Hello, my name's Jeff VC. I've been a Santa Cruz resident and landlord since 1982. And what I want to talk about is what I think the city council should focus on more as much as you can is three things. Preserving existing rental housing, encouraging people to convert existing housing to rental housing, which I've seen some nice proposals come up lately, and to encourage new rentals to be built. But what I want to focus on is preserving existing rental housing. And I think what's important to do that is to let landlords have control of their properties in setting rents and applying evictions. Penalties for excessive rent increases, like in the relocation ordinance, are okay as long as landlords can set the price. Certainly under the rent freeze, my rentals, I have six of them already valued between 10 and 20% because of my reasonable rents. And that's based on, you can't increase over 2%. So, and the message there is, right, it's the same for other landlords that have reasonable rents. It's that's not a very good, if there's a cap like 2%, let's say. That's not a very good reason to keep your rentals because you can get more money by just selling it or converting them. If you're selling them off the market, I can convert mine to like tenants in common and get back that 20%, plus another 20%. Not that I want to do that, but I'm saying it's kind of where you're putting the landlords in the position. And when rents can be freely increased, then property values are based on the market rents. Even if the actual rents are less, and that's what I'm proposing. Like myself and other landlords I know, we don't want to charge the highest rent we can. We want to keep our rents reasonable so we can keep our good tenants. And when we have one open up in a department, we can have a better selection of who we want as the next tenant. Because we're trying to keep good tenants and I think that's real important. And if you put a cap on it like 2%, then that's the problem. Then it won't be based on market rents. Thank you. Next speaker please. Hello, my name is Sharon McRam and I would- Hold on a second, hold on a second. Please, if you, those outside, if you'd let the speaker continue, I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. My name is Sharon McRam and I have a few comments. What Micah said, I agree with for the most part and I think that we're ignoring the larger level of basically culture side. We have a certain culture in this city and the more that we don't attend to the different aspects of the rent control issue, the more we lose really good people who may not have as much money as others. And as far as the measure M, to make assumptions that the reason it was voted two thirds was because of this and this and this is to lack a exit poll. Nobody knows what the voters, why they didn't vote for it. I have a friend who is a homeowner. She didn't rent it because she doesn't charge market value. So it would work against her interests. So I think that's a lot of assumptions on the part of the people who are trying to convince you that to leave free market alone. To me, when people put out their homes and parts of their homes, they're putting something up for sale. It's an unspoken contract before between the tenant and the homeowner. And even the animal shelter will investigate people who want to adopt an animal. And so we have to have the checks and balances between those who rent and those who provide a home. People do not come and rent a home saying, this looks like a great place I can spend for 30 days. They come because they want a home. I live in a senior apartment. Their management says more than a home. People need to have that sense of stability and home. Perhaps homeowners, if they're going to put out a portion of their home to be rented, perhaps they should be assessed as well. Thank you. Before you begin, is there anyone in the fifth row that's going to be speaking? I'd like you guys to kind of line up over there and integrate yourself into the line, please. Thank you, please go ahead. My name's Neil Langholds. The relocation assistance being considered tonight is reasonable and correctly focused on preventing rent spikes on local renters. Since it does not include just cause eviction and a rent board, it may put an end to the sale of rental properties we are experiencing since Measure M was introduced. I'm a real estate broker, and I'm currently selling four rentals for clients. One of my friends in real estate has sold 15 properties since the beginning of Measure M. The city of Santa Cruz cannot supersede the California State Law called the Ellis Act. It says that people have the right to exit the rental business. This is easy to do with single family homes. Renters in our area depend on 8,000 single family homes. Laws that go beyond the relocation ordinance put these rentals at risk. The threat of just cause eviction and rent board is the reason the rental sales are booming right now. Thank you. Thank you, next speaker please. Good evening, my name is Brennan and I'm a Santa Cruz tenant and an organizer with Students United with Renters. I'm here tonight to speak against passing this fake rent control. Perhaps we can call it the Swiss cheese rent control, as is. And to demand that you either extend the rent freeze or pass a stronger, actually meaningful measure to protect the thousands of tenants in our city who will be at high risk of displacement after the rent freeze expires. This is the second time we've seen the same measure come before council. And unlike the finer kinds of Swiss cheese, this one has not improved with age. It still contains no actual protection against rent increases and doesn't even try to incorporate basic standards for just evictions. To get any benefit whatever under this ordinance, a tenant facing a massive rent increase in the upheaval that comes with finding housing in this city must file a quote notice of intent to vacate. Who do they file this notice with? Where will it be accessible? And how will tenants even know about it when staff's agenda report for this evening says that city resources will only be used for a quote answering questions and preparing materials. No enforcement. How are tenants even going to know about their so-called rights? And what will happen when, inevitably, a tenant relies on the supporters of this ordinance's representations. They suddenly receive a massive rent increase, and I mean massive since the 10% cap on this is stratospherically high. They call on the city for a leave under this ordinance. And then they discover that unless they can find a new living situation, they have zero protection at all. Passing this ordinance will do nothing. Well, actually I'm wrong. It'll do worse than nothing, but it'll create the false impression that you've actually tried to do something. You can do so much better than this, and we need a wheel rent freeze. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, please. So my name is Liz Miller, and I grew up here in Santa Cruz, and so did my dad and so did my grandpa. And I would like to have an ADU unit in my backyard that I can provide a home for somebody that they can afford. But I want to be able to choose who that person is, and I want to be able to potentially move into that ADU unit when I want to retire and rent out my house. But I don't want to lose control over my house. I don't want to not know who gets to live there. I voted against Measure M, and I actually read it, and I actually understood it. And I do believe that most people who defeated it did read it and did understand it. Thank you. Next speaker. Howdy. My name's Connor Arnett. Santa Cruz used to be a working class community. Following the opening of the campus and the ineptness of the city, landlords have exploited the working class and abused the high turnover rate of students to raise rent to exuberant levels. This amendment is a small band-aid to a renting population that is being bled out by the city. My hope is revitalized when I see tenant unions and rent strikes spawning all over the country. This shows that workers are tired and done begging on our knees in order to survive. So the landlords behind me may make threats of lawsuit and selling their properties. The workers are waking up and realizing that we hold the true power to dictate our own future. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Next speaker. Hello, good evening. My name is Marta Aguilar. I'm a resident here of Santa Cruz. And I'm in the interesting position of being both a landlord and a tenant. The house that I own is out of a different county. But Santa Cruz is my home. And as a tenant, I've had to move five times in the last nine years. I'm a licensed therapist. I work with children for the county. And that means I have a student loan because I've gone to college and have that debt to pay. I work with the disenfranchised people of this city. So I know what evictions look like. I know how it impacts families. I know how it perpetuates abuse. I also have been having to deal with the rent increases as they have been before. Every year, 15%, which meant I had to find another way to hustle and get more money. When we had this cap recently for this year, it was amazing. I was actually able to make some payments to my student loan and be able to donate some money to causes that I believe in. And I actually felt peace. I've already been notified that if the city doesn't pass something in place for protection, I'm getting a 60-day eviction notice in December. That means that I'm going to be competing with everyone else getting a 60-day notice in December. Which means you're very well looking at another homeless person here in Santa Cruz. And I'm a working professional. If that's happening to me, what's happening to the other disenfranchised members of the city. Anything less than a 5% cap, I believe, is willful cruelty because you are talking about a city that's already in a housing crisis. To put anything less, or more than that, is willful cruelty. And I'm really depending on you guys to pull through and protect your residents here. Thank you. Next speaker please. My name is Jamie Holloman. Excuse me. If you move the mic up so they can hear you. Thank you. My name is Jamie Holloman. I'm a renter in town. First of all, I want to just make a comment about Measure M. An omnibus bill doesn't allow you to investigate each element in an intelligent way. Because you've heard tonight all kinds of factors that have to do with each question. The various parts have just caused the various parts of all of these things. So it seems to me that what you ought to do is kind of what your former member suggested earlier. Which is to look at one thing after another. One piece of this puzzle rather than trying to do it all at once. And do that in a careful way. The way that the housing investigation actually began here in the last year. Secondly, I think the best analogy about this particular bill is the one that the quiet speaker said about a speed limit. If you set a speed limit that's 15 or 10, people will drive at least 10 or 15. Or they may drive at 20. But they aren't going to drive at four. So if you want the market to hold down to inflation, then you need to set it at inflation. Period. I don't know why you wouldn't. Period. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker please. Hi. I'm Cindy Forenzi. Thank you for considering this ordinance. We canvassed for measure H and against measure M. And we had the opportunity to speak to many community members in that effort. Certainly it's just a small slice of who's out there. But what we saw was that people did want some protections for tenants. They wanted them to be reasonable. They were opposed to rent gouging. It's hard. We didn't talk to anybody who would actually support such a thing. But people did not want the just cause eviction clauses. They were especially troubled by the fact that lease end dates could not be enforceable. And people wanted to end the divisiveness. This has been a really unfortunate chapter in our city's history. And we're hoping that you can help us find a compromise that will protect tenants. That will actually work. So that there would be a way to ensure that this did not end up in evictions. So that that extra clause that they added sounded great if it could really happen. And if the caps could really be there could be some enforcement mechanism. So and the 10% does seem high to me. I don't pretend to have the right answer for that. But I'm hoping you can move us forward. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker please. Good evening. My name is Jesse Kempa. I've lived in Santa Cruz since 2001. I've been a tenant for many of those years. Only in the last couple of years have we been fortunate enough to own a home. I've never been a landlord. I voted against him because of the just cause evictions issues. The inability to have a defined lease end date and things of that nature. For me, if I were to consider renting my home out in the case of a financial emergency with those provisions, I probably wouldn't do so. It would also dissuade me from building an ADU to rent out. With respect to the proposed rental increase ordinance you're considering, I don't think it's bad. But I have spoken with a few friends of mine who are landlords who have made this their retirement plan, who I consider to be good people. And there was a common theme in speaking to them and that was that it's better to set the rent low, perhaps a low market rate to get a tenant and a good tenant and keep them there for a long time. That's better for everybody to have a good relationship. My concern with any additional regulation that we bring in is that it's going to incentivize landlords who might do this to set rents closer to what the market will bear. So all I'm asking is to proceed with caution. