 session of the May 24, 2022 meeting of the Santa Cruz City Council and I would like to ask the clerk to please call roll. Council Member Kellentary Johnson. Is it? Roller is currently absent. Coming. Yes. Vice Mayor Watkins. Here. And Mayor Brunner. Present. Thank you. We will now begin our agenda with presentations item number six, Beach Safety Week. And I'd like to welcome Fire Chief Rob Odie and Director of Parks and Recreation, Tony Elliott. Hello, Council. Thank you Mayor Brunner and Council. I'd like to start off this week's presentation with a brief moment of silence to remember, Hi Fam. He was a 50 year old male who died just over a year ago May 16th on our main beach while with his two children was caught in a rip current. And so I just want to observe a moment of silence for him. I think it's only appropriate to remember Mr. Fam and many of the others that tragically lose their lives on in our coastal waters each year. As many of you may know, this week is National Beach Safety Week. Each year to kick off the summer season, the United States Life Saving Association sponsors National Beach Safety Week in an effort to remind all beachgoers to use the mantra know before you go. This means that everybody should use extreme caution in the beach and ocean environment and always, always check in with lifeguards before entering the water to become familiar with any hazards they may encounter. This year, the fire department in a coordinated effort with a number of other coastal agencies developed a PSA public safety announcement that will be rolling out this summer. This is in light of in addition to Mr. Fam's tragedy in May of last year, in the fall last year, we lost three lives in five days on the north coast due to people being unfamiliar with the cliff environment as well as the ocean pocket codes on the north coast. And so that sort of drummed up a lot of concern on my behalf, as well as other county chiefs in the agency and led us to develop this public safety announcement to sort of make a connection with those local community as well as tourists that come and visit our beautiful area. So this PSA emphasizes the message of know before you go and reminds all beachgoers of many of the beach and oceans inherent hazards. And again, they're not limited to rip currents, large swells, ever-changing tides, cold water exposure, and of course, unstable coastal cliff areas. And we were able to, even though we finished wrapping production, video production a week and a half ago, I was able to get a teaser or a trailer developed and delivered to me early this morning. And so I'd like to share that with the council if we can. Bonnie, do you have that ready? Bonnie, I don't know if you have audio. I don't know if anybody else can hear that. I can't hear it. Yeah, we're not hearing anything. Well, if we can't if we can't get it queued up now, I can definitely share with everybody. National Marine Surfing Reserve. And as such, it's a destination. So people from all levels want to come and enjoy and experience surfing in Santa Cruz. They see the waves and maybe there's a small set and they think they can handle it. And when they actually paddle out there, a larger set will come and they'll wind up in trouble. But with the buddy, you know, if you're out in the water with a person, you guys can keep an eye on each other. You know, anything can happen, even if you are a really competent swimmer, even if you do feel like you could be really safe, it's better to have that extra layer of security. If you're going to go swimming around arcing kids and mostly kids, it's going to stay in the swim zone and stay close to the shore. Yeah, you would not want to just jump it out water and go swimming unless you're really prepared and you're used to cold water and the effects that it has on your body. So if you're going to come to the beach here in Santa Cruz, I would definitely encourage you to bring your sunscreen and bring your water and make sure to bring your common sense with you. It's the preventable situations, those situations that where we can intervene by way of outreach and education. So we're here because we love the water, we love the beach, we love the ocean, but a big part of my job and everyone down here is talking to the public. That's what we're here for, we love to provide such education to the public as we can. Our job is to help people in the water, but if we can help them on land before they get in the water and then, you know, limit people from getting in trouble, then that's like a really good day for us. Awesome, thank you, Bunny. So again, this that's just a little preview of what we have to come. We'll have a couple of different spots, 15 to 30 second spots that will be, we'll be doing a heavy push with the business community as well as the visitor's bureau to have those in hotels and other areas that we can make connections with. Again, the local community as well as visitors to our area. So again, this is National Beach Safety Week, which begins, began yesterday and extends through Memorial Days. Again, as a reminder of everybody to be safe when visiting the beach area. And so now I'd like to turn it over to DC from Parks and Rec to complete our presentation. Hello, I'm DC Lawson Thomas, recreation supervisor of our beach programs, notably the junior grant program. And I just want to go over some numbers from last year that was provided from the fire department. We had approximately 650,000 visitors on Santa Cruz beaches. This was an increase of 150,000 since the middle of the pandemic last year. With this increase in mind, we're gearing up for another busy summer this year. Because we are staffing Capitol Beach, we had 206,000 visitors at Capitol Beach last year. So it gave a department total of 860,000 people, which is a ton. So increased lifeguards had 96 aquatic rescues on Maine and 141 on Capitola for a total of 237 rescues. Across both beaches, we had 30 boat rescues and 142 preventative actions. Like what Rob said, a lot of what they do is preventative. And these numbers are why the Parks and Rec Department and fire departments are collaborating to spread this word of beach safety. On social media, we will be presenting all of USLA's top 10 beach tips. And we hope that we encourage everyone to share these tips. And these tips can also be found in the city manager's weekly update from last week. In tandem with the NOVA before you go PSA, I want to challenge city council. I want you guys to spread some of these beach safety tips. If you have friends and relatives visiting Santa Cruz and you visit the beach, point out a rep current, show them where the lifeguard towers are, introduce your friends and family to the lifeguard on duty. So for our programs, Jim Booth has returned to Harvey West Park and is offering swim lessons through November. And the junior guards is back in full programming. We're doing four week sessions, two sessions. Our competitions are coming back. We'll be over at Capitola Beach for Capitola competition. Our own NorCal competition is coming back. And regionals is down in Huntington, state beach near the end of July. Unrelated to the junior guard programs, I'm also happy to announce that nationals will actually be in California in August. But that'll be after the program ends. And yeah. Thank you DC. And again, thank you Mayor Brunner and council for this opportunity just to spread the word of beach safety. And I really want to point out that when you guys have the opportunity, please bring your family and friends down to lifeguard headquarters or to a lifeguard tower and allow us to introduce ourselves and provide them those preventive that information that's necessary to stay safe in our local community. And with that, that concludes our presentation. Thank you so much Chief Odie and Daniel Lawson Thomas. Thank you for joining us today and sharing that incredibly vital information. Stay safe out there. Okay, our next presentation is on the agenda is a mayoral proclamation declaring June 2022 as LGBTQ plus pride month. And this proclamation I have moved to present in person at the pride festival, though there will be on Sunday, June 5th in Santa Cruz at Abbott Square. There will be a program and I have been asked to present it in person 12 to four. I believe noon it will start. There is an 11 a.m. parade, but there is all the information about pride weekend next weekend as well as the festival on Sunday, June 5th. And that's at Santa Cruz pride.org and myself and I know we are very happy to support the festivities and the effort. So please join me if you can on Sunday, June 5th for the mayoral proclamation declaring the month of June 2022 as LGBTQ plus pride month in the city of Santa Cruz. And as a reminder from 2020 I believe the pride flag will be hung for the month of June at City Hall. All right, so now I will move on into the agenda. I have a few announcements and we'll then continue with the regular meeting. Today's meeting is being broadcast live on community television channel 25, as well as streaming on the city's website, cityofsantacruz.com. If you wish to comment on an item today, call in at the beginning of the item and using the instructions on your screen. You can mute your television or streaming device when you call in and listen through the phone. Please note that there is a delay in streaming. So if you continue to listen on your television or streaming device, you may miss your opportunity to speak. When it's your turn for public comment, please raise your hand either by dialing star nine on your phone or selecting the raise hand feature in your webinar controls on your computer. Please note public comment is only heard on items that council is taking action on and not on the regular updates and reports. The items that will be open for public comment during today's meeting are items number 10 through 23 on our agenda. I'd like to ask the council members if there are any statements of disqualification today. Any council members? I have a statement of disqualification for items number 13 and 14 and that is the annual work plans that are related to my employment. So I will not be participating in the vote of consent items number 13 and 14. And we'll ask the city clerk to announce any additions and deletions. There are none. Okay. At this point, I'd like to call on the city attorney Tony Condati to provide a report on our closed session this morning. Good afternoon, Mayor Brunner, members of the city council. This morning at 10 30, the council met in closed session via zoom to discuss the items that are listed on your posted agenda, including item one, the council referred the real property at 136 river street to closed session for council consideration of real property negotiations. Item two was a conference with labor negotiators council met from and received a report from its labor negotiator with respect to all bargaining groups, including SCIU temporary employees, SCIU service employees, mid managers, only three supervisors only three fire management, fire IAFF police management, police officers association and executives. Item three was an item of significant exposure to litigation. With regard to that item, the council by a six zero vote with council member Watkins absent approved the settlement of a claim by former city employee Susan O'Hara in the sum of $250,000. A copy of the settlement agreement can be obtained upon request by members of the public once it has been fully executed and finalized. Item four, there were two items of real property negotiations, one the real property at 115 C coral street owned by the city, the city met with its negotiator Bonnie Lipscomb on that item as well as item two, the real property at 136 river street, the former site of the outdoor world on river street there. Council met and received a report from its negotiator. There was no reportable action on that item. Item five was a conference with legal counsel involving existing litigation. That was the item city of Santa Cruz at all versus specific gas and electric company currently pending in the Santa Cruz County Superior Court. There was no reportable action on that item and that concludes my report. I'll now call on the city clerk to provide any updates to our calendar. There are no updates. Thank you. Now is the time for council members to report out on actions at external boards committees and joint powers authority meetings or future meetings. Please come prepared to provide an update on any meetings or actions that occurred since the last council meeting updates so that the council and the public can be informed. All right. I will go out to our council members and I will begin with council member Cummings. Thank you mayor. To report out, I'll start with Lafko. So Lafko on our agenda we had a sphere review item of the city of capitol and incorporated in the sphere that incorporates that area and one of the things that actually came out of that was that the within the sphere there's a lot of properties that aren't that have not been annexed into the city of capitol and there was some interest in determining what capitol is future plans are around annexation since the space is a lot of space within the sphere and the reason why there's that space within the sphere is that over time the city will expand and annex into that space. So there'll be some follow-up with Lafko staff and capitol city staff to determine what kind of plans will be put in place for future growth and that was also the last meeting where the city of Santa Cruz will have a representative on that board probably of the next two years I believe and so that actually concludes my term for your term on Lafko and we can actually now remove that from our external community organization since we will no longer have a representative on that board. Next I'm going to talk just briefly about downtown management corp but I think the mayor since she is on the downtown association could probably speak to that in a little bit more detail than I can but we um oh you're not a representative oh gotcha okay no I report to that board got it okay I don't sit on that board okay got it so then a large part of that meeting we have an update on um from the downtown association related to um the types of calls who we're seeing as calls for service related to mental behavioral health we also got an update on um tourism and people who are visiting the downtown uh the downtown management corp also took a position on the our downtown our future ballot measure that's going to be coming forward um the the downtown management court endorsed a no vote on that item and and also vice mayor Myers is on that board too so she can also help fill in if there's anything missing um criminal justice council we received an update on efforts that are underway to explore the amount of calls received by law enforcement related to um mental and behavioral health um that work is still underway but one of the things we did receive that's a piece of good news and came out of a lot of work that our community did around public safety in 2020 was that um last year as you all may know the criminal justice council had conducted a review of policies related to use of force transparency accountability and technology across all the agencies within the county and that report was um concluded in November of last year uh chairman Zach Friend submitted that report to the national association of counties and um at our meeting I believe it was either last Tuesday or the Tuesday before the last Tuesday he informed us that the sancros county criminal justice council uh received a 2022 achievement award from the national association of counties in recognition of their regional effort to examine cross jurisdiction police practices throughout the county and so that's a really good piece of news that reflects a lot of the work that was started when I was mayor and that was um led by our african-american community which then um went to the criminal justice council and um really showed uh you know how many policies we have in common throughout the county and the consistency in these policies around use of force transparency um and and uh accountability and uh this report also came to the public safety committee and I think the recommendation that came out of the CJC was that they come to the full council so that if there's any policies we want to adopt we can consider it and so given the significance of this award I hope that we can see um that report come to the full council for consideration um and I believe that is oh and the one other update is that the um the beach flats parking subcommittee did meet with staff and um piece of good news is that it seems like we're going to be able to get um 10 additional parking spaces in the beach flats area parking is a major concern for beach flats residents and so um we're glad to see that we'll be able to have some more opportunities for permanent holders within that area and there's um in addition to that the um lottery program for parking permits at Nueva Vista is underway um and that effort was led by the mayor as as part of this group as well um and there's further exploration around parking feet parking permit fees to determine whether or not we'll be able to make parking permits within that area more affordable for residents in particular those that are at Nueva Vista thank you and thank you for serving on LACCO as our Santa Cruz representative okay um I will now go to um uh council member Myers thank you mayor uh my report has been given I uh only attended the downtown management corporation um meeting and so my report was covered by a council member coming thank you thank you council member brown thank you mayor um so I'll start with the area agency on aging I have a couple of items of that maybe of interest to the general public as well as my council colleagues the first is that the California senior legislature um and our our region has an opening for an assembly member of the California senior legislature it's a program that has been in operation for um decades now and involves senior uh members of various of different communities and in the various assembly and senate districts uh serving and and actually bringing and introducing pieces of legislation concerning seniors and then working with specific legislators to try to get those moving through the state legislative process and uh we have an opening now for an assembly representative so a senior citizen who is interested in serving in the California senior legislature um we are accepting applications now you can go to the area agency on aging Santa Cruz and San Benito county's website to get the information or contact me and I'll uh connect to you um so this is and so we've had a really great representative for a long long time Chuck Molnar he is retiring from his position as a retiree and uh you know as a representative really well and he um we are hoping he is hoping and we are all hoping that we can get somebody to fill those um capable shoes the senate seat has been filled by Mickey Luna who is a San Benito county resident and longtime advocate around senior issues she was served on the AAA and has just been really involved so we're we're well represented there um but we wanted to try to get another person on board the uh the agency itself which has a mix of elected officials and community representatives on the board is looking for we have two openings right now for people with disabilities who would like to represent the senior and disabled community on the AAA and so those are also positions you can find out more about at the AAA website or by contacting me um another report that we received at our last meeting on the 18th was not such great news we the Live Oak School District has now and we this has been an ongoing conversation and I've I've mentioned it in the past but they have now officially served an eviction notice to the senior programs that operate at through at the Live Oak Senior Center which is owned by the Live Oak School District so um and that those programs include Meals on Wheels which um utilizes a commercial kitchen there and so the it's kind of a desperate situation now to try to identify an alternative location in particular for that function um and uh so I'm just putting it out there if anybody out there is listening has thoughts on this a lot of uh opportunities have been explored um but nothing has been identified as uh and you know suitable location that is uh accessible right at this moment so we are um beginning to have uh more in-depth conversations in the city of Santa Cruz the staff will be involved in those conversations as well but I wanted to just um let people know this is a pretty significant challenge this is where all of the meals that are distributed to um in home and to the congregant congregate meal sites um are prepared so um a lot of work need for an appropriate space and please um contact us if you have any ideas uh the regional transportation commission met and um we uh had a had a long meeting but hopefully this will be a short report um we uh we've been working to try to get uh uh projects started to rehabilitate the Pajaro River Bridge um along the Santa Cruz branch rail line and um had to unfortunately reject a construction bid um for it just coming in at a unreasonable cost but we are working the commission was clear that we wanted the staff to continue to work uh with uh various stakeholders to try to identify ways to do some of that work so that we can keep that bridge um in uh um safe uh and and you know operational um status we also adopted um an agreement with the San Lorenzo Valley Schools Complex uh to do a study around circulation and access at that site it's um been identified as a significant hazard for um people coming in and on and off the um SLV Schools Complex site so um the RTC and um you know really with the leadership of Supervisor McPherson has been working to try to identify ways to make that um site more safer and and more accessible um so that's happening um we also adopted an unmet paratransit and transit needs list um which unfortunately showed that we while we have made significant progress in large parts to the funding made available through Measure D and um other sources um we have been able to meet some of the the additional needs that have had not been met in our community for quite some time but we still have a long way to go um so um that is uh you know a lot of work to do there um but it's an interesting list and worth looking at for folks who are interested in transit um and alternative transit um options and you know just to get a sense of what we are funding and and what uh what needs to be done in the future uh we also uh adopted a program for highway corridors and active transportation we um a five-year program for projects um which will allow us to move forward with um applying for competitive funding for um for rail trail segments and also for the highway um work that needs to be done and the Air Board the Monterey Bay or Resources District Board meeting um was pretty pro forma um budget considerations and other matters but one item I wanted to highlight um is that the so m-barred has uh various programs that local agencies local jurisdictions can apply to for assistance for um emission reductions technologies and equipment um one of which we'll be hearing about on our agenda for a little bit later um but uh there's an additional pot of funding this year that is being dedicated to lawn equipment um so landscaping equipment replacement for reduced emissions and zero emission technologies uh so also interesting for for folks to look out for that um and I think and I filled in for uh councilmember Cummings on Ambag but I don't think there was anything significant to note there so I'll leave it there thanks everybody thank you councilmember brown uh councilmember Callentary Johnson thank you mayor um I have some a number of updates I I serve on the youth action network as a elected official representative and we've been working on um taking the children and youth fellow rights to throughout our county and in fact today the Santa Cruz county board of supervisors um considered adopting the children and youth bill rights which was formed after what we did here at the city um I assume that that went through but I'm not sure I haven't gotten an update um also working with youth action network to implement our youth liaison uh piece that we passed with the children youth bill rights so hopefully by fall we will have a dedicated youth liaison that will work with youth action network and and work directly with um myself or other council members who are interested so that's the an um the metro board met last week I was not able to attend but I did attend the finance committee and uh the finance committee approved a draft budget for FY 23 and FY 24 that was presented to the board last week and a final budget will be presented to the board at the end of June on June 24th and and that's about a 70 million dollar budget for the metro um let's see I also serve on the community action board and this last month the month of May was community action month we heard from uh cab employee Helen Ewen's story at our last meeting but I just want to reiterate and highlight some of the important work that our local cab has done they are part of a national network uh this last year in 2021 our cab served 10,643 people 85 percent of whom are Latinx and 80 percent um who live below the 250 percent federal poverty line and just really in brief some of the work that they've done includes rental assistance um food assistance job readiness and job placement working with individuals who are from the working with indigenous language speakers and providing them with COVID information serving immigrants and helping them on a pathway to residency and um legal and advocacy services so that's just some of the work that they've done and I wanted to highlight that because we of course the city does support and provide some survey um some funding uh to our local cab so um I'm glad that we can contribute to their amazing work and just want to thank all of the members of um cab employees and cab partners for the work that they do so that's cab and then just really briefly the safe parking program subcommittee did meet with members of association of faith community we're continuing to work with them to build out the safe parking program and I think I'll leave the health and all policies subcommittee to um vice mayor Watkins to report out on that's it thank you council member Calentari Johnson I let's see is council member Golder here absent uh vice mayor Watkins thank you and thank you to my colleagues for all the work you're doing on behalf of the council I think what I could add is the health and all policies um subcommittee that met just yesterday actually excuse me just really incredible and proud to see the work that's been happening within the city and just the progress we've made with the implementation plan a lot of work around translation policy so that we can ensure equity and we're able to communicate and have plans and practices in place to understand when translation is needed appropriate and best suited to meet the needs of our community and just learned about an online resource that sounds wonderful um to help with some of the translation services so more will be coming to the full council on that um a lot of discussion also around equity within the department and training that had occurred um within the city I think just last week and more trainings will be happening for city employees around equity and then um additional conversation had about commissions and how we can be aware of the demographics of our commissioners but also be mindful about wanting to really pursue more diversity within our commission appointments and identifying policy and just one sort of interesting note was that when a number of folks who are working with the city and with this committee and a number of interns did some research they found a lot of statements of interest around commission diversity but not a lot of policy and so as we move forward with designing what would work for the city of sanikers in this way I think we will really lead other cities and wanting to pursue something hopefully very similar um grants are always a key thing that we're thinking about and um and ways to financially resource the work so that was also discussed but more to come on that um I was a little bit late to the two by two meeting but that did um occur also we had an opportunity to um kind of just discuss with the county a lot of our strategies um the coordinated care some of the different programming the funding um how can we get creative with funding uh for example the homework bound program was was referenced in creativity in terms of funding but also just the transitioning of funding associated with some of the um some of the facilities that we have up and running for our unhoused population and I think that covers my committees for this report out thank you mayor thank you vice mayor Watkins um well that leaves me and uh let's see one of the boards that I sit on with vice mayor Watkins is visit sanikers county and that meeting will be tomorrow which we unfortunately will be missing due to our budget hearings so nothing to report on that um the health and all policies uh committee meeting uh vice mayors Watkins spoke to um really the summary of two items on working on interpretation and translation and how the city is addressing those needs across uh many aspects in the city and for our community um whether it be council meetings commissions complex documents council members being able to access information um so all of that's being explored and um the second item of commissions and uh committees advisory bodies and um how we're recruiting and applications and outreaching for diversity um in those bodies as well and then I think you covered everything on the two by two as well there was um great discussion um on really working together for the 14 million uh state funding um really having county and city work together um to really work on mutual agreements transparency collective direction and really keeping trying to keep flexibility in the funds knowing that so many of the programs and investments in the in the shelter opportunities um some short term some long term some with different needs so having um the funding remain flexible was key um and then we also had a um city selection committee meeting and we touched on um we had a public health briefing from our county health department who spoke about um kind of the numbers and the data and the most recent data um and uh really mentioning under reporting due to home testing the large amount of home testing that's now occurring versus um maybe last year there was more um site testing where those results were more known um so going with the data that is now current um also we had a discussion regarding 80 years and um whether they would be considered in affordable housing towards our regional housing needs assessment goals and countywide we spoke of our upcoming uh regional housing needs assessment goals um for all of the cities uh the city selection committee I should say is uh representative of mayors from city of capitol scott's valley Santa Cruz and Watsonville so we spoke of the uh new numbers for the the required housing uh goals in the next cycle and also touched on outdoor uh dining and uh parklet areas across the county and had a really good discussion around uh shared policies um noting that some members in the community are finding it confusing with different policies in place in the different cities and some of those uh some