 Good morning everybody, welcome to the August 22nd, 2023 meeting of the Board of Supervisors. Madam Clerk, we can begin with a roll call please. Supervisor Koenig. Here. Cummings. Here. Hernandez. Present. McPherson. Here. And Friend. Here and I'm in Sacramento right now because I'm going to be testifying soon. On the issue that's going to happen today, so I apologize that I'm not with all of you in person today, but we're going to begin with a moment of silence and a pleasurable lead. So are there any supervisors that would like to dedicate today's moment of silence? Yeah, I'd just like to dedicate today's moment of silence to the community of Lahaina in Maui. I know that, you know, we faced a fire and I don't think we've met since that fire has happened. So just, you know, letting the folks know that our hearts go out to the people of Maui and the people of Lahaina with 850 people still not being found. I think that we're going to see the death toll rise. And so our hearts go out to all the people in that community that was impacted by those devastating fires. Thank you, Supervisor Koenig. Thank you ladies and gentlemen. This is the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, and indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Mr. Claes, are there any changes to the State's agenda? Supervisors, yes. Chair Friend and Board of the Supervisors, there's one change. On the Consent Agenda, item number 39, staff requests that this item be deleted from this agenda and we'll be brought back at a later date. Thank you very much. Good morning. My name is Adrienne Saxton and I'm here to acknowledge the important work that community health workers have in our community. And by reading a proclamation. So, Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors proclamation, proclaiming August 28 to September 1, 2023, as National Community Health Workers Week in Santa Cruz County. Whereas the National Association of Community Health Workers has developed the first ever national campaign to celebrate and commemorate community health workers for the week of August 28 through September 1, 2023. And whereas community health workers are individuals who are frontline public health workers who are trusted members of and or have an unusually close understanding of the community they serve. And whereas CHW is an umbrella term that can include promotoras, community health representatives, and other 90 other job titles, and under this umbrella term for many decades, CHWs are a unique workforce, diverse in ethnicity, language, and culture, and recognize as health professionals by the Affordable Care Act. And whereas CHWs play a crucial role in societal health care efforts as documented and countless randomized control trials, systematic reviews, and return on investment studies of CHW interventions, and are increasingly recognized for their contributions to addressing racial equity and the social determinants of health by connecting individuals to basic needs and by organizing communities to address inequitable social conditions. And whereas at the breakdown of the Pajaro River levee, levee in March 2023, which flooded the community of Pajaro, multicultural and multilingual CHWs were essential in Santa Cruz County's effort to meet the needs of the displaced community members by providing resources and access to community services. Hi, my name is Hailey Mears. I'm with the Health Improvement Partnership of Santa Cruz County, and I'm just going to finish the rest of the proclamation. Whereas CHWs are a precarious workforce that need improved policy, funding, and legal support to promote their sustainability, professional development, career ladders, and recognition for their integral role in reducing health inequities. We have Zach, our chair of the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors, hereby proclaimed on behalf of the county and all residents thereof the week of August 28 through September 1, 2023 as Community Health Worker Awareness Week, and encouraged the many community, agency, and business partners to support local, state, and national efforts that improve policies that respect, protect, and authentically partner with the CHW profession and recognize it as a vital local workforce in Santa Cruz County, the state, and across our nation, and an important driver to reduce racial health inequities. And it was signed August 15th, 2023. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Hello, my name is Laura Chatham, and I want to thank you for doing the hard work. Oh, sorry. Can I start over? Because that's long. My name is Laura Chatham. I want to thank you for doing the hard work of being county supervisors. I know that there's a lot of difficult things going on in the county, and so you need people like me to come and tell you about it. Today, I would like to bring your attention to the County Mental Health Advisory Board. Last week, we welcomed back our new Behavioral Health Director, Tiffany Cintrell Warren, returned from maternity leave, another beautiful May baby. And Tiffany returned just in time for the Mental Health Advisory Board response to the grand jury report about entitled underfunded, understaffed, and overworked. I have a copy here, and I see it as number 18 on the consent agenda for today. We have known there is a hiring problem within Behavioral Health Department for a long time, for years. It isn't new, and it is crippling our Behavioral Health Department. I would like to request the Board of Supervisors instruct the Personnel Department to work with Behavioral Health to fix the hiring process. We could use Mental Health Services Act innovation funds to innovate and improve our hiring and recruitment. The Mental Health Oversight and Accountability Commission sent us the document that Amador County wrote to use their Mental Health Services Act innovation funds to improve their hiring process. I emailed it to you last week, and I gave the first two pages to pass out. The Behavioral Health Department should rewrite our application to focus on the real problem which is hiring. Instead of wasting that money when doing another study with an Arizona company to find out what we already know, we have plenty of great programs, just not enough services. There's long waiting lists for all our programs because we don't have enough staff. Thank you, ma'am. The RII study will take valuable time from our staff to work on another. Thank you. Thank you. We appreciate it. Thank you. Good morning. Welcome. I spoke before you briefly two weeks ago. There I sounded a somewhat discordant note, I'm afraid, suggesting that there's actually a crisis in our political institutions and public health institutions. And we might not recognize this in Santa Cruz, and I don't want to disparage the work of any community health workers. I'm sure their intentions are noble, but I'm afraid that the reality of what is about us is much more disturbing. For that reason, I suggest that we call something like a Truth and Reconciliation Commission as they had in South Africa after apartheid. Because it's time for us to look back on the last three years and evaluate every decision was made. Every community health organization needs to be examined for what financial incentives they gave to give the vaccine. We need a full exploration of all communications. And I invite the supervisors to take leadership in this by being fully transparent in all of their activities and communications and decision making structures in the last three years. I want to speak directly to chairman friend because on the one hand I feel conflicted because I honor and appreciate the hard work of public service and I know that you're all doing your very best. I'm troubled by chairman friend suggestion that AI tools could potentially analyze complex legal briefs and that's a suggestion for how we might go about this. I don't think that's going to be possible for Truth and Reconciliation Commission because that's something that needs human judgment and we can't do that with AI. I would also like to invite chairman friend to bring back professor Rebecca Dubois from the engineering department whom he had a virtual town hall with on January 5th, 2021. She made the statements that the vaccines were no corners were cut making the vaccines. She said that natural immunity was not protective and that everyone whether or not they had had COVID should go out and get that. I would invite chairman friend to bring professor Dubois back and have a full disclosure. Thank you man. Appreciate it. Good morning. Welcome. Good morning. My name is Nancy Macy. I'm chair of the Valley Women's Club Environmental Committee. We recently had the opportunity to present the commission on the environment with solid research and reasoning behind the benefits of instituting a new franchise agreement with PG&E. We sincerely hope that you will prioritize the time to read the commission's letter with its attachments included under correspondence in today's agenda packet. The COE voted unanimously to provide the board with this information and recommends the board analyze the annual annual franchise fees paid to the county. The current franchise agreement is a boilerplate ordinance approved back in 1955. PG&E committed to provide a system installed, constructed and maintained in a good and workman-like manner. However, PG&E has failed for decades to maintain no less comprehensively upgraded system. The result, less reliability and safety. The change has exacerbated PG&E's many infrastructure-caused ignitions creating deadly conflagrations year after year, despite the millions and millions of trees they have cut down. In contrast, Southern California Edison has been comprehensively modernizing its system with great success, with over 5,000 circuit miles replaced ignitions in those high-fire threat areas have been eliminated. PG&E has apparently abandoned public safety power shut off so no more warnings of a pending outage since cutting off power is the only way for PG&E to prevent fires. We now have EPSS repeatedly without warning, causing severe personal and financial hardship to residents and businesses time and time again. Along with other organizations working to motivate oversight agencies like the CPUC, CALFIRE, the OEIS and the Legislature, we've seen but minimal improvements, damages continue, and massive cost increases threaten. However, we recognize the real potential of local government taking back its authority through franchise agreements. Please consider the possibilities. Thank you, Ms. Mays. Good morning and welcome. Good morning. My name is Brett Garrett. I live again in the city of Santa Cruz and I'm a steering committee member of the California Alliance for Community Energy. Speaking only for myself today, I want to support the Valley Women's Clubs recommendation to renegotiate the franchise agreement with PG&E. There is so much good information in the packet of information that was provided in today's agenda packet. Actually, I would like to take the recommendation a step further. I'd like to fire PG&E. This company is a criminal enterprise that literally burned down paradise. Please terminate the PG&E agreement by the assets form a municipal utility district that provide electricity for our residents and businesses. The cost of buying the infrastructure is a small fraction of what we're already paying PG&E. Santa Cruz County is so much larger than cities that have their own municipal utilities, such as city of Alameda, Lompoc, Palo Alto, Ucaya, Needles, Shasta Lake. Tiny cities have their own municipal utilities, so why shouldn't we? The municipal utilities in general provide much better pricing and better reliability than PG&E. SMUD, for example, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, does have the cost of PG&E. PG&E charges us high transmission charges regardless of whether the energy is coming from across the street or across the state. We still pay transmission if it's next door. This system is rigged to facilitate a boondoggle of more and more transmission lines to profit PG&E. We need a different billing structure that encourages local renewable generation, including community microgrids. We need lower rates, especially for low income folks and disadvantaged communities. We need to stop the solar tax that is impending. And any franchise agreement with PG&E must include an expiration date the sooner the better. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning. Hi, my name is Susan Nielsen and I'm a librarian at Santa Cruz Public Libraries. I'm proud to provide library programs and services to incarcerated adults and youth in our county corrections facilities. I'm also an active participant in the Commission on Justice and Gender. Today I want to applaud those who worked so hard to reopen Blaine facility, women's facility. The library is so grateful to be able to provide books and weekly classes for incarcerated women again. We truly hope that Blaine will continue to stay open beyond the time when the electrical upgrade at the main jail is completed. Incarcerated women in our county need the same access to opportunities, programs like ours from the library and Cabrillo's Rising Scholars. The same ones that the men, they need the same access to opportunities that men get at roundtree facility. I'd also really like to see the return of in-person visitation for children and incarcerated parents. Physical interaction between parent and child is how children are reassured that their absent parent is safe and still loves them. Reducing anxiety and emotional harm to children of incarcerated parents is an important way to reduce cycles of trauma in our community. As it stands now, there's no way to know how many children in our county have incarcerated parents. Go to a question like, are you the parent of minor children be added to the jail intake process? Knowing how many parents in our facilities would help children and it would help organizations like mine to get more and more relevant support and resources to families who need them. Thank you all and thanks again for all your work to keep Blaine open. It really is making a world of difference. Thank you for those comments. Good morning and welcome. Good morning. My name is Faye Johnson. I'm a longtime San Fernando Valley resident. I live at Upper East by God's eye, Andy. We are eight and a half miles up a windy road and we are at the end of the line, literally for PG&E. There are 18 homes on the little dog leg that goes across the creek and across the canyon and then back to us. So when we have an emergency power shut off, there is very little bang for the buck for PG&E to come put us back up. And when the power goes out, it's going to be out for days or weeks or we don't know and they don't tell us. They come up with some reinstatement time 10 minutes after it goes out and then they just change it when they can't meet it. So when the power goes out, that's when all the generators start and they're diesel generators and gas generators. And we have all of the racket and all of the stench from all of that. This is not sustainable. And it's time that PG&E is being held accountable through looking at their franchise agreement and it should start with you. We're asking you to start that process. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning. Welcome. Good morning. I'm Bracken Andrews, a member of the San Lorenzo Valley Women's Club Environmental and PG&E committee. I was part of the BWC group that presented information on creating a new franchise agreement with PG&E to the county commission of the environment. The commission gave the Board of Supervisors recommendations along with our attached documents. I hope the supervisors will go over these attachments and have a favorable consensus to the creation of a new franchise agreement with PG&E. More than half of Santa Cruz County residents live in a high fire risk wildland urban interface, the highest percentage of any county in California. Most of these areas have dangerous bear power wires, which can cause fires and power outages. For more detailed information, please see the packet that you received. Fire dispatch data for Santa Cruz County shows how severe the issue of wires down has been. In 2021, there were 797 wires down. In 2022, 559. As of July 20 of this year, 1026. Many of these can be live and sparking. Santa Cruz County has almost 880 miles of distribution lines in high fire threat areas. PG&E undergrounding wires is just not feasible for most of the narrow mountain roads with rocky terrain and would be very damaging to our trees, our environment and our watershed. Plus, it would take many years of the slow pace PG&E is moving of only three miles in Santa Cruz County this year. Thank you, sir. You're welcome. Thank you. Good morning. Welcome. Thank you for waiting. Thank you. Good morning. My name is Kristen Sandel. I'm a member of the VWC. I've lived in the San Lorenzo Valley for 30 years and sure. Okay. Can you hear me? Great. And we have never had power outages like the ones we've seen in the past two years. These outages are not only disruptive, they're dangerous. This year alone, we've had dozens of outages, including outages of nearly two weeks over the winter. That was due to natural disaster, but as our weather patterns are disrupted and extreme weather becomes more common, less urban areas will bear the brunt of our failing infrastructure. And as California pushes for statewide renewable, green energy and electrification, the burden on our power grid will increase exponentially. We need that grid to be updated, safe and reliable. My house is 20 minutes from downtown. It's not even very rural, yet we routinely see outages, downed wires, failing equipment. Shutting off the power during fire season should not be PG&E's primary tool to reduce wildfire risk. A few years ago, we had a power pole and live lines come down on our road when a tree fell. My neighbor was a PG&E lineman and they had just replaced those lines with insulated wire. Those fully electrified but insulated lines lay on top of a pile of debris for nearly six hours, hot, before being shut off and did not spark a fire. That one section of insulated line probably saved us from a potentially dangerous situation since the wire was across the road and we couldn't drive out. When the county set up its franchise agreement with PG&E in 1955, it also assumed the responsibility to ensure that contract served its residents well, to protect us and our environment. PG&E has not lived up to its responsibilities to us. Please read through the County Commission on the Environment's excellent letter to you on the franchise agreement and the supporting materials attached. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning and welcome. Good morning. I'm really freaked out about the central bank digital currency and vehemently oppose it. After my experiences in family court that has all the hallmarks of the Satanic religion with people wearing black robes, how much more obvious can you get? Who are stealing, killing and destroying children and families in Satanic ritualistic abuse and reporting the minions with lots of money? It suddenly dawned on me that the paper Fiat debt-based currency we are using since the 1970s says in God we trust, but which God is that? I always thought it was God Almighty, heavenly creator, but now that I've learned that the central bankers Fiat currency is a debt-based and Ponzi scheme, I began to wonder if they're referring to the God Satan, so I want nothing to do with it. I propose we in Santa Cruz go back to physical metals. Someone gave me a silver coin stamp $1, it's one ounce, but it now takes 36.6 Fiat pieces of this paper to buy that one ounce silver as of this morning. Jesus Christ was betrayed for 30 pieces of silver, which technically still exists today in one form or another. The United States dollar that we use today has only been around for 50 years. It's nothing more than a number printed on a piece of paper with green ink. If I put a piece of paper written with the five in one hand and one with one written on the other, close my eyes, I can't tell the difference. But if I put one ounce of silver in one hand and a quarter ounce of silver in the other and close my eyes, I can feel the difference because it's real and has intrinsic value. The central bank digital currencies are just a number made up on a computer screen. It doesn't mean anything. So I propose we use real money that is time tested for thousands of years. Go back to silver, coin, gold and other precious metals. That's just my opinion. And I'm wondering why the United States flag isn't in the middle of those two flags front and center according to four US seven on flag. How to hang a flag. Thank you. Good morning and welcome. Good morning. My name is Becky Steinbrunner. I live in the San Cruz Mountains in rural laptops. I'm going to address your board this morning as the board of directors of Santa Cruz County fire department, because that is what you are. I want to first apologize for running over so long in my testimony when chief Armstrong was here and gave you the 2023 fire update. Two minutes is not very long to say a lot and it turns out three minutes isn't either. So I want to apologize first of all for running over. There was a lot of needed to say there's a lot you need to hear from the people. And what I really wanted to say and didn't have time to say at your last meeting was that Santa Cruz County fire department needs to do an after action review. Of the CZU fire. We're here on the third anniversary of that devastating event. People are still recovering. And we need to look at what happened well and what didn't happen well in that fire with the Santa Cruz County fire department volunteers. Those people stayed behind. They saved homes at a time when Cal Fire was telling them to go home, go away. We've got to look at why that happened. We've got to look at what went well. And rather than relying 100% on the AP Triton County fire master plan that was supposed to be done by your appointees on the county fire advisory commission. It was rested away from them. County fires now paying tens of thousands of dollars to have a consultant do it that doesn't know our county. Please have an after action review with the Santa Cruz County volunteer fire department people and the community and get this good planning information solid and moving forward. Thank you. Good morning. Welcome. Morning chair friend members of the board. My name is Jim Heaney. I am a shop steward here at the county of Santa Cruz. This morning myself and a number of our members will address you on a subject which has to do with probationary employees. You're not aware when you get hired at the county of Santa Cruz you serve a probationary period. Unlike board members who serve a four year period. And then follow the election. Most employees serve a six month period. And through that we have a process of evaluating those employees. And those employees are essentially at will and can be released at the end of the probation. If they are deemed not acceptable. We have a long standing past practice that when this occurs we have an appeal process. And that's what I'm here to address today. We need to retain and remain having that appeal process for the employees. Because it really is a life changing event when you come to work for somewhere like the county. After six months you get released and you have no way to say hey I don't think this is fair. And I will try to give you a quick example. Many years ago when I was first to shop steward one of my coworkers was sitting at her desk. Well a fellow coworker yelled at her and used the F word repeatedly. What happened at that time was the supervisor walked up and asked what did you do to upset him so much. Let's blame the victim. Good thing is 20 years later we've learned not to do that as much. So I filed an appeal. We were successful. And that employee was an employee for over eight years until the layoffs came in 2008. So to tell you it's a life changing event. That woman is my wife. That woman is the mother of my granddaughter. And so it is very personal to me that we should not be changing this because you know it does make a difference. And I will tell you it's very de minimis the number of times we deal with this is less than a dozen appeals a year. And when they are successful they matter to people. I thank you for your time. Thank you. Thank you for sharing the story. Good morning and welcome. Thank you for waiting. Good morning. Co Britain. Matt's Britain Architects. I'm here today to talk about the Coastal Development Permit on Beach Drive. It took many years and litigation and also the county's own legal expert witness telling environmental planning staff that they were wrong. Hundreds of thousands of dollars years and time. A part of this cost development permit is a landside mitigation structure. It's below in pairs below steel mash on another property. We obtained this permit or we were in process of getting our building permit. And we got the correction because a landslide occurred while we're waiting for the permit that we needed to get amendment to the permit because a landslide occurred. Well guess what's going to happen if we apply for amendment to that permit. The geologist has said that we're likely to have another landslide. So this is going to be a constant loop of applying for a CDP amendment for something that's going to be ongoing. To give you an example we have a project that is an emergency shoreline protection structure. EP staff said it was an emergency coastal staff geologist and engineer said yes it is emergency. So we are installing this emergency coastal protection structure. It is legally one not like what the pin piercer claim to be. But guess what happens every day. It erodes. We don't get another coastal development permit because we'd have to do one every day. One of what's going on here is that staff has absurd interpretation of code. Nobody wrote code to have this happen. So it's bad interpretation of code. If you get an absurd result. And this board really needs to talk to Mr. Machado and fix this stuff. Thank you. Thank you Mr. Brun. Good morning and welcome. Good morning honorable board. My name is Emily Chung. I am the public health division director for health services agency for the county. I want to thank the board for proclaiming August 31st as international awareness day. International overdose awareness day within this proclamation. We acknowledge that there are we are remembering those we have lost due to the impacts of substance use and that we want to continue providing equitable services and reducing stigma for those impacted. It reminds us also that last year in 2022 our county witnessed 98 individuals losing their lives to accidental overdose, which is a tragic number that we want to reduce. The resolution also reminds us that we support CDC evidence based strategies including naloxone distribution, medication assisted treatment, 911 good Samaritan laws and harm reduction activities like syringe services exchange programs. It is also very timely that starting next week we will begin town halls related to opioid settlement funds planning. So our county will be receiving part of the litigation funds related to opioid settlements from pharmaceutical firms. We will be we're doing this planning across behavioral health and public health. Next week we invite the public to attend our town halls to hear our survey results and a proposed spending plan as well as to provide additional input based on those plants. The events will be next Wednesday August 30th at 5 30pm for the English virtual town hall. And then in Spanish we will have an in person event in Watsonville at the city building on the fourth floor. And Wednesday September 6 at 5 30pm for the Spanish in person event, which will be also family friendly. Look for details on our county and public health social media pages when those were released very shortly. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Thank you for your work. Good morning. Welcome back. I'm a board of supervisors. My name is for the service. Today I stand before you as the co chair of the justice and gender commission advocate for the continued operation of the woman's jail and to address several crucial aspects that demand our attention. Our goals to not only keep the facility open but also to institute changes that promote the well being of both inmates and their families, while upholding the highest standards of justice. It is imperative that we find a way for children to visit their incarcerated parents in person and be able to share and embrace the emotional bond between a child and their parent should not be hindered by the circumstances of incarceration, especially when a significant portion of the inmates are awaiting trial, fostering these connections could lead to positive outcomes for both parents and children. Furthermore, we recognize the importance of ensuring access to prescription medication upon release collaborating with the current health care provider within the jail to facilitate a seamless transition to necessary medications. This post release is vital for the overall health and stability of the individuals re-entering society. This step can contribute to a reduction in recidivism and promote successful reintegration. In addressing the concerns related to the prison rape elimination act, we advocate for an unbiased and thorough review to guarantee impartiality. We propose that the newly appointed inspector auditor be interested with reviewing all fear related matters. The independence of this entity will help us instill confidence in the community that our commitment to the safety and rights of inmates is unwavering. It is essential to recognize the distinction between belief and knowledge. While the sheriff's beliefs are valuable, a neutral external entity assessment of Bria compliance carries greater weight. By embracing this change, we set an example for transparency and accountability that other communities can look up to. Finally, as we embark on this multi-faceted endeavor, we acknowledge that the path of our care carving may be unprecedented, yet the absence of prior presidents should not deter us. Instead, it challenges us to rise above, launching innovative solutions that can reshape the landscape of correctional facilities and inspire others to follow suit. Let us remember that our actions today can reverate our beyond our immediate jurisdiction by advocating for the women's jail prayers, prioritizing family connections, ensuring access to medication and the listening and partial review process. We are not just safeguarding the rights of the incarcerated, but leading the way towards a more equitable and just future. Thank you for your consideration. Thank you for those comments. Good morning and welcome. Good morning supervisors. My name is Greg Bangson. I took part in the annual point in time homeless headcount survey and to see the 22% reduction, so-called reduction, as Baldur Dasch, and I'll tell you why, because I woke up at four in the morning because I didn't feel like it, but I'd written 40 of my dead friend's names on my shirt. When I woke up, people that had died on the streets, that woke me up. It was a rainy, bad, bad day, and I can, you know, we can, I'll talk to you, Justin, perhaps, or send you an email, and I don't need to litigate, but people were trying to have it canceled that day. Nobody wanted to. I didn't want to get out of the car and look anywhere, but it was just, it's completely statistically off, and we've got to fix that because that's not only, I mean, it's money with the entire county for all the programs and the trickles down to us. But also, it's just nice to have a truth out there, you know, and to really know what's going on. And I promise you, and Justin knows how stubborn I get, but in a friendly way, we've got to figure out a way to, that's got to be corrected. And I've got friends of accountants and statistical analysis people back in my old days. Let's figure out something and let's work together on that and make it right. And thank you. Thank you. Good morning. Good morning. My name is Maria Luna. I'm right here representing monarch services. I have been doing in custody services for six years. When Jag first started, been doing the work with survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, human trafficking. I want to thank you for the services we are able to provide, which is the confidential crisis line, our safe release program. I also want to say that we need to keep blame open. And everything that Celeste just mentioned is very, very important. And the other big one is my the PREA reports, we need an outside investigator. It's really hard for someone that's investigated its own prison rapes. That is in-house. We need someone outside. I also just want to say thank you for giving me this time to speak. And I would really recommend that if you would like more information, stories, reach out, reach out to us. You know, ask questions. We have a lot to say. I've been in there. I go in there every week into main jail and blame. I have a lot of stories. And so this is our county. And I just want to say, I just want to say thank you for giving me this time. Thank you. Good morning and welcome. Yeah, good morning. My name is James Ewing Whitman. You know, sometimes I just wonder why human beings are on earth. I'd like to see, I'd like to think it's to help each other. You know, there's been a lot of discussions. Maybe not so much today here about the fires going on. I don't know how to really verify that there appear to be thousands of wildfires going on right now. You know, over 360 just in British Columbia. You know, three years ago, I mean, I was a direct witness to those lightning fires. I hadn't really seen anything like that before. You know, unfortunately, you know, not many people here were killed, unlike what happened in Mali. Some people say 1300 children were burned alive in their homes because the water was turned off. Electricity was left on. And the pictures that I've seen match very closely to the directed energy weapons attack that happened in this county three years ago. I wish more people that knew about this and my people around would be here talking about it. So, you know, why are we actually here? You know, everybody's pushing these stories, you know, they talk about climate change. You know, it's really climate terrorism. There's a lot of evidence out there that people that control various militaries are causing these fires. It's just really kind of sad. I mean, we're pushing this zero carbon. Both plants and human beings are carbon based are human, hemoglobin, hemoglobin, excuse me, is iron based. The difference between the plant blood is that it's magnesium based. So, I don't know, I'm kind of familiarizing myself with a book called On Message. How a compelling narrative will make your organization succeed. You know, Splank has written an entertaining and insightful guide to crafting messages and business life in politics. His advice is dead. Is there anybody else in chambers I'd like to address us? Seeing none, Madam Clerk, is there anybody online? Yes, there are two speakers. Linda, your microphone is now available. All right, can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you. Thanks. Well, good morning, Chair Friend and members of the board. I'm Linda Marin. I live on Smithgrade in Bonnie Dune, and I'm attending today to encourage you as others have as well to review the county's very out of date franchise agreement with PG&E. I watched firsthand after the CZU fire, after we fought our own CZU fire here on Smithgrade. I watched the PG&E's contractors fell countless healthy trees that were significant distances from any power lines, leaving owners in Upper Bonnie Dune shocked and outraged and burdened with the cost of removing those large and numerous trees from their properties. And those were trees that were providing habitat and increasingly sequestering carbon as they stood. So it's no secret that PG&E's wildlife and vegetation management is compromised and even dangerous. And why is it that the wildfire mitigation plan of PG&E compares so poorly to those of other California utilities like Southern California Edison, for instance? Fortunately, our county's commissioners on the environment are well informed about these issues and they've done their homework and they've shared it with you in the packet. And I encourage you to take guidance from them and considering updating the franchise agreement that the county enters into to deliver energy to the residents of Santa Cruz County, because surely we can do better. Thank you. Thank you. I'm calling user 8204, your microphone is now available. Caller user 8204, your microphone is now available. To unmute, you can use star six. Hello, my name is Emily and I'm putting out a call to action today for all people in Santa Cruz County to participate in exiting the who. In a who declared emergency, World Health Organization, here are the plans for your future. The end of American sovereignty, no freedom of choice for medical care, mandatory injections, no exceptions, surveillance, loss of privacy, loss of rights, liberties and freedoms, loss of personal choice and informed consent. Global control in one world government equals global totalitarianism. You can participate in exiting the who by going to exitthewho.com and learn more there you can get involved with some quick action steps and let's be sustainable and equitable and keeping American sovereignty for all. So go to exitthewho.com and help out. This is something for everybody, not just party people. So I implore you to go to exitthewho.com today and to help us participate in keeping our sovereignty for America. All right, thank you very much. Bye bye. Thank you. All in user one, your microphone is now available. Exiting the World Health Organization as well. And I also support the Valley Women's Club on renegotiating the franchise agreement with PG&E, which stands for poison gas and explosions. PG&E should be dismantled. Seems like how many ways can corporations destroy the planet? Have in front of me a publication called Wise Traditions from Westinaprise.org, an article, podcast interview with Naomi Wolf on the Pfizer documents expose. This is from this summer. The interviewer dates the Pfizer documents on the testing of the COVID-19 vaccines were released by court order in March 2022. A detailed analysis of the documents revealed that not only was Pfizer's COVID-19 injection far from safe and effective, but it was intentionally designed to harm the world's population and impede human reproduction. Naomi Wolf, journalist, activist, CEO of the Daily Cloud and author of books such as The Beauty Myth and The Bodies of Others walks us through the many shocking revelations of the war room. Daily Cloud Pfizer documents analysis reports now available in book form. Over 3,500 doctors and scientists participated in the project of analyzing the documents. One fact there were 42,000 adverse effects in the three months after the rollout. 36,000 of the adverse events. We're in the United States. Thank you, Ms. Garrett. There are no further speakers, Chair. Thank you. All right, we'll bring it to the board for consideration of the consent agenda. Supervisor Hernandez, do you have any comments on the consent agenda? No. Thank you, Supervisor Cummings. Thank you, Chair, and I just want to thank and appreciate all the people who came out and spoke with us this morning. Item number 19 is approval of the nominations for the 2023 CSAC challenge awards. I just want to thank staff for the recommendations that were made, but I do have to vote yes on this, but I don't support the the recommendation of the core program for this award. I think that that program is off to a good start, but it's obviously been a little bumpy. And right now I know that staff has been working to get feedback from community members and from different board members on how to improve the program. So I think after this program has gone through some approvals that it would likely be something that I would support in terms of recommending it for that award, but I can't support that recommendation at this time, however, I will be voting yes on that item. Item number 20 is the FEMA, the quarterly status report on FEMA and public assistance for the county's response to the Code 19 pandemic to CZU lightning fires in the atmospheric rivers. I want to appreciate this update from the county as well, but I do believe that, you know, I think it highlights the need for us to continue to put pressure on our officials and, you know, even if it takes us writing a letter to the president because I'm with all the different disasters we're seeing over time. These delays in this critical funding are just going to keep getting longer and longer and we need these critical funds to support our county services and so my hope is that we can continue to figure out how we can expedite us being able to receive the funding that we desperately need and has been a result of some of these natural disasters that keep continuing to occur. Item number 21, which was brought up by members of the community around the response to the justice and gender report. I just want to appreciate the sheriff's department for getting back to us with their responses. I also share the concerns raised by the justice and gender co chair and the people who spoke on this item. I've received some feedback from community members that are concerned that Blaine Street might be shut down in the future and I think it's important that we try to figure out what we can do to keep it open as long as possible. And I also share the concerns and share the concerns related to visitation and medical medication distribution upon release. And I also just want to acknowledge something that the sheriff's department brought up which is something that's common across many departments which is that we're having issues with staffing and recruitment and retention. And in order to run these programs we really need to try to do our best to staff up our different departments as best possible so we're not burning people out by making them work too much overtime. So I hope that as we continue these conversations around recruitment and retention that we're also acknowledging the needs in all the different departments including the sheriff's department health services agencies and the many other departments where we're seeing vacancies. I think that concludes all my comments. So thank you. Thank you. Surveys are coming. Surveys are coming. Thank you chairs to few brief comments on item 33 the telecare which includes $20 million for psychiatric health facility and 14 million for the crisis stabilization program over a two year period. I primarily want to thank the health services agency on this one for really we have had some challenges