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker please. Hi, my name is Chad and I'm with Students United with Renters. I have a question. Who do you protect and who do you serve? Because right now it's pretty blatant that if you don't have renters best interests in mind, which we've told you our emergency rent control and just cause evictions, you protect rich white landlords and corporate real estate. Let that fucking sink in, okay? This isn't an even playing ground. We don't need to give a platform to landlords because they already have the upper hand. They already benefit from economic and class privilege. So whether or not you see this, this is a racial issue. This is a class issue, a gender issue, and when tenants don't have legal protections from the abusive, profit driven landlords of our Santa Cruz community, that diversity is obliterated. Favoring maximum profit for landlords to extract from their tenants is a direct attack on the housing security of low, middle income communities, people of color, students, and other marginalized folks. My friends live in cars already. There are people in this community that I know paying $1,000 to split a single bedroom. Housing is a human right, and we demand that you extend the fucking rent freeze. Next speaker, please. And please, if you can, there are some kids that are going to be here. They're watching. I'd prefer that you keep your language to at least a sense that we can have some cooperative relations. Thanks. Hello, council. My name is Julian Prinoe Stoll. I'm a renter, a UCSC student, and I'm co-chair of the Santa Cruz Democratic Socialists of America. I'm here today to express my full support for extending the current rent freeze until the incoming city council can enact a more permanent rent control and just evictions policy. Yesterday, when I checked the agenda for this meeting, I was shocked to find the ordinance previously proposed by Mayor Tarazas on the agenda while there was no mention of the rent freeze. So let me again be clear. Mayor Tarazas' proposed ordinance does little to nothing to protect tenants. From its huge 15.5% permissible rent increases to its complete absence of just cause eviction protections, it's a thoroughly uncontrollable, unenforceable mess. And it's a mess which will be leaving people without homes in the winter and with massive rent bills on their dining room tables just in time for the holidays. This rent freeze will allow many renters to stay in their homes. It will make sure that many tenants do not find themselves making a decision between moving out to somewhere cheaper or finding a second or third job. It will ensure that students do not have the time or do not have to search for scarce housing at the start of winter quarter. Imagine my horror when I found out that attempts by other council members to add the rent freeze extension to tonight's agenda were not merely denied by Mayor Tarazas, but roundly ignored by Mayor Tarazas. It is obvious that tonight is supposed to be a show of political theater to force through a policy which isn't worth the paper it's printed on instead of considering the clear alternative which will not endanger vulnerable, precarious people. The proposed ordinance has been discredited and it is disastrous. Tonight is a fight about democracy and it's a fight about justice. The incoming council has the mandate to decide this issue. Let them decide. Extend the freeze. Thank you. Next speaker please. Good evening. My name is Caden Stearns. I am a new student at UCSC. A member of the UCSC Young Democratic Socialists of America and a huge proponent of rent control. I'm going to keep this short and simple to allow more time for my fellow Democratic socialists to speak next. I've been here for just two months and within that time I've witnessed the passion for rent control amongst tenants in this city. Renters are the backbone of this city and the current rent freeze has been a large source of protection for them. It ensures that they can afford shelter and provide basic needs for themselves and their families. Extend the rent freeze, protect your tenants and protect the very backbone of this city. Thank you very much. Thank you. Next speaker please. Next speaker. Hello council. My name is Hector Marin. I'm a first year student of UC Santa Cruz. I'm also with the Democratic Socialists of America, the YDSA, and I come here to urge for you guys to actually make an incentive to actually act on the blasphemy that's going out there on the streets, the homelessness out there. I live in downtown. Every single morning I have to wake up and I have to see all these homeless people. They're sleeping in the streets like nobody is caring for them and you guys are over here acting like there's no problem. We need to solve this problem right now by imposing these rent freezes because there's families being destroyed, kids being destroyed because of this. I mean, with me moving in here, I go on campus and I see kids squished into triples, being converted into quadruples, stuffed in like animals, not even living like people. With that incentive, I get it. You're trying to do what you can, but if you want to take care of your child, it's not only about taking care of your child, it's about taking care of these children as well. On top of all that, I hope that you guys actually take the incentive of this rent freeze and actually do an action. Invoke it for us so you can show that you care. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, please. My name is Michael Otero. I'm the Chair of the YDSA on campus. And I just want to say that I've heard a lot of lies tonight about rent control and Measure M. Anyone who's told you that these measures will result in them losing control of their properties or their lease is either lying or willfully ignorant. We have people here tonight right now who are at risk of being evicted from their homes because they can't afford it and others who are willing to lie and misdirect to protect their profit margins and that is sad. We need a comprehensive policy that addresses the concerns of everybody and protects the rights and dignity of tenants. And I hope that the new City Council will prioritize this. But the measure proposed tonight is simply not enough and will not prevent our neighbors and their children from being displaced. This city needs to stand up for renters and not landlords. Thank you very much. Thank you. And before the next speaker, is there anyone in row six or seven, the last two rows that has not spoken yet that wish to speak, please line up now. Okay, please go ahead. Hello. My name is Reggie Meisler. I am a tenant right now in Santa Cruz. I've been here for five years, so I have kind of an interesting outlook. I've seen the rents in outlook apartments, for instance, go from 1,700 for a one-bedroom to 3,100. And I hear a lot about how we don't have data and how we don't understand who's being affected, how it's being affected, but we do have data. We had the UCSC sociologists do the no-place-like-home study, and I'm really surprised that no one is talking about this. It said 70% of the county is rent burdened, 70%. That is not a small number. That's not like, oh, just give them some subsidies and they're going to be fine, right? This is ridiculous. Like, this is not a small... And why would... I'm sorry, I'm just a little frustrated. I mean, I guess that's it. No-place-like-home. Everybody read it. No-place-like-home.ucsc.edu. That's it. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Oh, well, yeah, yeah, yeah, well, I'm going to wait. Before you... Excuse me, before you begin. Give it a cold time. Is there anybody that would like to sit down? There's plenty more room now. Is there anyone outside that would like to come in and sit down? There's plenty of extra chairs. Anybody in the window looking in right now who would like to sit down, you can. All right. They like this part. They're seats here. And is there anyone outside who wishes to speak? If you would, please step in and line up. Is there anyone at the Tony Hill Room? Okay, so anyone who wishes to speak, that's outdoors, please line up now. And thank you for your patience. You're up. My name is Sergeant Smith. I'm no stranger to this council. Y'all know who I am. The last time I spoke before, for y'all here, I actually was at a different address. I'm one of those folks that got displaced during the rent freeze and the just cause evictions protections. And the person who kicked myself as well as seven other people out of their home left, I think, because he was ashamed. And I believe you all know who he is and the folks back here all know who he is. Eric Rodberg. And he doesn't have any control over me anymore, so I can actually say that. And I think that's an important thing to note. I got a call, or my roommate got a call the day after Santa Cruz together at its first meeting. And he told her over the phone that he was concerned about the controversy and the conflict because we knew that we were working on rent control. And though that's not going to hold up in court, we all know what that actually means. And so he wasn't going to renew our lease. Not covered by the laws. Totally legal and definitely unethical. And I think it's important to know that as people have mentioned before this council, the election was won with a million dollar campaign. But it was also won with bullying, with intimidation, with fear. And I stand before you saying that the measure, the audience that we have in front of us is not going to take us through to the next election, to the next time that we actually have to have another conversation about what rent control is. Won't take us to January. People are going to be kicked out of their homes. And that is not democracy. You're leaving out renters out in the cold with the ordinance on the table. It has to be better than what y'all are proposing. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Good evening, Darius Moseneen. I truly believe that. Okay, hold on, hold on. Pause. As a landlord with 30 years... Pause for a second. Okay, everybody outside. Thank you. Thank you. As a landlord with 30 years experience in Santa Cruz. Okay. If you want to begin, go ahead. Okay. Tenants definitely need protections. I understand, but... Should I go on or... As you wish. Let's go. No, I totally... With 30 years experience running as a landlord in Santa Cruz. Okay, hold on a second. Please, if you would, outside, would you please just take a pause? Sure. Let me just... Maybe I can... No, hold on a second. Why don't we do this? Why don't we just take a break as a council? We've gone for two straight hours. We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back. Councilmember Crone, if you're out there somewhere, we're going to start right now. So, if you're outside... As much as you do. Councilmember Crone. I can show you. Okay. We're going to go back and we're resuming public comment. You're welcome to... Okay. You're welcome. Next up on public comment. Next up. Go ahead. All right, let's try this again. Time continues. Okay, really quickly. So, having been a landlord for 30 years in town, I truly believe tenants do need protections. There's really nowhere for them to go except we end up at 701 Ocean Street in court. And by tenant protections, rent caps are not unreasonable. In fact, honestly, 10% is a little too generous. I think, and I can't speak for all my land, the rest of the landlords, but somewhere between seven, maybe even as low as 5%, is not death for landlords. However, however, you should allow landlords to get to, say, 90% of the same HUD market rent that we would have to pay on relocation. And so that's one item. Consider that. Again, 10%, a little too generous. It is status quo. There are communities typically between five, seven, is typical when you look at rent review ordinances in other cities, entities. But the other thing I'm not hearing about is what really is needed is like a tenants ombudsman organization like an echo housing, like a project sentinel. These are very, very effective organizations. I've worked with Echo Housing in San Leandro. They reach out to the landlord. They try to mitigate any kind of disagreement, rent increase right there. Echo Housing in San Leandro's case to landlord. It's very, very effective. I really, really highly, highly encourage you. Highly encourage you as part of any kind of ordinance. Please, please include one of the ombudsman type, tenant-focused organizations. And that's not acceptable. Okay, thank you. I hope I got my point across. Okay, I think you can. At least you've got two different decision makers. Obviously, there's other issues going on. Please, those that are outside, thank you. He's finished his comments. Let's continue. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Next speaker, please. Next speaker, please. Thank you. And before you begin, how many people are lined up that wish to speak? I don't know, but they should have stopped them. Okay. Thank you. So go ahead. Hello. My name is Owen Thomas. I'm with Students United with Renters. I'm also a working person and a tenant. I don't know how the city council members who drafted this ordinance could get up here today and stare people in the face and give them something that is so clearly not going to help them. I just don't understand, like, what level of cognitive dissonance needs to exist for you to be able to do that? Simply because we know that evictions and rent burden, well, evictions shatter communities. And we know that rent burden drains communities. And we know that these are the two, I think these are probably the two biggest things that are just destroying our community right now. And when you come up with something that is so clearly going to be ineffective, and then think that you can have a meeting and stare people in the face and present it to them, and that they're just going to sit back and be civil, because I've heard people saying folks aren't civil enough. Well, I'm sorry. When you get evicted, it's one of the worst things that can happen to you. It ruins your life. And not only it ruins your life, it ruins the lives of the people who you work with. If you're a teacher, it ruins the lives of the people you teach. I'm a caregiver. It ruins the life of the disabled people that I care for. It's one of the worst things that can happen to you. We're not, we cannot take this problem lightly. And so when you give, when you have an ordinance that is this, transparently not taking the problem like it should be, not actually treating the problem like it should be, well then clearly it's just a cynical attempt to undermine all the work that housing organizers have been doing to solve the problem, because y'all aren't going to do it, obviously. Housing organizers will. And that's why we're here. And that's why we're mad. So that's an explanation for why you're hearing the chanting out there. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, please. The city of Santa Cruz, in my knowledge, was approached three times to do rent control in the mid-1980s. So that was 30 plus years ago. The city of Santa Cruz could have done a lot in between now and then to develop housing for single people, for students, for working people, and it failed completely and utterly and totally. Just flat out failed and failed and failed and failed for years upon years upon years. And a narrow segment of the city continued to protect its interests, continued to add its own family and self-serving profits. And in some ways this is understandable. I've heard a number of people in here say, well, that's going to be my retirement fund. Some of us have no hope of any retirement fund right now, because we made a decision a long time ago to fight for things that were just, that made sure that we were having a voice, at least being presented to people of those who weren't in power. And so I just want to go forward this three times to get rent control in the 1980s. Now you have a huge segment of the city who are workers, who are students, who have businesses, and they have worked really hard to develop this conversation. And even though they have been completely and totally outspent, and to say this was a public referendum on Measure M is a joke, please. I mean, with that kind of unequal spending of money to get the word out. So I just want to say, you know, what's really going on here is not just a question about this measure tonight and how the city council might do something to make up for its complete and total failures in the past. But it's really about looking at the contradictions here where a few people who are privileged, who have wealth, maybe they got here at a good time in the 60s are getting to completely oppress those who did not. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Hello, everyone. I'm Adam Novak. 64% of voters didn't agree with every single point of Measure M all bundled together. That doesn't mean, and that isn't evidence, that we don't want renter predictions. I voted for Measure M. I didn't put up a sign because I might have been forced out of my home. People have a right not to be forced out of their homes without cause. It is appropriate to restrict property rights somewhat to protect that right. If you want to do that with the ordinance under discussion today, it's going to need some improvements. First off, nobody is getting 9.9% raises. My employer refuses to even talk about something like 4%, and I'm very lucky. Any rent increase above wage increases is unsustainable. If we allow it in the long term, it will kill our community. You must tie the limit to wage growth. Second, you must add just cause eviction protections. Failing that, you must prohibit evictions for the purpose of avoiding the effect of the ordinance. Otherwise, it just won't work. And finally, you must not place the burden of proof for that on the person being evicted. Nobody has the resources to sue when they're frantically looking for housing. If you can't fix these problems with the ordinance today, you need to do it for the next meeting. In that case, vote to extend the rent freeze now to the extent legally possible, and vote for it again retroactively as soon as you can get it on the agenda. Finally, I'd like to urge the council to work towards a permanent solution to our rent problems. Price controls can only do so much when demand keeps rising. I support a program of mandatory, city-led, tax-funded housing construction with units sold at auction to double in size every year that rent remains too high. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Hello. My name is Bradley Jin, and I'm a renter and student who has been researching the housing crisis here for the past 10 months, but I'm not here today to speak just for myself. I'm also speaking for one of my fellow renters who is afraid to speak tonight because he fears evictions. He has been in his home for 15 years and was recently told that after the rent freeze wears off, he will face a 30% increase of over $500. He's a Santa Cruz local who is afraid that if he speaks out tonight that he'll be evicted and the rent raised for the new tenant, which is what happened to the other tenants in his building. If his fear does not tell you the absolute terror that we are experiencing at the hands of our landlords, then I don't know what will. I want to speak again for myself only. Those landlords who have spoken tonight and said they will remove their rentals from the market are making no less than direct threats against tenants. If we in any way try to reduce their profits, they will do what they have always done, put tenants on the streets. We need protections for tenants, and to be honest, this watered-down rent control and just cause evictions that y'all have been talking about are bullshit. We need real-run protections now. People are dying in the streets for fuck's sake. Do something about it. Next speaker, please. Hi, members of City Council. My name is Gail Mackie. I was born and raised in Santa Cruz. I was educated here, and now I work for you. I work at the wastewater treatment plant. The rent freeze is the only thing that's keeping me in my house. When February, when you started the emergency rent freeze, the day you enacted it, I got an email from my landlord informing me that my rent was going to go up 10%. When I informed him that was illegal, he took extending my lease a year off the table and put me on a month to month and raised the, I rent the maximum at the time that the rent freeze allowed. When Emden passed, I was just waiting for what was next, another giant rent freeze, and it happened again in email the day before Thanksgiving. So when December 1st rolls around, I'm looking at a rent increase that I can't afford. So I basically can't afford to work for the city. I can't afford to live here, and I don't know what's going to happen if you don't put the rent freeze on the next agenda and vote for it at your next meeting. So please do that and think about all the people who work to keep the city safe, clean, and functioning while we try and solve everybody's problems. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Hello, my name is Janine Theodore. I've been a resident of Santa Cruz for 42 years. I rent two places. I rent my residence, and I rent for my business. I got a $500 a month rent increase. Then I got a 90-day eviction notice without any cause that was illegal. The house was sold, went, finished escrow today within 20 minutes. Two realtors came over and gave me a 90-day eviction notice. My rental, where my business is, is a mixed-use, 32 residential rentals, five businesses. My rent there hasn't been increased, but I was told if I would clean the bathroom, my rent would not be increased for a year because if Proposition 10 passes or if Measure M passes, they don't know what the costs will be, so they're going to put it on to the five businesses if it were to pass. Instead, I just got an eviction sheet. Did not honor the verbal agreement, then gave me a written agreement that if the measure, one or the measure, one or the other did not pass, she would honor my lease for the next year without a rent increase, then had me sign that I would be evicted by the 31st of December. So now I'm out of a home, out of a business to even get another rental that I can't afford, especially if it's a 10% increase. I'm devastated. My son is devastated watching this happen to a senior who has contributed to this community as an artist for 42 years and 10% is ridiculous and it's ridiculous that you don't keep on the table this rent moratorium until something can be done instead of just serving landlords and money. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Members of the public in the room that haven't already spoken and wish to speak to this item. The two lined up, anyone else? If you'd lined up, please. Any members outside that haven't spoken yet that wish to speak, please line up. Thank you. Okay, please go ahead. Good evening, Mayor Terrasas. Vice Mayor Watkins and members of the council. Santa Cruz is and had been in a rental housing emergency for a while. Several members of the immigrant community, the community that cannot vote and cannot have a voice about what they want as a measure in housing has already received 30 days' notice informing them of a rent increase on the rent. Some of them a substantial increase like a lady in the beach flats who got a $400 increase. Some of those residents will not be able to afford another increase to their already inflated rent which means that instead of preparing to celebrate Christmas, they are packing their belongings and starting looking for a place to move. This can be easily avoided by extending the rent freeze just enough to give the new council the opportunity to work with various stakeholders to create a meaningful rent control ordinance. I'm appealing to your compassion and your humanity and as you to think of the children in those families, some of whom are friends of your son, Mayor Terrasas, who won't be able to finish his school by being surrounded by their classmates or the neighbors who already know them. Please protect those tenants and extend the rent freeze. Our community need it. Thank you. Next speaker please. Good evening. My name is Hoken Williams. I'm a renter and small business owner here in Santa Cruz. We don't need to hear stories about individual landlords good-hearted or not. We need data and we have it. Average rents went up 52% in four years. Clearly, there are plenty of landlords who have no problem raising the rents and evicting tenants. Those rents were raised by somebody. If my rent goes up 15.5% in two years, I will be forced to leave the city, leave my friends and leave my clients hanging. Earlier tonight, I heard a landlord say that the incentive to sell rent-controlled housing is that you can make more money than by renting. Well, that's nice. You can make more money. It's good economic sense, right? Good economic sense is sociopathic because while you're making more money than you already were in this city with some of the absolute highest housing values in the country, more and more longtime community residents are pushed out and homeless. If there's any way to vote to extend the rent freeze tonight, I appeal to the members of this council to please do whatever it takes to do so. Barring that, please modify the ordinance under consideration to cap annual rent increases at cost of living 3% and please include language on just cause eviction because rent control without just cause eviction is no rent control at all. Thank you. Next speaker, please. My name is Ali Shamirza and I've been a landlord for more than 20 years here. And I work in Santa Cruz. I went to UCSC. Obviously, I'm a foreigner, okay? So for those that they don't know the cost of things, please educate the public because I have not raised my rents more than 3.5% and I still get complained of why I'm raising it. Well, please educate the public and put in the property tax bills in front of everybody because every single bond manager that passes keeps going on the property tax. Tennis don't see that. Please educate the public that the cost of when I was painting the house 10 years ago, it would cost me 2200. Now it's costing me $8000. The roof was $8000. Now it's $25000. How can I... I'm 54 years old. I'm a realtor too. 100% commission. How can I make a living? If I do an honest work, they think I'm a lawyer. As soon as I open up my mouth, I'm a foreigner in this town and they can see how many foreigners are there. Okay? So please be just. I think if I'm Iranian, if you want to go back and see the democracy in Iran and what they do there and you want to apply it here and you don't want to honor your contract, if I have a lease agreement with the tenant that we both agreed, two adults agreed on it, that should be honored. Period. I cannot go back and now you are changing the rules on me. My sister, Lasser's husband in Iran, they find out that their property was sold four times for God's sake. Don't let that happen in here. Have the property rights to a stick. And if you want to change it, put some grace period and give us some time limit. Put some... If the tenant has been there for nine years, hey, that doesn't apply. Okay, your time's up. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Next speaker, please. Hi, I'm Janet Barber. I've lived in Santa Cruz for about 25 years now and I'm a small-time landlord. We own two properties in town that we now have sitting vacant because we're just kind of freaked out by the... I'm sympathetic to rent control. We don't raise our rents. We're not trying to gouge people, but we take a big risk by owning property. I mean earthquakes, fires, you put a lot of money into buying a property and to then say like, oh, you don't have any control over who's going to live in your house or how many people can live there or they can sublet to whoever. It's just not fair. I'm supportive of putting a cap. I mean, the 10% seems high to me. Make it lower than that, but the just-cause eviction rules are what completely makes it so that we currently now have one of our rental properties on the market for sale because we don't want to... I mean, it's a hostile environment to be a landlord in Santa Cruz right now. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, please. My name's Josh Berhinsky, and I'm also a landlord in town. A friend of mine told me a story the other day. It's a real story, and so it's hard to... This is a person, right? There's a person in this town who's not here today and she was given a rent increase notice back at the beginning of the rent freeze and she went to her landlord and she was afraid. She came to me and she said, I'm getting this rent increase. It's 15%. I'm only supposed to get 2%. Should I go to my landlord and tell them and stop it? And I said, well, you can. The law is behind you, but that's a risk. And she said, well, I really can't afford it, so I have to go do it. So she went and did it. And she talked to her landlord and she said, I can't do this 15% increase. You got to do a 2%. So the landlord did a 2% increase and was furious with her. And he said, so you're not going to be on a lease anymore. You're going to be month to month. And the second I get a chance, you're out. So that's December 12th, right? So she and her two kids will be evicted on December 12th. You can do something very, very, very simple to make it so that this does not happen. We have a short period of time while we need to think together about how to make a decent rent control thing for the city, right? We know that over the last period, measure M lost, right? But 10,000 people voted for it when it was funded 10 to 1 against. So that's an incredible show of support. You have a mandate to come up with a rent control ordinance in this city that's not considered too extreme and not considered too expensive. But that's actually rent control. And rent control doesn't work without some kind of just cause eviction. So it's got to have both those pieces. And what you can do right now is not even figure that out. Just give us a chance to figure it out. Create a process. Give us some time and make it so that people are not evicted on December 12th. Because those people are going to be evicted. They're going to be looking for homes and they're going to have a really hard time. So please think about that. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Hi, I'm Christina Horn. I'm an 18-year Santa Cruz resident and landlord. I support relocation assistance and a reasonable cap on rents. And I encourage council to approve the proposal before you. I would actually recommend a lower cap than 15.5% and feel that 10% over two years is more appropriate. I would like to thank staff for thoughtfully considering the effective and uncontroversial rent control ordinance in place for over 25 years in our neighboring town of Los Gatos. Well, Santa Cruz is definitely not Los Gatos. And I appreciate the unique and special character of Santa Cruz who cannot be too proud to ignore the successes of other communities. Like many residents, I voted against Measure M due to the onerous just cause provisions and the prospect of an independent rent board. The city of Los Gatos contracts with HUD-approved nonprofit housing organization Project Sentinel for on-demand arbitration, mediation and conciliation services that can be initiated by either tenants or landlords. A modest fee ranging from $11 to $22 per unit is charged to landlords to pay for these services. The operating budget for the arrangement between Project Sentinel and Los Gatos is less than $40,000 per year. By way of contrast, the City of Berkeley's Rent Stabilization Board operates with an annual budget in excess of $5.2 million. My source for that is their own website. A good portion of that budget is consumed by executive salaries deemed by a recent Alameda civil grand jury report to be excessive and exorbitant. Executive Director James Kaliki enraged in a salary and benefits package in excess of $300,000 in 2017, which represented more than 5% of the operating budget for the organization. My source for that is the transparent California website. Precisely because we are Santa Cruz and not Los Gatos or Berkeley, we must try to do better. The proposal represents a reasonable first step in the right direction, and I would encourage adoption this evening. Thank you very much. Thank you. Okay. Before you're going to speak. Okay. Is there any other member that has not, the public that's here that has not spoken that wishes to speak on this item? Okay. You'll be our last speaker this evening on this item. Public speaker. Hi. Thank you. It's great to be the last person talking at such an eventful night. I didn't prepare any specific remarks, but I had to come up and tell my brief story because one of my ex landlords also came up and spoke tonight on the virtues of removing the rent control caps. I moved into the house that I'm in now on a six month lease with the belief that at the end of that six month lease, I would be signing a year long lease to get into the summer rental cycle. This was something that I understood between me and my property manager and something that I was excited to, you know, make a stay in this community. I have two kids and I'm really trying to find a neighborhood where we're not trying to move around every couple of years, which is what it's been like here in San Cruz. So we moved in and we were paying an exorbitant rent already just in order to stay in this area as you can imagine. And at the end of that six month period, we had a rent increase of $200 on the house. This is a 8% rent increase after living in a house for six months. This is during the rent freeze that was in place. And so following the city's website in hopes of making a place for my family here in Santa Cruz, I went and talked to a lawyer as referred by the city and was told that I had no recourse. So I'm here today knowing that the rent increase itself is not enough what has been done because my family is looking at having to move every single month. I am a professional here. I've been working here for several years. And I have to say, I don't know what folks expect Santa Cruz to look like in a number of years, but if the working people aren't going to live here, it's only going to be rental of these very nice houses with no one living in them. So I think I really want to underline what a couple of people have said here tonight because it's a really polarizing issue. What I see the city council as having an opportunity to do is something really good to come out for the people and just put Santa Cruz on the map as some place that is safe to live for a long time. Where I'll be able to stay here with my children. Thank you. Okay, thank you everybody for your patience and that was a good almost three hours since we started. So thanks for all the discussion. We're going to bring it back to the council for deliberation and council member Brown. Are we starting with questions? Questions. Questions for staff. Questions, yeah. Thank you. So I, as I understand it, Mr. Condati, we, so we're not able to vote on extension of the rent freeze and or the temporary moratorium on evictions without cause tonight. What we could do would be to direct the staff to come back for the December 11th. And I just want to clarify this because a member of the audience suggested that we could with a five, with five members of the council vote to do this as an emergency. I'm just saying technically, yes, that is possible. The charter allows the council to adopt an emergency ordinance that has the effect or that takes effect immediately upon adoption by declaring an emergency, specifying the circumstance that constitutes the emergency and approving the ordinance by a vote of at least, by at least five votes. But the charter does not preempt the Brown Act and in order to adopt that sort of an ordinance, you could not declare, you could not articulate an emergency circumstance that qualifies as an emergency under the Brown Act. So at best you could direct that it be brought back at a special meeting which could take place before December 11th or you could indeed direct that an ordinance be brought back for consideration at the December 11th meeting. Thank you for reiterating that and the reason that I ask is primarily because it was a question that was asked from the audience and I want to make sure everybody understands those parameters that it is, while technically possible, highly unlikely to be happening tonight. So I just want to kind of put that out there. So I think that was my only question. I do have a lot of comments that I'd like to make so I can just go into them unless there are other questions and then we can come back. Any other questions? Yeah, three questions that people brought up. Can landlords raise rents on December 1st according to the current rent freeze? 11. The current rent freeze remains into effect until the city council declares the results of the passage of measure M but the rent freeze does not apply to single-family residences or residences constructed after February of 1995. So landlords in those circumstances could. Okay, so I hope that person is taking note of what the city attorney just said and if you qualify, you should bring it to our attention. 8% increases during the rent freeze period and told there was no recourse. Is that pretty much the same answer? That's not allowed, but if it's after 1995 or 1994 and it's a single-family home, that is allowed. If the rent freeze does not apply to a tenancy pursuant to Costa Hawkins then an 8% rent increase would be allowed under the rent freeze but if it's protected by the rent freeze ordinance then it would not be allowed. The current ordinance in front of us about the file notice to vacate and someone asked, where would you do that? How would that happen? How would that occur? I don't understand the question. I think he was talking about how you would go up against being evicted and where you might file to appeal that eviction. Is there a way of doing that under the current ordinance that's before us tonight? No, under the current ordinance that we're talking about tonight. I'm still not quite sure I understand your question. Department staff, did you want to respond to that? No worries going. What the language actually says is that the tenant shall provide notice of intent to vacate and the intent that we had there in drafting this was that they would provide that intent, the notice to the landlord of intent to vacate. So it's not a filing per se but it's notification of intent to vacate. Thank you for clearing that up. Any other questions? Vice Mayor Watkins. I just have a quick question and it's in response to the item before us tonight. There was a comment made from the public that I wanted to see if I could hear your opinion on Tony but could we add language to protect a tenant from being evicted by landlord who seeks to terminate a tendency for the purpose of imposing a large rent increase without paying relocation assistance? I along with staff heard those comments and we realized that under the ordinance as drafted a landlord might be able to circumvent the payment of relocation assistance by preemptively terminating a tenancy as opposed to just simply giving notice of a large rent increase and then once the tenancies vacated then increase the rent to 30% or whatever. We have drafted some language to address that concern anticipating that the City Council might be interested in that and the staff has prepared this slide to provide for that circumstance. Sure, so let me just quickly remind everybody this is the text that we had originally proposed. I do want to say here that we made a modification indicating a change from a prohibition. So the original text, do you have that? Had said add text prohibiting evictions. This would not prohibit evictions. This would require relocation assistance to be paid to renters due to evictions that were made as a means to avoid paying relocation assistance. So this is a language that was initially proposed and this is the language you guys probably saw us frantically working over here while the speakers were speaking. This is what we were putting together with the City Attorney's advice in terms of some revised language that would follow the definition section that would address that issue. So what this says is that if the tenants who relocate due to a large rent increase or who are required to vacate due to the termination of a tenancy for reasons other than the breach of the terms of a rental agreement, the immediate payment of two months of the tenant's actual rent, the exception to that rule would be if the breach of the lease was simply continuing to occupy a residence after the expiration of the lease term. So if there's a one-year lease, the landlord gives notice of termination afterwards and the tenant doesn't vacate and that would still apply. So the relocation assistance would still be applicable. And if I could clarify just for everybody in