of the the input has come from maybe business owners that own businesses in two different cities with different policies around outdoor dining and um outdoor parklets so we had some good discussion around um around that and that includes my report thank you everybody I will now go back to my um agenda agenda we first up now have the consent agenda these items are 10 through 17 on our agenda for members of the public who are streaming this meeting if you wish to comment on any of the items 10 through 17 on our consent agenda now is the time to call in instructions should be on your screen please remember to mute your streaming device and raise your hand either by dialing star nine on your phone or selecting raise hand in the webinar controls on your computer all items will be acted upon in one motion unless an item is pulled by a council member for further discussion and I do want to reiterate I will not be voting on items agenda items 13 and 14 are there any council members who wish to comment on or pull any items okay council member calentary johnson likes a comment on 12 okay comment on 12 council member brown have a quick comment on 16 comment on 16 council member comings i'm gonna pull 13 um i have a question on 15 and a comment on 16 comings pull 13 comment on comment on 16 and question on 15 question on 15 okay okay so i will begin with comment and i will start with my agenda item number 12 and that is calent council member calentary johnson thank you i just um want to bring this to attention for everyone this is the um request for our mayor to send a letter to the governor around roe versus weights i want to thank you mayor bruner and vice mayor watkins for putting this on the consent agenda i just i think this is um an important time for us to speak up about reproductive rights and women's rights and lgbtq rights and i'm tracking this closely and see that that republican dominated states are um really forging ahead so it's an important time for us to speak up and support our governor and making us a sanctuary state and making this safe for everyone who wishes to choose um to have their reproductive rights maintained so thank you to my colleagues thank you council member calentary johnson um and now we have comments on agenda item number 16 council member brown thank you mayor i just wanted to highlight this item and thank our staff the item for members of the public um is uh essentially it's a series of actions to uh fully fund and purchase three heavy and medium duty electric vehicles um so i just this is something that i've been uh advocating for and and really you know wanting us to uh move forward on for um during my time on the council and so i just wanted to thank our public works uh staff and tiffany wise west in particular for uh doing the work to receive this uh competitive grant funding some of it coming through uh the community power board um central coast energy and some of it through the monterey bay resources district a different pot of funding than the one i mentioned earlier but there is funding available um out there and and we are uh going for it and so i just i i'm really thrilled to see this happening and um just wanted to thank everyone for their work to make it um to move it forward thank you council member brown council member comings who had a comment on agenda item 16 as well you know i just want to thank the staff for all their work on this um this was when i first got on council in 2019 this was something that many community members expressed interest in um because you know in our effort to reduce our carbon emissions um being able to convert our fleet over to electric vehicles is something that people express a lot of interest in and it's you know just one more step in the direction of doing our part to reduce our carbon emissions and um do our part to mitigate the impacts of climate change and so i just wanted to express my appreciation to the staff that they're actively pursuing you know all efforts to make our fleet um a hundred percent electric so just want to thank you all for in public works for all your hard work on this thank you council member coming um vice mayor Watkins you i see your hand up yeah my hand was up mayor i'm wondering if for the ease of sort of how this could flow for your purposes of disqualification is if it would be most appropriate for me to poll 14 and we could have 13 and 14 heard separately um and then hear the rest the consent agenda while you're able to participate so i'll go ahead and poll 14 for those okay great thank you so we um have items 13 and 14 hold okay so moving on with a question uh on item number 15 council member Cummings you had a question on item number 15 yeah so for um members of the public this is police department roof restoration award contract um and one of the things kind of similar to um item number 16 the city has been trying to make a lot of efforts towards going green and reducing carbon emissions and given that we're going to do um you know some substantial repairs on the roof of the police department one of the questions that came to me from the city from community is is there any effort to move forward with putting solar on the roof of the police station and they ask this because given the fact that there's going to be work done on the roof it would seem like you know putting solar panels in at the same time might be you know win-win and is there someone from staff that could respond to that question uh i see director mark deddle with public works go ahead yeah that that's a really good question um council member Cummings um at this point i we do have solar panels over the parking lot and we really focused on energy management we had a grant to actually reduce the energy used at the police department and that's a more cost effective way at this point but now that we do have a new roof on it that could be another next step that we could look at as we continue to move forward but obviously you want to do the roof before you do the solar panels so you don't have to take them off and redo the roof so that's a really good question and we can look at that in the future right that's that was my only question on that item thank you okay thank you let me go back to um my agenda here so we have a time now for public comment on agenda items 10 through 17 with the exception of 13 and 14 those have been pulled we'll come back to those so for now if you are a member of the public that would like to speak to any item on our consent agenda now is the time to do so please raise your hand by dialing star nine on your phone or selecting raise hand in the webinar controls on your computer when it's your turn to speak you will hear an announcement that you have been unmuted and the timer will then be set to three minutes and i go to the attendees list and i see the first hand raised ends phone number ending in 199 go ahead and unmute welcome yes hello my name is james ewing whitman um can i be heard clearly yes hello excellent so i would first like to thank the clerk that that answered the question that you can make comments about the consent agenda i would like to make comments first on number 16 and then number 10 number 16 is an allocation of about 2.1 million dollars for five fully electric vehicles i'd like to remind the public and the council that diesel electric locomotives are extremely efficient and can be extremely clean um that design was 1896 and there's really nothing better that's that's more efficient than that um so going to number 10 the resolution authorizing the city council to only have teleconference meetings my understanding and i could be wrong but you guys had two different opportunities for the public to speak in person i think i spoke two weeks ago five times um okay um if uh let's see he said his name was james if james calls back i can let him finish his second half um so i will go to the next hand raise i am watching you is the name go ahead and unmute yourself uh yes uh one of those bullet points on item 12 says uh advises to develop mechanisms to make sure any woman fleeing other states and coming to california for an abortion uh should get the treatment they need without regard to their ability to pay and the state working you know blah blah i should ensure the necessary funds are available to cover these services this seems fiscally irresponsible and it's going to make california if that happened uh you know californians paying for the abortions all over the country i think that's well i think that's dumb okay um as far as the rest of it goes uh my letter really that i sent pretty much says you know they do well you don't really acknowledge that there's a wide variety of opinion about how late the late term abortion is and it's going to vary between states and between individuals that 80 percent of the public doesn't believe in third term abortions and you don't uh you don't chime in on that at all uh i'd assume from reading your letter that you know limit and so i think that's uh not where the public's coming from and uh uh they're uh you know those supreme court has overturned previous opinions and many many times and it's always been to the good and i i mentioned in my letter consider where we'd be if this effort but equal doctrine wasn't overturned you know they they overturned uh after further consideration that some of the decisions haven't been right and if you read the opinion which i doubt you did it's 98 pages it's very convincing that the federal government does not have the authority to establish any such federal right to an abortion and it specifically states that it doesn't apply to lgbtq rights or any other rights private say thanks thank you for your public comment um i see phone number ending in 1999 has returned so go ahead and unmute yourself hi welcome back you know what i appreciate i don't know what happened to the thing so going back to agenda item number 16 a couple years ago germany had a hydrogen powered vehicle that was 750 horsepower a range of 600 miles and used 30 gallons of regular seawater i don't know what's more sustainable than that so going back to item number 16 um uh you know i'm just going to remind whoever's listening and the council that drew glover in 2019 brought up that uh under the first amendment people can say whatever language they want i'm going to try to keep it clean but you know i'm just going to do my best so i'm uh i find it really sad and disconcerting that the public can't show up and speak i don't know what kind of government is actually being practiced um my understanding is that there's government was created for these two primary reasons and that is to love thy neighbor and do no harm so thank you very much it looks like that concludes our attendees for public comment on consent agenda and i just did want to respond to item agenda item number 10 is um the reoccurring off 30-day authorization for the uh i don't have the exact wording in front of me but it allows us to hold virtual meetings um and that continues even as we do hybrid meetings we did have the several last meetings were in person and online so that's considered a hybrid model and as long as we do that whether completely virtual or virtual and in person we do need that authorization um unfortunately we were unable to hold in person today and tomorrow um due to the uptick in covid cases and um so we hope to return to in person um as soon as possible and um continue with the in person and online hybrid model so stay tuned thank you for being with us virtually today let's see i am now bringing it back to council and um i'm looking for a remote by motion on the items with the exception of items 13 and 14 council member vice mayor Watkins sure mayor i'm happy to move the consent agenda with the exceptions of 13 and 14 i'll second it mires and a second council member mires council member brown was was that why your hand was up okay thank you uh okay so may we is there any other further discussion may we have a roll call vote council member calentary johnson aye boulder aye coming vice mayor Watkins and mayor brunner aye those items passed unanimously okay um at this point i will hand it over to vice mayor Watkins for the remaining consent agenda items 13 and 14 great thank you mayor um so items 13 and 14 i pulled 14 um uh just for the purposes of having the mayor not participate in that item so we'll hear the two and i know um council member Cummings you pulled item 13 so we'll go ahead and have you speak to that yeah i thank you vice mayor i pulled item number 13 this is downtown association parking and business improvement area assessment fiscal year 2023 um i don't even know i pulled this is because it looks like there's two options within the motion it's approve or to modify and approve and so if that was to if we were to take a vote on that language in particular um it would be a little bit confusing i think and so i just you know was wanting to pull this to make sure that we clarified um whether or not there's a desire for us to provide input to modify the plan or if you're asking for just clear approval rebecca i see you on here i'm happy to hand it over to you yeah absolutely thank you so much good afternoon uh vice mayor and council members i'm rebecca unit at home development manager for the city of sankers um and so um i can just give a brief overview of this item and make the clarification in the recommendation for you um but as you're aware this is our annual renewal process for the business improvement assessment um and so this assessment is collected on behalf of the downtown association for the business owner in the downtown district and the city is just the fiscal agent passing through that assessment to the businesses so in our recommendation we do have approve or to modify and approve the plan um this is the work plan that the downtown association board brings together and approves typically the city council doesn't weigh in on that um it is typically just an approval process um so we would welcome that in uh the motion um and then the second piece of this recommendation is to adopt the resolution of intention to lovely the assessment so um it will come back at the june 14th meeting as a public hearing item um and any protests on the assessment can be heard at that time and we'll give notice to the um the downtown association gives them notice to their membership for the renewal um i can provide more detail but just want to give that initial clarification thanks so if i could follow up um so i guess you know the action we could take is just then to approve the plan prepared by the downtown association okay great thank you great thank you council member mires i would be uh i would be happy to make that motion if there's no other questions or comments and after a public comment is taken on the site okay okay move to approve move to approve okay great yep wonderful thank you are there any comments um from council members okay seeing none we'll go ahead and um move to the attendees and now we're hearing items 13 and 14 on our consent agenda and uh we have our first attendee in nita and i will stick to the mayor's three minutes and go ahead and um allow any to speak i had intended to speak to number 18 actually so can i hold for that yes you can thank you okay thank you there any other members of the community who would like to address the council on our consent agenda items 13 or 14 if you are interested in doing that please raise your hand now okay seeing none we'll go ahead and return back to the council for action i believe council member mires was interested in moving 13 and 14 with the modified language to reflect approved um in item 13 if that's correct we'll go ahead and hear uh council member mires motion i'll second okay all right any further discussion all right seeing none we'll go ahead and take a roll call vote thank you for both items 13 and 14 council members calentary johnson i my older i want the member mires mayor wadkin so that passes unanimously with uh mayor bruner recusing herself okay i'll bring it back to the mayor but we have the second item council member wadkin oh i apologize is that item 14 no uh yes so um cooperative we did confirm really really quick we did a vote on both item yes we did there was only one reason the item 13 was pulled um it was for clarification that council member comings had i pulled 14 for um ease of the kind of facilitating the process so that was voted upon in the last um vote if unless council member symany further questions okay seeing then great thank you thank you rebecca great okay well that concludes our consent agenda and i will hand it back to the mayor now that she is able to come back thank you vice mayor wadkins okay next up on our agenda is item number 18 this is a public hearing for second reading and adoption of ordinance number 2022-06 an ordinance transitioning to district-based elections and selecting a seven district map option and a six district map option along with related election sequencing for members of the public who are streaming this meeting if this is an item you wish to comment on now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen the order will be questions from council followed by public comment and then we will then return to council for comments deliberation and action in addition to the public comment we will be hearing on this item three emails were sent to city council at city of san jose dot com regarding this item okay so now i will um see if there are any questions from council on this item and i see council member comings thank you mayor i had a i was contacted by a member of the public um um earlier today and they shared an article and in that article um was a quote related to the fair maps act and potential violation of the fair maps act and so just wanted to get some clarification on this so the quoted in the article was that in 2020 the california legislature amended the fair maps act to adjust the deadline when the final district map must be adopted agencies with elections held between january 1st and july 1st 2022 must complete the redistricting process and adopt the final map no later than 174 days before the election for agencies with june 7 2022 elections consolidated with the statewide primary election the final deadline was december 15 2021 agencies with the november 8 2022 election consolidated with the statewide general election must adopt their maps no later than 205 days before the election or april 17 2022 the act permits charter cities to establish different deadlines however they may face practical deadlines to finalize maps and submit them to their county in time for a particular election and so given that information um i forwarded this over when i received it to the city attorney and was wondering if you could comment or if there's any concern related to violation of the fair maps act which would then put us in a legal situation should we move forward today yes thank you councilmember comings um and and thank you for giving us a heads up uh about this article which which does quote the fair maps act and um you know after my uh art stopped palpitating we were able to take a look at this statute and the fair maps act is in the in the language that you quoted from is from elections code section 21662 i believe and and that applies for redistricting that occurs during that window of time that the legislature enacted this special statute but it expressly does not apply to a charter city that has adopted a different redistricting deadline by ordinance and more importantly it's expressly does not apply when a city transitions from at large to district based elections so so the fair maps act is really looking at redistricting and not um establishment of district elections in the first instance so we're comfortable that the deadlines that we've uh checked with the research stand checked with the county elections official are still applicable as as we've previously advised thank you councilmember comings and city attorney is there any other council questions before i bring it out to public comment okay going out to public comment if you're interested in commenting on second reading and adoption of ordinance number 2022 dash 0606 raise your hand either by dialing star nine on your phone or selecting raise hand in the webinar controls on your computer and when it's your turn to speak you'll hear an announcement that you've been unmuted the timer will then be set to three minutes the first hand raise has a phone number ending in 1705 go ahead and unmute hello hello can you hear me yes hello welcome great uh yes thank you for taking my my comments today um like councilmember comings i have some reservations that uh this which the district elections will result in any sort of fair representation i like the at large system however i totally understand why council is doing this and i think it's appropriate so i differ with comings councilmember comings on that but more importantly this idea that somehow the council's actions are illegal or just the opinion of the city attorney or unconstitutional that's just totally wrong a government code section 34886 expressly is council the ability the power to go to district elections without a public vote and even though we are charter city this section was put into place by the legislature specifically for charter cities let me redo the relevant passage the legislate this is government code section 34886 the legislative body of a city may adopt an ordinance that requires the members of the legislative body be elected by district or by district with an elective mayor without being required to submit the ordinance the voters for approval now uh councilmember comings and other people members of the public have said that council's actions are unconstitutional by inference the only thing that could mean is that he believes that this government code statute is unconstitutional however a statute is not unconstitutional because a councilmember says it is or because a stand for law school graduate says it is it's only unconstitutional when a court little bit is and usually in most cases that court would have to be an appellate court it would have to be a published decision of an appellate court so i don't know if councilmember comings is misguided or if he doesn't understand that but it's really there's a difference between some of the opinions about what the city should do and whether or not it's illegal and like i said at the beginning i think we'd be better served by sticking with that large election this is my opinion doesn't mean what the council has done is illegal and i think councilmember comings and others could do better by saying it's my opinion that a court might rule this unconstitutional because clearly it's not unconstitutional now and city attorney kandadi's generous characterization that that's a lay opinion is just that it's generous it's not a lay opinion it's a fact that it's not unconstitutional because it's only unconstitutional if a court rules it has it is and there have been no court rulings on this whatsoever thank you very much thank you for your comment our next public comment is phone number ending in nine six four two hi there welcome we go ahead and press star six to unmute yourself so um thank you um i would like to register my disappointment on the majority vote uh to select nap six i think she's trying to mute her the streaming which is the delay that she's hearing is the accidentally muted her phone too here we go hi i think i it's great thank you thank you um i would like to register my disappointment hello can you hear me yes continue to hello okay thank you so much thank you for your patience um i i would like to register my disappointment on the majority vote uh to select nap six oh two um yes i can hear you hello i can hear you recommend that they that they turn off their stream lower the volume what is happening is um yes okay can you hear me now hear you but there's uh an echo from your um whatever is playing the meeting there's a delay so you'll have to mute that oh i can't because on my screen i'm only showing the directions of how to comment so there's uh so i would have to go back i guess to live okay i can't mute it because on my screen i only see the directions to um address the city council on my um with a phone okay i'm not having a live just talk without the and ignore the mayor yes i think you can also just hit pause on the streaming no don't mute okay let me try that okay let me let me try that okay there i think this will um help that because i press stop okay can you hear me now without the echoing yes hi welcome okay thank you thank you for your patience of course um i would like to register my disappointment on the majority vote to select nap six oh two at the april 19th special city council meeting and my objections are based on the california voting rights project report entitled the bridgement of latino voting rights and racially polarized voting in the city of santa cruz out this was published february 2020 and this report was cited in a santa cruz local article as a contribution by jessica york santa cruz a sentinel reporter um my first concern was that the report was not available on the city map i only found it by accident but it gave detailed data and charts showing why they came to the conclusion that a bridge voting characterized candidate elections and other electoral choices in the city of santa cruz it further stated and concluded that there is also significant evidence of the extent to which latinos in the city of santa cruz bear the effects of past discrimination in such areas as education employment and health um so i'd like to make some points on um the choice of the map based on this report and the data made available for the district map um the choice of map 602 over 604 b deludes in district 4 the percent of latino registered voters by 6 percent now it's uh the district maps may not be drawn with race as the predominant factor in violation of the principles established by the u.s supreme court but predominant does not mean to exclude it that race cannot be a factor uh the cvrt report states that it would be possible to create approximately three city council districts with proportions of members of protected classes significantly greater than the city as a whole now race is a protected class of the state and federal level so this could have been done uh the other point i'd like to make is that the choice of map 602 over 604 b reduces in district 4 the percent of renters by 15 percent the choice of map 602 over 604 b increases in in district 4 by 10 percent the number of households with incomes over 75 percent the choice of map 602 over 604 joins uh lower ocean with sea bright and lower ocean is the neighborhood that has more in common beach routes than it does with million dollar homes on top of the hill this also includes lower ocean business car which has more in common with the beach flat okay thank you for hearing me out um there were some other points but i i'm thankful that you were able to hear these thank you thank you for your comment i'm glad we worked through that uh troubleshooting as well um i see qc himard you popped on are you available for any questions or any i am here and our demographer doug johnson is also here um who can uh who's more of a subject matter expert on on some of the mapping uh details and cvr as well as kassie bronstons here too wonderful um it looks like that concludes our public comment um i don't see other attendees so i will bring it back to council for comments deliberation and action and um for this second reading on this item and um oh i see one more public comment i will go back and just make sure i grab that phone number ending into 174 are you commenting on this agenda item 18 yes thank you thank you mayor brunner i'm sorry i just got in and uh just quickly dialed to come to make a comment um i'd like to speak on behalf of so many people who are just beginning to realize your choice the choice that the council majority made on the maps and are puzzled confused a concerned and outraged so i'd like to express all of that and specifically uh i think uh other callers although i missed the public comment have spoken about how you have divided the latino community i'd like to add to that concern because time will go quickly here um the way that the west side has been split is just unconscionable um that you have divided the low west side vertically and the upper west side vertically it makes no sense except maybe someone's thinking of running for council and could get votes that way it makes the the voting rights act that um the the act of which you've been following requires you to divide districts of mutual interest and not sleep from well you've you've divided the map so that highway one goes through the middle by dividing it vertically the upper west side and the lower west side have quite different interests that is obvious to anyone who's lived here for any time the the impacts of beach traffic uh and children crossing Delaware to get to school on their bicycles impacts the lower west side above highway one or above mission the upper west side has its own issues to divide those and one of the maps goes straight straight through the circles neighborhood uh it it makes no sense it doesn't appear to comply with the the criteria on which you were supposed to create districts and i think it's going to prove uh to be a problem going into the future as people who represent who are elected to represent districts now will not be representing districts with common interests but will be split in half providing lower ocean from beach flats and uh maybe you cannot take race as the only criterion but you certainly can use and ethnicity and common interests of lower income residents in your deliberations to choose a map and you have violated that premise so on every level the choice of maps you have made is a disservice to the community and uh i would question its conformance with the law and uh i thank you thank you for your comment we have another hand raised the name i am watching you go ahead unmute yes hello um i've i've spoken to this before any problems i i might have had with measuring mostly disappointment that it wasn't uh well that it says somewhere lopsided and unfair but as far as the districts they're not treated equally but i i don't have any problem with the maps i think that's fine um you know dividing the lower west side is uh if anything that's like twice as much representation you know it's almost better um but uh my real concern is that well in case their measure e you know fails and i really don't know how i'm going to vote i probably think that measure e is better than what we do now as far as electing city council but uh you know the alternative which is this default seven district you know that just there's nothing going for that for me and so it's not much of a choice but it seems like you could make the seven district option better by somehow allowing the public to vote for whoever's on the council uh for mayor and i don't see why you can't do that and uh even if it's just an i know you've got to change the charter uh to make it stick but uh you could still do an advisory vote even without the charter you could always change far or later uh and i i i i think uh if you could uh explain why you know you wouldn't want to do that uh or that you would intend to do that if it passed uh or if you failed i mean then you know that would give people a better choice and that it could actually be a very competitive option to measure e um i i also think a two-year mayor is better just because i believe in uh public oversight and the more the better and uh and it