in this area and I appreciate that HSA is digging in to provide a greater level of technical assistance and improve operations particularly as far as our process for around 5150 holds and transportation to and from the jail. And I also appreciate that it's just a two year contract and will provide an opportunity to reevaluate in the near future. On item 40 the heart of Soquel repair for $140,000 I want to thank parks for their quick work on this. You spend a lot of time talking about all the work we're doing on roads after the storms but of course parks had many millions of dollars of damage as well, particularly in the first district since people may have not realized most of the stairs that go down to the beach are in fact County Park facilities. So already we've had spare pairs at 26 20th 12th. I know more pairs are in the works for 38 and other plus well known coastal access points. So again my appreciation of parks for all their work on this and general responsiveness to the community. And finally item 46 the improvements to Redwood Road I'm going to abstain from voting on this item since I do a family that lives on that road. Thank you. Thank you. Survisor Kona. Survisor McPherson. Thank you chair friend. We're going to address items number 16 and 19 on the strategic plan update and the CSAC challenge awards. You know every time the county county strategic plan and operations plan around the board's agenda we should really be thinking about the counties and thanking them. Of the executive teams for this effective management tool that was introduced by CEO Carlos Palacios and carried out by the executive staff and Nicole Colburn in particular should be mentioned. This really creates a framework for the county staff to work better as a team to focus on accomplishing the objectives that we're targeting and to be increasingly transparent and accountable to the community we serve. And it's working as evidenced by the challenge awards that this county in competition with the 57 other counties in the state of California year after year has received awards from the county or the California State Association of Counties or CSAC. I'm excited to see that three more programs apply for another round of the challenge awards the core investments neighborhood courts and or our threes bridge internship internship program. These are innovative and effective initiatives which the county can be proud of and which the grand jury even has addressed some of them and really given given some really high marks to on item number 20 the frame of reimbursement update as was mentioned previously. Again I want to thank the county staff for keeping the board so up to date on the situation with our FEMA or federal emergency management agency reimbursement processes. Thank you especially to Allison Violanti from chair of friends staff for working closely with our congressional partners to free up some of those funds. My office has also communicated numerous times with our congressional representatives who have been very responsive, including the recent as recently as yesterday how critical it is that received this funding. It seems that the situation is improving but it's not fast enough to put the need into perspective outlined in our report today. The $65 million we believe FEMA still owes the county is equivalent to the general fund budgets of parks or three probation public defender and the county clerk combined. That's big and that's why we are in a real tight financial situation in the county or part of the reason anyway. So we'll keep on hitting the message and bring trying to get it home and we know our congressional leaders will help us as much as they can. In regard to the written correspondence on today agenda today's agenda and some of our constituents especially in the fifth district have responded to. I want to thank the commission on the environment for this information about the PG&E franchise agreement and especially appreciate the fifth district constituents who brought this forward to the board today. These are really serious issues that PG&E will need to be addressed addressing on the state level in partnership with other communities. And I understand the county staff is looking into auditing the franchise agreement fee situation and it's welcome and we need to do it as soon as possible. Thank you. Thank you Sir Rezmik first and a couple brief items here. I just want to appreciate the board support of the letter of support for SB 620 in regards to low impact camping areas which will greatly improve equity and access for a number of residents throughout the state for access to these open spaces. A lot of recreational opportunities are limited because of cost or availability and so to have low cost and greater availability for these kinds of locations will be very important. On the FEMA item I think it's first I appreciate Sir Rezmik first and acknowledgment of Ms. Villante's remarkable work on this and I just wanted to point out also that the National Association of Counties of which I serve on the National Executive Board is now taking this up. As a priority issue to Supervisor Cummings note about the advocacy unfortunately we're not alone in having this issue across the country and so now the National Association of Counties is doing even stronger advocacy in regards to trying to free up some of that money. FEMA of course is dealing with disaster after disaster after disaster and so it is important that we constantly keep the reminder that there are a number of communities across the country that are still building out of previous disasters and have spent a significant amount of money on those issues and so I appreciate the board's continued support on that and I will continue to work with Naco on that issue. Lastly just on the Westridge item and the South County Service Center it's just great to see that continuing to move along. This is going to be a great component for access for South County residents as well as for South County and even beyond employees that will not need to make the commute. Some of those that desperately need the services the county are currently commuting very far in order to receive those services so to have that building up and running and it's moving closer and closer every day as this item notes is very important. Alright I'll bring it to the board for a motion on the consent agenda recognizing one abstention from Supervisor Koenig on the Redwood Road item. I'll move the consent agenda. Second. Alright we have a motion from Supervisor Hernandez and a second from Supervisor Koenig if we could have a roll call please. Supervisor Koenig. Aye. Cummings. Aye. Hernandez. Aye. McPherson. Aye. And Friend. Aye and that passes unanimously with one abstention. Sorry to interrupt Chair I thought that Supervisor Cummings had a no vote on something on the consent agenda related to the core one item matters that right? Yes and maybe I can get some, well I need some clarification. What I was trying to do is support the agenda item with the one caveat of making a statement of not supporting the core item that was a part of that agenda item. Okay. Three recommendations with three or four recommendations within that one item. Okay so you're a yes vote on that item. Yes. Well also just making the record stating that I don't support the core. Okay. Thank you. Sorry for the interruption chair. No it's okay. Thank you council. We'll move on to the first item of the regular agenda, which is item seven, a presentation of a check in the amount of $394,000 from the friends of the Santa Cruz public libraries for the new Aptos branch libraries outlined in the memo of the CAO. And this, as I was just fortunate to just tour with Damon, thank you for that tour of the Aptos library. It looks so good there. I mean, I'm so excited to have the community check it out and a remarkable work of the Aptos branch library friends who have done a lot to really help secure this and so I believe we have a Ms. Driscoll. I can't see the chambers, but I believe that you were there. I'm here. All right, so go ahead and fire away. Thank you. My name is Janice O'Driscoll, and I am president of the friends of the Santa Cruz public libraries. I'm accompanied by Bruce Cotter, the executive director of the friends, and by Eric Howard, who is the assistant director of the Santa Cruz public libraries. The friends are advocates of public libraries, as we demonstrated when we worked for the passage of measure s to revitalize all 10 branches of the library system. The friends are fundraisers. We have successfully conducted a series of capital campaigns. So that we can stand here today. Seven years after the passage of measure s and know that at the end of this year. Nine of the branches will have been upgraded. And reopened to the community. The people of Santa Cruz County love their libraries. They are vigorous users of the services. They make their votes known at the ballot box. And they are generous. The most recent capital campaign, which span 2020 to 2022. In spite of a pandemic, in spite of a long lockdown, in spite of anxiety of the times. The friends were able to raise over a million dollars for the support of the Garfield Park branch, the branch of 40 branch. And the Aptos branch. They are very generous people and we stand here now, supporting those donors who have made it possible. For the friends to present this check for $394,000 toward the construction of the Aptos branch. I don't know what will happen at the AGM. So maybe we should go take a picture. Thank you. This is so cool. Thank you for that. Are there any supervisors like to make comments on this item? Mr. Chair, this is so cool. This is the Friends of Libraries is a great organization that works so hard to support the measure. Yes, ballot measure in 2016 that gained 70% of the post. Really remarkable, but just generally to support our branches that all 10 of them, the staff and the libraries and their terrific program. Just the opportunity to thank the county voters who supported that measure in 2016. We have a tremendous library system and it's being made better by your contributions, particularly from what we see from Aptos for that library, a phenomenal building, and it's going to be much appreciated by county residents for many years to come. So thank you. Thank you for those comments. I mean, Aptos before the closure on any given day was this was either the second or third most branch in the entire use branch in the entire system. It's really a community asset. It isn't doesn't just serve the residents of the second district. It does serve our residents from both the first and fourth districts pretty commonly as well. The new facility has a greatly expanded children's and youth area, a special area for teens and little study areas for teens and adults that has great new technology area. It's wide, it's open, it's environmentally sound. It's got a lot of natural light. I think that people is evocative of both the Redwoods and the sea with with some of the design elements. It's a very, very special place and and we were as Miss O'Driscoll noted and I know that some of the board members that are still serving today worked on the measure s committee to do this outreach. So once in a generational opportunity to upgrade libraries that have been upgraded in 3040 or 50 years in certain cases and we're definitely appreciative of the voters that supported this and giving them libraries that are worthy of this community. It's very exciting to see the Aptos branch open at the end of the year. Are there any other comments from board members or Mr Plosios? I know you and Miss Coburn work on the serve on the library board as well. If there's any comment you'd like to make. Yes, on behalf of the board of the library joint powers authority like to really thank the friends of the library for your work. I know how hard they work to give us report at every one of our board meetings and believe me it was not an easy thing to raise the amount of money they did they had so many events. And they've been so tireless in their efforts and so we really do appreciate it because this is crucial in getting all the amenities we want to add that beautiful library and like the rest of the board I can't wait till it opens and the community sees it. It's going to be a great, great addition to Aptos. Thank you. Thank you. Is there any member of the community that would like to address this on this item? It's an on action item, but it is an item on today's agenda in chambers. Madam clerk is or I'm seeing none. Is there anybody online? And then I see a supervisor Hernandez. We do have one speaker online. Thank you. Call in user one. Your microphone is now available. The friends of the library in their work. I call on your organization to assure a safe and healthy environment with wired computers. Without Wi-Fi, microwave, radiation, assault. This is not an environmentally sound library or any of them. I used to love to go to the library as a teacher. I took classroom children to the library. But I avoid it now. Why? I have in front of me a brochure Wi-Fi in the library question of convenience or health hazards. And there are over 3000 studies conducted worldwide on the cell phones, cell towers and other wireless technologies. About 70% of all studies show one or more health effects. Symptoms include neurological symptoms of headache, shizziness, which I experienced when I go to the library briefly. I hardly ever go. I pay taxes for it. This is the elephant in the room. Wi-Fi is a barrier to people with disabilities because exposure to Wi-Fi radiation can trigger seizures. People with epilepsy, heart arrhythmias, people with heart condition, asthma attacks, people with asthma. Also on taskforce.org is a good source of information as is bioinitiative.org. Make the library safe for everyone. Remove the Wi-Fi, microwave, radiation. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Garrett. Is there anybody else online, Madam Clerk? No further speakers, Chair. All right, Supervisor Hernandez. I'm going to extend my thanks and appreciation to the Friends of the Library. It's an extraordinary fundraising effort that they've done. And I think that this library, of course, is going to be an asset to not just Aptos, but the entire county. Having served nine years on the library finance authority in the past, it's always great to see contributions, fundraising efforts that go into the library because they're greatly needed in the libraries. Many times serve not just as libraries, but as community centers now. And so that's always appreciated by library staff and the community as well. So thank you to the Friends of the Library. Thank you for those comments. All right, we will close this item. And we'll move on to the next item on the regular agenda, which is, I apologize, I can see a Supervisor, please. Yeah, I just wanted to also thank Friends of the Library and extend my ongoing support and just appreciation for everything that they do to help make our libraries such wonderful places for our community to visit and to have access to in terms of having access to information or just a quiet and peaceful place where they can read a book or enjoy a moment of silence. I was at the Brands of 40 grand opening and that was such a beautiful library and was just down in Capitola at their library. I didn't have anywhere to go to do work and so was able to just drop in and spend a few hours there and it's just great to have those types of places where we can, you know, go to and work in if we need somewhere to go and so just want to, you know, continue to be able to support Friends of the Library as we move from our Aptos branch and hopefully to our main branch here soon in the near future and continue to have these places be beautiful, accessible places for our community. And Chair, I'll just add, I also extend my thanks to Friends of the Libraries. I grew up going to Aptos Library and I'm really excited to get in there and see what the renovations look like and also to take my own daughter to the newly renovated library. I mean, every one of these new libraries that I go into is just, it's such an inspiration, such a fantastic investment in our future. And of course, as mentioned, it's really a flexible public space. In fact, I've gone to a number, we've held a number of public meetings at the Capitola Library. It's become an essential meeting place for a number of our commissions. So really a great help. I'm looking forward to the opening of the Live Oak Library annex soon too. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for all those comments. We'll move on to item eight, which is to conduct a study session to review updates on addressing homelessness in the county of Santa Cruz and improve and approve recommended priority goals for the next six month housing for a healthy Santa Cruz implementation cycle, accept and file progress report and implementation of the housing for a healthy Santa Cruz framework and direct the Human Services Department to return in February 2024 with further updates as outlined in the memo. The director of Human Services, we have the agenda board memo and the housing for a healthy Santa Cruz six month update. We have director Morris and Dr. Ratner here for the presentation. I'll turn it over to you. Thank you, Chair Friend. Good morning to you and to board members to county and city colleagues watching and to members of the community. Thank you for this opportunity to discuss quite a different item than celebrating the library. This is arguably one of the most difficult public policy issues facing the state of California in our community and quite a humanitarian crisis, but this is our responsibility as a Human Services Department in this county to work together with you as our elected officials with our county colleagues with our city colleagues and community to try to make a dent on this challenge that is very complex. I am going to make a few introductory remarks and then I'm going to turn it over to Robert and the clerk of the board is going to lift up a PowerPoint and then he will go through a formal presentation. I just want to make sure to remind the community and the board and for those who are new to this topic that we are in front of you at the two and a half year mark of a three year strategic plan. Which means we are just finishing up this first ever three year strategic plan before this three year strategic plan as many communities struggled with this growing crisis there was sort of no framework to follow to try to sort through how to navigate this complex issue. I think it's important particularly with our city colleagues that all the mayors are new and three of the four city managers are new to remind everyone that this is not the county strategic plan. This is the community strategic plan. We came to your board asking for commitment to be the lead facilitator of this effort, but then we went to the four city councils asking for their support to adopt this so that we would work together collectively on these ambitious goals. A couple points to note, like most strategic plans in California and the country attempting to address the issue of homelessness. This plan is absent identifying specific funding to pay for how we will achieve the aspirational goals. And it is also absent any delineation of what the county or a city will do. And that is on purpose, because we are working together to come together to apply for funding. To figure out the answers to these questions which unfortunately are not answered by the state or the federal government. So, as we position ourselves to end this strategic plan and prepare for another, I want to share with you what I see as a human services professional working in the safety net for the last 30 years. As I look at the housing for health division run by Robert compared to all the other safety net programs we run because I see a set of very complex structural challenges that we have to concurrently work in advocating with the state and federal government to fix, because there are limits to what we can do locally without changes to these structures but I want to share with you what I see. But then I'm going to end with some comments that woven into Robert's presentation are some hope and some optimism that we're on a good track. So let me list the challenges as I see them. First, we cannot lose sight that we are talking about an affordable housing crisis. It is absolutely true that we need to talk about services, mental health issues, substance use issues and a host of public assistance programs. But if we lose track of the main issue in our country in California and in Santa Cruz County recently deemed the most expensive place to rent in the United States of America. If we don't recognize that we have an affordable housing crisis and just focus on the services we need to provide, we are never going to bridge the gap to help unhoused or people who lose housing find housing to bridge the gap between people's incomes, low wage earners, people on fixed income through SSI and what it costs to afford housing until we can address the affordable housing crisis. We are sort of nibbling at the edges of a bigger problem. Number two, budget. As I look at the human services department budget that your board approves every year. 95% of the budget that I manage that your board approves is stable, predictable federal and state money. When we look at the budget, Roberts division manages it is the opposite. 