the audience who might not work with red-line documents all the time, the text that you see in white is text that was already in the ordinance as proposed and what you're seeing in yellow is underlined as text that we're proposing adding. Any other questions? So in other words, remaining on the premises after the expiration of the lease would not be a violation of the lease. That would preclude payment of relocation assistance. Any other questions at this time? Okay. Any Council member Brown? I have comments. This now is the appropriate time. So there's a lot that could be said, a lot of it has been said here tonight. I want to start by saying there seems to be significant difference in the post-election analysis regarding the defeat of measure M and that's led to a significant amount of interpretation, assumptions. I believe it was Mr. Holloman who said, you know, this was an omnibus bill that didn't take, you know, poll surveys, post-poll surveys. So we don't know exactly why and what it was that was objectionable to the majority of the electorate. I'm not going to sit here and, you know, hazard any guess about that. I believe that what I heard and what many people heard during the campaign is reflective of some pretty significant concerns about a rent board, mom-and-pop landlords, you know, people who maybe own one home or a second home and worries about family members or them being able to move in, economic hardship. There were a lot of legitimate concerns expressed. I'm not going to speculate about how, you know, the general electorate feels about each and every one of them. What I can say is that to suggest that the defeat of measure M means that the defeat of the idea of the temporary moratorium that we put in place is just simply inaccurate, because what that did not include a rent board, that did exempt people with up to two homes in the community, it was one additional. So two homes, ADUs, any duplexes, you know, there were a lot of exemptions. Written into that. So to suggest that we would, by extending that rent freeze and just cause moratorium, be thwarting the will of the voters is just inaccurate. I just want to make that clear, because, you know, there are people who will say that is the case, but that is not factual. My preference would be, under the circumstances, to extend, to ask staff to come back to us on December 11th. I was one of the council members, perhaps the only one who asked that it be agendized. It wasn't. I'm reading the tea leaves here, and I'm not sure I'd even get a second on that motion, given that where we should do it, the city attorney has advised that two council members will need to recuse. But I'm going to just say it publicly that that would be my preference. And I'm looking forward to having the conversation about how we proceed in the future. You know, it's a shame that we aren't going to be able to do that tonight. It's a shame that we may not even have the opportunity to get it agendized until January, because I do think that that creates some instability for people, and we're hearing about it. Of the 209 pages of comments that we received, overwhelming majority, three to one probably, where people asking us to either extend the rent freeze or do something that included some kind of just cause or eviction protection for no cause evictions in that messaging. So it is not the case that everybody who said no to M is absolutely opposed 100% to just cause. I just have to be clear about that. That would be my preference. It doesn't look like that's going to happen with respect to the ordinance that's coming before us here. I do also believe that the figures are too, the percentages are too high. It basically is status quo. I appreciate the spirit in which it was crafted. And, you know, however, and with all due respect, I'm pretty underwhelmed by it. I think it is the case that even with some language that says, and I appreciate the change here, and I know that you were doing that on the spot. This is something that I mean should have been realized. I realized at the minute I saw it back in September. So to just realize that, oh, people could get around paying the relocation assistance by just simply evicting was pretty obvious to me from the minute I looked at it. I appreciate the sentiment again of trying to get at that. I don't know how it would in the world there would be any enforcement of that. But I understand the spirit where it's going. So I just want to put that out there. I hope that we can get to something tonight that is at least nominally protective of people who are at risk of losing their housing immediately. The community said, and many who oppose Measure M said, we want to have an opportunity to have that conversation to have a process, a three-month period where we actually sat down and we made good on our word about that would be welcome for me and I think many others in the community. So I will leave my comments at that and look forward to hearing from you all. Yeah. Thanks for walking. Thanks for walking. All right. Well, I want to thank all those that came out tonight. I'll just sort of briefly say a few comments and then I think we're presented with an option here and there's some action that we can take. You can interpret that as you will in terms of whether or not it's adequate or what we can do to make it adequate considering the circumstances. I just want to say, you know, one of the things that I think we all really know if we kind of take a step back is that there's a larger context here, right? There's an affordability imbalance here in Santa Cruz or it's affordability imbalance in a lot of coastal communities in California. There's limitations to land use. There's the impact of UCSC. There's Silicon Valley. There are a number of influences that impact the affordability of housing in Santa Cruz. And we experience that. I don't think anybody up here hasn't had a person that they loved or care about move away because they can't afford to live here. Families who can't afford to stay here because obviously a four-year-old can't pay what a one-bedroom rent might be in terms of renting here. There are teachers that can't stay here to teach our children. We're having a shift in demographics. There's major implications to a lot of these. There are major societal things happening within our community. I think we need to remember that context. This hasn't been coming either from out of the blue. This is definitely something that could have been stopped many, many decades ago in terms of interventions. So it's something just to kind of also consider in terms of perspective. I do want to say in terms of solutions that, you know, one of the things that I've had the opportunity and appreciated the opportunity is being able to work on the Housing Subcommittee's blueprint, looking at affordability of housing, looking at housing protection, looking at community vitality, thinking about how we can impact affordability of housing from all angles. And tenant protections is one component of that. I have to say just personally, I have not been impressed by the experience that this measure has had on individuals within our community, the people that I know and love on both sides of rent control. I feel that it has been a similar experience that we talk about that we dislike in Washington that we've seen here today just because of how people are treating each other. And it's not, to me that it's been probably the least, least, you know, the worst piece of it for me, just in terms of just the overall sentiment and experience. I think that we have focused on a lot about what divides us as opposed to what unites us and that there really requires some healing and some work to be done in terms of how we can come together to look at solutions. And I think that, you know, what we have tonight, and I said it last time, is a good opportunity for a good something in the absence of something perfect, and we have to start somewhere. The voters did vote on Measure M. We had a temporary rent freeze in place that had an expiration date, and there is a democratic process, and that is also a consideration. So it's not, if I had a solution, I would 100% propose that. And I think that, you know, we will have to continue, as we do on a regular basis, looking at housing affordability solutions in our community, and that is something I'm 100% committed to, and I know many of this council is, as well as other councils. I'm speaking now. Thank you. We've had an opportunity to hear from you, and now it's an opportunity for us to discuss. I think at this point, what I do know that I feel, in terms of the item before us, is that the 10 and the 15 is definitely too high. And I'd like to see something lower. I mean, I'll, I'm happy to move it and to sort of start the discussion if we'd like. Okay, so I'll move that we reduce the percentages from- Make it to the motion. Right there. The motion for this, yeah, for the item before us. So I'll move that we reduce the percentages from 10 to 15.5 to five and 7%. And look at how we can, I mean, and then I think there could be a conversation. I'd like to see if there's interest in having a conversation if we want to look at other types of support services or investigating projects, Sentinel or something like that in terms of tenant supports, and or potentially looking at an extension for eviction timeframes from 30 to 60 days to something more like 90 days. But right now would be the original motion would just be to reduce the five to 7% with potential discussion around the other ideas. I'll second that. And it would include the additional language that's shown on the screen and also includes language that those numbers can be adjusted and the compensation can be adjusted by resolution in the future. That is, it doesn't have, it wouldn't have to go through a first and second reading. It's a motion and a second on the floor. Motion by Vice Mayor Watkins. Second by Council Member Matthews. Is there any further discussion on this? Just say a couple of things. I resonate with much of what the Vice Mayor has said. It's, this issue has been painful all around, I think, for our community. I just briefly want to speak out about those who would demean the motivations for those who brought this forward. This, and I think both Council Members Watkins and Brown were on the Housing Subcommittee. And this particular item was one of many, many, many items that came forward to the Council. And so it's not at all as though this was seen as the silver bullet or the magic solution. This was one admittedly very small step to deal with one specific issue. So I just want to acknowledge and respond to those who say, well, how could you be so stupid to think this would solve the problem? Nobody did. It represented a year when Council Member Chase was Mayor of a deep devotion to exploring housing issues, both by her leadership and Council Members and our staff and community organizations, and then going to the Housing Blueprint Committee. And there was just a huge amount of effort that tried to hone in on some of the things that we could do in terms of policy and resources in various areas. So I just want to acknowledge the goodwill and hard work that has gone in. And I hope we'll continue to go into, it really is the profound issue that our community faces right now. I just wanted to set that context. Yeah, thank you. Council Member Brown. I appreciate the idea of doing this. I just want to clarify for the maker and the second of the motion that we are not talking about the 90-day eviction portion that you raised as a possibility extending the time period for it. So would that happen through a separate motion? It could. To ask that this be brought back, because I'd like to make that motion and I don't, I'm guessing it's not going to be a friendly amendment to this motion, but I would like to make that motion as a separate motion prior to closing the discussion for this agenda item. So I just want to clarify when is appropriate time to do that. So you're interested, if I may, you're interested in the potential of increasing the, extending the notice for evictions from 30 and 60 days to a 90-day timeframe. Just while I'm actually interested in making a motion to ask that the conversation be agendized for a discussion about some form of eviction for, protections for evictions without cause and the 90-day for discussion for this council at the next meeting. So that's a motion that I would like to make, but I don't, I want to make sure that it happens before we close out the agenda item whenever that is. I have just a quick clarifying question if I can. For Tony, is it necessary if we were interested in extending an eviction timeline from 30, 60 to 90 to have that as a separate item, or could we incorporate that? Because I would accept that as a friendly amendment if it was appropriate for us to do that tonight. I have a couple of concerns about that. The first is that it's not agendized. As the subject matter, this in my view is within the scope of what's described in your agenda, the change that you see on the screen here, but extending the notice that's required in order to terminate a tenancy above that, which is already required by state law, is really a different topic entirely. And so I think that would have to be brought back for further consideration. The other concern I have about that is if it's intended to apply retroactively so as to protect tenants upon the expiration of the rent-freeze ordinance, and this question was actually posed to me before this meeting, I just don't know how it works because a retroactive ordinance that could be held up to a court, I mean, I'm banking on the fact that an unlawful detainer action that's brought will not go to