solves a lot of these district unfairness type problems and uh you know i could see a seven district with a two-year term mayor being voted on by the public at least an advisory capacity if it's not a charter change thanks a comment is the name Anita okay thank you um first of all thanks again to council member Blontari Johnson for answering my questions on this item this morning um there was missing postings uh that were an integral part of the ordinance that was not with this agenda item specifically exhibit a and exhibit b that has now been posted uh but exhibit a is for 604 b but the ordinance refers to uh map 602 and exhibit b refers to map 101 but posted is 101 d so i really have no idea what is actually being adopted here can you clarify what's happening here my public comment is not a dialogue period it's a time for you to give your public comment in in the the time allotted okay uh well i've stated there's conflicts of what the ordinance says is being adopted versus what's posted on your agenda does that conclude your public comment uh yeah that i object to this proceeding without proper um maps being posted on what is actually being adopted thank you thank you for your comment okay looks like that concludes our public comment period i don't see any other attendees with their hands raised i will now bring it back to uh council for comments uh and deliberation and action on this second reading and adoption of ordinance number 2022-06 um i would like to start maybe by answering a couple of the questions in um that were brought up during public comment and um one of the the callers questioned um their comment question the legal aspect of the maps and i'm wondering if someone can speak to that the demographer uh or kasey marred i'll defer to Doug on the legality of the maps that we that were selected by the council sir uh may our members council just briefly um both the maps that the council has adopted and the other maps that were proposed at last meeting meet all the legal requirements um there obviously are differences of opinion about which maps best meet them but they all meet the legal requirements thank you um there was another question regarding um seven districts allowing for an elect mayor um okay go ahead tony uh i think the question was can we have seven districts and allow the public to select among willing council members to serve as mayor and the reason why that's problematic if measure e does not pass and the city council adopts district elections hold on someone's not muted um uh i think uh anita is still yeah okay thank you um so so the reason why that's problematic is um measure e would amend the charter to specify having a directly elected at-large mayor and if measure e does not pass and the city council moves forward with seven council districts by ordinance then the existing provision of the charter section 604 i believe uh would require that the mayor be selected by the city council so so that's why with the seven district maps um the council would continue to select the mayor because it's specified by the charter okay and the last question brought up was regarding the supporting documents in conflict with what stated in the ordinance yeah i uh mayor brunner this is casey um i i actually have wrapped up my time at the city about two weeks ago so i have not actually been involved with loading these uh since my temporary project management role i thought was going to expire on may 10th i i i've left so i've not been involved i was not there to make sure that the exhibits were attached um so i'm guessing that there's probably an an error um in an inadvertent error and somebody trying to be really helpful in loading uh the maps uh as attachments when this was brought to the city's attention um any other comments this is i i would just add that just as a reminder i don't know whether he kills the agenda packet but all the maps throughout this whole process are all still available on the um project website on the season and and i will add the city's transition to district elections website clearly marks which maps the council selected on the date it's it's uh very clearly noted and has been since the day after the council first chose those maps thank you um and then city clerk bonny bush yeah thank you i was just going to say we um inadvertently added the wrong maps but i was going to say what casey indicated that on the website it does um specify that on april 19th which maps were adopted or approved right thank you um okay sorry for that confusion i'm glad we were able to clarify that so um the ordinance in the agenda with um the maps shown not the exhibits the exhibits are incorrect and the agenda is correct is that a case it sounds like that's yeah that sounds correct mayor brunner yeah and city attorney do you have any comment on this um it's an unfortunate oversight but it does not affect the legality of the proceedings that are before you today okay thank you council member coming uh sorry council member brown the squares moved go ahead i saw your hand up and then vice mayor watkins uh yeah i so uh well i was going to ask a follow-up question about the um any potential concerns about the legality given the um confusion around the postings um given that this i mean this is a very confusing issue and in the conversations i've been having with people in the community some of whom were very excited about supporting measure e because they like the idea of an out-large mayor who then heard about what was happening with the maps have changed their perspective and more people are um beginning to try to understand this and the fact that we have not made this legible to the general public in a way that's really accessible is very concerning to me um i um so so i think that you know we've got some serious work to do here and i think that we are opening ourselves up to uh the potential for uh complaints about you know related to the potentially to the brown act because this information was you know you have to really pull it apart and know what's going on to be able to access all of the documents and there was um a misrepresentation about those exhibits for this um this meeting um you know i just think that given this kind of change um you know and i recognize that staff has been you know trying to roll with the punches here of what you know some council members brought very last minute to uh this public body and um you know it just seems to me that we ought to be taking that more seriously so you know i'm i guess the question's been asked and answered but i'm not satisfied with the answer and i believe we need to um you know re-notice this and i also um you know inclined to suggest that given the um the significant concerns with the sixth district map that was selected by this the council majority um or a majority of council members um that we should really be reconsidering that map um before uh and that should be done after you know perhaps after the election so um you know i'm not going to support moving forward with this ordinance second reading today i think we need to be um looking at this after the election and give people time to decide do they want six districts and a mayor um without all of this confusion about the map and what it means um or um you know be prepared for a lethal challenge i think that's that's what's in the cards here if if uh the council majority moves forward in this way thank you council member brown um k c humard yes i also i wanted to also just let you all know um the last thing i did before i left the city on may 11th was um i physically posted um in the spots where we post council noticings outside of council chambers and over on church street um a notice that also explicitly states that the count city on april 19th the city council selected district maps 101 and 602 and introduced the ordinance um i also uh posted this particular notice on the transition of district elections website and um marked the different marked it in several different places that this that these were the two maps selected on april 19th just for your information thank you vice mayor watkins thank you mayor yeah i do want to appreciate the comments and also the folks who are here to help sort of refine our responses to this item and specifically call out kc um for coming back even after not necessarily being with the city anymore we appreciate you um i also really want to thank our demographer for really clear clarifying that these are all legally viable options i know that's been um stated as um not true but um what it is is true and i think it's important for us to be very clear about that because probably what the biggest threat to democracy is is really the um lack of clarity of information and um being really clear about what's legally viable is essential i also want to um make sure that the community knows the maps have been publicly available on our website and clearly articulated on our website for weeks and um this has now been delayed as an item because we wanted to ensure that we were really clear specifically with the title and action for this community so i do believe that we've done our due diligence in that way um therefore i'm prepared to move the ordinance and the second reading of the ordinance um item number 18 and i don't think i need to read that i don't think i need to reread it but i'm happy to make that motion okay we have a motion by vice mayor watkins is there a second and then we can continue discussion council member boulder all second okay we have a motion on the floor by vice mayor watkins to move the second reading and a second by council member boulder um thank you and um council member brown i saw your hand went back up um did you have a just really quick um i received a message as i often do when we are on zoom from a member of the public who was trying to call in and did not get called on um wasn't able to the raise hand function didn't work um and so i'm hoping that that and it looks like um i see a hand up now in the attendees so i'm i'm hoping that um people who given that this is probably the last opportunity people have to weigh in that you'd give that individual an opportunity to speak okay so we have um a member of the public who was trying to call in for public comment it sounds like let me go to the attendees list is it okay um i'm going to go out and then come back to council get this member an opportunity to speak okay um i see a hand raised with the name and go ahead and press star six to unmute yourself yes thank you mayor brunner i just wanted to quickly add that uh i as a member of this community for 46 years almost 47 now that these maps do not represent neighborhoods that deserve to have representation what they do is they seem to be reflective of council members wanting to be reelected more than it has to do with keeping lower ocean with with uh beach flats with keeping uh communities together this is uh it's outrageous to think that lower ocean is connected with highland avenue if you couldn't take two more disparate groups of people and think that that is a community and you should all be ashamed of yourself for voting for that and i i'm just fed up it's very just it's very discouraging what's going on with this community thank you okay thank you for your comment i'm bringing back to council and um i see council member boulder you have your hand raised and then council member comings could i could i interject a comment um i'd just like to clarify something for the record there was a comment about the wrong map being posted on the in the agenda packet and i just want to clarify that um first of all the ordinance that was included in the agenda packet did refer to district map 101 and district map 602 but those maps were initially omitted from the packet so there weren't maps in the packet the correct maps were referred to um but the maps were not attached and that was corrected yesterday but any any person who reviewed the ordinance would have received the information about the correct maps it just that they weren't included as part of the packet okay thank you council member golder so i just want to say that um to to respond to the the members of the public that think that we drew the maps or you know gerrymandered the maps in some way that those of us on council could get reelected i i just want to dispel that notion and say that couldn't be further from the truth i think all seven of us you know have um no desire to do anything like that and have nothing but the long-term you know vision for the best Santa Cruz in our hearts all seven of us and so um the other thing is i will i agree with what council member walken said and that the maps have been very clear and posted throughout the process we didn't draw the maps the demographers did we've chose the map that we felt was best given the information we were provided and i think the people that are saying they're confused are not actually confused they're just not happy with the ones that we chose and so it's just disappointing to see um people act you know acting like this and accusing people of things that are accurate too that's all okay thank you council member Cummings i just want to you know express it i've heard a lot of concern around transparency which we're seeing unfold before us today um and also about around the uncertainty of the outcome of measure e i think it would be much more transparent of a process if we wait until after the election to select these maps many people have said they've had difficulty finding the maps and i believe once we know what direction the community will be going in we can then have a special meeting so that the community can weigh in on which map will be best at ensuring representation in our local government so i'm going to make a substitute motion to continue this item until after the election to provide more transparency second okay we have a substitute motion by council member Cummings to continue until after June the election okay after the election with a second by council member Brown curious on the the timeline of that is that um what that affects uh city attorney i'm not quite sure i mean one of the things that we need to be able to do is submit the maps to the elections official before July 6th we have an ordinance that adopts the maps and the ordinance doesn't take effect for 30 days after its final adoption so it may be possible to uh return with a resolution adopting the maps but i um i would have to research that oh my Cassie's just pointing out that because it relates to an election the ordinance goes into effect immediately so i stand correct on that i see city clerk Bonnie Bush also has um her hand raised i do thank you just um a follow-up the council the county clerk would have 30 days after the election to certify the election so i don't know if your intention is to wait until the results are in in which case it would be too late it would be too late it would be too late to come back and adopt the ordinance because you'd have to have another meeting to adopt this ordinance but then the county would meet the maps by July 6th if that makes sense so 30 days from the election would be July 7th so timing-wise there wouldn't be enough time to have another meeting to adopt this ordinance based on the results of the election okay um this is good discussion uh vice mayor Watkins uh well given this information that it's not viable in addition to the fact that this has been vetted as part of our community and outreach process i'm wondering if the maker of the motion wants to withdraw the motion or if we want to go ahead and take the vote on it which in which case given what we know i'm going to vote no because it makes no sense because the maker of the motion want to withdraw the motion yeah okay is there any other discussion on the substitute okay um so we have a substitute motion council member Cummings and a second by a council member Brown um and we'll have a roll call vote for accepting that motion council member Callentary Johnson no Boulder no Mayor Watkins no and Mayor Bruder no so the substitute motion does not pass five uh against two in favor brings us back to our motion is there any further discussion on that motion council member Cummings thank you mayor um given that we're moving in this direction and based on what we've heard from the community our decision here is to really be addressing racially polarized voting of all the maps maps 604 b for six districts and one on one d for seven districts with best increased representation of Latinos Asians low-income residents and students to be on our uh city council we have an opportunity before us to promote diversity equity and inclusion of people from a protected class in our elections and i believe the best way to promote racial representation student representation and representation by working class and low-income residents is to go with the staff recommendation so i'm going to make a substitute motion that we adopt maps 604 b and one on one d um for district elections second okay we have a substitute motion by council member Cummings to adopt 604 b map and one on one d map with a second by council member Brown council member Calentari Johnson yeah i'd like some clarification from staff this isn't the agenda item we're voting on the charter amendment correct and i know you've voted on the charter amendment uh at a at a prior meeting this is the ordinance by which the district maps are selected and also that specifies the process for a seven district election uh should measure e uh fail at the June 7th primary election so the mo the motion that's put forward isn't what's on the agenda correct what's on the agenda is the ordinance that incorporates maps 602 and 101 i understood the substitute motion would be to to remove those references and substitute the uh the maps that council member Cummings was referring to but we're voting on the ordinance not on the maps so that's why this motion that doesn't make much sense to me it's both the ordinance and the maps that are incorporated by reference into the ordinance the ordinance includes the maps so yes we are voting on the ordinance or the ordinance is before us but the ordinance includes two maps and we're already voted on say that again that we're already voted on based on staff recommendation at the at the first reading correct thank you uh vice mayor Watkins yeah i think i guess i was just saying that this sort of to the point that council member calentari johnson was bringing was this is the second reading so i will be voting no on the substitute motion and also just want to again point out that what we had was a series of maps that had been um vetted by our demographer who has um really taken into consideration the demographic demographics of our community so they're all very different options that we do the best we can to choose from so no map is the perfect map but we want is hopefully a map that we think will provide the best representation and split of representation throughout the entire community so in regards to i think again some of the misinformation that i'm hearing which is that it's not rooted in um or it's not viable or has um sort of racially polarizing components that it's not democratic which is factually incorrect and frankly to me is the biggest threat to our democracy if we're having fake news brought before us or fake facts brought forward that's not true so for me i feel comfortable moving forward with the second ordinance and i'll be voting now on the substitute motion again council member brown well i just had raised my hand to correct a statement that council member calentari johnson made about um this ordinance being an ordinance with maps that were recommended by staff which was not the case um the council member calentari johnson chose to move and five members of the council supported other maps that were not recommended by staff they were included in the menu of options that were given and um while the assertion has been made that they um are not that they are legal and they they are legal because there is no legal precedent suggesting that they they are not legal at this moment it's really an empirical question as one of our callers um suggested um it's an empirical question that will not be answered until there is a judgment in and it's put into case law and um that is a concern that i have moving forward and um so i'm i absolutely support uh returning to the original staff recommendation i recall during the meeting when we were discussing the maps that were presented to us by the demographer um at the time the demographer did say in particular specifically with respect to the question of uh lower ocean and beach flats a clear community of interest being divided when it does not need to be um that um the demographers used the river as a natural dividing line um and i say this with no disrespect for the demographer but that is clearly um an indication of not being particularly familiar with our community and it's a different thing to look at census tracts and uh demographics in census tracts and to actually understand our community when that input was provided the demographer said well we can certainly do that and that's what happened the council majority chose to ignore that possibility and um i guess again i'm not going to debate whether or not it's legal we'll find out down the road i suppose um but i if i really just and you know and and then i just have to say that the idea that calling these maps questionable is fake news is just so disheartening to hear um to you know to refer to uh you know something that you know an elected leader that i don't think any of us want to emulate um you know something that he used is is just it's really um i just don't understand it um so while i had the floor i just felt the need to add that as well and i'm sorry that this has become so incredibly um you know emotional for uh the community i suppose there's some emotion there as people are finding out about it for council members to um to not see that the decisions that are being made here do have an impact on those in our community who have been voiceless or close to voiceless and who are we're the subject of this original um legal claim under the california voting rights act so i'll be voting yes uh to consider the substitute motion and um i imagine we'll find out more as the community moves forward with the response um vice mayor Watkins and then council member Cummings sorry there's just construction starting here me i can you hear me okay hopefully it's okay um yeah no i just i mean i guess i'll clarify my comments since i have the floor i guess my concern is that when you have comments made that this is an undemocratic process or that we are gerrymandering maps that's not true and and frankly what we see happen is politicians specifically using their own set of data or information to further their political agenda and that is concerning to me and frankly is exactly what's at concern for our democracy so i think that there may be a difference around the individual maps that are chosen in terms of weighing all of them but in terms of the representation that went into it in terms of how our demographer figured those out um those were vetted by an expert which we heard so for me i'm comfortable moving forward with the original um maps i think we could go round and round and given that um this is the second reading i'm happy to just call the question in terms of the substitute motion so we can just take a vote on that okay okay the question has been called so let's take a roll call vote means to be voted on you have a second on that a question okay so the question has been called second by council member brown no i'm sorry i wasn't um we we can call the question and do the whole vote i don't know are there any other comments by vice mayor Watkins and the second second we just keep going mires okay and um so question by vice mayor Watkins question has been called second by mires roll call vote council member is calentary donson boulder hi vice mayor watkins hi and mayor brunner hi okay so the question has been called and now we go to the substitute motion to the main motion oh okay you vote on the substitute motion now substitute motion and then we'll go from there substitute motion council member comings seconded by brown on uh replacing them the two maps with 604 b and 101 d roll call vote council member is calentary donson no boulder no mayor brunner no the main motion there was a first by uh vice mayor Watkins and a second by council member boulder we'll take a roll call vote council member is calentary johnson mayor brunner sorry i council member brown yeah if if um we'll need another uh calling the question to cut off conversing discussion about this particular motion so if somebody wants to do that next feel free to go ahead and do that but i'm going to make my comments now that they were related to you know the general issue so i think they're just as applicable now um so you know i just wanted again to you know it's been suggested that um some council members may have a political agenda here and in response to that i want to say yes i absolutely do have a political agenda here my political agenda is to ensure that underrepresented voices are heard and are better represented in the decisions we make that is my political agenda and i'm very proud of that um and so the idea that having a political agenda is um inappropriate to me is also very dismaying and um i think we just need to be transparent about what our particular personal or not necessarily personal each individual but what are what our political agendas are i would like transparency among all of my colleagues on that i'm making mine transparent and i'd be happy to talk more about that with people offline i want to take up more time here um because clearly the decision has been made but um i do want to state that for the record thank you council member brown council member Cummings thank you mayor um i'll make my final comment as well and just want to point out that the reason why we're in this entire process is to address racially polarized voting and to increase representation in our local government at the last city council meeting the item that was on our agenda stated the staff recommendation for these maps were the following the ndc has revised the initial draft maps in response to feedback received at the public hearing on march 29th staff recommends the council slept map 604b as it's the most effectively and it most effectively incorporates the majority of the feedback received from the community at the public hearing and then that was for the the sixth district map for the seven district map it said that quote at the public hearing on march 29th and in the city's whole co-survey the community and the city council indicated that map 101 was the preferred model with a few modifications the staff recommends that the council slept map 101d as it most effectively incorporates the majority of the feedback received our job is to work on behalf of the community our job is to ensure that diverse voices are heard it's something that we've been committed to and the recommendations that were brought forward by staff not only incorporated the feedback from the council from the community and were the best maps to address racially polarized voting those maps are not being voted on today and um and those are the maps that we should be going with because it's coming from an impartial group um so similar to council member brown my political agenda is to make sure that there's representation for low-income working class people of color all people on this board because it's been it hasn't been that way for so long and again the reason why we're here and we're making these decisions and moving to district elections is to address racially polarized voting that's what we should be going with and that's what we should be doing but that's not what the outcome of this vote will be today you council member Cummings um you know the maps I will just say um the the maps that were brought forward from initial community input and some of the initial engagement that we had and with 604B and 101D as options that were added after some of that initial input there was continued input uh once those options were um posted and and shared on the site so um all of these maps do take into account various demographics from age to income uh ethnicity um and I uh encourage everyone to look on the website or come to city hall to see all of those percentages and statistics to understand this discussion as we really move forward to um really incorporate some of the um uh input that we've received and the the the best uh map options as we move forward and so um you know it's it's been a it's been a really hard uh navigation through all of the information and the different various options um they're all slightly different and um hopefully we can uh have the best the best results um from this process uh council member kelling tarry johnson I just want to acknowledge uh city staff and the demographers for all of their incredible work um it is disheartening to see some of the grandstanding given that there's been so much work put into this so I just want to acknowledge and thank um the whole team for the work that's been put into this over the last year thank you council member kelling tarry johnson um it it looks like there's no other council comments or input and we do have a motion on the table and I like to ask for a roll call vote please council member is kelling tarry johnson I older I coming so uh vice mayor watkins I and mayor brunner and that motion passes with five in favor to know can I just pull up uh city staff again and just a quick clarification for next steps on this item for the public to understand I can't speak to the city's efforts on educating people on what's going to happen with measure e the material on our website has to stay there for and I think it's 10 years um Doug may be able to speak to that and um all the resources from this process will remain there for a long long time I see demographer Doug johnson and city manager map huffaker as well as city attorney yeah just want to go for one the 10-year requirement cassie mentions is in the fair maps act but like the dates you talked about it only applies to redistricting so the city the city will keep these records as it does all city records but there's no special record keeping for this just to clarify thank you Doug thank you um okay city manager or city attorney I will just add that this is the last action that the city council has to take in order to move forward with the district elections process and it really is at this point in the hands of the voters as to whether or not we will have an election with six districts in an at-large mayor if measure e passes or seven districts if it does not okay thank you all right question vice mayor since we have Doug back on I wonder if Doug you want to just clarify in regards to sort of the racial polarizing kind of you know the balance of that within the various maps that none of them specifically do you want to do you want to speak to that I want to order I mean I'm happy if but if we're going to go back and forth on questions with the demographer I mean the item was just voted on so if council member Joachim's going to ask questions then I think it also opens us up for more questions for all the council members so I don't know how that plays out in terms of process but and I'm happy if we want to reopen this item and start asking more questions but we just took a vote and that was it's fine because you already said it Doug that's fine you already said it was fine they were legally viable I already heard that