95% of Robert's budget that he manages is one time state and federal grants, all with expiration dates. We were in front of you a year ago to tell you that the COVID money in response to the pandemic that brought a huge infusion of federal and state money was about to expire and we called it cliff one. And when that money terminated so did all the shelters that we stood up to help people experiencing homelessness not get the virus. We are about to face cliff two. And thanks to the federal and state government, we are given another infusion of money to help all those who are moved into emergency housing. To have services and supports to be able to move not back to the streets but into housing and you'll hear in Roberts presentation that has been successful. But I want to highlight and I probably will another time. This would not be successful without the partnership of the local housing authority, the housing authority and the vouchers are what bridged the gap between the cost of housing and all the services we're trying to provide. Last comment about budget, we have a challenge in this country in California and particularly in Santa Cruz County, which all the money that Roberts division manages from the state and federal government is categorically restricted. It's not open ended money that we can do whatever we want with locally it has rules and unfortunately those rules prohibit us from using the funding for emergency only shelter, which is often the major ask that we get asked to fund but we don't have money, because it's categorically restricted. Number three of four disasters up until three or four years ago, disasters were now and again fires, but we have had seven EOC activations in the last three years as community knows and the conflation of trying to manage the strategic plan and disasters is creating two issues. Number one, more and more people are losing housing, which exacerbates the challenge because of these disasters. And number two, we add to the challenge of what to do with those who are unhoused in the middle of a disaster which is creating a lot of chaos and a lot of expectation to respond and take the limited money we have to respond to the disasters in competition with everything else we're trying to do. But the fourth and final challenge I want to share is by far the most complex in my experience, and that is the complete lack of alignment between federal government state government and local government county and city and I want to outline this because this tends to be where we spend a lot of our time trying to figure out what's the problem. At the federal level, we have two branches of government that have absolutely competing in different priorities. The primary funder of homeless and housing services is HUD. And about 15 years ago, they made a policy decision to stop funding emergency shelter only services. So all the federal HUD money we have does not fund emergency shelter only services. Yet another branch of federal government, the federal courts on the West Coast and particularly are increasingly intervening on local government cities, counties and the state Caltrans and disbanding encampments unless local government can find funding to help people when you disband encampment go into emergency housing. So the funder of the services is no emergency shelter, yet the courts are saying you can't disband an encampment it's quite a dilemma that's being created by two different branches of government. There is a misalignment between the federal government and the state government. The federal government has dictated as a matter of policy. The responsible party to address homelessness at local government is the continuum of care or COC or what we call housing for health partnership. But who in California knows what a COC is unless you're on the inside. California in turn puts money out to everybody from multiple departments. COCs can apply, cities can apply, multiple county departments apply, CDOs can apply. So they're at the money spread everywhere. So there's a misalignment. And all of this leads to the challenge that's happening at the local level where cities and counties are left to figure out what to do with this maze. And when times get tough, cities and counties fight. And when we work together, you will hear in Robert's presentation, we actually make progress. And the communities that are making progress are figuring it out. The communities that are struggling are fighting. So I hope this very complex framework of challenges, I just wanted to lift up because there are limits to what we can do and we need to continue to work to advocate for resolution to these structural issues. But let me end with some hope. Number one of three, the point in time count, the public comment earlier, comments on social media, they're all correct. I want to affirm the point in time count is a flawed federal mandate. We have to do it in January. We asked for a waiver to wait for the January rain. So we did it in February. It's a tremendous lift to pull it off. And there are flaws in the process, but it is the same metric that's measured every single year. And it points out that what we have done, and this is what I'd really invite the board in the community to hear, point in time count is just a day. But look at all the trends of all the information materials and everything Robert's about to present. It all lines up with what the point in time count showed. We are making progress and that progress is because of partnership and braiding of complex funding streams to try to move the needle and Robert will share more about that. Number two, equity. You will see the city of Santa Cruz, 29% decrease in the number of people experiencing homelessness and what Robert will present in is in the materials tells why. However, Watsonville, 15% increase predominantly families living in cars displaced by disasters in the economy. I'm putting this in the comment of hope because you will hear in Robert's presentation, we saw this inequity, a lot of focus on North County over the years in this community. But over the last few years, we have been leaning heavily towards investments in Watsonville and it takes time to build up programs, but we are moving in the right direction. And last but not least, and this is where I'll end. If you are not aware of this level of detail, our governor, Governor Gavin Newsom, who has arguably put the most amount of money and history into this issue. Is sort of this is my commentary getting tired of cities and counties fighting. So he made an act of legislation in this last fiscal year that going forward he will not fund local government for any new grants if we're fighting with each other. He will only fund local government if we have a new strategic plan showing that we are going to work together. So the solution going forward in the current political and funding environment requires us to build upon the partnerships we've built, work together, but our differences aside, or we will not have funding available to us. So with that said, I hope these framing comments are helpful and I'll turn it over to Robert to go through the power. Thank you. Thanks, Randy. Thanks, members. Slides up in a second. I wanted to first just provide an outline of what I'm planning to cover with my brief presentation and then we'll have time for questions and answers at the end. There we go. Thank you. Thank you. So first I wanted to follow up on some of Randy's comments and share investments and impacts of those investments over the past six months and year. Many of those dollars that Randy alluded to came from one time state and federal investments related to the pandemic. Highlights and a little bit more detail what's working and making an impact on people's lives who are experiencing homelessness. Then an overview of what the pit count, the point in time count showed and some other data and how we're doing addressing this issue. I wanted to review some of the work that our division is doing with partner county and city agencies on developing new permanent and short term housing and then a more detailed update on the funding situation and then what we're planning to focus on over the next six months. On the bottom of the slide is a quote from a public health journal and I first got interested in this idea that everyone should have a home when I was an undergraduate student living in Los Angeles. And the time the conversation was why are there so many people? This is a new phenomenon. So many people without homes and this scholar and physician wrote an editorial essentially saying that homelessness is a policy creation of disinvesting in low income and affordable housing that happened in the late 70s, early 80s. And I think one of the things I've observed as I've remained committed to this idea that everyone should have a healthy home is we've kind of forgotten the story of how we've gotten to this moment. That we collectively at the national, state and local level have failed to invest in enough affordable options for people. And if you're someone who left an institution or you're struggling with health issues. The main reason why you can't have a living situation is because it isn't a place that you can afford. And certainly we need to do a better job of helping people transition from institutional settings back to community. But if there's nowhere for them to transition to you can throw every amount of service at folks. But if there's nowhere for them to land, it doesn't work. I hear a lot about the need for more and improved behavioral health services which I'm completely supportive of most of my career I've spent in behavioral health care. And I know we can do a lot better than we are in this country and meeting the needs of people with mental health and substance use issues. And as someone who worked in psychiatric residency program. I knew and I continued to know that it's really hard to help people with mental health and substance use issues if they don't have somewhere to sleep that's stable every night. So I think that that's a primary thing we need to keep in mind in this affordable housing gap is really critical. And I found it a little bit of frustrating a little frustrating the University of Washington put out a book homelessness is a housing problem in 2022. And there was all this press about how this is new and insightful. And one of the metaphors in that book was housing policy and addressing homelessness is like musical chairs. Well it was known that this was the case back in 1990. So if we really don't collectively work on the fundamental underpinnings of why we have this problem we're still going to be struggling. So I think it's important that we all keep that in mind while we address the consequences of not having enough affordable housing. So this slide is an overview of the investments and impacts last fiscal year. So our division is managing 44 programs either indirectly or directly with contracts between the county and nonprofit organizations. We budgeted twenty three point two million dollars. And I think it's important to highlight that because this board and the leadership in the county supported the creation of this new office. General fund investments in addressing housing and homelessness have increased substantially over the past five years through a combination of increasing general fund but also having staff to go after all these grants that Randy alluded to it takes a lot of time and energy to apply for and secure funding. So I want to applaud the board and the leadership here at the county for investing in us in our division so we could bring in some more resources to support the community. The investments resulted in and the data on the right comes from our homeless management information system and fairly mandated data system for certain programs that are addressing homelessness. So we're forty five hundred people experiencing a risk of homelessness were served in the last fiscal year and close to twenty five hundred exited those programs and other people that exited around thirty seven percent nine hundred eleven exited to permanent housing. And that is an increase from prior years in our county and it's also a little bit higher than the average in California. So HUD has reports available through the federal government twenty twenty one looking at how states and jurisdictions are doing in terms of their programs address homelessness. So we're exceeding the average but it's lower than I would like it to be. I'd like us to be way above forty percent and the number of people who come into programs and exit to permanent housing. The other part of this story is that about the same number of people that enter programs exit to places and we don't know where they're going because the programs haven't had enough time and capacity to build relationships. We fund a fair number of programs that are very emergency response oriented. So if you're open for two to three days it's hard to build a connection with someone and to find out where they're going to go next. So the programs that have the largest number of exits to unknown destinations are the programs that are only light touch light relationship building with clients. So if we're going to reduce the number of people we serve that exit to unknown destinations we've got to focus on developing better connections and funding programs that allow staff to build connections with people. The geography of the investments I wanted to highlight that most of our funding because it's coming from the federal and state sources is about 90% from federal and state sources has to be county wide for the most part. There are examples where we can use those dollars to fix on specific regions and because a lot of the demand and interest in addressing homelessness is focused in the northern part of the county. I think that there's a general bias. My estimate is around 80% of those county wide dollars are invested in the northern part of the county. And then if you look at this slide about 2.7 million of the fund is devoted to North County programs and 1.9 million to South County programs. So what is working Randy alluded to this and I tried to emphasize this in my introduction the having been involved with issue for the many, many years and hearing from providers and people experiencing homelessness. The thing that makes the most difference is if we help people close the gap between what their incomes are and what it costs to find housing. What we were able to accomplish with the pandemic funds and this amazing partnership with the housing authority is helping over 900 people move into permanent housing because we got a substantial increase in long term housing subsidies from the federal government and the housing authority. We coupled those vouchers which are really hard to use in the most expensive rental market in the country with other funding for services that staff focused on using a model called strength based care management and we also had incentives and education for property owners. And all those things together with the partnership I think got us to this point where we are in reducing the number of people who experienced homelessness in the point in time count. If you look at the data with 349 vouchers were added due to these federal pandemic investments and 708 people who used to be homeless moved in over the past year and a half so that's a huge portion of the 911 people that exited homelessness. During the period of time. I think some other things that have been happening over the past six months or years that our shelter and transition health shelter and transition housing outcomes have been improving. Think apart because of the relationship building and focusing our funding on the services that people need to secure housing. We've expanded through grant applications some money for rapid rehousing funding and we're doing a better job of coordinating across our programs. We've got a long ways to go and data and I think the success we've had primarily with the work with the housing authority has helped us be more competitive for grant applications at the federal and state level. So the point in time count Randy alluded to the fact that it's a flawed methodology and I want to echo that point and it is used at the federal and state level on a very consistent basis as a driver and informing data piece for policy so we have to pay attention to it. And my personal view is that we generally aim to keep the methodology consistent so when there are changes in the count from year to year there's something else going on besides the methodology and people will have differences of opinion about what's going on. I've been in a fair number of conversations where it's clear that when the number goes up in Santa Cruz County people believe it and when the number goes down they don't believe it. So I think we can't have it both ways. We either don't believe it consistently or we believe that it's telling us something but I don't think it can be both things simultaneously because if you don't think the methodology works then just be consistent that you don't trust it but don't accept it when it's high and deny it when it's low. So the the headliner I think from the count is that we saw a 22% decrease overall and it's the lowest count ever in this community since 2007 when these were mandated by HUD. This is the lowest it's ever been. All the jurisdictions in the county except for Watsonville saw a decrease in the number of people experiencing homelessness. Randy alluded to this in his points we saw a 15% increase in Watsonville. We saw the highest percentage of Hispanic Latinx individuals ever in the point in time count 44% of the people are estimated to be Hispanic Latinx and was 35% of the general population in our county. This is a trend that's happening statewide, not just here in Santa Cruz. The Hispanic Latinx community has shown higher increases in homelessness since the pandemic, and I think it's a combination of political social economic forces that are impacting that community. Again, we see consistently that people who are experiencing homelessness are primarily losing housing in this community in this county of a 75% statewide that's a similar figure. Most people who are unhoused in California and our counties are from California and from the county where they are unhoused about a third of people who are homeless are employed. And many people that are social workers and work in this field are having trouble finding and keeping housing. It's heart wrenching for me to have social workers who have clients who have housing vouchers, they're helping them to find housing and they get a notice from their landlord that the rent's going up and they can't afford to live here. Three stories come to my attention of staff who are doing this work who've left the work because they don't have vouchers and can't afford to live here. So again, it's affordable housing issue that's impacting many of us of the folks who are unemployed about half of the people in the town said they're looking for work. In our community, we don't have dedicated shelter or temporary housing for transition age youth and underage minors. Hopefully that will be changed because we submitted an application for funding to set up a youth focused transitional housing program. But nearly all of the minors and youth in the county that were homeless were unsheltered. And the other key point in the data is that homelessness among families with children has been increasing and in the data that's primarily been in South County. And I think as Randy alluded to, we don't have perfect information but putting some data pieces together. I think a lot of people are living in vehicles. It's not on this slide, but the point in time count also showed that a large number of the unsheltered in Santa Cruz County are living in vehicles since the highest it's ever been. My memory serves me correctly. I think it's 46% of the unsheltered are living in vehicles according to the point in time count. So those are folks who often recently lost housing and still have some assets and maybe are still working but just can't afford to live here. I wanted to share some updates on some housing projects that our division has been working on. The members of the board are familiar with some of them. We applied for and secured funding for three project home key projects. Casa Azul is with Housing Matters at seven units, conversion of a dental old dental office into housing, which I love. There's opportunities for converting commercial into housing. This will probably be the building that has the first group of people moving in which I'm really excited about. Park Cave and Plaza and Soquel 36 units on its way to getting developed. And then the Vets Village and Ben Lomond already has veterans and folks who've been impacted by the acquisition of that property. And we're working with them to secure the money needed to really remodel that and have the village become what we hope it will be. The County Behavioral Health Department has helped secure funding through another source at the state level. The No Place Like Home program. And there's four projects close to 100 new supportive housing units for people homeless with serious mental illness. The Harvey West Studios and Santa Cruz, Chessie Street and Santa Cruz, Vienna Star, which is a capital of very exciting projects that's close to being leased up. And another project in Watsonville with Eden Housing. And then we have two temporary housing projects we're