trial until the new ordinance goes into effect. But I don't know how you hold up an ordinance that, say, it takes effect in February to a judge on January 15th and say, well, under this new ordinance, the 60-day notice I got of termination would not be adequate if the ordinance were in effect today. So I'm just not quite sure how that works. And I spent a bit of time on it in the time I had available to me this morning before the council meeting, looking into that, and I just haven't resolved that issue. There is, of course, also the question of whether or not the field of notice of termination or the required notice of termination is preempted by state law. I've researched that as well, and I haven't found any clear authority one way or the other, but I would note that the Code of Civil Procedure for notices of termination requires at least 30-days notice for a termination of a tenancy of less than one year and at least 60-days notice for a termination of a tenancy that has been in effect for an excess of one year. So the state law on its face doesn't set an upper limit on the amount of notice that can be required. It just sets a minimum amount. So I think that arguably provides some guidance that says that the council could do that without being preempted by state law, but there is some uncertainty there. Thank you. Okay. Okay, Council Member Mathews. I would also point out, relative to the just cause issue that Council Member Brown raised, it's my understanding that, yes, regarding the possibility of agendizing a just cause, an ordinance that included or an emergency measure that included a just cause component that neither Council Member Cronin or I would be able to even vote on agendizing that. Is that correct? The FPPC concluded that both you and Council Member Cronin were disqualified from participating in the rent-freeze portion of the ordinance that was adopted in February but not the just cause eviction ordinance. So if that were brought forward as an emergency measure without a rent-freeze component attached, then I think both all seven council members would be qualified to participate in that discussion. And that is why I suggested that I'd like to make that motion on its own. I'll just have to read this memo. Council Member Cronin and then Council Member Nroyer. I first want to say to my fellow council member, Ms. Matthews, the whole notion of pain all around, I mean, we really have to look at that and unwrap it. There's a lot of power and privilege in owning a couple houses. And one has to really take into effect the difference between someone who might be feeling forced and painful to have to sell their property because they don't want to be under some sort of rent control versus a family, as we heard tonight, that had to move five times in 18 months. It's not the same pain. And there's pain all around. There's levels of pain that we're dealing with here. And I don't want to minimize what pain renters go through because I think most of us up here were at some point in our lives. And I think we have to look back. In just reviewing what folks said tonight, Curtis said that we are facing a moral crisis. And I think a lot of us would agree with that. Stacy said that the life for renters is hell right now, and it is. Paula said if you relocate, you need a place to relocate to. Tanya said families can't afford to live here. And we know that. And I don't know if what's before us tonight is going to alleviate that pain. Justin said we need tenant protections now. Scott said what about the city evicting people in non-permitted units? We haven't dealt with the rental inspection ordinance that right now we know that there's over 500 units. I've been red tagged. Micah said that renters under press group. And I have to agree with that. And I think that's the feeling around town. Shannon said the longer we don't attend to rent control, the more people will lose in this town. And we have lost a lot of artists. We have lost a lot of musicians. It's a very different place than when a lot of us moved here many years ago. And we're not going to relive that. We're not going to bring that back. But we also have a chance to stem that tide as a council. Somebody, a tenant, said they had to move five times in the last nine years. And they're getting a 60-day eviction notice in December. Chad said her friends live in cars. And I associate with that. I know students that do live in their cars up on campus. Reggie said in the outlook apartments, I walked, I knocked on every door in the outlook apartments this past election. The rent went from $1,700 to $3,100. This is obscene. And Adam, I'll just end on this. Adam said that any rent increase has to be similar to a wage increase. And if we're going for 5% and 7%, which is 12% over two years, I don't know of many jobs that will give you a 12% raise over two years. And it flies in the face of what we're doing here. At the university, we have gotten very few raises, maybe 6% over the last five years. And there's been, it was a long period of time when we didn't get any raise at all. So I just want to close by saying, I agree with Council Member Brown. We need a period of time to figure this out. I think that's what I heard during the election. If Measure M doesn't pass, we need a period of time to bring renters, bring landlords, bring students, bring homeowners together and figure this out and give them a timeline. If they have to meet weekly, I mean one of the Council candidates was saying, put him in a room and don't come out until we figure out what's going to work in this community. Council Member Watkins said that the family's moving away and there is a shift in demographics here. And again, is it up to us to try to stop them moving away? Give them opportunities to live here. I just don't see that what's before us is going to work. And I think if Council Member Brown makes her motion, I will support that. And I think we need to, the next Council has to figure this out. And it definitely was, I didn't go to any candidate forums that people didn't talk about figuring out rent control after the election if Measure M goes down. Thank you. Council Member Morroyan. You know, unfortunately the historic persistence to any high density building in Santa Cruz and that what I see was almost an absolute refusal to plan for any sort of growth has exacerbated the situation that we're in. And in fact, some of the people that I see who are really pushing for rent control were the same people who supported policies that didn't allow high density building and didn't allow any sort of planning for growth. I grew up here when I graduated from high school, went away to school and decided I wanted to come back to my hometown. Me moving out of my parents house was growth. We didn't even plan for that type of natural growth that would happen when you look at a community and figure out that people who are currently in K through 12 may want to stay here and may stay here. So we didn't even do that. We didn't even plan for growth knowing that some people who came to UC Santa Cruz wanted to stay here after they graduated. And so that's what I find ironic in this discussion is the people who are yelling the loudest about renters being in a bad position, some of them are the same people who helped create the situation or make it worse in terms of where we're at. When I came... You know what? Those outside, you may want to listen. You may want to listen because I might provide a perspective you haven't heard before just as I listened to you tonight. I grew up here. I grew up very working class. My father was a bartender. My mother was a clerk. We were able to rent a really dumpy house. Hold on a second. Hey, I need you to... We've listened to you all night. You've had your time. Now it's our time to speak. Thank you. Yeah, I think... Yeah, I would really like you to hear me because I think I do offer perspective. When I came back to Santa Cruz, even in the mid-90s looking to rent an apartment, I still would have to compete against 50 people for that one apartment. Today it's more like 200 to 300 people. So when you look at what's driven the price, it's not just greed. It's just that stuff isn't available. And people mention the outlook apartments. That was owned by the same person for years. It was sold. It was sold at current market rates. They can't buy an apartment complex and then rent things out at below market rate and expect to not go bankrupt. That's an unfortunate truth that exists. So, you know, in the long term, I really, really hope that we consider some of the mistakes in my opinion that were made when I was a kid in school here. I don't feel that the people who were in political office then really cared about working-class kids like me growing up in Santa Cruz. They didn't accommodate for us and they didn't think about the growth that would be created when we moved out of our homes as young adults. So I don't want to make those same mistakes going forward. I think we need a combination of both planning, making sure that we plan for higher density growth downtown, that the university is able to build more housing up on campus. And in the short term, we need relief for our renters as well. Because when we talk about building more housing, it takes several years for that to come online. So I completely acknowledge that we need to provide some sort of relief for our current renters. And so I'm going to support the motion, definitely taking it down from Tin and 15.5 to 5 and 7. I will definitely support that. I think we should pass at least something tonight to get us to the next council meeting where maybe there's some more protections that we can put in place because it'll get agendized and noticed like it's properly supposed to. And my hope, and the council member Crohn said this, is I would like to see and I want to stress this, local landlords, not ones that own the big apartment complexes and maybe work out of another city and have no clue about our community, but local landlords, to get in a room with tenants, both students and longer term renters and longer term residents who live here, there are all sorts of renters, really run the gamut. It's just like any population, there's a variety of people within that group and we want to make sure that one group of renters don't dominate over another group in terms of their interests. So I would like to see these people go in a room and not come out until they can come out with something that we can all agree on and will work. So in the short term, we need to have some rental protections, not measure in, but something a little different. I have to tell you, I don't think I heard one person tell me everything's fine the way it is, the rental situation's great, we don't need to do anything. No one said that to me from local landlords to tenants. So I think it's really important that these folks get together because I think there's a lot of solutions that we can all live with on this and I just want to say I feel the pain of the renters. I didn't become a homeowner until I was 40 years old. I was a renter in this town and I had to rent some pretty dumpy, disgusting places for a large amount of money and I have to say I displaced other people because I had a decent salary by the time I was in my late 30s versus people who didn't and I was renting dumps so I can't even imagine what those folks were looking at. So let's move forward and let's be collaborative on this. I usually hate that word but I think in this case we need to be collaborative and I think we can find a solution and I don't think we need to renters a typical way or paint landlords a typical way. I think landlords run the gamut too between who is greedy and who isn't. So I don't know if my comments were helpful. I hope they were. But let's move forward. I'll say I want to say thank you to those that were on the housing subcommittee that one brought forward several recommendations not only about looking at how we might have some protections like this one but also about producing new units and we have our next item on our agenda is just that looking at how we can produce more housing units in our city. I'll tell you that in overwhelming majority of people I'd say over 60% voted against Measure M right and that was after over I think two years when you think about listening with the public and also a freeze that took place to have an outreach and discussion that provided at least some sort of semblance of education about what that ordinance meant to the community it failed and I think that frankly this is not something that's going to be resolved in a meeting. It is going to require a more comprehensive and thorough look at to look at the nuances of what it is that the community can not only support but also one that's going to support the families and tenants and workers in our community for our future and it is a combination about building new units and that may be objectionable to some and it's also about looking at ways that we can control rising rents through other means that may be revealed through comprehensive discussions with those that are not only housing producers but also those that oversee housing in our community. I frankly liked one of the comments that I heard was that there are many different ideas out there and if we limit ourselves to just this idea as being a panacea to what our community feels is going to resolve this housing crisis I think we're sadly mistaken and so the idea of coming back with something that seems like a silver bullet I think is is is not functional in my mind this is going to require a discussion that is maybe a wider more broad and comprehensive discussion that even took place the last time so I look forward you know one for the