don't don't worry about it I would draw my question that's not sure mayor and Catherine I'll just say that if there are follow-up questions you know we're not going anywhere we're happy to answer anything you want to send us after this meeting thank you so much Doug Johnson appreciate your work thanks for being with us today um okay I will pull back to my agenda here um so next up on our agenda is item number 19 historic preservation commission appointment and for members of the public who are streaming this meeting if this is an item you wish to comment on now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen the order will be questions from council followed by public comment and then return to council for nominations and action we have um our presenter of this item is our city clerk Bonnie Bush thank you mayor you said everything okay thank you and um are there any questions from council at this time no questions okay let's go out to our members of the public for any member input any public comment on agenda item number 19 historic preservation commitment uh commission I'm not seeing any attendees with their hands raised seeing none I will pull it back to council for nominations and we did have applications will you be calling nominations city clerk we'll call or shall I just go around I can do it um just in if I there is one opening so you just nominate one person um council member Calentary Johnson do you have a nominee Frank Swartz Swartz I don't know if I'm pronouncing the last name council member Golder you're muted William Schultz council member Cummings nothing new council member Meyer my my person's been put forward thanks vice mayor Watkins and mayor Bruder same and so now we'll do a roll call though between William Schultz and Frank Swartz council member Calentary Johnson Frank Swartz Golder William Schultz no I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm going to go with Swartz Frank I'm going to go with Frank actually Frank Swartz and council member Cummings you're muted Frank Swartz council member Brown Frank Swartz Frank Swartz vice mayor Watkins same Frank Swartz and mayor Bruder Frank Swartz we have Frank Swartz with a term ending in January 31st 2024 thank you okay uh Swartz is now appointed to historic preservation commission thank you so much we will move on to our next agenda item now 20 sister cities committee appointment oh wait I'm sorry but we did not have any public comment okay I just want to make sure double checking my note next up is item 20 sister cities committee appointment for members of the public who are streaming this meeting if this is an item you wish to comment on now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen the order will be questions from council followed by public comment we will then return to council for their nominations and action and uh we'll hand it to city clerk Bonnie Bush is there anything else to add thank you mayor just one thing to add there are two openings with two different term limits so when we do the vote the person with the most number of votes will get the longer term okay all right um are there any questions from council members being none I will take it out to public comment on our sister cities committee appointment if this is an item you'd like to comment on raise your hand by dialing star nine on your phone or selecting the raise hand feature webinar controls on your computer I'm not seeing any attendees with their hands raised I'm happy to bring it back to council for nominations the city clerk can you call the nominations I'll switch it up a little bit um council member Brown I'd like to nominate Linda Snook and Amy West vice mayor Watkins I will add um Michael Teseo council member Golder I don't have any data council member Cummings no new additions vice mayor Brunner no new additions and council member Calentari Johnson nothing to add council member Meyer no new additions so we have three um nominees Linda Snook Michael Teseo and Amy West and two openings um again the person with the most number of votes will get the longer term ending in 2026 count uh council member Calentari Johnson I give my two votes is that that how it works that's right okay um Amy West and Michael Teseo council member Golder well I served on sister cities with Linda I think it's time to give other people a chance so Amy and Michael my two council member Cummings Amy West and Linda Snook council member Brown Amy West and Linda Snook council member Meyer Amy West and Michael Teseo vice mayor Watkins Michael Teseo and Linda Snook and Mayor Brunner Linda Snook and Michael Teseo so we have um Amy West and one Amy West and Michael Teseo are tied at five votes each um so we do need to do a vote just on those two to determine who gets the longer term am I good to go okay council member Cohen sorry Johnson has her hand right all right I just had a clarifying question so were Amy West and Michael Teseo the top two then is that okay yeah yeah I have I have Linda Snook is having four four votes I see okay and the other two at five okay so so I just vote on one of those then I see okay you vote on um Michael Teseo or Amy West Amy West thank you council member Golder Amy West would you hear me council member Cummings Amy West council member Brown Amy West council member Myers Amy West vice mayor Watkins Amy West and mayor Brunner Amy West okay so Amy West got the most votes and her term is ending January 31st 2026 and Michael Teseo his term will end January 31st 2023 thank you let me go back to my agenda okay thank you so much uh to Amy West and Michael Teseo for serving on our sister cities committee at this time we will take a brief break and we will return at 315 we will continue then with item number 21 on our agenda thank you with our agenda today is the city clerk ready and thank you thank you okay we will now continue on with our next agenda item and this is agenda item number 21 impact report for the empty home tax initiative petition for members of the public who are streaming this meeting if this is an item you wish to comment on now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen the order will be a presentation from staff followed by questions from council we will then take public comment and then return to council for deliberation and action in addition to the public comment we will be hearing on this item four emails were sent in to city council at city council at city of Santa Cruz dot com I will now hand it over and welcome Bobby McGee our interim director of finance hello Bobby well thank you uh mayor bruner and members of the council the next item before you is related to the empty home tax initiative petition which is a citizen based initiative there's a process for getting these types of items out in in front of the voters which is outlined in the in the staff report and at this time you can see that this has been moving forward and so in reading the full text of this proposed ordinance change staff notice that there were a number of administrative requirements that would be placed on it on on us which would be needless to say a little bit challenging to administer under under current resources and so what we are recommending today is that under California elections code the city council may refer this item to staff for a future report on a number of different items which are also outlined in the staff report at a minimum we are suggesting that the council direct staff to return with this report on June 28th at a minimum with the with the fiscal impact report as well as any other items that are listed in the staff report that may be of interest to the council and so with that I'd be happy to turn it back to you and and I'm here to answer any questions thank you so much for bringing that forward and bringing some of those questions forward and the recommendation and do any council members have questions at this point on this item the impact report for this item I do see that there are attendees here and so this is now the time I will go to public comment if you are interested in commenting on the recommendation for an impact report for the empty home tax initiative petition you can raise your hand either by dialing star nine on your phone or choosing the raise hand feature in the webinar controls of your computer when it's your turn to speak you will be unmuted and the timer will be set for three minutes so our first member of the public is the name Amanda hi Amanda go ahead and unmute yourself our star six Amanda is gone hi everybody my name is Amanda thank you thank you thank you um my name is Amanda I'm a community member and an organizer I would like to point out the larger picture here of why I'm in total support of the empty home tax initiative and why it's desperately needed to help our community community stay a community this larger picture speaks to the issue around creating fair district maps we have a pack in Santa Cruz that has the ability to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars in order to help fund some of the very council members in this meeting right now at a recent meeting they discussed how they wanted to support the election of an at-large mayor and they have also openly discussed and started to organize against the empty home tax spewing false claims about the initiative I ask you to all think about our service industry workers our healthcare workers teachers etc that are fighting to just barely make ends meet how are these groups of people supposed to fight against a group made up of Santa Cruz seaside company local developers and realtors that have the ability to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars in just a few months to fight any efforts made to create any relief the empty home tax can help support desperately needed affordable housing projects we do not want falsely inflated administrative costs to keep this measure from passing there are other current ordinances that have similar administrative structures like the short-term rental program and I urge you all to find a way to make this work thank you thank you okay our next member of the public has a phone number ending in one seven zero five thank you mayor can you hear me yes welcome great thank you this is Eric Rodberg and I strongly support this ordinance I do think uh impact analysis is very important and the issue of housing affordability for both renters and buyers is uh difficult it's in all of coastal california and Santa Cruz no exception the causes are multiple but one of the causes in Santa Cruz is not empty homes anyone who actually lives here and is being honest will know that we have an extremely low vacancy rate if there were significant vacancy rate I would definitely think as something like an empty home tax would be worth considering but we don't so what's going to happen if it passes is very likely that the cost of administering the program will outweigh the revenues especially when the ordinance itself limits the administrative expenses to 15 percent of the revenues not the administrative expenses I'm sorry they are not limited but the 15 percent of the revenues are limited to pay for the expenses so the expenses are most likely going to outstrip the revenues that can be used from the tax to pay for the expenses which means the revenues will have to come out of our already short general fund the proponents have been touting the census numbers as showing a large vacancy first of all the census is not a relevant measure because the census is a point in time count the EHT is a year on vacancy those are two totally separate numbers and you can't use a metric for one to measure a metric for something else it just doesn't work like that on top of that this census 2020 census was taken during the height of the lockdown when UCSC closed in-person instruction and close to 20,000 students left town and there were great vacancies during the beginning of 2020 so you need to you can't rely on the census it's not relevant and even if it were the 2020 census is not accurate now I will point out a couple things one is that there's an ordinance on the books uh Santa Cruz Municipal Code ordinance that prohibits kind of minimum conversions when the vacancy rate is below five percent that has been in place for decades because we've always had a very low vacancy rate so I really encourage you to look at you know look at this very closely because I think what this measure is doing is it's scapegoating a very tiny number of people who have vacation homes they're not because of our housing problems in fact I would say that the proponents of this measure are more of a cause than the very small number of wealthy out-of-towners who have vacation homes on Westcliffe because the proponents of the measure are the same people who oppose every single housing proposal even the 100 percent affordable housing proposals such as specific stations when they come up so it's just going to divert our attention from real solutions thank you for your comment okay our next member of the public is the name Reggie Meiser hey can you hear me yes hi um yeah I am obviously a big supporter of the empty home tax I helped canvas um to get this on the ballot and you know I well I think impact analyses are important for something like this I just want to voice a bit of concern given the history of city staff engagement with community measures specifically back in 2019 I worked with council member Cummings to find uh to try and develop an ordinance to get us a better understanding of evictions by tracking notices to quit and rent increases after the failure of measure M to try to figure out how to get some movement forward and to inform policy now what happened was staff took what we were trying to develop and made the data collection voluntary and so what does that do it ruins the data by introducing a ton of selection bias and this is not the only time staff has taken something that was specifically for working people that was coming from the community and sort of tainted it because of backroom conversations with California apartment association Santa Cruz together um basically people who are owners landlords uh realtors people with money and power in our community and so I just want to like urge folks to understand that given the history I'm concerned that this impact report is meant to take public dollars and produce propaganda against empty home tax before it is put on the ballot and it really disturbs me to have to say that because I feel like city staff should not be a biased organization they're an executive branch right um so the other thing that I want to just quickly mention is where was the impact report for the tow yard that like police and city staff just sort of developed on their own no council approval I still don't think we know how much that cost and what was it for it was exhausting city workers it was just hurting people to just increase our capacity to tow vehicles away and take people shelter from them so where was the impact report where was the sort of feeling that this needs to happen it was not there and I think that just demonstrates the sort of discrepancy about where when we care about impact reports in the city and when we don't care so I'll leave it there thank you for your comment um our next member of the public Cindy Dawson hello can you hear me okay hi uh good afternoon council members my name is Cindy Dawson and I'm the volunteer campaign manager for this community driven people powered empty home tax initiative as you know we're in a housing affordability crisis and this seeks to create an annual funding stream which is something the council talks about and struggles with often about not having funding to do the things we want to do um and this would do that for the lowest income levels and in the Santa Cruz we know that the lowest income level includes teachers it includes health care workers child care workers and the service workers that drive our tourist economy so if we want to keep those people in our community we need to find a way to build them housing the empty home tax does that um I'm happy to hear that you're interested in an impact report and I want to just ensure that it's um well researched and balanced the California Department of Finance just re-released numbers um showing that we have a nine percent vacancy rate I hear lots of people talk about that this isn't a good number that isn't a good number um the methodologies were changed by the census in 2020 for the American Community Survey they actually look at length of of of vacancy so it's not that the decadal census it's actually the American Community Survey and I hope that your staff does the research really looks into these numbers and also just take a spin around town we have lots of homes that are not used for 120 days a year and we want to provide an opportunity for those folks to either live in their house rent their house or if they choose to hold it vacant they can support the biggest need of the community that they were drawn to which is these lower income units and that's why affordable housing experts like housing Santa Cruz county have endorsed the empty home tax it's straightforward it makes sense and it helps it's not a silver bullet but it will help um also as for administering the tax there are models in place around the world Vancouver has a model very similar to what would be in this ordinance it's a self declaration at the david it's an online form it takes about five minutes for the average homeowner to fill that out every year costs can be managed if the city looks around for existing models we also spoke to staff in these cities and they they told us leave some flexibility for the city so that they make sure to keep costs down and integrate to existing systems we did that in the ordinance so that the city can choose to to integrate into existing symptoms um uh the you know the yearly affidavit again it can be done online or paper um and and how much this cost is really dependent on the city there's no minimum number of audits for instance it's just like any other tax it can be random audits it will be random audits and how many of those audits the city does a year is administration costs can be managed turn in over 6000 signatures it would be many more if we had chance to talk to people we saw broad support your time is up thank you like myself thanks for your comment our next caller has the name Darius Mohsen and go ahead and unmute hello hi good afternoon um it's ironic that the council meeting has been gone all remote because of the uptick in covid cases because we follow the science well i advise you to follow the science on the empty home tax and i did just that uh in front of you on your email you have basically a database of all of the housing units and Santa Cruz that have absentee ownership this is from the assessor by the way that are absentee owner owner owned not in the rental inspection date not in the rental inspection database and not in the short-term rental database therefore they are potential homes owned by absentee owners um either not either vacant or rented there's a total of 575 in your database i've even organized it by street so people can walk and check for vacancy or i could see i did just that with a couple of folks in on a rainy february we sampled 49 of these potential vacant homes again based on absentee ownership from this assessor we found three that were vacant two that were being remodeled one that was being prepared for sale so i challenge the fact i invite the eht folks and i'd love to send this to them and they can help help do the research and actually identify if these are empty now let's talk about the other homes there's 24 500 rental four rental units uh excuse me drawing units in Santa Cruz 11 375 are in the rental inspection database 308 are in the str short-term rental that leaves about 13 000 that are basically owner occupied these owner occupied homes have taken the majority have taken the homestead exemption which saves them 70 dollars a year under penal and property tax under penalty and perjury they've told the assessor yes this is my primary residence so why would we snow them annually with affidavits saying are you still there are you still there do you still live there do you still have primary residents when they've told the assessor i mean it's harassment of homeowners it's a huge waste of resources uh administrative time of which by the time you do the research on those 575 homes in front of you in a database i will in fact you have this in writing or on on record i will contribute 10 000 to the eht campaign to cover their cover their expenses if 50 more than 50 rental home 50 vacant homes are found thank you thank you for your comment uh our next member of the public has the name i am watching you yes hello i have no idea why member brown isn't refusing herself from this item since her name seems to appear as a signatory to the out of council initiative measure i have no desire to report on my personal property used to this communist bsa inspired measure it's another pick on someone else anybody else hijack the government to strongman somebody enforce people to rent property because somebody doesn't have what somebody else has what the city is is what the city is what it becomes is what it becomes but private property cannot be continually coming under attack as a result of these socialist communist ideas hey communist bs there's it's not your house you'll buy one and you can rent it out as much as you want is a two-home owner owner any different than somebody that owns a mansion or a large lot not really but this measure says it is it it doesn't make sense for me and it's just like it's like another reason to move out of here i mean really i mean if i didn't have certain people to care about i'd be gone a long time ago thanks thank you for your comment our next member of the public is katie spencer um yeah my name is katie spencer i'm a community member who has rented in santa cruz for the last five years now um i saw that the empty home tax was on the agenda today so i wanted to make time to call in and waste my strong support for this initiative um the empty home tax just makes sense in our city which has both a very high vacancy rate as cindy mentioned like so many coastal california cities but also uniquely tops the list as one of the most unaffordable places to live in the entire country um we so often are told that the funds don't exist to create low and very low income affordable housing and as a result we see a lot of units built that are marketed as affordable but are unattainable if you're making our city's average income and the empty home tax is not the only solution for this affordability crisis it doesn't pretend to be but it also feels important to note that it isn't that radical of an idea similar vacancy taxes have been implemented with success in other cities like vancouver british columbia and relevant to this discussion uh sanikers is empty home tax initiative follows vancouver's lead and caps admin costs at a certain level so there are protections baked into this initiative that limit admin costs i very much support this initiative i hope that this impact report is done fairly thank you for your time thank you the next name is jasmine mia go ahead and unmute welcome yes here i go sorry about that anyways um i'm jasmine mia and i'm calling in in support of the empty home tax because um i hear people's concerns about you know it's private property how can we dictate what they do with it but we have to remember that the empty home tax is a way to try to chip away at the problems of our housing crisis and i think it's fair to preclude vacant houses given our out of control housing crisis in sanikers so many people are not able to afford housing who work here who are part of our community we're trying to take away the rights of people to live in their vehicles and camp and so where are people supposed to go what are they supposed to do and i think you know it's given the crisis that this is so warranted and i would hope people would tap into their humanity and realize if they have a house sitting there that they're not using for more than you know 100 that they're not even in for 120 days i mean that should totally go to someone who needs housing also i agree with um the public comment of reggie misler um because i saw that go down you know i'm i'm his wife and i saw him fight for that data collection and how city staff just totally tainted the whole process because you know taking statistics all sorts of things like i know that if you make something voluntarily reporting there's a selection bias you're not going to get all the data of all the actual evictions and tracking so we wouldn't get the correct data anyways and um and so i do think and worry that city city staff is working with um potentially backroom deals with realtor associations and so i don't know if i would trust their impact report um at this point and so you know as people have stressed i would hope that's a fair impact report and um yeah but i support empty home tax and yeah i want this to be a fair process and for people to have like and you know real information so they can make an informed decision for the ballot as it should be thank you thank you for your comment um is there anyone who has not had a chance to speak for public comment at this time i will bring it back then to council for comments action and deliberation discussion um and just for those of the public tuning in um this item is a recommendation from um our finance staff for an impact report not whether or not we will decide on the empty home tax but an impact report if the empty home tax proceeds forward how will that impact the city and in what ways and in our agenda report there were eight i believe eight um bullet points that were listed and um if there are any others i know that one of the callers did bring up the homestead declaration as something to look at so i'd like to um see if any council members would like to ask any questions have any discussion council member brown thank you mayor uh so for the sake of full disclosure for those who may not be familiar since it was mentioned by a member of the public i am a signer on the initial petition the and to circulate the initiative and um we did uh garner the requisite number of signatures to put this on the ballot um i so just so everyone's clear i i did that as an alternative to um because i was not able to get that on our city council agenda for the council to place it on the ballot so um yes that is true and um with that full disclosure i'd like to ask the city attorney to respond to the question about my ability under the brown act and any other potential um rules about whether or not i should be uh weighing in or voting on this item uh yeah thank you council member brown i'm happy to respond to that question um we looked into that issue uh under the political reform act and um also under common law conflict of interest rules and concluded that there's no disqualifying conflict of interest thank you thank you council member brown and so if i just a follow-up question i am not seeing a lot of hands go up here so i want to try to move us along um i do think it's important to uh try to uh get additional information and i'm glad we're now in a position to be able to get some of that additional analysis from the city which we didn't have access to during the signature gathering phase and um so i'm just in terms of uh director mickey you said that you'd like to have us move a recommendation to bring back an impartial analysis um and i'm i'm prepared to go ahead and do that um right now so i would take that motion we have a motion by council member brown to move the recommended motion to order an impact report pursuant to california elections code section 9212 related to the empty home tax initiative petition with the report to come to council at the june 28th 2022 meeting is there a second i'll second that okay we have a second by council vice mayor wapkins your further discussion council member comings thank you mayor and um yeah i think that related to the comments we heard i just um you know hope that we can ensure that this is a transparent non-bias process that we're about to engage in um i think that there is some concern from the community on um the types of reports that have been created in the past and there's just concern um about you know the potential for bias and so to the extent that we can also report out on the methodology behind the process so the community is clear on how the process took place i think that will help the community better understand and see what sources of information we're using um you know how we came up with the plan and and really used and demonstrate the methods that we're using so we can make it clear that it's an unbiased approach thank you council member comings i will add um as one one member of the public commented to make sure that it's well balanced and researched um and um to really look at you know how we can integrate into the systems that exist and so having all of those options you know the eight bullet points outlined um as you know in our agenda packet i think it's really important to document and and show all of those various impacts thank you all right well we have a motion uh and looks like we can go to a roll call vote council member councillor johnson hi holder hi coming council member meyer by fair watkins and mayor brunner hi that motion passes six in favor one absent our next agenda item is number 22 and this is a impact report of effect for our downtown our future initiative petition for members of the public who are streaming this meeting if this is an item you wish to comment on now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen the order will be a presentation of the item by staff or council members followed by questions from the council we will then take public comment and return to council for deliberation and action in addition to public comment we will be hearing on this item nine emails were sent to city council regarding this um item and so um i'd like to um present let's see council member calentary johnson and uh council member mires if you're present i think council member mires logged off um so i'm happy to speak to it and i'll keep it brief the agenda report um outlines the reason for this impact report there is extensive public process of course on the mix use of affordable housing project which this initiative will impact and um you know similar to the last um item that we just heard we want to make sure that we have an impartial review of the potential impacts of this proposal so um with that i'll pass it to matt or lee or bonnie if they want to add anything thank you council member calentary johnson uh city manager matt huffaker thank you mayor i think council member calentary johnson covered it well this is an opportunity for us to really review a range of potential impacts associated with the the on-off initiative that was brought forward we do anticipate that that will likely come to the council for certification in late june which would give us um approximately no more than 30 days complete that study which will be brought back to the to the council as part of the special meeting in late july so that's the rough time frame uh happy to answer any questions that the council may have otherwise okay thank you do council members have any questions on this impact report for this item okay i will look out to members of the public for public comment now is the time to raise your hand by dialing star nine on your phone or select raise hand on the webinar controls of your computer when it's your turn to speak you will hear