working on and we secured funding for through collaboration. So we partnered with Monterey County, Watsonville and the Pajaro River Management Authority to secure a camera resolution grant to create a new navigation center in South County for people who are living in campments along the Pajaro River. And after that grant's over, we're developing plans to sustain that effort and maintain it as a high quality navigation center long term. And then we are partnering with our County Behavioral Health colleagues on a behavioral project and using some whole person care funding to get a new behavioral health focused temporary housing program navigation center up and running in the next year. Funding updates. So this slide lists some of the funds we've secured over the past six months and this is part of our I think our tradition of presenting to you all new funding that we're bringing in and updating you on funding that we're losing. The behavioral bridge housing funding one time grant of 10.2 million that we partner with the behavioral health department on the encampment grants. The block grants homeless housing assistance and prevention program have for we secured that grant quicker than most other counties because we have strong collaboration between our consumer care and the county governments. And because we are working together so well, we were able to get essentially get an advance on those funds. So before we actually have expenditures, we have the money coming into the county's bank account so we can get some interest and then help more folks. Permit local housing allocation working with their colleagues and community development infrastructure applied for and secured some funding that we'll be using our department. And then one of our nonprofit providers decided not to continue to apply for hop up funds housing opportunities for people with HIV and age and we decided we would take that on apply for the funding and secured those dollars. alluded to this 90% of our funds come from federal and state grants. Most state funding is multi year discretionary from the standpoint of the state and federal government so we have no reassurances that the funding will be there in subsequent years so we have to plan the use of block grants and spread those dollars over multiple years to get some semblance of sustainability of programmatic interventions. And then I know many of you on the Well, two of you on the board are involved with the consumer care process and know that every year we have a ritual of applying for funds and we're in the middle of that now through the consumer care process and it's a competitive process. Most of the time we get all of our grants renewed but there are some that are at risk as opportunities to make adjustments. And I am really concerned Randy alluded to this about the big cliff that's coming. The first cliff was for the shelters and this next cliff is for the services and the resources we have to partnership with the housing authority so we're going to have to find ways to address that big drop in funding during this fiscal year. And that leads to what are we doing the next six months so Just to build off what I just said one of the things is we're going to apply for as much funding as possible and then the fifth bullet on here is a reflection of the state shifting a lot of resources to Medi-Cal managed care plans for addressing homelessness so As local government agencies and community-based organizations we've got to learn how to be and I'm a healthcare person who's now working in human services but it takes a long time to learn how to be in the healthcare universe and to build for services and understand how Medi-Cal works. So we've got to make a lot of progress in that area over the next year if we're going to have any success in closing that financing gap that I mentioned. Randy alluded to this the next block grant of funding the HAP-5 funding from the state Requires that we at the local level develop an updated plan to address homelessness conveniently for us in our county our current framework expires December 31 so we're due to update our plan anyway. A lot of other jurisdictions don't have that alignment so they're having to negotiate with the state whether the plans that they have are going to work or not. I think key to updating the framework from my perspective is showing that we really can align around shared understanding of how we're going to invest our funds and be more realistic about how much money we have and how we're going to invest those over the next period of time that the state wants us to look at I anticipate the state will be recommending a three year plan but we don't know what the requirements will be yet. That new plan is going to be due to the state on or before March 31 so our next update to the board will be in February and will include information about where we are with that planning process and there are going to be three required public hearings before that plan gets approved so there will be a lot of more conversations over the next six months to get this updated plan together. Really trying to get these housing projects community development projects moving forward I hope in the next six months I can report back we've got people moving in and pictures of people moving into their units which will be really exciting for the many people that have been involved. There's an effort currently underway to improve our HMIS data and collaboration and data sharing along with how we coordinate our services and people access services. We're in the beginning stages of that process and hope that over the next six months we'll see a lot of improvement in that area. And our team in Housing for Health and many people in their community are really invested in raising the voices of people who live through homelessness in Santa Cruz County and hearing their perspectives on what worked and what didn't work and what we could do better. So we've been doing some fundraising to create some paid positions and opportunities for people who've got valuable life experience they can add to our effort. So we're going to get that going in the next six months. And then we I believe continue to need to improve and coordinate our efforts to outreach to people who are unsheltered both in vehicles and living in encampments and living on their own. We did secure some funding to start a new street outreach program for unincorporated areas of the county. And want to share with the board that there are no dedicated funding outreach programs currently for those parts of the county. So we have to stretch the money and programs that do outreach to cover those areas. So I'm excited that we'll finally have some dedicated outreach for those geographic areas in the county that haven't had that kind of attention. And I also want to be clear we don't really we don't have enough outreach for anywhere in the county but particularly for unincorporated areas where we don't have any dedicated funding. I think this is an opportunity for us to demonstrate if we resource it the impacts we can have with more coordinated outreach. That's the end of my presentation and wanted to open up for questions and comments. Thank you Dr. Ratner. Are there questions from my colleagues? I'll start with Supervisor McPherson. Yeah. This three ports and the data show that we are making progress. It's pretty troubling of what some of the statistics show. But on the other hand, I'm encouraged that the point in time numbers have gone down by 22%. As you mentioned, it's a flawed methodology. It's not at the right time probably in January, but it's consistent. And that's what we have to that's what we can go by with what we're doing and what we've put in place with the funding that we have. And I believe we're going to we're going in the right direction because we're focusing on permanent housing and case management and prevention. A couple questions. The report mentions that nearly of the nearly 2,500 program exit this last fiscal year over 900 of them exited to permanent housing. That's 37%. Is that above or below what you were hoping for or what you anticipated? Well, I hope for 100%. Yeah. That's my dream aim. And I alluded to this earlier. Our framework calls for 40% of people exiting shelters and transition housing to exit permanent housing as a goal. And we're not there yet. And we're above the state average. So I would say we're making progress is trending in the right direction. I'd like to see us collectively with all of our programs at least over 40%. So we've got a ways to go. I will say that when I looked at the statewide data, the trend is every community is going down in California in terms of the numbers of people coming to programs that are exiting the permanent housing, which is the wrong direction. Okay. And they were the report also says the reduction in the number of people counted in the the point in time year over year is lower than the number of people we help secure housing. But this data really reaffirms that the number of households losing stability in their living situation outpaces our ability to help them return to permanent housing. Can you explain that further? Yeah, I really appreciate the question and regret that I didn't highlight it a little bit more in my presentation. One of the things about working with people who are currently experiencing homelessness is we're working in the housing market is is and we've made a lot of progress the 911. But if we look at our data on HMIS the number of people coming to ask for help every month compared to the number that exit it's two to two and a half times the number of people that come to ask for help that compared to the number we're able to secure housing. So it's the wrong formula of the forces that are leading to people having unstable housing are so great and beyond our current capacity within our teams and what we're doing to help people hold on to their housing. We've got more people losing housing than we can help to get back into housing. So it's a formula. There's a recipe for a continued problem. I appreciate the question. We've got to do more upstream to help people keep their housing while improving the pace at which we're helping people get back into housing if we're ever going to really address this issue. Well I appreciate your statement that this is a county wide statewide nationwide problem huge and it's very complex and it makes it more difficult for local governments especially when we're so dependent 90% of the funding to address this or solve it from federal and state resources and sometimes not consistent to a minimum or one or two year grants that are fine for a year or two but then we fall off the cliff as you mentioned. So I appreciate your and our our four cities that we have in the county trying to work together as best we can and I encourage us to continue that effort because I think when we do we're going to get more results in a coordinated effort countywide. So I appreciate your efforts to make sure that's held together and we address it on a county wide basis. Thank you. Thank you supervisor McPherson supervisor Coney. Thank you chair. I want to start by thanking you Robert and Randy for presentation today but also really your work over the last few years and you've got brought just so much professionalism and dare I say process to addressing this issue. You know that process can feel slow at times but really I think you know we were we were starting from practically zero in terms of our systems and organization and approaching this issue. And so it does feel like we are a lot better organized and a lot better prepared to make more substantive gains in the future. I mean and I think this report is really the most encouraging most promising we could ask for that's really the question at this point is can we sustain it based on based on the funding. But I mean 911 access to housing is huge. And I mean I would point out that we only saw a drop of 495 people total in terms of the count. So I mean with that as you point out there's a flow of people who are becoming homeless every day because of the high cost of housing. And we are able to address and house some of those people a lot of those people but but not enough and this gets back to your point. Director Morris that this is really a housing problem. We've we've largely created ourselves by outlawing apartments in as parts of our cities. Not just here in Santa Cruz but but statewide to countrywide through single family zoning. And of course just complicated complicated building process that adds a ton of cost and slows down our ability to address the process to address the housing crisis. So few questions for you. The first is how many of the placements into housing were within the county versus out of the county. So for the housing and authority voucher programs. I think it's around 85 90% of the people were able to secure housing in the county and we had another benefit of the federal voucher program. Generally with vouchers you have to find housing in the jurisdiction of the housing authority but this particular program or housing vouchers let people look for housing outside. So I think it's around 10 to 15% of people found housing mostly in our neighboring counties Monterey, San Benito and Santa Clara. It's that's very impressive and of itself and as you said a lot of work on the ground with landlords and with the residents or with the folks being placed themselves to make that happen. But it's amazing it's such a tight housing market to find so many units within our county. So our goal for the three year strategic plan was to reduce homelessness 25% 22% this year I mean we're pretty good on our goal that's encouraging. I mean honestly obviously there again there are flaws in the count but still it is if anything consistent and we're making good progress. But it doesn't seem like we've made any progress on the sheltered component right I mean if anything so our goal was to have half of the population experiencing homelessness sheltered. And if anything we've backs it a little bit from 77% sheltered in 2022 to now or sorry 77% unsheltered in 2022 and 79% unsheltered in 2023. And I know that we do offer some shelters which don't actually qualify as shelters under federal standards but you know are in and looking at those projects that you put on the screen at the various types. I mean I guess we'll qualify as shelters but how do we make more substantive progress on that. Yeah I think the major reason why we've seen a decline in the number of people in shelters we've just lost shelter capacity over time due to the loss of the COVID funding that allowed us to expand mostly hotel based sheltering and other kind of congregate especially sheltering programs that we're able to put together. I did mention we've secured funding to create a navigation center with in Watsonville that'll add 34 beds but we're not able to sustain the current shelter plus the new shelter financially so we'll be a net gain of 13 beds if we are able to pull that off. And with the Bayborough health bridge housing funding that'll be another 34 additional beds. I didn't spend a lot of time mentioning this but I'm very hopeful that our proposed transition age youth transitional housing program which will have 21 beds will get funded. So those that's under nine beds and I think there are really some opportunities in partnership with the city of Santa Cruz. They had $14 million available from the state to help address homelessness and part of what they invested in is securing additional land around the current housing matters campus and the neighboring parcel. The city purchased that there's opportunities for us to secure money to expand capacity there that I think can help make a dent in the need for more shelter. And I don't think anyone knows what the right number of shelter and transitional housing beds is for a community. If one looks at the data in California around the country you'll see really different numbers of how much shelter people invest in. I think that's New York state is a good example of if you just spend all your money on shelter you have still have a really big problem with homelessness so you don't want to spend all your money on shelter. And I think when you do invest in shelter and a lot of the federal and state funding requires this that the programming has to have evidence that has services to help people get into housing. So if you're seeing programs where less than 10% of people are exiting to permanent housing the funders don't want to support those projects. We want projects that are helping 40% plus of the people who come in that they can show that they can help people get back into housing. So my hope is that we invest in regional high quality navigation center programs low barrier high quality services the kinds of health services that people need one in Santa Cruz one in the mid unincorporated area one in Watsonville. And then the youth focus one and can we get those four projects to be really solid and then can we help the privately funded shelters with fundraising etc to keep doing what they're doing. It's important to remember that in this county most of the shelters don't use public money. Before the creation of our unit there was very little public investment in shelter the shelter that the governments were funding were winter only or storm based shelters. And it wasn't until the state started to put money into shelter that this community started to invest in year round shelter. So I hope we can keep raising the money to get this kind of minimum for high quality programs and then keeping the private Lee run and community supported programs going helping with fund rears etc. And our goal I think is a reasonable goal in our framework of 600 beds and we've been trending in the wrong direction so we've got to get all those things that I just described moving forward so we can get going in a better direction. And I'd like to piggyback briefly at the risk of redundancy. I feel like it's my responsibility having been in the safety net for 30 years to share these patterns I've seen, which is health and human services are predominantly funded by fate and federal and state dollars so often the answers to these questions come from. What are the federal and state government funding and what I have seen in my career and different safety net issues this being probably the most complex housing and homelessness. Do not underestimate the story we can tell to our state legislators and our federal Congress people because I think the feds and state are hungry to find a solution this issue is growing big. So I think at the risk of oversimplifying there has been a disinvestment and shelter only funding from the feds, no surprise there is lower shelters. So, focusing on not that this was your question Supervisor Connick but focusing on trying to find a local solution to the emergency shelter crisis is in competition with our need to get organized. Work as a county with our city jurisdictions particularly Watsonville and Santa Cruz and have our state affiliates California League of Cities and California state associate counties. Work together to tell the story about what the funding formula is because right now we are really pinched to find dedicated federal and state funding to pay for emergency only shelter it's only with this string of resources and that's the conundrum so I just wanted to highlight that most of what we do in human services is based on federal and state policy not local policy and I think behind the answer your question is federal and state priorities that shifted over the years and maybe they need to shift again. But that's not going to happen if we don't advocate and let's advocate together with the California League of Cities instead of writing over why there's not enough shelter locally which is happening all over the state. I think it's a missed opportunity to apply pressure where it needs to be applied to which is at the state and feds. Thank you. Yeah so I mean I think you as far as the shelter question goes I think you answered my next question was that the last that last year the big story was that we had sheltered most youth and families and this year we're seeing an increase and I guess the answer for or why that's happening simply just less shelter overall. I think it's less shelter but also I think that the economic housing social trends are contributing to it with the storms made it really hard for some people to stay in situations they were in the kinds of work that people have been able to secure post pandemic and afford to live here real stressors. Huge percentage of students at Cabrillo and UC Santa Cruz and unstable living situations experiencing homelessness. So I think that the data is showing us certain populations are struggling which and it moves around it's the musical chairs which populations are really struggling with housing. And what I see in the pit count data is some real need among families particularly in South County bubbling up and then I think young people many people who are trying to go to school in this community are struggling to find and keep housing. So the next six months when we do it we can focus on those things and part of that is seen if we can get some more capacity for shelter. Got it. I mean and yeah to your point director Morris you know this the way that we fund this issue through state and federal dollars is one of the most frustrating parts of it. For me as a county board member as I expect from my colleagues as well just because it means that we have so little flexibility in terms of how we direct the resources. And I hope chair friend can speak a little bit to you know our prospects of changing that in at least at the state level and having more more flexibility maybe that comes with more accountability as well. But more flexibility and more certainty in terms of how much funding we can expect every year. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you Supervisor Connick supervisor Cummings. Looks like we may have lost supervisor friend but as vice chair I think he was about to turn it over to me to see if I had any comments and questions on this item. So I'll just go ahead since we lost this connection. First I just want to thank in particular of the current board supervisor McPherson and supervisor friend who I know and along with our county administrative officer have really moved us forward to have a division that is dedicated to homelessness. And over the years we've been building that program out and I know that previously there have been a time when the county didn't want to address homelessness. And under the leadership of our county administrative officer Carlos Palacios and the board members who've served over time we've been able to actually build out a program that has been able to expand our ability to secure resources to provide shelter and to put in the services that our community needs to address homelessness. And so I just want to thank you all for the work that you've done over time to help us get to where we are now, which has shown that we're making a lot of good progress on securing funding and getting people into housing. 911 people housed over the course of a single year is just phenomenal. And so I just want to thank you all for that and for your efforts. I'd also like to agree that, you know, while the point in time count isn't perfect, it has been consistently implemented over time. And if we had seen just decreases in everything, maybe that would have been a alarm of, well, maybe people fled to drier places because of the storms. But we saw reductions and increases in a variety of different areas, which shows that there is something that's happening. We are seeing reductions in homelessness and a lot of our services are likely part of that. But we are seeing increases in areas that should be of great concern because if we're seeing increases in homelessness in South County, one thing that makes me think of a driving force is the potential for a lot of gentrification that can be happening with high prices in North County, leading to people moving to South County who are then competing with people who have lower incomes and those people are getting pushed on the streets. And so this is something, it's probably one of the biggest equity issues that we should be really focusing on is how we can stop that from happening. And I look forward to seeing, you know, as this plan or next three or playing gets implemented and develop how we can try to address those issues over time. I also want to just thank Robert and Randy for the transparency that was provided in terms of the numbers and where, like how much funding is being spent, where that funding is going because a lot of people don't really know how the funds are being spent and allocated. And I think this gives us something to refer people to when those questions come up. And then I guess the next just comment I have is that we really need to start thinking about policies that will make housing more affordable and provide people with protections. We focus a lot on, you know, we need to build more shelter, we need to address the people were on the streets, but it's also in what I've heard from this presentation is that when people get on the streets, it's really hard for them to get back into housing. And so how to keep them in their housing in the first place is really going to be critical for us to focus on in this next three year plan. And I know some of the recent reports that have come out have really focused on needing to also have in addition to sheltering options and programs, tenant protections and eviction protections so that we can keep people in their homes. And I know that the county of public defender has been working on, you know, right to counsel and we've been having those discussions, which which has been shown to actually reduce evictions in other communities. And I think we need to continue down that path, along with exploring other ways that we can help protect tenants who might be vulnerable. And then one other comment I have to is that I really think that we also as we're considering how to make housing more available, keeping residential property from becoming commercial properties. We've seen in a lot of residential areas homes being converted over to Airbnb's and that reduces the amount of housing that currently exists. They could go to people to actually live and it also drives up the housing price. So I think, you know, we need to really be focused on, you know, given that we're in a housing crisis, kind of pulling out all the stops in terms of how we can make housing more available, how we can make housing more affordable and how we can keep people in their homes. And so those are all the comments I'll make because I can go on and on on this subject. But I guess the question that I do have is, you know, what will the next kind of process look like in terms of this next three year planning process and how the county be engaging with the COC and other jurisdictions and I guess and then maybe a little bit around the timeline of that. Thanks for the comments, Supervisor Cummings. And the question, the planning process will be very dependent on what the state requirements are. So the California Interagency Council on Homelessness is supposed to issue official guidance on what is expected for this updated plan on or before September 30. And so once we get that information, I'll have a better understanding of what are some of the key elements, but I do know based on the legislation, what are some of the expectations. One is that we really hear from the people who are running the programs and the services, what are their challenges, what are their issues. People who have experienced homelessness or experiencing homelessness lift up their voice, gather the input on what's working, what's helpful, what's not helpful. Partnership with the Housing Authority is specifically called out in legislation. So continuing to work with our Housing Authority on opportunities that they see. And the process will include because it's going to be required and I also think it's a good thing, at least three public meetings where we can get input from folks on elements of the proposal. And I also personally think that we need to be more realistic in setting our goals and more specific than we were with the original framework. I think that from my perspective, the framework has a nice skeleton of how to think about this issue and how to focus on it. But it doesn't have the details about where is the money going to come from, who's going to do what and when are they going to do it. So I think that's one of the principles in the framework is that we move closer towards more specificity and having goals based on the availability of funding. I anticipate we'll need to have some outside support to pull this plan together because the staff who are involved with running the programs and writing grants and we're not able to have the kind of process that I would like us to have. So we're going to probably need some extra help to have an open and fair process to get input. The state is making some funds available to help with that process. I'm not sure when they're going to release those funds, so that'll be important for kind of when we start it. And then I think you and Supervisor Koenig are both on the Housing for Health Partnership Policy Board, the COC board. And I think that group is going to play a really critical role in providing input and feedback as we develop this plan in more detail. I don't know if you have additional clarifying questions, but I think what stands out for me and I was not here for the local planning process that resulted in the current framework. My sense is I'd like to hear more from people who've lived through our experiencing homelessness from property owners, managers, and from service providers. Then I can see embedded in our current plan and make sure that they're part of the solution. That's great. I appreciate all that. I just look forward to hearing more about how this process plays out and is there any role that we can play or if there's people we can connect you all to. I'd be more than happy to provide our support. And I think it'd be negligent if I didn't mention I'm a huge fan of libraries. I love that that contribution happened and libraries are one of the few places where people who have different life experiences could come together and be in the same space. And I think they need to be part of the process. They've actually been part of this process. The libraries here have hosted community forums and meetings. There's one tonight in Capitola where I'm presenting. And so they're an example of a community asset that's really leaning in and trying to be part of hoping to address this issue. And I think the more that everyone just steps a little into doing something a little bit differently, we're going to make progress. In Supervisor Cummings, if I may, could I respond to a comment you made? This storyline gets lost in the complexity of the discussion and I just want to appreciate that you, as I heard you, recognize that before your time on the board. Carlos is our CAO and the board members of which at the time it was only Supervisor McPherson and friend made some very courageous decisions and I just want to put this in context. I started one month before the pandemic and the decision had made to transfer the homeless office, which was one analyst and then a grant funded second analyst. That's it. And then a lot of work by the other to try to do what we are doing with 20 people in this odd enough. The pandemic hit and we got a direction from the board based on CAO budget analysis that we need to do 20% budget reductions. To one of my first political meetings with my new boss Carlos was what are we going to do about this homeless office you're transferring to my department. And he said, as long as I can get the board's approval, we need to hire an executive to help run this despite the budget challenges. Thank you Carlos for that. I don't know how I do this without that. And then we had a large community hiring process that led to the hiring of Robert. I want to connect another dot. A lot of questions come forward about you don't spend enough general fund we are a general fund or county because we spend so much of our general fund money on unincorporated services not run by cities and property. Prop 13 tax formulas and other things. In the presentation, it highlighted that from five years ago to date the county committed $3.5 million of extra general fund, which built out the division that Robert now runs of 20 people. Half the positions are limited term because we don't have that she did funding, but without that commitment and this is the point I want to make the math is different depending on you look at that has generated a six to 10 time return. On grants that Robert's team has been able to secure. So without that county's commitment to create the infrastructure, which we could have had good reason if Carlos didn't step up and say this is urgent and the board didn't say we must do this while we're in a budget freefall. We would never be where we are to which is still not enough. But the storyline that the county doesn't commit general fund to sort of invest in this issue is factually budgetarily incorrect. It's just invisible because it's tucked in the people behind the curtain, getting all this money. So I just want to lift that up it's not enough we have more to do but there have been courageous decisions by the board, and by our CAO to say we must and we need to do more but I don't know what we would do if we didn't have this division. So thank you for lifting that up I just wanted to piggyback on that to share that storyline. Thank you. And, and there's more work to do and just want to thank you all again for being able to take 3 million and turn it into 24. And so with that, I don't know if Supervisor Friend is back on the line yet, because I get back on. Okay, so I'll just turn it back over to Supervisor Friend as the chair. And I believe that it's Supervisor Hernandez comments but just want to recognize that I'm no longer chair right now. Thank you Supervisor Cummings. Thanks for jumping in Supervisor Hernandez please. Yes, so I also just wanted to thank also our CAO Carlos Palacios for, you know, the story right now storyline about investing in this as well. When the times are tough with that's when it's most critical, the need is most critical. And also extend my appreciation to Dr. Robert Radner and of course, Randy Morris and all the members of the Housing for Health Division, Human Services Department for their dedication to housing. You know, I just want to acknowledge you guys' relentless efforts. And I agree, you know, with Dr. Radner and Director Morris comments about needing more housing. One of the programs I really appreciate it is a Supervisor Cummings tenant assistant programming that was done earlier. You know, those are kind of things that are really critical. And I would like to see more policies and programs like that that address and continues the support for low income housing, affordable housing, even a workforce housing as as Dr. Radner was saying, some of those issues are actually facing county employees. In our county. So whether it's, you know, streamlining the planning process here within our department, whether it's inclusionary housing ordinances, or just, you know, simple first time home buyer programs. I think we need all are all the solutions, a multifaceted approach, not just one solution to these issues. And I think that, you know, with the recent release of the pick count. You know, it, we've made progress and also of course some challenges. You know, it revealed some advancements across the country within almost all the municipalities, unfortunately in Watsonville that is within the boundaries of the Fork District. It had an uptick of 15% in homelessness. And, you know, we've made tremendous strides though in decreasing the number out in in the north right 22%. But I think it really illustrates that we got to take a deeper look at these indicators with the lens of equity as to where events investments need to be made in the county to address this uptick in homelessness so that we can better address this crisis that's happening in the county. And I think that it is as it was alluded to right it's a different character that's happening over there it's a different situation. It's harder to find as well, because it's families living in in in automobiles it's not as as forward as it is in in the north. What's the initial plan to deal with this 15% uptick. I think that I just want to suggest that I think it's going to need partners in South County to address this as well because there's language barriers there's different cultural factors. They also need to be part of the plan. I just want to start with with a lot of humility as a newer member to this community I benefited from having my former deputy director Emily Bali from Watsonville and one of her parting words is. I said thank you so much for helping me survive during this and she said you got it please never forget Watsonville and my new deputy director Kimberly Pearson as a former mayor of Watsonville so we're always trying to think about this and in my introductory comments I spoke to we have a long way to go. But we have investments that are coming online but the comment I want to make and I'll turn it over Robert to specificity is I think we have this wonderful. Silver lining in the pandemic, which is the South County community based organization leaders stood up loud. And partnered with the women leading the health agency the health director the health officer the public health director. And focused on an equity lens how to address the needs of the entire county, but the pandemic was most hitting South County. So we that just happened. And that was not just a concept that happened and to what I'm hearing your point supervisor and is the South County community leaders and the South County Watsonville staff and your former council. There's a lot of energy say don't stop this momentum. And we participate regular means to make sure whatever the next thing is we keep that lesson learned and apply it doesn't mean you have to take money from somewhere else but you have to focus equity. So I just want to recognize the shoulders I feel I stand on as a public partner to health. And to all the community based leaders in South who really stood up and said, we are here to help so we are going to lean into the community based organizations who just did an amazing job, making sure South County as community provider so we will piggyback on that experience. And then I'll let Robert say some specificity because we already have some ideas of course. Yeah, thanks for the comments and the questions who rise Hernandez I completely agree with you that we need to listen and connect with people who are in the community and who here and live and breathe what's going on and figure out what are some of the best approaches we can take. Two years ago, we looked at it, we didn't look we applied for a family homelessness challenge grant with the state. And the idea was to partner with some of the local nonprofits that are part of something called the South County Housing Collaborative which is a core funded general fund project to secure some additional funding I was concerned at the time looking at the U. S. D. Power Valley Unified School District with a number of children who are homeless according to the Department of Education definition. It's the highest in the county and that definition includes couch surfing unstable living situation so not the kind of homelessness that had talks about, but often the precursor to living in your vehicles. Then that was a warning sign. And now I for me personally the pit counter sign yeah we didn't tend to that as much as we needed to during the pandemic so this to me is a wake up call. I think that South County allowed housing collaborative that we're already supporting and working with your office, having more of our staff time in South County talking to those folks and figuring out what we can do. I think supervisor Cummings comments about eviction protections and looking at a legal right to counsel or things we're definitely going to see if that initial investment is having traction and we should think about that in South County as well. The one other thing that I feel is particularly important for the board in the public to know South County but also countywide is that some of the new funding available from the state requires each jurisdiction to get their housing elements approved. So I really want to work with the city of Watsonville and the board here let's get our housing elements approved by a CD so that we can go after more of the housing resources at the state. And it's just the theme I think of the presentation that Randy and are giving collaboration. Most of money is coming from the Steds, the federal government and the state government let's collaborate, particularly in South County let's go together with a shared voice and unified vision to go after some of this money. And would appreciate support from your office and organizations in the Watsonville area to kind of move on this. Thank you supervisor Hernandez for those comments. I'll just make some brief comments and I appreciate not just the work that you did but also providing this breakdown so we have a better understanding of where and how the funding is being spent within the county and I share supervisor Hernandez's concerns about the inequities of funding throughout the county Dr. Ratner you had mentioned by your estimation I recognize it's not an exact number but your estimation and maybe 80% of the countywide money is being spent on the northern section of the county of the clearly allocated is about 60% when we looked at those two numbers so we know that that no matter what it is a significant amount of our funding is going to the northern section of the county. Yet, and maybe causally or at least correlated. There was an increase in the southern portion of the county that did not occur in the north which saw a reduction and so I think that more directly to supervisor Hernandez's point I think that the board should be providing additional information for us to look into this allocation I don't think that this is. The intention of the all in plan I don't think this is the intention of a number of the equity initiatives that we've done I don't think this is the intention of some of the core analysis. Funding programs that we have done where we look at how the money is being distributed across the county in particular I would take your guidance on how we can do it in such a way to provide an analysis that would be useful for the board for consideration of future allocations because while I don't think that it needs to necessarily be just populationally based or something