city to look at this I know over the last year it's been the top of mine it's actually crowded out I think issues in our community that have been equally important dealing with the issue of homelessness dealing with mental illness in our community and it's one while I've heard a lot of students in the community talk about the rents I'd like to see an equal number of those same people up on campus demanding that there be new housing production there. We're seeing we're seeing our local community members local families equally impacted by the rising number of students in our community and the values that they're able to pay for rent that frankly working families here are unable to do and so I think that is while it may be objectionable to those to speak about in this room I really encourage those that make those same sorts of arguments here to be out there active to look at how you can build more housing up on campus to reduce the rights and relieve some of the pressures that families and working folks here in the community are feeling because of it. So I'd like to say we have a motion on the floor in a second. I just have to take issue because I work on campus and I do work on campus very often and you need to go up on campus and find out what students are doing because students are speaking out, students are speaking out to their administration we have an overloaded they've sent too many students to Santa Cruz is the problem when I was a student they housed 50% of 7,000 now they house 50% of 19,000 something's got to give. And thank you council member Cron in no way is argument they aren't already doing that I'm just saying that we do those pressures and again I've heard from students myself about the rising costs those that are students at Cabrillo don't even have housing and they're impacted equally so this is not a matter of UCSC it's a matter of just looking at how we can absorb some of the impacts of the rising level of students in our community. Okay we have a motion on the floor thank you council member Brown question before we vote point of order and maybe it's called voting so right now we are voting but that does not preclude an opportunity for me to make an additional motion or do I need to do that now before we vote on this final? Again did you want to make a my motion is to direct staff to bring back for the next council meeting some options that we can discuss related to tenant protections during an interim period of three months time at the expiration of the temporary moratorium on rent increases and just cause eviction provisions that we had passed on February 13th and make that motion after this that's why I'm asking because when I'm just asking the question because sometimes we do we vote and then close shut the agenda and I don't want that to happen we'll leave it open with that advance notice and then we'll go back to the motion on the floor Mr. Mayor can staff ask a clarifying question on the motion from Vice Mayor Watkins so I just want to make sure were you proposing a total of 12% or 7% over two years 7% over two years so as we understand the motion 5% no more than 5% in one year and a total of 7% over two consecutive years thank you thank you so do you understand did you clarify the question for you? Does everyone understand? I'd like to ask I know this was something that comes up that one that this is something that's been presented to the public at public meetings I asked the future council would like to look at that and see whether they provide data or analysis also look at some type of independent study of are the rental costs and how they can actually look at other other means than this particular ordinance, but what other possibilities exist for ideas to help control rising rental costs through production and other means? So if I'm hearing you correctly, which I think is the other kind of component of what this is. This is something that we're doing right now that we have sort of the best available before us tonight, considering the outcome of the election. That being said, I think there is a new council coming on. There will be a need to reconvene and re-examine and come up with what unites us in terms of our agreements around tenant protections as opposed to what we've been focusing on in terms of the division. And so in terms of your suggestion, if I'm hearing you correctly, it's around convening the folks to help look at these types of, this policy as well as additional policies and data? No, I'm just saying that on this, just look at whatever process is in place by the new council, but you kind of look at this and saying it's part of it as something where you might revisit those numbers after you speak with property owners and tenants to see what it is. To revisit the shift of the time. Okay, the percentage. Yeah, the percentage. Sure. Okay, and it's motioned by Vice Mayor Watkins, and that was seconded by Council Member Matthews. Any further discussion on this item? I'm not going to support it because I don't see any eviction protection in this. And I think it's really going to be a way that's going to be a step in the direction tenants want to go. And I think that Council's duty should be to be protecting the vulnerable in the community. And tenants definitely fall within that category of vulnerability. I just have a quick clarifying question. My understanding is that with some of the changed language that there is some elements of eviction protections. Do you want to elaborate on that a bit? Absent of full just cause policy, which was heavily debated. I mean, I think it'd be helpful to hear what you- It's really relocation. It's relocation. The language that was provided was intended to address the concern about evictions for the purpose of raising rents, right? But if you pay your rent, you don't have criminal activity going on, you can still be evicted from your place. And Mr. Mayor, I'm sorry, there's one more thing that we did change that we wanted to show you, if I can find it here. So here in section three, we just clarified the date. If you see the date in blue, that is the date that we changed while we were making our edits. That changed the text that's strike through that we were proposing initially that said the date by which city council certified the results of the election. So what this does, if it were to be adopted by council, would make the ordinance come into effect 30 days after today with a retroactivity back to today. Tony is, I'm sorry, yeah, Tony, is that right? I'm tired. That's right. Okay. What this addresses is an ambiguity in the rent freeze and just cause eviction ordinances, which is that they say that the ordinances will expire on the effective date that the city council declares the results of the election. But under the elections code, the city council does not declare the results of the election. The county elections official does that. And then the city council votes to essentially accept the results of the election. So it just addresses that potential ambiguity. Okay, thank you. So we have a motion on the floor by Vice Mayor Watkins, seconded by Council Member Matthews. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Those opposed? No. Okay, that motion passes with Council Member Crohn against Council Member Matthews, Council Member Brown, Council Member Naroyan, Vice Mayor Watkins and myself in favor. Council Member Chase, absent. Thank you. Now we'll go to the next item, which is you were going to propose something. So I'd like to move the- Okay, let's hold off until they have a chance to chat. We were going to ask Council Member Brown who was going to make a motion that probably they would address your clapping, so. You want to go out and clap with them? That's fine, but she was going to make a motion I think that's going to address what you're kind of have concerns with. Let's just take another break. You know, it's getting late. I know it's getting late. So I can talk loudly about what's going on for you. So I supported the motion because I do think, although I do for the reasons I express, think that it is not going to necessarily provide a whole lot of relief for tenants who are suffering. But I do think it is a place that we can start from to have a conversation, so I appreciate that. However, as I said, I don't think that without some kind of eviction protections, this will have any meaning. And so now I'm prepared to make a motion to direct staff to come back to the council on December 11th with options for tenant protections in the case of evictions without cause. There are a whole lot of ways we can do that. There are exemptions that could be included. I'd like to have that conversation with my colleagues in the public arena. And I would ask that it be considered for a period of three months to give the new council time to bring people together to have the conversation, perhaps also in that discussion, have some kind of discussion about the structuring of that process with the council present. So that would be my motion and it could also include a discussion of as an alternative 90-day eviction as Vice Mayor Watkins suggested. So giving us the ability to have that conversation on December 11th, so that is my motion. Come back, agendize eviction protections options for the council to consider on December 11th. And just to clarify before anyone seconds that, that is something that any council member present can vote on. There's no conflicts. Yes. That as presented by council member Brown, I believe so. Okay. All right. So the council member Brown just made a motion. Is there a second to that motion? Second. Okay. Council member Brown, second by council member Cron. Is there any further discussion? Quick question. So is it your intention that staff would come back with actual legal language of ordinance? It's okay. And so that'll have to be ready in about a week to make the agenda. We have a pretty clear template to work from. It's based upon what we adopted in February to start with. That excluded most of the concerns that were expressed in this room tonight. And in letters, the concerns were largely around individual homeowners. I want control over the property where I live. So we already have that covered in exemptions, but there could be other ones. I'd like to have that conversation with the council and public. I'll advise my walk ins. I appreciate the intention behind the motion. And I think one of the things that hasn't happened is the opportunity to have a longer discussion. And I don't think that what you're describing is going to preclude that. And I think it is extending something that the voters did weigh in on. And so I just process wise it feels disingenuous to me and a little bit off for me. I am interested though, however, in learning the 90 days. And I think if that's something that you'd be willing to compromise on, to understand more of whether or not we could potentially extend the eviction timeline. I'd be interested in learning more. I don't know if you could figure that out in a week though. Tony, I'm happy to hear from you. I'm just going to say, sorry, without a discussion about just cause options, I can't do that. And I would hope that we could have the full conversation, whatever we decide to vote on. As I indicated previously, the difficulty that I'm grappling with in terms of an ordinance that extends the minimum required notice is how to structure it so that it takes effect in a way that's meaningful for tenants who receive an eviction notice. Between the date that it's introduced and the effective date of the ordinance. Could be done as an emergency. That would solve the problem. That requires five votes, but it could be done as an emergency if you make it an emergency finding. So there's a motion, a second on the floor. I'll just, did you want to say anything? No. I was going to say that, you know, I think that I frankly, like Vice Mayor Watkins feel like the voters have weighed in on this. And that was something that there was a phrase that existed for the better part of last or this year and even the year before that led up to it with these public hearings. And I think I totally understand that, you know, one, when the people have spoken on a matter, I mean, we do need to honor that. And if the next council has a different interpretation on what that means, then I think that it's important that they weigh in and make those interpretations. But at this point, my opinion is that those viewpoints were rejected. Okay, so if there's no further discussion, go ahead, Council Member Brown. I just want to revisit this conversation with the Vice Mayor here. So what you're saying is you would be willing to support bringing back an agenda item for December 11th that would allow the council to consider extending the 30 and 60-day notice requirements for evictions as per state law that it would be 90 days for the city. Now, so now I have a question. Is that something, I know we kind of talked about this, but is that something that we can do if we agendize it for another day? Let me ask you a clarifying question. Is it possible to prepare that for the December 11th meeting? Is it possible to, well, I assume it, I mean, preparing it doesn't seem like it would be that challenging. Would not. Is it something that we can do because we would be- As it may conflict with state law? Yes. The answer to this question, and I don't believe I'm going to give a more concrete answer on December 11th, is I think so. Because the state- It goes beyond. Yeah, the legislature hasn't stated in, I think it's 1941.6 of the Code of Civil Procedure that it intends to occupy the field with respect to the subject matter, or that it's a matter of statewide concern, and that the notice requirements of the Code of Civil