an announcement that you have been unmuted and the time room will be set to three minutes and our first member of the public has the name elissa kroger good afternoon can you all hear me yes welcome thank you good afternoon mayor brenner and city council members elissa kroger housing program manager with monterey bay economics partnership calling in today to express our strong support for requests to prepare an impact study of the our downtown our future ballot initiative and require an accurate depiction of the facts framing the issues put forth by the initiative if it qualifies our housing initiative supports projects that reflect high quality design higher density housing serving all income levels and inappropriate locations near jobs and other amenities projects like the downtown library affordable housing project odos initiative if passed would terminate the proposed downtown library affordable housing project along with the difficult to secure grant funding associated with this project effectively halting 125 affordable units already in the pipeline that would assist the city in reaching its increased six cycle arena targets of 3736 new units by 2030 and would keep a green space modern library with resources for all a child care facility and a parking component that includes up to 315 public spaces none of which are intended for the proposed affordable housing units and which consolidates current surface parking lots resulting in an overall decrease in parking spaces and downtown Santa Cruz from benefiting the greater community it is paramount especially in the face of our local housing affordability crisis that a thoughtful analysis of the odos initiatives impacts be thoroughly studied and presented to the public to address any potential for misinformation and encourage informed decision-making at the polls thank you for your leadership and addressing the potential impacts of this far-reaching affordable housing issue as it relates to the odos ballot initiative thank you for your comment our next member of the public is kyle kelly now i'm here bruner and council members this is kyle kelly i'm in support of conducting a study on the effect of the our downtown our future initiative i'm in full support of the expanded library space affordable housing child care and public open space that come together to form the library mixed use project additionally i do support a permanent home for the farmers market on lot seven i'm ready to bike walk and roll to the new farmers market market location i welcome neighbors to their new homes above the library as a supporter of the library mixed use project that was watched to become a better and better project through years of community input i would like to have the honest truth about a measure that allocates zero funding while throwing away years of work and advocacy as part of the study i asked you to determine how much additional time families will have to wait for their chance to live in affordable apartments downtown if this measure were to pass this should include how many evictions increases in rent and the overall exacerbation of homelessness will be expected if these 100 plus homes are stopped and housing advocates know that if the library mixed use project is stopped it will affect not just the 100 plus families that move into their new homes people that move out are making room for someone else to move in right you're looking at not just those 100 families but everybody else is able to basically move in a new housing is as as people move into affordable housing right stopping the library housing project now is telling hundreds or even thousands of families to wait their turn please support conducting the study and reaffirm your support for building housing a library and childcare now on lot four thank you for your comment our next member of the public is reggie mysir welcome hi i just want to take this opportunity to sort of note how interesting is that we have yinbi supporters coming on to comment on this ordinance but not on the empty home tax which they supposedly endorsed just recently um i find it really disingenuous or the santa cruz yinbi group to endorse ordinances that they put no actual energy or support behind and then kind of you know endorse candidates for district three supervisor race let's say that are against said ordinances so i just wanted to sort of bring out that sort of discrepancy to the public about what santa cruz yinbi says they support and what they actually do thank you okay that looks like that concludes our public comment at this time i will bring it back to council and our agenda um and does anyone want to make a motion we can further discussion vice mayor wattkins i see council member calentari johnson who brought this item forward are you interested in making the motion if so i'm happy to say sure i'd like to make the mention thank you vice mayor wattkins okay we have a motion by council member calentari johnson and a second by vice mayor wattkins okay and now a discussion uh city clerk bunny bush thank you i just want to confirm um because the agenda report as we brought forward had a date of June 28th for the report back i just want to confirm yes making that a little bit later we need to make it later yeah we could uh sorry mayor and council and perhaps uh council member calentari johnson might want to make a tweet to the motion but uh we would ask for um time to develop that study to bring it back no later than July 20th which would be approximately 30 days from the council's expected certification of the petition as the maker of the motion want to amend that date in the recommendation sure would you like me to read the motion i realize i didn't do that yes thank you okay so um motion to order an impact report pursuant to california election code section nine two one two and as described here in related to our downtown our future initiative petition with the report to come to council no later than July 28th 2022 okay and is the seconder okay with that okay uh city attorney did you have any comment no okay um okay thank you so we have that motion on the table um council member brown and then council member comings thank you mayor um yeah so i i just wanted to say that i i also support moving forward with this uh analysis and in in the spirit of ensuring that it is an impartial analysis i would hope as we discussed with the previous item that um members of the community and in in particular uh representatives of the our downtown our future campaign be consulted in that process um you know i unfortunately because we in our community have we have trouble and i don't think this is particular to Santa Cruz but as we engage in in politics um having conversations with each other and it often feels like um you know people feel like their voices aren't being heard um this is i think part of the the challenge that we face and part of the reason we are here today with this initiative coming forward um and uh so i would like to make um i'll i'll attempt to make a friendly amendment here to um ask that uh the consultants you know in the spirit of impartial analysis include um our downtown our future representatives in the conversation as part of their analysis i'm happy to uh include that as a friendly amendment thank you okay all right so in the seconder of the motion great so we have a friendly amendment to include in the spirit of impartial analysis the consultants of our downtown our future okay city clerk did you get that i did thank you all right uh councilmember Cummings thank you mayor yeah um i just want to express um my support as well for the impact report um i mean it's it's pretty clear that there's gonna be some financial impacts if we deviate from the direction we've been heading just because we've been spending money on um architects kind of designs and so you know if we shift it away from this right now it's it's clear that there's gonna be financial impacts um so i guess you know and i guess that actually leads me to a question is part of this analysis gonna really look at you know the overall should the measure pass the overall impacts on all the different pieces of the ordinance or is this specifically focusing on um the library i'm here i'm gonna attempt to i can attempt to respond to that real briefly i appreciate that the question councilmember Cummings you'll note in the staff report that we included um a detailed range of potential impacts associated with the various proposals set forth uh in the initiative so the the hope here is we can get a full comprehensive understanding of the potential impacts related to the proposal both financial but land use as well as the project as well how the project stacks up with remaining in its current location versus the the current path that we are headed down in addition to applications that could have on the farmers market as well as housing generation of the downtown and an overall downtown economic development as well so we tried to put together a fairly robust set of impacts to be studied acknowledging that this is a fairly complex proposal and wanting the council and the community to have the benefit of understanding what the potential impacts would be yeah i just wanted to make sure that that was clear to the community because there's a lot of potential impacts and you know being gonna be good for us to see what those will be and i know for some community members it's going to be at a shock and they're going to be opposed to it and for some community members they might actually want to you know they might think it's a good use of tax dollars so um so yeah again just hoping that you can have a very impartial um an unbiased process and just encourage us to have that process clearly laid out um along with who was engaged with how many meetings were had the how the analysis came about just so that um we're reducing the potential for um for bias and also so that we are being transparent most importantly with the community on how this process that was carried out great thank you there any further council member comments or discussion if not we'll move to a roll call vote on this item okay uh city clerk we can have a roll call vote please council member is calentary johnson hi boulder hi council member meyer the absent um vice mayor wadkins and mayor bernard hi that motion passes six in favor one absent council member meyers thank you um okay so at this time we will recess for a food break dinner break and we will return at five fifteen for oral communications and um our budget hearing presentations so i will see everybody at five fifteen thank you oh council member brown mayor bernard i'm i'm just wondering is it possible i know we have budget hearings tonight and tomorrow um what departments will be up this evening or will we be doing an overview i'm just trying to get a sense of where to focus my next hour in our big binder yeah so um city manager matt puffer i believe it's library and water right so this afternoon thanks for the question council member brown we plan on starting off with a budget overview that'll be followed by uh library finance human resources information technology and water which will then be followed by an opportunity for public input so we're hoping to cover our afternoon session thank you and we will continue our meeting welcome back is the city clerk ready i am thank you okay thank you all right good evening welcome to our five fifteen p.m session of the may 24th 2022 meeting of the santa cruz city council and i would like to ask the first please call roll thank you ma'am oh my gosh thank you mayor council members calentary johnson president boulder president coming member coming just currently absent brown council member meyer his absent okay vice mayor watkins here and mayor brunner president thank you our agenda is oral communications oral communications is an opportunity for members of the community to speak to us on items that are not on the agenda for members of the public who are streaming this meeting if you wish to comment during oral communications now is the time to call in instructions should be on your screen oral communications is an opportunity for members of the community to speak to us on items not listed on today's agenda if you are interested in addressing the council raise your hand either by dialing star nine on your phone or selecting raise hand in the webinar controls of your computer you will have three minutes to speak please remember this is a time for council to hear from the public in this format we are not able to engage in dialogue with each member of the public but when we are able we will address the questions raised after oral communications has completed i will now go out to our attendees and look for any hands raised and i see a hand ending phone number ending in 1999 go ahead and press star six to unmute yourself welcome good evening my name is james ewing wittman let's see just what's coming next i just wrote something and read it back to myself i'm just going to say it in october 2024 cosmological alignment not experienced since 79 day ad is stated to be happening i.e a mud flood fast changing the subject vast amounts of study in regards to the sun of a clock cycle based upon thousands of core samples around planet earth where in just the last 200,000 years an average has been made of 12,068 years this is a naturally occurring ice age the last one 12,500 years ago was the younger drive this ice age doesn't occur in months it's some people you know it could occur in hours imagine 1,000 feet of ocean evaporating that will cause an ice age but but but we have world famous i use the word idiots that are sharing that carbon dioxide is an issue where in fact 400 parts per million which is what we're currently at now is the lowest it's been in two million years so what makes planet earth healthy it's carbon dioxide now i'm just going to go through some other stuff um you know there are a great deal of carbon that's being used it's being used to track our food it's called graphene oxide it's one of the adjuvants that's in these vaccines now you guys are are being cautious but are you really being as logical as you could be let's use the example of if the cornholio virus was really so deadly why haven't all the homeless people died in the past two and a half years i think that you guys would uh would market that as well so i have a lot of questions going on and it seems like for whatever reason what steiner wrote about the soul of man was going to be removed through vaccines is happening vaccines and frequencies he wrote that in two in 1917 so i have a lot of compassion for the things that i keep hearing um but i find it kind of annoying can i be told how much time i have left i forgot my timer 45 i know if i'm still on the phone 45 seconds 39 seconds you know what i have a lot of questions i am reminded of the beautiful conversation i had with police chief andy mills on january 24th 2020 where after like a 30 minute one-on-one conversation i looked out his windows of his office and i said you know i was going to rent a garage there but i don't think that's the best part of town but wow what a bunch of chemtrails today and he said you know i'm not worried about that there's a lot of things that could be talked about that jurisdictions like this are not talking about thank you very much okay our next member of the public for oral communications is the name brian shield hi there welcome hello and uh thank you for thank you for spending your time tonight um good evening mayor and council members my name is brian shields i'm an organizer for carpenter's local 505 that covers Santa Cruz tonight i want to speak to you about the need for labor standards standards that would secure the working class's place here in Santa Cruz as everything continues to increase in price as we know apprenticeship healthcare local hire and livable wage should be the template developers need to approach Santa Cruz by i would like to express to you that without such standards the construction force is systematically abused through wage theft 1099 where workers have no workers compensation when heard on the job and a litany of safety violations the language that should become policy here in Santa Cruz would support responsible contractors that are already doing the right thing by their clients environments and employees these responsible contractors have proven time after time that they can perform to the highest standards the policy would bolster the working class and cultivate responsible markets for good contractors this would be the creation of a floor a minimum bar set for developers that are coming into Santa Cruz saying value our citizens as you build on our land i would very much like to have a real conversation a valued conversation with each and every one of you to answer questions that you might have about labor violations that i have seen and what the standards might look like before i go let me leave you with this question how can you as city council members better support and guard the working women and men of beautiful Santa Cruz and thank you very much for your time thank you our next member of the public for oral communications is phone number ending in 8157 press star six to unmute yourself good evening my name is john hall and the co-chair of our downtown our future i'm not sure whether the consent agenda item number 22 was pulled to be discussed if it was i would wait until it comes on to the agenda to talk otherwise i'd like to speak now this is for any at oral communications for anything not on today's agenda all right but i guess my question is has item 22 been discussed or not we are currently on item oral communications and then going into item 23 i see so you've already talked about i am 22 the odor of our downtown our future consultant that item has passed okay all right well i would still like a i can't comment on it except in public comment given it was on the consent agenda so i just like to say that our downtown our future would look forward to working with the city within its planning framework as it's implemented if our measure passes we do endorse the motion for a consultant to conduct an impact assessment of our downtown our future's measure and we encourage the city to search for a consultant of the highest competence and one that can provide a completely objective and unbiased analysis as a policy analysts will know analyses concerning future events and their impacts have to be based on information that can never be complete or absolute given unknown developments and unanticipated events we therefore urge that the consultant be tasked with reporting its range of confidence in its analytic conclusions as well as the degree of certainty concerning predicted events and finally i'd like to raise the issue of scoping both our downtown our future's measure and the lot four mixed use library parking structure housing proposal contain potential costs and potential benefits uh each alternative thus should be analyzed in these terms as the staff report indicates the consultant's analysis needs to incorporate comparison not only to the status quo but to the present plans for downtown so we anticipate that a thorough consultants report would include analyses of a number of issues that we have identified in our letter that i submitted to the city council and the mayor yesterday i would appreciate it if you would attend to that and forward those requests for the report to include those analyses for the public's benefit as well and we look forward to working with and hope that both the consultant and city staff will consult with our downtown our future during the period of the consultants work on its report thanks very much to all of you we appreciate your time okay our next member of the public um and this is oral communications um and then we will have item 23 on our agenda after oral communications so oral communications is a time to comment on anything that is not on today's agenda rob daryl is santa cruz pride welcome thank you mayor brunner and members of the city council first i want to thank you for the proclamation declaring june 2022 is lgbtq plus pride month hopefully i'll get a copy of that and i can put it on our website um as you may or may not know the first santa cruz pride event in santa cruz county was in 1975 the third such event in the state of california after san francisco and los angeles that year the santa cruz pride organizers organized the first day pride week in june of that year most of those activities were in salamence a park i'm here today to invite you to be part of santa cruz pride and the santa cruz pride parade this year which will be on june 5th and downtown santa cruz in particular if you'd like to be in the parade please let anybody uh let me know and i'll make sure that you can be included in the parade um in addition i want to just commend the city parks and recreation department for guiding us in the organization and the permitting of the pride parade and festival they have been helpful in our planning and quick to respond finally in 2025 will be our 50th anniversary of santa cruz pride and we look forward to working with the future council members to make that 50th anniversary a big celebration across the county more than anything i want to thank all of you for the work you do to make the city of santa cruz one of the most inclusive cities for lgbtq plus people in the nation thank you thank you our next member of the public is marie bunch hello city council members my name is marie bunch i'm a seventh grader from tier pacific at charter schools and a youth representative of friday night live santa cruz city schools chapter tonight i would like to share with you our project that's focused on tobacco waste as well as my personal experience and perspective of how tobacco waste affects our community i've lived in santa cruz my whole life and seen trash and especially cigarette litter and not just my community but the larger santa cruz county has made me disappointed and frustrated over 4.5 trillion cigarette butts are littered worldwide but are also the number one littered item found on california roads and our beautiful beaches in marge of this year five fnl youth collected over a thousand cigarette butts around downtown santa cruz and over 300 butts around the beach boardwalk in just one hour even though smoking is in both of these locations it's amazing how large these numbers are it makes me think about the impact on fish and other marine animals because cigarette waste is not only disgusting to look at but also has a huge impact on the animals living here and human health cigarettes contain things like arsenic hydrogen cyanide sulfuric acid tar and many more incredibly harmful chemicals when cigarettes are littered these chemicals make their way into our waterways soil and oceans harming our plants and ecosystems santa cruz is such a beautiful place with so much wildlife and it's home to many different animal habitats seeing all that harm by cigarette litter makes me inspired to advocate for policy change to make a turn for the better as i expected other people care about this issue as well i've been able to go to events like the sea morse under earth day event to share our concerns and the community response has been overwhelmingly positive we've collected over 64 signatures from residents of the city the degree that they support a policy solution to mitigate the impacts of tobacco waste in the city of santa cruz f&l youth want to thank you for recognizing tobacco waste as a public health environmental threat and for your commitment to prioritize it in an upcoming agenda we ask that you continue to prioritize next steps to identify a policy solution they'll mitigate the impact of tobacco waste in the city of santa cruz and keep our community and wildlife safe thank you thank you our next member of the public is nico marino vick hi um i'm uh f&l youth representatives like the person before me and i'm here to give a little speech on my uh the project that we just did um this year the santa cruz city schools friday night live f&l chapter has taken a specific interest in tobacco waste we dedicated our time to understanding the impacts of tobacco waste designing a project to educate our peers and community on this issue and are passionate about reducing tobacco waste in the city of santa cruz we wish to commend you for your council resolution in april of 2021 recognizing tobacco waste as a public health and environmental threat to the people of the city and we recently unanimously voted to put tobacco waste on the agenda in an upcoming city council meeting no later than august we thank you for your leadership we support you in these efforts and we look forward to the adoption of policy as a best practice solution to addressing tobacco waste through our research we have learned that tobacco waste is the serious public health and environmental justice issue secret butts are the number one littered item on the plan this has been the case for the last 35 years furthermore they are the number one littered item on california roads and our beautiful beaches that are special to our county over 2.5 million adults in california smoke cigarettes in 2019 which is roughly 10 of the population over 40 000 adults die of tobacco related illnesses every year but that's not all in 2019 37 of all us high school students reported using some kind of tobacco product the city council has shown its commitment to creating a community where young people can thrive in a healthy environment we ask you to continue prioritizing and protecting youth in our natural environment from toxic waste produced by tobacco products as you take action on this important health issue thank you for your time thank you our next member of the public is i am watching you yes thank you i am perplexed considering the wad of amoola jackola per homeless individual being committed to a new welfare program lately that i would be surprised if better even if small private sector capitalist innovative partnership solutions couldn't exist why do only the so-called non-profit homeless industrial complexes and the government get to blow all this money mostly on themselves for starters to cost per person to supervise house and feed one person at the armory i calculated is at least 26 30 a month while i can't say i personally would be interested in renting and providing for a few subsidized homeless people let's say in a backyard backyard adu i could afford to build because my girlfriend would disown and dismember me but if my situation was different or in general a suitable potential adu property was under a five-year rental contract when built to the city to rent to the benefit of two or three homeless individuals at anything like those per person armory rates two people for a year being 64 000 three people being 96 000 i have to believe there are select investor landlord providers that would be oh yeah very interested even if it meant some supervision stocking food and paying utilities it could also be catalytic housing not sleeping on the floor at the same price as the army including a mailing address food showers bathroom heat and perhaps laundry try a pilot program to see what happens offered only to landlord investors willing to build a new adu and participate for five years to spur building more housing the agreement could be tricky needs definitions not for everyone but there's nothing quite big cash only to spur new housing investment and house homeless at the same time as those money gushing rates i would guess there are landlord investors who would take even less than armory rates of housing three people the city would be responsible to fill the vacancies allow reports big reports vacancies that the city was possible to replace problem tenants the entire contract is between the city and the landlord with ample landlord protections and insurance i doubt we'd run out of homeless candidates if such a rental market existed it could spur and target new adu construction considering adu would be paid off in dang short order as a great investment yes i suppose such a program could be problematic with drug addicts these mainly all aggressive types and those who don't respect private property but considering they're doing this promising homeless people who would respect what a great opportunity it is for them and the city would be obligated to send them back to the shoulders of streets if they cause problems eventually some people would behave most agreeably that's not everyone but i'm not talking about housing just anyone or everyone this way this special housing benefit would be for promising individuals and that would have time limits so they would know this is their one valuable chance in time to achieve personal independence so don't blow it landlords pay taxes unlike nonprofits and they do like the cash use also the money you would spend is the same as now that accomplishes less thanks thank you it looks like that concludes our oral communications i'm just making sure there's no other attendees with their hands raised i will bring it back to our meeting and before we begin with item number 23 i just i know that news reports are coming in and i wanted to take a moment of silence um there was a elementary school shooting in texas and it looks like 14 students and a teacher um i don't know if anyone has any other updates but it's just so tragic and i just thought we could take a moment to just take a moment of silence for them okay now we begin item number 23 on our agenda this is the fiscal year 2023 proposed budget this is part one of the city's annual budget presentations we will receive part two presentations or we will receive some presentations today from some departments and we'll continue and resume tomorrow part two nine a.m for the remaining department presentations at the end of today's presentations i will call for public comment on the departments that have presented today i will now call on city manager matt huffaker to get us started thank you mayor burner and counsel it's good to be here this evening i'm going to be tag teaming our kickoff of our budget hearings with interim finance director bobby magie who's going to be pulling the presentation here up shortly all right can everyone see the screen yes thank okay very good well again i wanted to start off by saying i'm pleased to kick off the fiscal year 2023 proposed budget next slide our agenda for the evening will include an introduction and overall outlook that'll be followed by a fiscal summary from bobby based on our current fiscal outlook and then of course that will be followed by a series of department budget briefings as we move through this evening and our discussions tomorrow next slide as we get started or you can go back one bobby one ahead of you as we get started i wanted to thank bobby magie lupita alamos and our whole finance team along with all of our departments who have contributed to the proposed budget that you will hear more about today these continue to be challenging and unprecedented times in the proposed budget like the last two budgets required making sacrifices with departments across the city contributing to budget reductions as part of our ongoing focus to achieve long-term fiscal sustainability for the city i know these decisions have not been easy and i want to thank all of our departments and our employees for rolling up their sleeves and helping to achieve a proposed balanced budget for the next 12 months ahead i know a significant amount of work led to the proposed budgets that we will be presenting this evening next line as we look to the year ahead i also think it's important to reflect on