like that I do think that there needs to be some flexibility in how this money is moved because you can't have the county spending tens of millions of dollars in one section of the county that it's not in another area. In particular an area that has historically been an unquestionably been under invested in in all services and access to government services in the county has tried to lift up we had an earlier board item on the Westridge center for example tried to lift up for services so my first question I suppose for Dr. Ratner would be how would you recommend that the board address this funding and equity and how do you suppose it has one of the recommended actions is provide direction for coming back in six months in regards to the plan and how can we look at ways to kind of smooth out that funding and equity. Thanks for the questions who rise a friend I have a couple of ideas and definitely open to other ones I think one element of the new planning process should be exactly what you talked about a deeper analysis and not just off of the top of my head but actually advising us a staff to look at you know what to the extent that we have useful data and it's imperfect like who are the people that are being served by the county wide programs where are people actually securing housing I think we could do more detail analysis kind of the geography of how things are playing out with people who are losing housing and so what where are people losing housing and where are people securing housing and then looking at where the programs are the kind of wide programs are picking up new clients. So one way in which we can address this is with our new coordinated entry process the unexpected process of assessing people experiencing homelessness and when we create new programs we can articulate particularly county wide programs we can have as a policy that we bring to the spectrum of care board we want to have a preference for people from this geographic region for certain programs in addition to looking at the distribution of funding overall. I think another strategy is to really look at and we did this when partnering with Monterey County what funds are available and can we collaborate with our partners in the city of Watsonville to apply for and secure more funding in ways that really meet the needs and to the extent that we can support the city of Watsonville the housing element and becoming the pro housing community in terms of housing the more we can align with the state's directions of getting approved housing elements becoming a designated pro housing community that increases the funding for availability of funding for jurisdictions. So I think leaning in and South County and then from my personal experience the process of making decisions about how core and general fund investments the sooner the board starts those conversations around the equity issue and looking at the distribution of the dollars that we have some local control over that can be a factor as well and in looking at how with the next round of core funding you know how do we want to distribute those dollars in a way that addresses some of the disparities that you articulated. I appreciate that I mean I'm concerned also with just when we just geographically create a bright line because what we need these are evolving issues and you need flexibility in it but nobody can look at a distribution of estimated at three quarters one quarter 80 20 and be proud of how that is being equitably distributed I mean I think the county needs to take a very serious and significant look as to how resources are being invested in the area not just in the northern section of the county and to supervisor Hernandez's point build up those relationships in ways that maybe we haven't historically done because it is a more challenging area to ensure that we have the correct data to know what the sense of the problem is and I think one of the challenges also on doing the analysis Dr. Ratner as I'm sure I mean it kind of akin to the point in time count is that because of an under investment I think that the data that we're going to have is going to be challenging to even show what the extent of the problem actually is or may skew what the need actually is but I think that at the end of the day we know that there's a growing problem in the South County that's not being addressed because of funding and so to the degree that as part of this additional direction when we when we come back in six months we can look at a process that helps smooth that over time I think that that will be good and I appreciate that I do want to address there was a point that supervisor Koenig had brought up in regards to the state and state funding and flexibility and for that matter in regards to the hearing that I'm testifying out in about an hour and a half here the state is functionally removing local flexibility on a lot of these funding in both behavioral health as well as homeless services there's a movement to be more prescriptive and what it is and that's one of the challenges and it's going to that's what the legislature is debating right now that's what we're working on the amendments in order to ensure that that flexibility still exists. One of the challenges that we face in Santa Cruz County is that we've done a good job leveraging money we've done a good job with our accountability and showing how the money is being spent we don't leave money on the table. Some other counties have struggled or in particular a couple of unnamed particularly large counties in the state have struggled with this and that has led to I believe the governor's office trying to create more accountability protocols but that one size fits all doesn't work for accounting can have real impacts on our safety net here in Santa Cruz County so that's what I'm actually here to speak about so I wish I could give you a greater speech of hope supervisor Koenig in regards to this but actually what we're trying to do today is prevent this greater prescriptive element that's currently proposed by the state. So I would like to open it up now to the community I know there's been some members of the community that have been waiting for a long time on this item so first we'll do it in chambers are there's anybody in chambers I'd like to address this please feel free to step forward. Thank you. Thank you Steinbrunner. You know what I always appreciate about your presentations Mr Morris and Dr Ratner is that they're very human. You don't throw up a bunch of statistics and graphs and make everybody blurry I tried to make a point. You really talk with us and explain things well on a human dimension so thank you. I really appreciate that. I have at times been a volunteer food deliverer for Teen Kitchen Project. So I've seen a lot of different living conditions and the ones that always disturbed me the most were the ones in Watsonville where people had lost their homes because of their health crisis. And they were staying with friends of friends of friends and it was a very eye opening situation. So I think what we really would really help set help us set more meaningful effective goals is to really find out why are these people homeless. What happened. COVID certainly had a huge piece in it. People lost their jobs. People lost their businesses. Utilities went up. They continue to go up. So why are they homeless. Is it drugs. If it's drugs. I really would love to see this county embark upon a pilot project using Ibogaine that can help people with their consent get off of the addictive pathway. Then we can teach them life skills that can help them help themselves and their families pull themselves out of homelessness and poverty and being dependent on the government to help them live. I asked this board why the county is using 12 practically new mobile homes that were given to the county during COVID for the transitional youth sheltering. They're being used as office space for parks department. Why aren't we using them for homeless shelter. Can I have one more minute. Yes, one more minute please. Thank you very much. So that's a travesty right there that we have shelter that was given to us and it's not being used to shelter anymore. I I demand that this county board look into that and hand over the keys to those trailers to the homeless services people and put them to use for shelter. I think that a number of people also became homeless during this easy you fire. I think that the power valley floods had a huge piece in the increase in homeless families in South County this winter. So again it comes back to the question is why are these people on the streets were in their cars or couch surfing because that's what we have to know in order to help them help themselves. I am happy to hear some discussion of the city of Watsonville being included. I think we should also include capital city. And Scott Valley because they also have homeless in their jurisdictions and we're all here to work together. Thank you very much. I appreciate the extra time. Yes, thank you for your comments. Is there anybody else in chambers that would like to address us. Seeing none. Madam clerk or is there anybody online. Yes chair we have five online. Thank you. Ellen your microphone is now available. Thank you. Good morning chair and supervisors county staff and community members. I'm Helen you and story assistant director for the Community Action Board of Santa Cruz County. The county's designated anti poverty agency for almost 60 years. We're based in Watsonville and serve over 10,000 low income individuals annually throughout the county with programming including homelessness prevention and intervention services. Housing and homelessness ranked in the top five issue areas in our recent community action plan not surprising given the last few years of fire COVID and recent floods. And as we all acknowledged earlier in the meeting you know our county had the dubious distinction of being identified as the most expensive metropolitan area in the county this year or in the country this year with two bedroom housing wage identified at just over $63 an hour. This is in stark contrast to the 20% of cabs recent cap plan respondents stating they make under $5000 annually that's just over $400 a month. County supported services such as cabs rental assistance programming youth homeless response team and navigation services. Watsonville works homeless work crew South County housing connector and emergency payment programs including the housing assistance fund all serve hundreds annually and are critical to helping community members stay housed or be rehoused in this challenging environment. Cab has been actively engaged in the housing for a healthy Santa Cruz strategic framework and implementation. While encouraged this year that the pick couch showed a reduction in homelessness County wide. It's disheartening but not surprising to see that the numbers in Watsonville including that next families has increased. Cap supports the reports conclusions that homelessness is primarily housing challenge and that large income and housing cost gaps, including those we see in the city Watsonville and South County increase rates of homelessness. Have further believes it's crucial that local jurisdictions and I hope I can have about 30 more seconds. Please go ahead. Thank you. Have further believes it's crucial that local jurisdictions work together and with state and federal government to continue to bring resources for eviction prevention like rent assistance, as well as very affordable low income housing and the resources and support services to support them. And so we hope that there's continued focused in collaboration there. I will now turn over to our next speaker I'm hoping she's next in line cabs director of programs and impact pass Padilla to continue our statement. Thank you. As Padilla your microphone is now available. Good morning. When was the as chair and supervisors as Helen mentioned my name is pass Padilla. I'm camps director of programs and impact overseeing caps programming, including the homelessness prevention and intervention services. In addition to supporting the recommendation of the age for age report cap also encourages your board, your board to support flexible, no low barrier rent assistance for families and households and overcrowded housing with two to three or many more individuals and families living in one house. Because of the gap between wages and sectors, such as a farm and service work, and made even it may even worse by the loss of housing to to the reason winter storms. Many families in this overcrowded conditions aren't on a formal lease that would make them eligible for the majority of available rent assistance, or many be undocumented and ineligible for other assistance, making them specially vulnerable to homelessness. Further assisted in attachment to the report we encourage your board to provide additional resources to the cap left South County housing collaborative to decrease South County homelessness and families with school age children and increase family housing stability and the equitable distribution of county resources where they are most needed. Additionally, we encourage your board to continue to collaborate with the County of Monterey and City of Watsonville to rehouse the over 50 power of families, many with children and PV USD schools displaced by the winter storms and are currently slated to loser temporary lodging at a Watsonville hotel. Thank you. Muchas gracias for your ongoing focus and partnership on this issues. And please know that cap stands ready to continue to collaborate to accurately resolve homelessness and housing vulnerability and Santa Cruz County. Thank you. Carol, your microphone is now available. Thank you. Good morning, Chair and Supervisors. My name is Carol Pojimas. I'm speaking on behalf of West Side neighbors, which is a neighborhood organization of several thousand lower West Side residents. Santa Cruz's lower West Side has been greatly impacted by issues related to unregulated vehicle camping. There's a nightly average of 60 plus vehicles camping on just the foremost impacted streets, Schaefer, Natural Bridges, Swanton and Delaware. The point in time data states that 46% of the 1804 unsheltered people are living in vehicles. That is 829 people living in vehicles, the highest number ever. The Armory Safe Spaces Program is great and Evan and Corey are doing a wonderful job, but their program has a waiting list of over 50 people who want to participate in the Safe Spaces Program and who have already signed up for it. Providing safe spaces for people to park overnight with services makes so much sense. People sleeping in vehicles already have shelter. They just need a sanction placed to park. Consolidated parking will provide for easier intake and access to necessary social services toward the goal of securing permanent housing. Consolidating parking also makes the delivery of sanitation services more efficient. The county has property it already owns to use for temporary Safe Spaces parking. We know that Supervisor Koenig is working on an ordinance to expand the possible member of Safe Spaces parking and we commend and appreciate him for this work. The residents are frustrated with years of excuses by the county for not doing what seems so plainly obvious to us. The fact that Safe Spaces parking is not discussed in this report is surprising. Please designate at a minimum parking for 100 vehicles per night at several locations throughout the county. This will alleviate both the issues related to unsanctioned vehicle camping in the neighborhoods and the challenge of providing outreach and access to social services for people living in vehicles. This will also help the residents of the county to get their vehicles out of necessity. I need 10 seconds, please. Thank you so much. Designating Safe Spaces parking immediately will alleviate suffering much faster than waiting years for future permanent housing to come online. Please prioritize safe parking areas and include this in a three-year plan going forward. Thank you so much for listening to our comments. Thank you for that. Thank you. 3377, your microphone is now available. Caller 3377 to unmute, hit star six. Hi, yeah. My name is Chief McHenry and I've been feeding the homeless for 43 years and I was involved in providing the only hot meal for homeless people in Santa Cruz for three years of the lockdown. I would say, you know, we have plenty of money, but the policies and dictated by both the federal, state and local governments make this crisis impossible really to resolve. And as I'm sure everyone there is aware, we're entering into a severe great depression where in March, according to Lending Tree, there are already nearly 9 million families who are behind on their rents and we're facing homelessness in the United States. So this is going to be, you know, many, many more homeless people on the streets and it's odd that I should support somebody from West Side who's been tacking the homeless for so many years, but she is right. They need to be a lot more safe parking locations throughout the county and it's frightening how many people lose their cars and get towed and then they come to food on bonds, I hand them the pup tent and then we send them to the levy only to be swept from the levy. So the one of the increases, even though the numbers are horribly bad, and to give the impression in the point in time count that the numbers went down is a tragedy because that means people are going to think the problem is being resolved and that just only the evil homeless that they see that are causing the problem rather than the county really resolving the crisis. I get calls probably, but often not as many as 20 a day from people that are seeking food and many of them express their anger that we have billions for Ukraine, but we can't feed our own selves here in the United States. And so I think that, you know, and then I've got to really point out that homeless people in this that have to deal with the shelter program. The one thing that they uniformly ask is that Jeremy lens fire because he is just like outrageously vicious and violent. Thank you. Call in user to your microphone is now available. I'd like to hear more comments by Keith McHenry and food not bombs. Ask him his ideas for solutions. The title is in the program isn't it? Our money is going to the military industrial nuclear telecom media complex and not to feed and house people at home. I think back often to the trip I made in 1966 to the former Soviet Union. And there were not people hungry on the streets. And my second cousin paid about 5% of her income for rent in a small but very pleasant apartment near the forest. People in your meeting there have talked about shifting of priorities and where is the money coming from. And we need to have money stop being siphoned out of our county to go to this military industrial complex. And the pandemic I call it part of it was a great reset which is drainage of resources and diminishing the power of local government. And here's a quick quote in one year Tony Fauci his cronies his intelligence agencies the farm of the physical companies and these billionaires from Silicon Valley. Have engineered a shift of almost $4 trillion from the middle class globally to a handful of Robert Baron such a quote from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In a top entitled when money intersects public health policy. And you can see the whole thing at Weston a price dot org and the wise traditions publication of winter 2021. Thank you Ms. Garrett. We have no further speakers here. Thank you madam clerk will bring it back to the board. This is an action item for emotion. And ideally if we could get some additional direction I actually can't make the motion but the additional direction just in regards to the analysis on the equity side just empowering the staff to come back in six months with a look at those issues. I'll I'll move the recommended action actions with the additional direction that at the next six month report. We have additional analysis of how we can more actively distribute funding for homeless services throughout the county. Second. Thank you. Survisor Connick it's any additional comments. If not, then roll please supervisor comics. Yeah, just one comment. I'm just hoping as well when this comes back if there's or within this process of planning. If there's recommendations that can be considered and brought back around increased tenant protections and various tenant protections that can help people stay in their homes I think that would also be helpful in this process. I don't know if that's okay with the rest of the board. But I think that we have to take this at both approaches, the rehousing people but also trying to figure out how we can keep people in their homes and so I don't know if that needs to be made as a friendly amendment or if that can just be recommended. May I ask a process question. I don't know if it's vice chair chair friend, we will do both. But if you want to codify it I don't know how this works. We will come back for a general six month. We will put in a review of the distribution of resources and I'm hearing supervisor Cummings with a motion or not we can make sure to speak to the tenant protection dynamics the programs we have in place and just speak to it as part of our presentation. But I defer to the board and council if that's a motion or not but we'll I'm tracking both and we'll make