Procedure specify the minimum amount of notice that's required. So I think it could, but it's not entirely clear under the law. Dude, you're blocking- Excuse me for a second, Rachelle, I got it. You need to keep your- You can stand in the back with your sign, but you can't keep it above your- Thanks. Go ahead. Again, understanding that it's probably okay because the state hasn't occupied the territory if we do it as an emergency. Make the findings to do it on an emergency basis. If you did it on an emergency basis, then it would take effect immediately. The dilemma of how to make it effective retroactively would not be present. Okay, so I'll accept that friendly amendment. So is that all we're doing? Is that the whole motion? Yeah. Right? Yeah. I suppose that would be when we would move back. Are we talking about doing it on an emergency basis or no? I would like to. I would like some clarification on that point. I would like it to be, but- Sure. And again, I think probably the city clerk would appreciate restating the motion. The motion will now be to direct staff to return to the council on December 11th with language prepared to consider extension of notice to vacate from the 30 and 60 days required under state law to 90 days. And prepare that as an emergency measure. Ordinance. Does that need to be seconded? Yeah. I second the motion. Oh, okay. All right. Second. Yeah, but why does it have to be emergency? Why can't we just do it tonight and have it on the December 11th agenda? Not agenda. It was an agendized. It's not on the agenda. I'll let the city adjourn. When we set the calendar, can't you just set it at the calendar term? I'm sorry? When we set our calendar, can't we just then calendarize it for December 11th? Yeah. Yeah, that's what we're doing. Yeah, but you won't have to if the council approves a motion at this time. Yeah, I got a lot of- I want to speak in favor of this. In talking with local property managers, many of them say that the 30 and 60 is not enough time for people to find another place. And this, you know, very much in demand rental market. And that talking to some property managers, there were folks who, you know, property managers in favor of extending the notice for eviction just because of that reason. So I think that's an easy one for us to support. Okay. So we have a motion on the floor in a second. I'd like to ask this. What is it about like bringing in, there's been discussion about, you know, the changing. This is right on the heels of a new council coming in. What is your sense of when you want this going? We have a very full agenda on- Renters need protection now. Thank you. Quite honestly, this is 90 days that people will have for us, for this new council to be seated and begin to have the conversation. If we can't set up other additional protections at this time, we have the opportunity with a new council to do that. But with 90 days, that provides a little more stability for renters. And it's not a very difficult thing to consider. I don't think it'll take much of our time. Then you'll have the new council seated at that time. Okay. We'll have a new council seated during the 90 day. So if people get eviction notices it will be 90 days extending into February. Yeah, call the question. Okay. Second. You've got, well I can't call that, but I was just saying I heard that. Okay. I guess I'll ask all those in favor for the motion on the floor. Please say aye. Aye. I'm going to say that I would rather the new council weigh on this. I'm not going to support the motion on the floor for this. But I understand the perspective on why you brought forward. So that motion passes with council member Cron, council member Mathews, council member Brown, council member Narroian, vice mayor Watkins. In favor and council member Chase Absent. So we'll move on to item number two. This is the successfully dwindling ordinance unit. Before we go on to that item, I'm going to ask for a break. Can I crash at your pad when I get evicted? Take a break. It's going to be on the next meeting. Okay. Okay, thanks everybody that are here for item number two. It's late in the hour. Item number two, and we're going to begin now with our presentation, which will last what I understand about 20 minutes. Less than 20 minutes. And then, hold on one second. Yeah, we're going to reset the mics real quick. What did they say? Okay, so we are here for item number two, the accessory dwelling unit ordinance amendments. As a reminder, the order of this item will be a first of staff presentation followed by questions of staff from the council. We'll then take public comment and then return to council for deliberation and action. So I'll turn it over. I would like to make a motion that we postpone this item to a further council meeting. It's 11.05. It's absolutely ridiculous to be making policy on such a dense subject at 11.05 p.m. at night. Second. Let's see. First of all, let's have some discussion. We have a motion by council member DeRoyan, which seconded by council member Brown, right? Yes. Okay. So we have a lot of people that have waited here all evening for this. And I'm, you know, I'm prepared and yeah, prepared to continue. But let's hear from the rest of the council members on what they think. Council member Matthews. I'd be prepared to extend the meeting till midnight. Council member Cron, last person? I don't think it's good policymaking to be doing. This is a very complex, dense subject. I think there's about 40-page, 50-page staff report, and then about 150 pages of comments. But I don't want to disappoint the people who are here too. I totally understand waiting around for something, and it doesn't happen. I agree. Vice Mayor Watkins. I like the idea of extending to midnight, and if there are elements that we aren't able to accomplish, then we can revisit them in a future day, potentially. Actually, I have an issue with going to midnight, because I think if we go to midnight, whatever we do between now and midnight, will just be repeated again at another council meeting, and then the people who are sitting here will have to sit through this twice and make comments twice. And I just don't see what going to midnight. I don't think we're going to be able to get through this item in 50 minutes. Okay, so we have a motion on the floor to continue this item to a future meeting. And one of the questions that came up, and I'll ask the attorney this. If members of the public wanted to speak to that motion to continue this item to a future meeting, that's something that we can open up before we start the item. In my view, it's not required, but the council certainly could entertain public comment. I would like to do that, actually. Yes, I would. Just on the issue, I'm going to give like 30 seconds per person. The motion on the floor is to continue this item to a future meeting, and we heard from those that were willing to have it go till midnight. Is there any member of the public would like to speak that waited here throughout the day to hear this item and would like to come up and speak? Please go ahead. Okay. I just have a... I have this idea that you should be able to build an ADU and a multi-res. It's strictly to the idea of continuing the item. This is why I'm saying that. I was wondering if you continued it, in the meantime, if you could ask the staff to include that when it comes back, because that's something that's been talked about a lot, and I don't think the staff are against it. I've been talking to the staff. That would be my request. I don't care if you continue or not, but if you do continue it, if you could ask them to include that when they bring it back. City Attorney, Kandadi. That type of a substantive change would require that it be referred back to the Planning Commission, but you could do that when you consider it, when at the continued meeting. Mr. Nielsen, thank you for being here. Good evening, Christian Nielsen. I was actually here to enjoy the last item, so I just happened to be here, so I thought I'd hang out for it. It is a very dense document. I have read through it, and it probably does make sense to take some time to hear public input and to be able to not have to do that twice, probably does make sense. So that's where I will leave it. Next, Speaker, please. My name's David Wood, and first off, I want to thank... Hi. I want to thank everybody for doing such a great job. You guys are all real champs, no matter where you stand. It's a really hard subject, but I would like to see the presentation before we go, just so we can start to understand it. If that's a 20-minute presentation, or... We've been here since 1.30 today. I know. I've been here for five or six hours. You want to just watch the presentation, and you've been here as well, so thank you. Good evening, Scott Graham. I would rather see you put it off, and I'd like to see it come back with some idea that ADUs, whether they're non-compliant or future development, could do like the counties doing where they're fee-free if they rent them at under-market rate or an affordable rate for 20 years. So I'd like to see some language like that included. Thank you. I'm Cindy Forenzi. I think the staff has done a fantastic job working on all of this, and it would be great to give them plenty of time to go through it at another point in time. And it would be wonderful too if you could include those of us who built ADUs prior to this. So I know that's not really on the agenda, but if that could be looked at, you know, I'm especially wondering about the home on an ADU property, whether or not that could be included in the short-term rental program, if you might look at that anew. Thank you. Tim Willoughby speaking for affordable housing now. It's a late night, and I'd like to go home too. The only point we want to make is, as you know, we love ADUs. We think that's one of the best solutions for the housing problem in this town. However, we would like to see you pull out the vacation rental incentive. We think we spent months and months and months, and you spent months and months and months on that issue, and I would hate to see that return. Thank you. Hi, my name is John Burke, and I'm in the process of legalizing an ADU at the present time. My son lives in the property without living there and we don't charge you much rent at all, but we make him pay something so he knows he's you know, he's going to own it one day anyway, but he would not be able to live in this county in this area without where he's at now, and I'd like to see also an item, I believe it's number 15, to change the owner occupancy to sibling being on the property. Thank you very much. My name is Jesse Kempa, and just very quickly thank you very much for everybody's perseverance this evening. I mean I'll be able to make it back for the next meeting on ADUs if it is a subject of interest to me. One thing I would just like to support is the notion of removing the restrictions and adding parking requirements and looking over the future of the town. I think it would be neat to move away from so much real estate being devoted to cars. Thank you. One more? No? Okay. Council member, so that closes out the comments on the idea of an extension. So we have a motion on the floor from council member. I changed my vote. Let's postpone. Okay, motion on the floor from council member Naroyan, seconded by council member Brown to extend this out to a future meeting. I'll just like to say that I do the one thing I don't support the removal from the owner occupancy requirements, but I do like the idea of a sibling or the immediate family member I like that that was in there and I would support that if it came back. It looks like it will probably come back at some date in the new council but we'll leave it for that. Or could we do it next week? I don't think we have a special meeting. Yeah, just have a special meeting. You guys? You know, if we're going to do that then I don't know. We serve at the pleasure of the council. You certainly do. Do the 90 day if we're going to have a special meeting. 90 day on that date as well. Yep, there you go. So let's see there was a motion on the floor to continue this but is there any noticing requirement that we'd need? You would just need to continue it at this meeting to a date certain in order for us to not have to re-notice. Okay, well, I would be open to the idea of having that notice requirement on a date other than the 11th if that's something that the 90 day notice that we just talked about having that come back okay, so having those two items on the same meeting. One thing. What's that? Sorry. Okay, that's a different thing. You're talking to someone else. So, Tony looks confused. Yes? I just want to make clear that you're voting on continuing this item not taking action on the 90 day ordinance. Well, I'd like to say this that we still haven't, I mean still the same session, I'd like to see can we both go on that same agenda if we're going to do a special meeting on the same day? They could. Yeah, that's what I'm if you were to consider an emergency ordinance you can do that on short notice. Yeah, so that's so I think that whatever date certain if you guys want to look at your calendars and was it that Tuesday the 6th, the 4th the 4th of December? Yeah. I would mean to have to be evening. I will not be in the mainland of the U.S. Seriously? On that date, yes. That's okay. Okay. I don't know if anyone's here that wishes that item is, I mean I don't want to do a show of hounds, is the 4th of December, you guys waited for a long time and I'm going to look at you out there. Okay. Would you schedule a time? Would that be evening or day? I think it's going to have to be the day. Okay. Alrighty, so there's a motion on the floor and a second.