how we got to where we are today the many challenges that we've navigated together as a community and the organization these times continue to be challenging and it has obviously been quite the journey and i wanted to to run through a number of the challenges that we have faced and responded to over the last nearly two and a half years of the COVID-19 pandemic that includes the the pandemic itself along with the czu lightning complex fire which had significant ripple effects across our county including our community there was also the significant shock to the local economy from tourism business closures the university abruptly closing down and and being slow to really come back to life and all the residual effects that that has on our downtown on our local economy is our business's struggle to keep their doors open of course the pandemic has also worsened and really exacerbated our homeless crisis and housing availability and scarcity it's a it's a challenge that we have seen really reach unprecedented levels not just in santa cruz but across the state of california of course santa cruz is not immune to those impacts we faced two fiscal years of revenue losses really a large piece of the way in which we've been struggling to keep our revenues and expenditures balanced which has resulted in a reliance on reserves one-time money and budget solutions to keep bridging that gap which has proven to be increasingly difficult as we move into this budget cycle and budget cycles to come and again just a shout out to our employees and the tremendous resiliency that this challenging period has required and the many contributions over the last two years to keep the organization running to keep our budgets balanced it has not been an easy time to work in local government and to keep budgets afloat next slide in the face of these many challenges our organization was quick to respond on a multitude of fronts we declared a fiscal emergency in early 2020 and for the past nearly two and a half years have continued to adapt and respond to the changing community needs and unexpected new challenges that have come with it that focus and to prioritize our work a comprehensive re-envision santa cruz work plan was developed to ensure that we're investing our time and our resources and the right things as we help our community recover and ad hoc revenue committee was established to help explore and identify new revenue streams to get us on more stable financial footing and in fact the the measure f half-cent sales tax that's on the june ballot is a is a byproduct of that important work that staff has been exploring alongside the council subcommittee and I want to thank them for their time and leadership on on that front we have our fingers crossed for june and that community will be supportive of this very important additional revenue stream and in the meantime we have been fortunate to receive one-time state and federal funding to help our organization stay afloat invest in recovery efforts and develop more sustainable approaches to homelessness response next slide so what's next as we look ahead we're framing the 2023 budget through the lenses of recover rebuild and refocus we've overcome significant challenges and we have tremendous opportunities ahead of us you'll hear from bobby and our budget team this afternoon that we are continuing to see encouraging signs of economic recovery as major revenue streams reach pre-pandemic levels of course many of those gains are also being offset by some storm clouds on the horizon when it comes to the direction our overall economy is heading risks of a recession and of course the ongoing challenges of increased inflation as well as federal reserve increased interest rates we'll talk more about that as we dive into the fiscal summary and bobby has more details on that front as well and we're continuing to prioritize our employees fill vacant positions build back areas of the organization that were hardest hit through the pandemic as well as bolstering our homelessness response capacity in an effort to increase our effectiveness and alleviate the burden on our operating departments as we focus on rebuild data then lastly our ref refocus refocus in our work through the development and intentional work plans that align with the council's priorities all of this work has helped to inform the proposed budget that you'll hear about this this evening and as we move forward into the year ahead so with that I'd like to go ahead and hand it over to bobby McGee who's going to run us through the rest of the presentation before we jump into our department presentations thank you for your time thank you mr. Hefker I would like to echo his comments and and acknowledge the this financial department budget team who put in some very long and very stressful hours in order to prepare for today's budget hearings today and tomorrow's budget hearings so thank you to the entire team I wanted to talk a little bit about economic trends is as you already heard we are monitoring a number of things and of course inflation is a hot topic right now we have noticed that inflation in the month of April was actually down a little bit however that is not in line with what the overall inflationary trends have been for the year and we are continuing to monitor that as we've looked at some of the high fuel prices that you'll see down there I know that we've looked at oil futures and we are expecting inflation to continue well into the summer based on some of the data that we have seen so far there's a number of other things that you'll see on this slide that we are continuing to monitor as far as macroeconomic trends the general fund revenue trends as the council has heard me say multiple times the recovery the revenue recovery this year has been stronger than expected and so although we have we are approaching overall pre-pandemic general fund revenues I do want to caution that this is not adjusted for inflation and so while we've seen the the hard number of actual revenue come back what we have not seen is our purchasing power that we enjoyed previously before the pandemic so major expenditures that that we're looking at here in fiscal year 23 there have been a significant increase in liability and property insurance costs that is not indigenous to this city I've talked to finance directors all over the state that have said they're seeing some of the same types of activities as far as risk management costs the budget includes five million dollars in capital projects for this year as we've discussed a number of times five million dollars barely scratches the surface when considering the city's overall unfunded capital needs an ERP system is going to be required to be replaced in the near future the city is currently using the Tyler Eden system that system we received notification from Tyler that it will be sunsetting in fiscal year 27 and so at this point we have no choice we're going to have to replace that system that is a known cost and so what we are recommending is a set aside for each of the next four budget cycles and and two million dollars has been included in this year's budget we are projecting at this time that in fiscal year 27 that replace the replacement of that system will be in the neighborhood of about eight million dollars and so this year's budget includes two million dollars and set aside for that investing and organizational capacity continue to implement council goals and then there are we are currently in negotiations with five different bargaining units whose contracts are expiring this year major investments the homelessness response so obviously the council has put together a program in response to employee and community feedback taking a very proactive approach to this we need to build capacity and and we will continue to search for systematic solutions at the state and federal level by our lobbyists so the fiscal year 23 proposed budget so the total general fund expenditures are 127 million the total general fund revenues are only 122 million in order to achieve a balanced budget we are recommending the use of 5.2 million dollars in existing fund balance and i'll get into that in just a moment and so as you can see when we look at the general fund reserves that use of the 5.2 million dollars in general fund unrestricted general fund reserves in order to balance this year's budget will take our general fund unrestricted balance all the way down to zero there is still approximately 21 million dollars in total general fund reserves that is restricted funds the OPEV reserve and the pension reserve those are locked up in trust funds they can only be used for those specific types of activities and then the council's familiar with the stabilization reserve and the recommendation would be to keep about 6.6 million dollars in in that reserve so other funds we have a number of funds that are currently showing deficit balances in the funds including the parking fund the general fund CIP the street maintenance CIP the stormwater overlay fund and the equipment operations fund and that is something that we are actively monitoring and trying to find solutions for how to bring these funds back into into balance as the council has heard we have some very large unfunded capital needs you can see the numbers here the total unfunded CIP estimates right now are about 365 million dollars so as part of achieving a structurally sound budget we do have a balanced budget for this year but you all have seen a number of times the long-term projections that we plug into our budget model and in order to move continue to move towards a structurally balanced budget we asked departments this year to have a target reduction of 2.3 million dollars in structural cost and departments were able to come up with proposed solutions of about 2.4 million dollars and over the next two days you will hear from the departments on on where these proposed cuts are some of these are one-time cuts some of them are structural cuts and so what is measure F measure F is ballot measure for the city of Santa Cruz general fund maintaining essential services it's a one-half of one percent sales tax or about five cents on every ten dollars we are currently estimating that that will raise about eight million dollars annually in the first year the way that that the city tfa collects the taxes we would only raise about six million dollars in the first year because we would only receive nine out of the twelve months and then in subsequent years we were expecting to receive about eight million annually so the budget forecast with no measure F and once again when we put together these graphs we make a number of assumptions on absent of any future budget solutions given some of the known costs known revenues that we are expecting what would what would the future look like moving out several years if we were not to take any actions at all this includes no new programs no new staff no expansion of programs and you can see off to the left there the number of assumptions that we've made as far as expenditures continuing to put five million dollars a year into that unfunded cip project list about one point six million dollars in new positions and other items that you'll hear about in today in today and tomorrow's budget four million dollars in council directed ongoing homelessness response programs the two million dollars over the next four years for the erp system the one time homelessness cip projects of seven million dollars it includes an assumption of modest growth and employee costs somewhat can measure it with the expected long range rate of inflation over the course of time we have here in america we have experienced about two and a half percent and so that while inflationary costs are very high right now we have built into the model an assumption that those caught those inflationary factors will return to normal over the long haul the liability insurance as i mentioned that's going up significantly and from what we have heard from the city's actuaries we're expecting that to continue to rise significantly over the next several years revenues and offsets we did receive 14 million dollars in california state funding some ongoing fiscal reductions that you can see there as well as we just applied for the second tranche of arpa funds that we are expecting to receive realistically any day now haven't i to my knowledge we have not received it yet our revenue manager is on vacation this week but when she had left she had said we had not received it yet but we have entered the application so the budget forecast with measure f looks a little better you can see the graph off to the right there the the net total includes all of those various general funds items that we talked about earlier the available would be your unrestricted balances which includes some of the arpa money that is completely unrestricted and that's why you see a little bit of a spike here in 22 23 and 24 but we have built into the model a recessionary impact around fiscal year 27 and the reason we do that is historically we've experienced a recession about every seven years and so to not build those types of things into the model would probably be false so we build those types of things in and as you can see even with measure f we still have some structural issues that will need to be addressed in future years so fiscal strategies the ad hoc revenue and budget committee will continue its work to explore new revenue sources we are going to be doing a citywide fee to address full cost recovery of programs we'll continue working with our lobbyists to secure state and federal funding and just yesterday we released to the public a request for qualifications for assisting the city and developing a long-term financial plan which includes a tremendous amount of citywide items that will will be rolled into the plan that the council will see at a later date so the public hearing schedule right now we are in the fiscal summary and then tonight after questions on the overall presentation from the council we'll turn it over to the library for the the start of departmental presentations and then the administrative departments administrative services departments will follow including finance human resources and information technology and then we'll wrap it up with water and then the remainder of the departments will be on tomorrow's agenda thank you bobby mickey what do those different blue colors um what what do those do you know that yeah in that chart here sure that that's really just to break it up so so that it's visually more appealing obviously the gray areas we the light blue areas really are the departments the gray areas are your breaks your lunch public comment sessions okay great thank you and that is the end of my presentation be happy to answer any questions that the council may have for that overview um are there any questions from council thus far before i call on our departments let me go to council okay um i would like to ask the city clerk if um we are good to continue i know we've been having so yeah if we could take a three minute break just to reset on base okay get our streaming going okay great um so we will take a three minute uh break to reset on base and um return at 602 city clerk i'll wait for your confirmation that we're ready to continue great thank you they're still working on it thank you okay thanks everyone we're good whenever you are wonderful thank you okay so then thank you for everyone's patience thank you to interim finance director bobby mickey for that introduction we will now continue and receive presentations from departments and provide feedback to staff for preparation of the fiscal year 2023 adopted budget i will now call on yolanda wilburn director of libraries to give a presentation on the library budget and i will call for questions from council members after welcome yolanda our council members thank you for having me here i'm so happy um that i can be here to share this with you i'm just going to pull up my presentation here and share my screen all right can you see that yes thank you perfect all right so this evening i am going to just give you a brief overview about the background of the library talk a little bit about some of our core services our achievements over the last year and some of the challenges that we're facing as we move forward into our 2023 budget the santa cruz public library system is one of two library systems in santa cruz county our system serves its region independently although we do share revenue sources with boxonville the santa cruz public libraries operate under a joint powers agreement uh among the county of santa cruz the cities of capitol scott's val and scott's valley and santa cruz the original joint powers agreement was approved in 1996 and in december of 2015 all four jurisdictions approved the fourth amendment to the joint powers agreement that currently governs our library services today the library system is supported by a quarter cent sales tax that's measure r and that taxes from the jurisdictional and there's also jurisdictional contributions known as the moe or maintenance of effort that comes from the cities of santa cruz and watson bill and the county library fund which includes capitol and scott's valley santa cruz public libraries also receives a modest income from bequests the revenue donations from the public and our friends of the santa cruz public libraries the library joint exercise of powers agreement which enables which establishes the contributions for each jurisdiction is set to expire in on june 30th and a fourth amendment is expected to be approved in the next few weeks by each jurisdiction once that is approved it will establish an updated maintenance effort contribution for our libraries from those systems the library's mission is to connect inspire and inform our community members we do that by providing core services that support lifelong learning through our programs services and collections we support digital inclusion through our training programs um maintaining digital devices and high speed broadband that our communities need to fully participate in the world our transformative spaces in the library promote individual and collaborative multi-purpose learning zones and our user experiences are patron centered to reflect our each of our community's needs we also strive to provide organizational capacity that really works to develop our staff with the skills that they need so that we can pursue strategic partnerships in the community very currently um employees approximately 102 full-time equivalent team members in a variety of administrative and public facing positions we do anticipate that the number of staff will be increasing we've had a number of vacancies over the last year we anticipate that that will continue to increase as we begin to reopen our libraries and expand our programming and services as well as look at increasing some of the hours that we have at our library facilities a few of our library achievements over the last year include maintaining open hours and services during the fluctuating pandemic safety precautions um that there were several challenges with staff and having our doors open but we overcame those um we reopened the boulder creek branch on May 7th of this year and we are anticipating opening our garfield park library branch on June 11th from 12 to 4 pm and so we certainly hope we'll see all of you there just last week our youth services team received the first ever county office of education partner of the year award which is really exciting because of the work that we're doing with them and how we help to support the schools during the pandemic um so that their students could have devices hot spots and the digital um resources that they needed to be able to continue their educations our staff implemented a number of state library grant programs over the last fiscal year including programs with regard to book to action the community conversation around housing with Connor Doherty and Jonathan Franzen we increased the number of Wi-Fi hot spots and Chromebooks that we have for checkout because of some of the grants we received and we're also providing California State uh park passes for patrons to be able to check out for free and of course we cannot forget our friends in the library who not only met but surpassed their goal of raising a million dollars for our libraries as wonderful as our achievements are we do know that there's still work to be done and challenges we see opportunities to complete and implement our new strategic plan in the fiscal year 2023 as well as improve our information technology infrastructure collaborate with partners and other organizations including the aptos history museum when we reopen the aptos library after construction is completed in 2023 we also will review and revise our processes to improve performance and ensure fiscal responsibility um we want to make sure that we are operating in a way that is most efficient and effective for our organization we continue to face challenges around supply chain delays with regard to completing our renovations and rebuilds staffing shortages are currently being addressed um as we fill positions vacated over the last two years we are increasing uh the trainings that we're doing and that training budget is increasing this year by 20 percent because we know that we need to help our staff grow and develop professionally the costs of housing for our staff and for those who we seek to hire from outside of the community the the cost of housing is really creating um some threats to our ability to hire and actually retain uh highly trained staff we do also know that we need to prepare ourselves to ensure the sustainability of our new and renovated and rebuilt libraries by supporting ongoing maintenance efforts and so we're trying to make sure we're studying aside funding for that the downtown library is desperately in need of replacement and the current efforts that delay and threaten the rebuild not only put us further behind on the new library but also mean that we're losing out on some of the sunk costs today leaving us short on the project should we have to start all over again and so that's a concern that we have the library budget overview pictured here shows a 2.9 percent increase in staffing costs and this is largely due to PERS and health insurance costs the rising costs of collection the collection insurance premiums which Bobby mentioned in his presentation have been a factor for us bilingual translation services as well as the rising costs of goods and an increase in our training training budget for staff have all contributed to the 8.3 percent rise in services supplies and other charges under the current MOE agreement the city of Santa Cruz will contribute approximately 1.8 million dollars in 2023 through the maintenance of effort however the library does pay the city for a variety of services including human resources risk management city attorney and other administrative and fleet work those costs as you can see here are deducted under the resources by fund section with the resulting net general fund cost going to the library system some notables with regard to our revenues sales tax is projected to grow 4.6 percent in 2023 yielding an approximately 500 thousand dollar increase in our revenue in 2023 and for the purposes of this presentation the maintenance of effort does remain flat for us right now however as I mentioned previously the county and cities are renegotiating the MOE contributions made by each jurisdiction and once those are finalized we may see that that MOE contribution begins to grow instead of remaining flat other notables for 2023 include a review of the number of staff needed to provide excellent service levels and reduce our reliance on on-call staff we're hoping that that will help us to stabilize our staff so that we can get them the training and support that they need to develop professionally ensuring that we can retain good staff members sort of grow your own culture is what we're looking at and then as measure s projects wrap up and we reopen we want to ensure that all of our systems and infrastructure meet the health and safety needs for our staff and patrons while striving to achieve the sustainability goals set out by the city one time costs are needed to relocate our collection management and information technology teams into the library administration building and some of our fleet vehicles are in need of replacement our Felton library will be established as a PG and E community resource center in the event of public safety power shutoffs and so we hope to add that type of infrastructure at our other locations so that we can be prepared to help the community be resilient in the event of other emergencies as well we'll also continue to work with our friends of the library as as they begin their next fund raising campaign and that is for the new downtown library branch they have an aggressive goal to accomplish over the next three years and we are really grateful for all of their dedication and support in trying to raise those funds for the downtown library we're also incredibly grateful for the support of our joint powers authority board our library advisory commission and the Santa Cruz city council and with that I thank you for your time I'm happy to answer any questions that you might have for me thank you so much that was very informative and thank you for that overview I'm also appreciated the information in the binder that we received and let's see I'm going to bring it out and call for questions from council members there's any questions on the library presentation and budget and I see council member brown thank you mayor and thank you director wilburn for the presentation yes it's really helpful to get a sense of where the money is coming from and what the needs are I just wanted to ask about the maintenance of effort agreement and your projections on that I mean obviously that's going to be renegotiated but I'm just wondering if you think that that's going to change significantly or if you think it will be kind of within the same range and I recognize that's some speculation but I know you're closer to those conversations so just wondering if you could give us a sense of what might happen absolutely so right now we are anticipating that the increases in the maintenance of effort will bring us will generate an additional million dollars a year for the library at least in the first in the in 2023 typically the agreements will stagger so each year it increases slightly more and more to keep up with inflation and so that will be really critical for us as I said our collection insurance just this was went through the roof and so and then again being able to retain good staff is important to us so that we can provide the community with the services they need thank you thank you council member brown any other council members I guess I'll just say thanks and welcome I know this is your first budget hearing but I just want to appreciate the work that you all are doing at the library and also I'm imagining we're going to continue to hear a common theme of affordability and retention of workers being one of the number one issues facing the city so just want to thank you again and that's all I have to say thank you thank you director will burn appreciate your work I will now call on the next department I will call on Bobby McGee interim director of finance to give a presentation on the finance department's budget thank you mayor welcome back thank you all righty this is the finance department fiscal year 2023 budget on the agenda today um talk a little bit about our core services our organizational chart we have had a little bit of a reorganization since I've been here some achievements in fiscal year 22 our goals for fiscal year 23 our fiscal year 23 budget overview and then finally some impacts as part of the budget reductions that that we are recommending so our core services are accounting accounts payable and payroll budget and then we're recommending to split out purchasing and have that as its own division again and revenue and then finally risk and safety management we currently are recommending 29 employees you can see the distribution is fairly even across the board there with the exception of purchasing it's a pretty lean purchasing division in a decentralized environment we think that's probably an appropriate number so fiscal year 2022 achievements there's a couple of things that I'd really like to highlight for the council here so one of the things that the feedback I've gotten from finance staff is they have really enjoyed working with the council's budget and revenue ad hoc committee they feel like and I will say this for all of us we feel like we're really getting an opportunity to make a positive impact on our community and and assisting the council in getting the sales tax measure on the ballot was it was a real sort the source of joy for for our staff earlier this year you may have heard that kronos experienced a a global hack event and we had to pivot on a dime and establish and implement an emergency payroll processing protocol and I'd like to give a shout out to every department out there people were very understanding and very helpful as we went into absolute crisis mode trying to figure out how do we get payroll out this week given that the entire system for all employees citywide went down it was really a citywide effort and we couldn't have done it without everyone else's help a couple of other items on this slide that I'd like to draw attention to was since I've been here I've been working with our revenue manager one of the things that we've noticed over the past several years is that the city's investments primarily in life do not earn a very high percentage and so one of the things that I've been working with Kim Wigley on is restructuring the allocation of some of these and pulled investments and so far we've shifted about 30 million dollars out of life and put that into government agency bonds and the council does receive that report each month and so I think that you'll notice moving forward that while theoretically not taking on much additional risk we've you're going to see some additional interest revenue coming in over the next over the next year and then we have also developed a new account structure to better track resources and uses of funds related to homelessness response this is something that the finance department is extremely proud of because we've been trying to find anyone who has done this nationwide and so far we haven't found anyone we've understand that a lot of agencies have talked about doing these types of activities but I can tell you that developing an accounting system which is multi-directional multi-departmental multi-disciplinary to track what all of these homelessness services expenses and report that back to the council is a little bit bigger the challenge than just saying hey start tracking that and so under the leadership of assistant director Marisol Gomez and our accounting team they've developed a system that that we believe is is really kind of groundbreaking and so we're going to roll that out and some of my friends in the consulting world have reached out to us and and and said how you know how are you going to do this and please let us know how this looks moving forward so those are those are some achievements that the department is very proud of our goals for next year is a study of citywide fees as you heard me mention earlier the long-range financial plan which hit the street yesterday so hopefully we'll get that thing started sometime in august the