sure to speak to both at the next six month report. I'll consider a friendly amendment and happy to include it in the motion. All right, it's added as an additional amendment to the motion by the maker supervisor conic and approved by the second or supervisor Hernandez any additional comments. Seeing none if we got a roll call please. The provisor conic, I Cummings Hernandez, I MacPherson and friend. I and that passes unanimously thank you for your presentation and for those that patiently waited to comment on that item. We'll move on to item nine which is to approve and accept the terms and conditions of the seller financing agreement addendum number four and updated vacant land purchase agreement to purchase real property located at one eight eight on the fighting road APN 05104201 for a total purchase amount of 2.31 million dollars and take related actions that under the memo the deputy CEO and director of community development and infrastructure we have the board memo the financing addendum the land purchase agreement and a number of other items here on the schedule and for presentation. I have unfortunately I can't see who it is but I think it's the director of parks is that you Mr Gaffney and miss oh there we go and miss and like all right welcome. I needed the camera to be turned around. I was trying to make a judgment from behind and you know I didn't want to be wrong. So I appreciate both of you for your presentation please director Gaffney. Good afternoon chair members of the board. My name is Kimberly Finley. I'm the chief property agent with the Department of Community Development and Infrastructure. I would like to recommend approval of the seller financing and updated vacant land purchase agreement to acquire real property located at one eight eight fighting road for parks purposes to further discuss the community need and envisioned use of the property. I will turn the presentation over to the director of parks and open spaces chef Gaffney. My name is Finley and board members staff. I do want to thank Community Development Infrastructure Department for all the work they've done and in particular Kimberly Finley to get us to here today and also CEO plosios. Thank you very much. We've been working on developing the need. I'm sorry. The need for a park has been assessed over the last 70 years in the South County area and we have gone out to the community on a number of occasions. Both through our strategic plan planning process and also three surveys at community meetings and events. And it's it's very clear to us as a department and both through the data and also just anecdotal stories that we are in much need of a park in South County as well as actually in district three. So both district three and four are our park forest districts within this county. So in that process we did develop some of the community needs and some of those were athletic field space. We need open space and healthy environments for people to participate in activities that bring them peace and serenity. We wanted to expand some of our county park trends programs connectivity to open space and also some of the climate resilient practices that we're looking at. And so in that process we found some available space that was potential for Parkland and we came down to where we are today. So next slide please. And that is this property at 188 Whiting as we've talked about. So this is an envisioned idea of where we could go with this. This would be some of this would be the interim uses. Some would be uses that would be long term there at the park property. One of the things we do think is it would be vital to part of the process is developing partnerships with some of the local farmers developing a lease program. It's really for farmers to grow crops out there. Ag tourism is as a result of that and also sustainable ag practices could be demonstrated for local youth nature trails. There's also the potential to create an emergency evacuation point. So next slide please. One of the reasons that we really highlighted this property in particular was its availability to local community based organizations and schools to do a lot of the youth programming and education farms and agricultural practices. This would of course coincide with your typical expectations for a park where we would have these as we talked about the athletic fields nature trails rec programming. In addition to that we would be partnering with the agricultural history project at the fairgrounds the city of Watsonville the power of our unified school district as I mentioned a lot of the community based organizations and as I mentioned the indigenous people representing the area. So next slide. I think also we would partner with a lot of the relatively close organizations that have done parks like this in the past. They're all within less than an hour's drive of here. A lot of really good information that things they've learned practices they've developed programs they've created as a result of having the same type of park. I just wanted to give a quick overview before I turn it over back over to miss Finley I just have some perspective. You can see the slide on the left and the slide on the right. The slide on the right will give you on the top of the screen you'll see Paulson Road which becomes Whiting Road right about the apex of the property up there. And obviously adjacent to that you can see the Baja Valley Water Management Agency and open space and then down at the bottom screen you can see the Santa Cruz County fairgrounds. All of that means that we're connecting to existing open space land and protected lands and has a lot of potential for connectivity. So to provide a history of relevant board actions that have occurred on this matter on August 24th 2021 we appeared in closed session to receive authority to negotiate an option to buy 188 Whiting. December 7th 2021 we appeared in open session and received approval to enter into the option to buy agreement and associated vacant land purchase agreement. On February 28th 2023 we received authority to extend the option to buy and on May 31st 2023 in closed session we received authority to negotiate seller financing terms. So this item has been pending for quite some time. Since entering into the option agreement we have completed the feasibility studies necessary to recommend purchase of 188 Whiting Road. Those feasibility studies include a phase one environmental site assessment, water quality and quantity studies, agricultural viability studies, a biotic report and a determination on CEQA and general plan consistency. The option to buy agreement that was previously approved in 2021 set an agreed upon purchase price of $2,310,000. That purchase price was determined by a county contracted certified third party appraiser. Pursuant to the terms of the option agreement we have now accumulated a $50,000 credit for half of all monthly payments that we have made during the term of the option. We will also receive a $20,000 credit for the option deposit because we are exercising the purchase during the term of the option. So we have a purchase balance of $2,248,000. To help purchase this property we have negotiated the terms of a seller financing agreement. The seller financing agreement requires a down payment of $1,100,000 with a seller finance loan of $1,140,000. The loan will be financed and amortized over 13 years with a 4.03% interest rate. The monthly payments of $9,400 and the down payment of $1,100,000 will be funded with a mix of Measure G funds, Parks Capital Projects funds, 2015 unfunded mandate repayments and park dedication funds. We now recommend the following actions. Approve and accept the terms and conditions of the seller financing agreement, addendum number four, an updated vacant land purchase agreement to purchase real property located at 188 Whiting Road in Watsonville, APN 05104201 or $1,104,000 with a total purchase price of $2,310,000. Authorize the close of escrow if and when all contingencies are met pursuant to the terms of the vacant land purchase agreement. And authorize the chair of the board to execute the certificate of acceptance for the associated grant deed. Escrow documents and loan documents as required to effectuate the transfer of the county property. And take related actions as further outlined in the board letter associated with this item. That concludes our presentation today and we are available for any questions. Thank you, Director Gaffney. Thank you, Miss Finley. Are there questions from board members? I'll start with Supervisor Hernandez. So we had a really nice presentation from the friends of the library. At what point would we be able to do a partnership with, or would we be able to do a partnership with Friends of the Park to do like a capital type fundraiser for this that can incur some of the costs that we're having for the project? Would that be like a second phase that we can do some capital fundraising for this project as well? Absolutely. We have been in partnership with the county park friends, nonprofit, our partners and everything, all parks throughout the county. And for probably the last year and a half we've been working with them as we've looked towards the purchase of this. And so they are well prepared and looking towards the future on what especially I think they're excited about the potential for programming, but also development of all resources available to us for this facility. That'd be great if we can raise funds to, you know, for programming, but also, you know, development as well. Absolutely. Questions from other supervisors? Supervisor Cummings? I just want to start by thanking staff for that presentation. I guess in terms of kind of next steps. So this is obviously the property purchase. And I think to supervisor Hernandez's point in terms of developing the different amenities of that park, that's going to be a next step. And I'm just kind of wondering in terms of the planning process and what the next step will be in terms of defining what the use will be of that space. Good question. We're fortunate enough that we feel we can implement some interim uses right away so that the property doesn't sit vacant and not be utilized. Some of those may be leasing it for farming as it is right now as we develop some of the other infrastructure that we need to. And then also potentially athletic fields could be right out the gate, something we can look at in the next nine to 10 months potentially. In addition to that, there are some very basic things that need to be done. The site needs to be cleaned up. There were some folks living out there for a while. We need to do that. The entrance to the park that will now be a park potentially would need to be changed in the way it is laid out for public use. There's a lot of little things that need to be dressed, but right away we'd like to get some use on the property. That's great. And I've got to put my plug in, but I think for kind of longer term use and maybe some multi athletic field use. I know that there's been a lot of some people reaching out about trying to figure out how we can get rugby fields. And so if there's an opportunity to have joint soccer and rugby, and I know there's a lot of people who would be encouraged to bring rugby to South County as well. And have that be another activity. So there's opportunity for conversation. We'd love to have that offline. I can talk to Felipe a little bit more about that and see how we might be able to bring out some more activities down in South County. Happy to maximize the use of all our parks as much as we potentially can. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Cummings, the captain of our new rugby team for the Board of Supervisors. Let me just, I want to thank Ms. Finley, who's been working very hard in the negotiation on this and trying to bring what will now be the largest investment in South County parks since the opening of Pinto Lake County Park. This is a pretty significant investment and it'll take some time to be fully realized. But now it's coming into the fold in public ownership and I think will be very important for future generations in South County. So I just wanted to appreciate all the work that's been done behind the scenes on it. Are there any other questions or comments from my colleagues before we open it up to the community? Yeah, Mr. Chair, I don't know where former Supervisor Greg Capitas today, but when he hears about that, he's going to have a big smile on his face. He's been working at this for years with the Parks Department and for, you know, he has been consistent and not arrogant, but really, he's been really pointed to say, let's get this done. And then Supervisor Hernandez for following up on that. And I think this is another great example recently of how the county is working diligently to improve the services and programming in the South County. When you look at the Watsonville Hospital Project, the County Government Center and the work on the future of the Pahua River and improving that, we can be proud of all the funding and resources that have been invested and have been invested. And now we'll be more heavily invested in the Pahua River Valley. I think it's a credit to the county that it's really taken a targeted approach to improving the services in the South County. Thank you. Thank you for pointing that out Supervisor McPherson. Any additional comments or questions before we open it up? Sure, Chair. I'll just add that I'm also excited about the potential for this site. I've already seen a number of creative ideas for it and I look forward to seeing those blossom with the support of the community active rugby enthusiasts and other enthusiasts, as well as hopefully some help from county park friends. And I, you know, you mentioned in the presentation, but I think the proximity to the fairgrounds there and the potential evacuation site also just mean this strategically. This is a good purchase for the county. And I also want to thank Kimberly Finlay for her work in structuring a creative deal that ultimately works well for both parties. And also, I think, I think that our ability to raise funds for the park should increase now that we have it in public ownership. I know that was a challenge when we went out for the grant previously. A state grant is that they said, well, hey, you guys are on the site yet, so why should we give you millions of dollars for it? So hopefully we've got a good answer for them when we go back. Thank you. Thank you. Now open up for the community. Is there anybody in chambers that would like to address us on this item? Thank you, Becky Steinbrunner. I cannot agree more that South County needs a park. This is not the place for it. If you could please put the slide back while I talk about the aerial view of this, ma'am, it will become painfully clear. Where do the people live that would be using this park? They don't live near this land. This park should be put on the county-owned property behind the master gardener's place and existing community garden at the intersection of Freedom Boulevard and Crestview. That's where the people are. That's where the kids are. That's where the gardens are. That's where this park should be. You could put soccer fields there. The water is there. I'm not so sure if the water for a soccer field or a rugby field is going to be there with an old agricultural well. This is not the place for a park. How are the kids going to get there? Are they going to ride their bikes on 152 or Paulson Road, which is even more dangerous? There's no bus service there except Sundays for the farmers market. No bus service. And during the county fair. Where is the tie-in with the county fairgrounds? There's no access across that ravine. Who's going to build that access? I spoke with CEO Zeke Fraser about this. He's the new CEO of the county fairgrounds. He knew nothing of this. Maybe you've been talking with the Kegabinds and Bag History, but they didn't tell the CEO anything about this. It's a surprise. So this is not the place for a county park that will serve the youth and the elderly for recreation. It needs to be in a place that the county already owns. You already own the land on the bus route. It's easy access. It's easy water. The farmland issue has been, there's a farmland that has been for rent across the way for months and months. It's not being farmed. One quick second. I would just give an additional minute please. Thank you very much. I'm thinking that farmers will flock to this land and rent it and use it for farming is not realistic because they're not renting the land on the other side of College Lake to farm that now. Using it for soccer fields is great, but again, where's the water and the access? This is not where the people are. Who is it really going to serve and how can any sequel analysis of vehicle miles travel make this pencil out? It's not going to serve the people in the way that we all want to do in South County. So please do not approve this. I am distressed that the county has already spent $50,000 in purchase order payments. We should not move any further with it and instead invest the money instead of $9,000 on a dream that maybe people will come to invest that money in improving the park land on Freedom Boulevard and Cresview. Thank you, Ms. Steinbrunner. Thank you. Is there anybody else in chambers that'd like to address us? Madam clerk, is there anybody online? Yes, chair. We have one speaker online. Colin user to your microphone is now available. Thank you, Becky for a reality check. What Becky Steinbrunner stated makes total sense. I had no idea in your presentation by staff. You left out these critical points of the access and somewhere people live, et cetera. It's just shocking to me how omission of facts is like, it's like a deception. You don't get the whole picture. So I agree with Becky. I also wonder with farmland, the pesticide use, how toxic sites are. And I was trying to picture where this location is the cross street. I remember going out to the fairgrounds from the city of Watsonville. And there's a rather large cell tower near there. And I'm always noticing where cell towers are and I'm always feeling sick around where the locations are. So this does not sound like a good plan. We definitely need parks, but take up Becky Steinbrunner's suggestion. That sounds like a good place to put it. I'm not again spending that amount of money for parks, but we need to have it in a good location. I know that it's like $20 million just went to Telecare, which my friend got picked up for and had a terrible time, not a blink of an eye to approve that money. But let's have parks where we need them. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Garrett. Are there any other speakers, Madam Clerk? There's no further speakers chair. All right, we'll bring it back to the board for action. I'd like to move the recommended item. Is it A and B that we're moving on the recommended items? And I've got some additional comments as well. So is that a motion for all of the recommended actions? Supervisor Hernandez? All of the recommended actions. Is there a second? A second. We have a second from Supervisor Cummings. Additional comments, Supervisor Hernandez? I'm just happy and seeing this vision finally become a reality as a dream come true for many South County residents. We're proud to finally have secured this land. And on behalf of the community, we look forward to opening it up to the public. I think this park acquisition addresses a lack of recreational spaces in South County. And it's like a region that's been under-resourced in terms of open space, outdoor opportunities, with a dedicated focus on promoting physical activity. The park is really going to counteract a lot of the chronic health conditions that we're facing, especially amongst young people. You know, studies have always shown that positive impact of physical activity on both physical, mental and emotional well-being. So it's something that's tremendously needed, you know. I think the groundbreaking, this is a groundbreaking project that exemplifies District 4 and the County's commitment to equity and a better quality of life. For everyone recognizing the scarcity of parks within the district, we hope to create a vibrant hub of activities that cater to people of all ages from landscape, greenscapes, walking, versatile range of attractions, soccer fields, organic demonstration farms. The parks can be designed to captivate the hearts of youth and families alike. I want to thank all the Board of Supervisors, my colleagues, CEO Carlos Palacios, the Parks Director, and of course, making sure that the whole deal went through as well. But I also want to thank former District 4 Supervisor Greg Caput for helping identify this location and putting funds aside for the land acquisition as well, and always being pit bull and making sure that the project happened as well. So thank you to him as well, and I think that's my comments. Right, we have a motion and a second. If we could have a roll call, please. Supervisor Koenig. Hi. Cummings. I just wanted to also thank staff for all their hard work on this. Thanks for getting this across a lot. Nandis. Yes. McPherson. Hi. And friend. Hi, and that passes unanimously. Thank you. And that is the end of our regular agenda. We have a closed session agenda. Council, is there anything expected to be reportable at a closed session? No. All right, then we will move straight into closed session. Thank you, everybody.