consultants work will begin on that we've been in developing a new cost allocation plan for citywide use we hope to implement that in fiscal year 2023 we've hired a individual to focus on on transient occupancy tax audits of short-term vacation rentals this is your air bnb crowd your vrbo crowd those have historically been not not audited at the rate that we felt was appropriate and so now we have an individual who is focused specifically on those she's she's really hit the ground running and has really ramped up her activities quickly on that we're planning on implementing phase two of creating equity and budgeting we recently completed that we and we now have a draft report of a procurement organizational assessment and we are going to be moving into phase two which is a citywide purchasing task force so that we can continue to strengthen our procurement activities citywide based on what council policies are and we will certainly be bringing some recommendations back to the council sometime hopefully sometime this year on ways to strengthen and improve our procurement system and then finally coming up with the new cost allocation formula for the city's self-insured liability program and i say and much more because i know that there's going to be a lot of other things that come up during the year so the finance department budget is about seven million dollars in services and supplies a lot of that is tied up in risk management activities as well as just short of four point three million dollars in personnel costs the liability fund obviously takes up the bulk of the revenue against that and then the general fund supports the department to the tune of about four point five million so budget reduction impacts we are in the process of moving into a permanent location now we have been in a temporary location the niac building on front street which is scheduled to be torn down and so we knew that we were going to have to move and so the council approved a seven year lease over at 1200 pacific avenue so we are making final plans as we speak to move over there hopefully we will be able to move into our new location in july although it may get delayed until august we are recommending a decrease in temporary hours which is really kind of right sizing what the department needs are and it'll result in longer processing times for digital conversion of some paper documents that come in and into the agency however we feel it's appropriate it'll take a little longer to get to it but we do believe we will still be able to get to those types of activities legal services decreasing by five thousand dollars again just right sizing it based on historical activities we thought that that was an appropriate line to cut and then finally in courier services a decrease in cash pickup services and so with that I will say thank you and ask the council if there are any questions I am available as well as members of the finance staff thank you director McGee I see council member golder and then council member Cummings with questions hey bobby um sorry for not thinking of this in advance but it came to me while you were giving your presentation and I've been asking this for years I'm curious I saw that you have an auditor that's doing like the short term rentals and I know people are you know I know I understand what they're doing what I don't understand is why we don't collect those tot taxes off the top like via the platforms Airbnb and VRBO like the county does and I've never understood like why we don't do that because I feel like our revenue would be um you know higher uh yeah candidly I was unaware that the the county had a system where they were collecting it off the top um my understanding uh in working with our revenue manager uh is that VRBO Airbnb they don't have the system capabilities in order to collect that directly and then have that um ship to the state and so the way the program works currently is the hoteliers actually report it back to the city and then they uh they submit the funds and then we'll come back and audit their results later but they do have that capability I'm happy to look into that yeah because because I I know because that we rent our house out on Airbnb when we're out of town and it's like as a host it's not very convenient to like submit monthly things it especially you know nine months out of the year I'm not going anywhere but I have to submit a receipt to the city saying zero zero zero zero and it's just kind of a pain and just knowing other friends like I guarantee people aren't being entirely honest with the city if I can be frank and like like if um if it was just collected and it's confusing for the guests too they always think I'm some kind of shyster like asking for this extra 11 so I have to have like this receipt book and this explanation and this link to the city website and they're like well this other people don't charge me and so it's just kind of confusing and I just think um if if there's a way to talk to the county about the way they've been doing because they've been doing it for several years that way I getting text messages from my staff as we're speaking we're happy to get into that and see how the county is doing that information that that we've been given I've been on the phone for some of these conversations so I'm not sure exactly how they're doing it but I'm happy to look into that and and see if there's a better way cool thank you thank you council member golder council member coming yeah thanks for that presentation actually the question it's related to the presentation but it's also for the city manager I'm just wondering I know you were able to show where those you know certain cuts and reductions are going to need to occur and I was just curious for the city manager if we have that information for all the the the departments and if so if we can get that because I think it really helps because the budget packet that we have doesn't include that information and it'll really help as we're thinking about where cuts are being made and if we want to you know shift the where those cuts occur it'll help to have those numbers and be able to see um you know where the cuts are are happening yeah thanks for the thanks for the question council member Cummings as we move through the department presentations that information will certainly be included as we move through so happy to continue providing those details as we move through department by department of where those reductions have been made and as bobby mentioned earlier it's about split 50-50 between one time reductions and ongoing reductions so it's a combination including some some unfilled positions and we're happy to provide those details as we move through thanks but I guess my my bigger question is wondering is there a way we can get that in writing because like if that was with our packets we could see if we could kind of follow it line by line and um yeah it would be just be helpful if we had physical copies of that information as well we can certainly provide a summary for the council to review does that conclude your questions thank you uh council member calentari johnson uh council member brown glasses yeah I so it just as a follow-up I it would be to council member Cummings that would be really helpful in the past during budget hearings um and prior to adopting the budget we have had those summary summarized for us by department so we just have a kind of like a cheat sheet to help us um uh understand by department what's um where the cuts are uh and so it that would be great if we could get that via I don't know in a memo or something that we could have for reference thanks are there any other council member comments or questions okay thank you so much um to your work and to your department thank you let's see I will now call on Ken Morgan director of information technology to give a presentation on the IT budget sure I think HR was scheduled to go first but I'm happy to jump in and jump out of order sure thank you no problem uh sharing my screen can you see my presentation yes thank you great so good evening mayor brunner city council my name is ken morgan director of the city's information technology department and here to give you an overview of our proposed budget for the upcoming fiscal year presentation like other departments will include an overview of our core services uh highlight of some of our key accomplishments this past year I'll cover our fiscal year 23 proposed budget and finally discuss goals associated with our upcoming fiscal year starting off with our organizational chart these folks make up the city's IT department when fully staffed the department has 21 full-time equipment employees with three of those individuals being funded and assigned to the public works and water department at this time last year I reported out that the IT department was operating in about 65 capacity and while we're still working towards reaching full capacity we have made progress including filling some key leadership vacancies Mike Schmidt joined the team eight months ago as our assistant director Dennis Kiyabu has been promoted to IT manager in charge of our infrastructure and we've also added some talented folks to supplement our process and application solutions teams and that would be James Armstrong our new business systems analyst too and Eric Kuimoku our new programmer analyst and just as yesterday we added Blake Irby our new business systems analyst for the water department our IT mission remains the same which is to cultivate increased connectivity of people technology and processes and we do this by trying to deliver business driven efficient quality technology solutions and services for our staff and the public and these efforts really do start with our amazing client services team these are the folks responsible for receiving and resolving thousands of annual requests via phone calls work orders at the city's help desk and they really do an amazing job of supporting the hardware and software on the city's endpoint infrastructure that's our PCs our laptops our mobile devices our desk phones and all together that's an ecosystem of about 2000 devices our infrastructure services team manages network and infrastructure and data centers and offices throughout the city it includes our wired and wireless networks our server infrastructure our voice over IP telephonic equipment and they spend a lot of time on security and that's both cyber security to keep the bad guys out and our physical access security to protect our city assets our process and application solutions team and we support over 90 applications citywide these are our database admins our developers our custom report writers project managers and application experts and the last we have our strategic and admin services division focused on strategy special projects and of course budget planning and execution with regards to our accomplishments always best to start by highlighting our customer service despite staffing challenges and COVID challenges and shifts in how our colleagues are doing business the level of customer service continues to be something our department is proud of and that equates to directly serving 554 of our employees that means 70% of city staff sought out IT for technology support of some type we replaced 127 PCs as part of the ongoing emergency telecommunication policy we supported 230 employees that worked remotely in some capacity we answered or responded to 2800 help desk phone calls and we completed 6300 work orders which was an uptick of about 5% over the previous years with regards to infrastructure this is often a less recognized aspect of service delivery which is why I wanted to highlight a few impressive statistics our critical network infrastructure and our critical server infrastructure were available 99.9% of the time last year and I know Bobby mentioned the Chronos outage and that is a hosted application not one that we manage internally here so good to delineate that IT geeks refer to 99.9% as the triple nines and really that just means that services like email network files applications they were available for all but eight hours accumulatively last year pretty impressive cyber security continues to be a focus for us from an infrastructure perspective we took a very proactive step forward and we partnered this year with a managed security security service provider the service provides both intrusion prevention and detection devices in our network as well as an actual security engineer that monitors our endpoints within our network 24 hours a day seven days a week 365 days a year so a really important step forward in improving our posture along with security awareness our security awareness training continues to be prioritized we provide quarterly security awareness campaigns for employees and this year we also introduced fishing tests in which we anonymously sent out suspicious emails asking employees to take actions that would be considered risky or counterintuitive to best practices and the hope is that the training employees have taken paced dividends but if not the tests give us some insight as to where training would be focused in the future and then applications while we were onboarding an almost entirely new team to the application space there were some notable accomplishments supporting 90 plus applications we upgraded our Tyler ERP system our cash sharing system our utility management system system we added additional transaction types to our aggregated payment portal my city of Santa Cruz the community can now pay for planning permits online and last from the final phase of two rps to select a couple of enterprise applications it's going to bring us a new and modern land land management system and also a new computerized maintenance management system for our public works and water department getting us to our budget overview slide it's proposed budget is 5.9 million 3.4 goes to personnel services the remaining 2.5 is going to be our service supplies other and capital outlay the major costs for it continue to be the the software and hardware maintenance contract as well as our telecommunication services these three categories make up about 81% of our non personnel related costs it's proposed budget does represent an increase of 4.5% and this is the result of a few factors first we have our anticipated inflation for our maintenance and support contracts this is typically about 1 to 3% the depending on the contract in addition to those kind of uncontrolled expenses we have committed ourselves to a couple of other priorities one is our Microsoft 365 implementation which is currently underway that is going to modernize our employee's ability to work and collaborate and then the other investment priority is our cyber security enhancements which i highlighted when i discussed our managed security service provider from a personnel perspective we are also requesting two additional FTEs to help support our applications team one position will be funded and assigned by the water department and the second position is an IT business systems analyst three position so outside of the water department we currently have one IT BSA that is responsible for supporting those 90 applications and business systems and so adding this position is going to add a senior level BSA to supplement those support challenges and in addition bobby had mentioned the sunsetting of our ERP and so this person will kind of lead the process to replace Eden which is going to be a multi-year multi-department effort so we are proposing close to $180,000 in cuts to help offset some of these increases cuts would include eliminating and consolidating some IT tools and departmental apps additionally we have worked with AT&T to find some cost savings in the types of telephonic equipment that's used in our city on elevators and then the large impacts are going to come from a reduction in our capital outlay fund as well as reducing the number of PCs replaced next year reducing capital outlay will prolong the replacement of some of our networking and server infrastructure and then reducing the number of PCs replaced for a second because that could be yours going to likely lead to more increased help desk work orders to kind of support that that aging infrastructure. I'm running up against my 10 minutes but I got some goals for the next fiscal year for the department I mentioned the two RFPs that we are very close to wrapping up and we'll move into project implementation mode the Microsoft 365 project that I mentioned we're hoping to finish that in the summer and fall we have some plans to improve the technology and the security used to support our remote workers we've been pursuing an ongoing physical access security project we have over 30 sites completed now and we're focused on the downtown facilities including city hall parks and rec civic and ed like other departments there's some supply chain challenges so we're remaining patient there we have an ongoing approach to our cyber security mitigation will be required to perform an audit this year of our credit card handling the city executes about two million transactions per year so we're we've fallen to our PCI card audit that's required we're going to be working with the city manager's office and a third party vendor on an initial phase to improve our ADA compliance on our website and last as I mentioned the city's ERP is set to sunset in 2027 and this will be a multi-year multi-department project that we'll need to focus on and that brings me to the end. Wow okay you did it thank you so much for that presentation with that additional information from our binder our budget binder um can I ask a quick question of the analyst one two position you said was funded by the water department. So we have two position ads one is a programmer analyst one two that one will be funded by the department the water department and supplement the business systems analyst three that exists over there so two allocated positions to water and then the general fund request is for a business systems analyst three for the remainder of the city. Okay got it okay and one more question under business apps or where does Chris fall in your IT world? Yep so Chris falls under our process and application solutions team we have as I mentioned we had just onboarded a new assistant director Mike Schmidt and one of his first asks is to do a deep dive into Chris and kind of articulate out the business process and make sure that departments are working in a kind of concurrency that we have subject matter experts assigned so those work orders are getting completed. I understand a lot of the general service requests that we're coming through we're sometimes perhaps falling through the cracks so that'll be a part of this to make sure that we have a more cohesive approach to that. Great thank you and Chris for those that don't know CRSP is the acronym for the city's community request for service portal and there's a free app as well as a website URL to report to any of those categories to the city I think there's eight categories. Okay thank you. You're welcome. Council member Calentari Johnson. Thank you thanks for the presentation Ken I wasn't able to catch um did you say 800,000 in reductions? 180,000 dollars in reductions but we had an overall increase based off the obligations that I discussed like Microsoft 365 and the cybersecurity. Okay and so it was a four four point five percent increase that 180. So four point five percent equates to about two hundred and sixty five thousand dollars which is the overall increase for the department's budget. Okay that answers my question thank you. You're welcome. Any other council member comments or questions for IT director Ken Morgan? Just like you know a brief comment in that and you don't there doesn't necessarily need to be an answer but you know we get a lot of information about smart cities and how cities internationally are using technology just to improve quality of life and resilience to climate change and so I look to those world of tech to help us know what we could be doing or innovation that we could embrace particularly in our proximity to Silicon Valley and all of the innovative folks we have in our community um just to think about what you know what we might not be thinking about. So I know that you already have some of these goals set out and I just I feel like there's also so much more so anyways I appreciate the work and I appreciate your presentation. Thank you. Thank you Vice Mayor Watkins. Okay thank you that concludes thank you for jumping and being ready to go. No problem. I will now call on Lisa Murphy director of human resources to give a presentation on the HR budget. Good evening Mayor, good evening council members. Lisa Murphy your human resources director presenting my final budget. Let me put my PowerPoint up here and share my screen. Let's see share screen okay am I sharing my screen can you see that? No. Let's see let me try that again. I have it up if you need me to. Oh I think I'm getting there there we go. There we go. Yeah let me get it on to the um ending there we go great well thank you I'm pleased to present the FY 2023 budget from my department. Human resources mission I'd like to share with you as a resource and a trusted advisor we strive to cultivate an inspiring and fulfilling work environment that attracts and engages a talented workforce. Some of our notable achievements for this year COVID-19 response that's really a lot of what we focused on between creating new policies bringing on employee testing locations we are one of the first agencies to do that to returning our workers back to work safely. We've initiated a diversity equity inclusion program here in HR that's one of our biggest undertakings this year where we've worked on revising job descriptions to eliminate biasness. We've revised our minimum standards to recognize not everybody needs a college education to achieve to enter the workforce. We've implemented implicit bias training for all of our hiring panels and we've also implemented a new employee bias training program. We've moved to online applications and in our 2023 goals we want to move on to technology with the support of IT my partner in crime to do onboarding online. We've also completed a lengthy compensation study and we've also just about to wrap up our permanent remote work policy which I'm excited to get that implemented and along with a number of other notable number of recruitment implementation of benefits these are just a top-level look at some of our notable achievements. Just a quick summary of our budget overall our budget is $25.5 million but what you'll see that is primarily composed of workers compensation and benefits. There's five categories within there we have administration workers compensation benefits and employment and our volunteer program. We do all this we administer our program server 800 employees nearly four to five hundred temporary employees during given the season with just 11 employees. Our services include recruitment selection onboarding labor relations administering our workers compensation program our benefits management training and organizational development and we also staff the equal employment opportunity committee. Let's change in our budget what you're actually going to see is a pretty large increase in our budget and that's due to our workers compensation budget our unemployment insurance increased from an average of 90,000 to over 278,000 a lot of that had to do with COVID. Lisa? Yes. I'm so sorry this is Bonnie the issue we were having with Zoom earlier in office just happened so the people who are listening who are at City Hall probably missed a lot of what you just said so if you can go back maybe four slides or so I'm so sorry. No worries what do you think? I left technology okay do you think we're back online there? I am. I can see you where I last heard. All right I'll go over again because I don't want to shortchange my staff and and I want to be able to recognize that they have this incredible staff and achievements that they made again just a review for those who may have missed this section of my presentation. I think COVID response was again one of our number one priorities our return to work bringing back our employees safely implementing policies implementing the sick leave implementing employee testing on site. Also I want to really highlight our initiation initiated our diversity equity and inclusion and human resources department and some of those things that the actions that we took we have revised our job descriptions taking out any bias type language we revised our minimum standards for employment really looking at whether you need a college education or there is experience just as an equivalent. We have implemented implicit bias training for all of our hiring managers and hiring panels we have again new employee bias training for for our new employees a bias training program and some technologies we've moved to online application and we're looking to move to online onboarding which would be a huge technological achievement and we completed compensation study and finally one of our biggest lifts is to complete our remote work policy for our employees a high level summary of our budget it's 25.5 million to the general fund there's five budget categories that we break that into and I'll go into more detail in a couple of slides we have administration workers compensation benefits unemployment and we also house the volunteer program and we administer all of these programs to over 800 employees we have over between four and five hundred temporary employees depending on the season we do that with a staff of 11 really hard working dedicated human resources program employees we freeze I have a feeling we're frozen no we're not frozen okay let me just go over a few human resources services recruitment selection onboarding living relations workers compensation benefits management training organizational development and we also staff the Equal Employment Opportunity Committee that into our budget numbers some notable changes while my budget actually we we were tasked with eliminating two and a half percent of our budget which was an equivalent for the general fund was about $50,000 we also had some pretty large increases and those notable changes increased my total budget almost 10% and those were as a result of our workers compensation increased over $2 million and that is a reflection of an updated actuarial which we do every three years and it catches up and it looks back to what we've experienced and then we carry that forward and it raised our our workers compensation rates we've had some notable injuries the previous three years our employment insurance increased from an average of $90,000 in 2020 to nearly $300,000 in these past couple of years and that was most notably due to COVID and in addition medical insurance has increased nearly a million dollars from the previous year just to look at the numbers overall you can see from FY 19 to FY 23 we're fairly consistent but then we have this jump that's coming up again you see from 2022 to 2023 it's a cost of doing business quite frankly unemployment insurance medical benefits and workers compensation for over the past three again the the previous three years just a little more detail on my budget where that money goes you can see in the different categories administration that's what houses my staff for the most part and then we also have our medical insurance which you can see quite frankly the yellow is 20 million unemployment insurance roughly around 300,000 a volunteer program is roughly 50,000 and then our workers compensation program which is the gray which you can see has a steady increase where it went from 3.3 last year to 5.06 million but quickly want to give a little more detail of some of the things that we do because it's pretty incredible what my staff does our training and development program is pretty pretty robust we offer nearly 65 classes to our employees in our recruitment we looked at we reviewed 2,500 applications we are an employer of choice we do have a lot of people who want to come work for our city we also regular classification and compensation plans we we administer labor relations which is all of our employee negotiations we have eight bargaining units as you know we're in negotiations now and all of our employer relations and that's where we work with our employees we've resolving conflicts working to help improve relations and also our some of our fund programs that can play engagement which I want to give a little bit shout out again to my play training development this is one area where I really refuse to to shave off the budget or nibble at the edges because this is one area that's so important to professional development it contributes to succession planning and if we start to eliminate here that we're I think we'll find ourselves into trouble one of the things that training and development really again encourages our employees to move up through the through the ranks we do a lot of promotion internal promotions this last year we had 585 employees attend our voluntary training programs so we have voluntary training programs we also have mandatory training programs such as cultural awareness and sexual harassment and discrimination we have a really great leadership development academy where employees can advance in their career if they do not have one of the credits to doing our leadership academy is that if you take eight classes you will receive one year supervisory experience and that really helps those folks who never have that opportunity to supervise to start to move up through to be supervisors or into management and again over 65 classes that are voluntary for our employees to take and that and we're starting to see a pick up since COVID was tough trying to do it online my staff really worked hard to get folks to attend but now we're starting to do a little more in person we're going to kick off our fourth and employee engagement survey so that's pretty exciting news it it took a little hiatus because of COVID but we want to get back in there and get back to our work plan in addition it's really important for succession planning and we have a really robust program that again I think COVID has really you know impacted how we've been able to reach out to our folks but we're about to relaunch our programs such as our stretch assignments our career counseling our job shadowing programs and really getting our folks because that's what we want to do is get our folks ready for that next step to move up to our employee with labor relations again I want to give a little bit of a shout out there we have over eight units that we work with we have worked really hard to resolve workplace issues this this division also works with the equal employment opportunity commission and this this division also works on the diversity equity inclusion accessibility program that we're trying to launch benefits team this this really small team and you think about how many employees that they are trying to manage their benefits and all the programs medical disability retirement insurance vision dental long-term disability it's incredible the amount of knowledge that these people in the in the benefits division have and work with our employees particularly in some of their most trying times they they are there to help them through some of these really difficult decisions and help them with their benefits workers compensation we did see a 34% rise in our costs again what happens is is it's a look back we have an extra where we're all done every three years and they look to see what our experience factors are again we did have some pretty large claims we had some cancer we had some very large medical claims that have they're called presumptive in our public safety sector and then those will stay on our books for about again another three years till we can cycle those off just wrapping up just to give a shout out to our volunteer center they're a fabulous group we house them in the HR department our city contracts with the volunteer center we supported over 300 volunteers and our total volunteer hours last year was fiscal year was over 8 000 hours and that's actually kind of on the low and that's a lot of hours again because of COVID but I think we're going to see a nice big uptick finally my HR priorities are not very different from the previous year I want to stay consistent with what the things we're working on number one employee development for professional and personal development number two subsection planning stretch assignments the over hire program we implemented the coaching and the mentoring you can't get enough of this exceptional planning and three improving our organizational culture through our employee engagement program and our diversity equity inclusion accessibility program the HR we serve the people who serve the community so I thank you for your time and if you have any questions I'd be happy to thank you for that presentation director Murphy um thank you for the goals as well and can you give a little timeline on the diversity equity inclusion launch sure we're actually already in it we've been implementing for the past year where we take our uh we've been taking our job descriptions so as a new job opens up we've been taking them one at a time we already implemented the the hiring panel training in January February where we wanted to really before I even launched a documented program which I'm still working on the actual document with the work plan I wanted to get that out there and start training our employees and we already implemented what's called circle up has been the the company we brought on to do the the training for us for the cultural uh training we started that actually about a year and a half ago so we're so slowly implementing the different aspects of it and then the my my final version of the copy will go to the EOC to really solidify the plan and you know get it and writing is circle up the company out of Oakland yeah I think that's where they're from okay thank you uh council member golder thank you Lisa I took one of those classes online that you were offering I like I don't know maybe a year ago or something like that it was it was good it was it was interesting so thank you for doing that um I did have a question with two questions actually one is in regards to the workers compensation was you said it was do you with some of the increased cost due to COVID is that what I heard you say you know actually I had thought that that's what we were seeing was because what happened for public safety the law changed and that COVID was a presumptive injury that it happened at work and so that was a minor piece of it but we actually haven't quite seen that impact yet but it really unfortunately we had like you said some uh in public safety some um medical conditions that were um life-threatening and without revealing too much that really picked uh jumped our claims up quite a bit I'm sorry to hear that I hope those people are you know doing well I did have a question a follow-up to that question was um the department where my husband works over the hill they're required to be vaccinated are our public safety employees required to be vaccinated as well no our employees are not required to be vaccinated and so if they get COVID at work or if they then we still have to pay them it doesn't matter if they're vaccinated or not vaccinated we actually have a really high vaccination rate in our city was close to nearly 80% and actually in the prior department it was almost 100% but even we're still getting COVID no yeah I understand that I just was curious yeah but the way that works is you're right it's presumptive so it automatically is assumed that they got it at work and so immediately they get 100% of their salary from day one until they return to work okay and then a completely unrelated question about the work from home policy while I think it's great for people to be able to you know to do that I'm a slightly concerned because as the city we are you know a public service um organization and I'm concerned just about a decline in our ability to serve our customers in in departments where you know not everybody has access to technology and and I know it can be frustrating like for example like going to pick up a bird building permit or going to the water department or going from place to place and if people aren't available because they're working from home it can be quite frustrating and I've heard a number of complaints over the last couple years about when the workforce coming back and so if that's not happening I have a concern about the service that level of service that we're providing as an organization I agree I agree with your assessment we at the end of the day we are a public service that's what we do we we service the people right and so being open and being accessible is extremely important because you're right there are inequities in our accessibility on technology and I think each everybody needs to recognize that and make adjustments for that the policy is operational based on each department they can choose how they want to implement based on their their level of customer service so for example I'm open all the time and I do have an individual who is in the front office and so that person is not able to telecommute because I we have such a customer interaction where some are so it's really dependent on I think the job and the ability to telecommute and and the the ability to monitor to make sure that we aren't there aren't a reduction in service levels I agree and we've put in in terms of in the policy the agreement and the ability to monitor at least performance wise but that the customer facing in the office opening may be a different a different issue and I'd be happy to you know work on that and address that yeah I just think it's hard then when we're treating all employees essentially equally in bargaining negotiations but some are here physically every day day in day out and some are allowed to you know to not and it's it's hard to wrap my head around that as well thank you does that conclude your questions council member golden yes thank you thank you so any other council members have any comments or questions for the hr budget okay well thank you so much for the presentation and I believe now I will call on rosemary minard water director to give a presentation on the water department's budget welcome rosemary good evening there we go thanks everyone for the opportunity to talk about the water department's budget and I'm going to I'm going to tag team this presentation a little bit with our chief financial officer David bomb we're going to talk tonight about our core services and alignment with the re-envision Santa Cruz council priorities we're going to talk a little bit about our org chart we're going to talk about key accomplishments and then I'm going to give a quick overview of the operating budget and the capital investment program and then as you made some of you will probably recall we do an integrated thing where we have a financial pro forma that's part of our long-range financial plan that allows us to integrate the way we look at our capital and operating budgets into a kind of a one financial picture that helps us really look at how we're doing and how we're meeting the goals that the council established for us when they adopted our long-range financial plan which we updated in 2021 and then finally I'm going to talk a little bit about the water commission's engagement with us on our budget and cip development review so what our core services are you know we produce and deliver safe high quality water to 100,000 people we do it 24 7365 we provide meta reading and billing and prompting courteous customer service to our customers the meters are we have 27,000 meters in the system they're read monthly bills are produced and delivered monthly our our customer service staff process is about 45,000 customer calls a year and we do utility billing for the city for the wastewater and also the refuse so we take refuse calls and also the anything related to wastewater we operate maintain and when we're needed repair replace water system infrastructure about valued at about a billion dollars and we plan for and manage 4,000 acres of land and many valuable natural resources and for long-term sustainability in our community the the re-envision Santa Cruz priorities which got carried over into your new work plan for this coming year has had three priorities and we're our work is very aligned with two of those financial sustainability and also infrastructure investment and we're going to talk a little bit more about those things as we get through there we are we're an organization of about 120 fte's and you'll see that we're divided up into these four big operating organizations I wanted to mention a couple of things related to the the it budget because a number of you probably heard of things related to it that were specifically focused on water department things whether it was the computerized maintenance management system for example or the business systems analyst three or the programmer analyst position that is that's going to be added in the it budget this coming year and that the water department is funding part of the reason that we're doing those kinds of funding across our organization is that we have applications and needs based on our our billing system is one the uh the metering infrastructure that's being replaced now provides a lot of additional opportunity for technology innovations and also for customer portals to support that the computerized maintenance management system that we're talking about that you heard about a little bit earlier that's a basically a work order system that our customer service folks would use to take work orders that they receive from calls from customers send that information out to our staff to follow up whether it's a water quality complaint or a leak complaint that work order system will be the portal to you know connect those or the organization and send that out and produce a document that comes back into the system to make sure that we've finished the work but also when it comes back in to finish the work order it will update the asset information about that particular asset whether it's a meter or a pipe or you know a something that's going on like a pump station and that information is really invaluable in planning and and developing a capital investment program because you have really sophisticated and uh and on you know organized and online kind of information about the quality and condition of your assets what helps what helps you really have an effective and sustainable over time asset management program for the billion dollars in assets we manage I think that one of the another thing I just wanted to mention as we're sort of talking about this customer service or the the chart here the enterprise resource planning program the ERP replacement that Bobby talked about and that Ken talked about this is something that the what the utility billing system is currently a part of our Eden system so the replacement of that ERP process which is planned out a few years will also have a major impact on our utility billing system which supports obviously you know producing really tens of millions of dollars and revenues for our for our community for the enterprise resources so in terms of accomplishments I think that in addition to making water and making it come out under every kind of imagining condition whether it's you know COVID or other kinds of challenges we we did complete a lot of really important projects over the last couple of years involving updating the urban water management plan and water search contingency plan as I mentioned the updating the long-range financial plan and updating our system development fees and water rate charges rates and charges those are major elements of our financial foundation and our utility planning foundation that we completed in the last fiscal year and parts of this fiscal year and then we initiated construction on a system wide meter replacement program Graham Hill water treatment plant concrete tanks replacement project and continued construction on a really big project that's going on at Newport Dam right now and it's about six to nine months away from being completed a hundred and three million dollar project that's getting ready to be completed we're gonna I'm gonna show you some pictures of that in a little bit our key performance measures that we monitor obviously and we you know are really careful to see how we're doing is we have 100 compliance with drink and water quality standards zero worker comp entries requiring more than a 30 day absence we have 98 percent of folks paying with their 94 and fiscal 22 goal of 98 in fiscal 23 of people paying their water bills within 60 days so even in spite of the of the COVID and some of the economic issues associated that our customers continue to pay their bills we also implemented a water rearage program and we're in the process of implementing a wastewater a rearage program that's funded by the state and also a additional water low income water rate assistance program coming out of state funding and in the governor's may revise he authorized an additional 200 million to go into that fund so we have some progress on helping our our low income and fixed income customers who may be struggling with rising utility bills to provide some support there that's something we've been actively working on and then we maintained our credit ratings with the standard and for and bitch the overview the operating budget we're at 39.3 million you can see here that we are looking at some significant you know personnel costs are a big chunk of it clearly services and supplies chemicals power other kinds of services and supplies are a big chunk of it debt services becoming a bigger portion of our total budget over time and you'll see some information about that and then we have a capital outlay that pays for capital equipment trucks and you know other kind of machinery that we use in our operation that's not part of our capital improvement program we we're looking at personnel costs including no salary increases in this in the way that this budget has been put together because across the board that you know we're still in the process of negotiating with the the labor group so we don't have an assumption of building into for salary increases we we are looking at benefit increases of about eight and a half percent and services and plot and supplies increases of about six point nine percent from fiscal 22 part of that is definitely the cost of inflation and then three additional positions that I mentioned an additional engineering tech the replacement of a limited term management analyst with the management analyst for our customer service group and then the additional programmer analysts that we are funding out of the it's budget and then this is just some comparison of a number of years of our operating budgets of the actuals versus the adjusted budgets from that came in and I want to point out a couple of things going on here in 20 fiscal 2020 and fiscal 21 fiscal 2020 was the beginning of the impacts of the covid shutdown and so I think that the spending that we anticipated doing in that period really got scaled back due to the shelter in place activities that started happening there and then in fiscal 21 we had the impact of a furlough a 10 percent furlough for employees that wasn't built that was not built into the original budget but was shown up in the actual spending one of the things we've been working on over the last several years is to try to align our actual spending a lot more closely with the budgeted amounts and our staff have been working really hard on that so in proposed we're showing about 40 million close to 40 million and again the same categories that you saw in the previous slide moving on to the capital budget for the next five years our capital improvement budget is 295 million which is two million dollars more than last year however we have significant unspent funds that are carrying over from fiscal 22 to fiscal 23 a lot of that has to do with some of the slowdowns associated with some supply change things and you know things have taken a little longer to move forward than we imagine we do in terms of forecasting our capital costs we've been looking at construction costs which have been increasing and we're looking at a eight and a half percent increase in construction costs over last year the significant issue we're being actively monitoring it supply chain issues are a big part of that disruption and contributing to the inflation of our the cost of construction that has been experienced not just by the water department but really all across any the city and the community and the county and the country really this is an example of our what looks like our five year and the way that our capital budgets will be over the next five years as mentioned there's a pretty good size for year one there's a pretty good size carryover so this amount really is larger but this is the amount of additional appropriations we're asking for in fiscal 23 then we're funding these by a mix of state and federal loans low interest loans and bonds proceeds when needed as well as pay as you go financing and you'll see some results that compare those amounts a little bit further on in this presentation this is the the sort of new appropriations and where those dollars are going the Graham Hill tanks project is really it's underway right now it's under construction right now we have a new quick pipeline replacement project that is coming and that will be a big chunk of funding in fiscal 23 the finalizing of the new creek inlet outlet replacement project is occurring we're working on water supply after storage and recovery and recycled water projects that are moving forward to try to help us with our drought vulnerability meter replacement is on this list doing a lot of planning and design under the design build contract we have for the Graham Hill water treatment plant facilities improvement project we've got a brackening landslide area pipeline risk reduction that's a part of the new creek pipeline replacement project that's upstream of the felton to Graham Hill piece main replacements and water program administration these are funds that we use to sort of fund the sort of overarching support services for the the Santa Cruz water program and at the end of the year these funds are allocated to the projects that got worked on so they're not they're not just sort of like funds that are spent for things that are don't matter there they are allocated out to support the actual cap capital programs that will be happening I want to sort of take you through some slideshows this is a a picture of Graham Hill water treatment plant from the air the tanks that are being replaced are these three tanks right down here the plant is a subject the the facilities improvement plan is working on basically a major upgrade of this 1960 era facility and you will see here is the tank construction this is a few few months ago or a few weeks ago when they were oops sorry when they were removing the the original the one the tank one of three and they're getting right they are actually building the replacement tank for tank one right here and getting ready to build tank two which will then allow them to take tank two out and build tank three and then they'll finally the end process will get rid of the last tank so this is a few big project that's underway and we'd be really looking forward to an opportunity to take you up to see this construction and projects in in process it's a pretty fascinating project big and consequential for this facility the facility has to operate without these tanks which is a little bit of a challenge and so that's one of the reasons for the phasing why it happened here's a familiar picture of the of the no creek dam and lock loman reservoir this has also been the subject of a lot of work over the last couple of years this is the actual work in the reservoir to replace the the intake structures build new new intakes this is a part of a intake structure as you can see the scale of this particular thing that with this person here working on it this is a set around the the actual intakes to be able to protect them this is the part of the 1500 foot long tunnel that goes around the dam to connect the new piping to the new intakes and this shows you sort of all the way down into the tunnel this tunnel is completed now and they're getting ready to install the actual pipelines the intake structures are completed in the reservoir as well and by the miracle of I think GIS they were able to actually connect this tunnel to this intake structure under the reservoir and they hit the mark on the nose so that was really great another thing that we're doing and just to sort of wrap up this part then I'm going to turn it over to David this is the Laguna diversion which has a 1890 plaque on it this is a really one of the oldest structures in the obviously in the water system was part of an original privately owned water utility that was acquired by the city in the 1916 when they were pulling the various pieces of water infrastructure in the community together to create a water system and the one problem with this particular facility is that we've it traps a lot of sediment and it's a very difficult to operate once that sediment has been trapped so a new facility this is called a coanda screen has been added here that allows for the sediment to move through the system as opposed to accumulate behind and still allows us to divert water when water is available through a new intake structure here on this dam so this project was under construction last year and was completed at that time so I think with that I'm turning this over to David and David if you want to come on and take over this for the remaining part of it I think I can change the slides for you very great thank you and I'll just move quickly through this because this is sort of a reiteration of what Rosemary has already provided in terms of the operating and capital budget for the for the water department but the purpose of my little spiel here is just to talk about how we incorporate this into our pro forma model and we're guided by the long range financial plan which the council approved last September as well as we've we did a cost of service study last year and created new rates and and and that was something the council approved as well so that's all now being put into our long range financial plan and model and the outcome that we look for is the what is the debt service coverage what are the cash reserves because we sort of make a implied promise to the marketplace that loans money to us and you know we're held accountable by the RAIN agencies, Stern and Portes and Fitch to meet these and so we're very cognizant of these these coverages and these reserves and so this model will just I'll show you it meets those meets those targets next slide please so as Rosemary mentioned the key assumptions are these salary benefit increases um eight and a half percent and then the service and supplies you know we've we're fall we're we're coming into a period of great inflation and hopefully it's transitory but so far it's been a little bit sticky and so this is unfortunately what we're dealing with I mean one of the things that I think maybe Lisa mentioned earlier in her presentation is just how the pension costs have increased and you know we're looking at an 18 percent increase for the unfunded liability created by the Cal in the CalPERS system and so that's that's that really pushes on the salaries and benefits and services and supplies Rosemary mentioned the power of electricity where a huge electricity user over a million dollars a year that's going up by a greater than 10 percent chemicals kind of chemicals that we use to process through the water those are going significantly as well over 10 percent but maybe the biggest change are the interest rates we've enjoyed historically low interest rates I'm getting an SRF loan for 149 million to build a couple of those projects we're now seeking more SRF state revolving fund money for the next couple of projects and we're also seeking a loan from the EPA for water infrastructure finance and innovation act money which is also below market it's below what we would have to pay if we were to go out for municipal revenue bonds which in today's market they've risen to four percent just to put that into context last year they were at two and a half percent so that's why there's this asterisk at the bottom subject to change because interest rates if anybody's been refinancing a house or looking to buy a house recently you know how they've gone up dramatically in the last six months next slide please just to look back to last September November we got these increases for the water rates that we need to build what we think is about a 600 million dollar capital investment plan over the next 10 to 15 years we're focused on the the next five years in the cip that's the 295 million but these are the kind of rates that need to be increased 6.9 percent up to 16.4 percent to get those projects done and then if we look beyond that to the work that goes past the five years I mean we focused on five years because the cip is five years but we're looking at probably 10 percent for your rate increases thereafter next slide please the pro forma that we have again factors in the revenues the operating costs but also the capital investment plan the 295 million how do we pay for that and as rosemary mentioned there's 113 million in the current year fiscal year 22 not all that's going to be spent we bet burrito lunches over this we're told by our consultant that we're gonna probably spend 69 million and carry over 44 million some of us think that's more like something around 50 and 50 but suffice it to say there's going to be a fair amount of carryover of the capital improvement investment program into fiscal year 23 and then of course again through the pro forma we see that our metrics are met next slide please and here's a an abridged version of the pro forma showing the revenues the expenses and we break it out in much greater detail on our on our computers but for presentations sake this gets to show you what the net operating revenues are forecast to be in the current year and then the next five years and what the debt service also is forecasted to be so the focus we have is on that debt service coverage in the middle of the page and the the legal requirement for the water department's debt is that we have a dollar 20 of net operating revenue to each dollar of debt service but according to our long-range financial plan it's it's a dollar 50 to the dollar but here you can see that we are higher than that so we feel like we have a pretty good plan for meeting our debt service and then looking down the page the cash balances we focus on the at the bottom there fund 711 and fund 716 90 days of cash available in each or 180 days available in each to pay for operating expenses in the current year so like rosemary mentioned it's you know 100 it's a 40 million close to 40 we're looking close to 20 million for the 90 day cash and then okay so at the bottom line of our model is the 180 days cash that is the target that we meet for the next five years next slide please so just just some graphical presentation of what that looks like fiscal year 23 we have very little the red is cash funded versus the debt funded because we've had a couple of lean years in terms of revenue due to covet and drought we expect with the rate increases that we're going to do better in the cash funding in the years to come after fiscal year 23 overall over the next five years we're looking at 85% of funded with our loans and 15% funded by cash and that's aligns with the long range financial plan that we was approved next slide please by the operating forecast I guess one of the main takeaways that on this one is that well it is increases by the amount of 6.9 per year the biggest piece of it is the debt service which goes from about five million in fiscal year 23 to around 13.5 million in the last fiscal year so that's about 165 increase in the debt service and that's the main driver for the operating expense forecast over the next five years next slide please and then finally the cash balances by fund the cash balances increases mirror the increases in the operating expenses and they are an invaluable resource for us because you know for the last couple of years I mentioned that it's been lean and the rate stabilization fund 713 has been used to restore some lost money to the funds 711 and 713 to make sure we hit our targets over the last couple of years so we expect that to improve over time I just want to mention there's certain talk recently of recession that could come next year and if you look at the history of water revenues in the water department there was one bad year in particular in fiscal year 2010 where it dropped 10.7 percent and that if that happened today we would be dropping about four million four to five million dollars well because of these reserves we could weather that kind of a situation not saying that's going to happen and don't want to create a prophecy that would create a situation of negativity but we're pretty well positioned for you know changes in the economy if they should occur so now I'll turn it back to Rosemary for the final slide great thank you David so just to give that council a little bit of a context we work very closely with our water commission starting usually around the beginning of every year to talk to them about what's going on with the CIP and both the projects that have been completed and the projects that are planned in March we provide them with you know data that for example in this year that was linked to water quality data is linked to the Graham Hill Waste the Water Treatment Plant Facilities Improvement Plan which is a really important project in a big chunk of the funding that is going to the the capital investment work that's going to get done in this five-year window and then in May we present the sort of first look at the budget and CIP together including the kind of budget analytics that you've seen here the information about where we're going to be with our financial preforma and meeting our targets and then in June and a couple weeks here we'll have a final meeting with them well they will actually take an action on providing their recommendation to the council on our budget and CIP for the fiscal 23 and that will be reflected in the materials that you see in your budget approval packet that comes to you for the June 14th meeting and with that I'm going to take your questions. Thank you Rosemary Menard for that presentation and David Baum for explaining some of the trends and past financial overview. It's really interesting to see the scope of work that has been done and that still needs to be done and I always you know see the Water Department as this invisible need to to most of us in the community but extremely vital right. Thank you for all of the work and getting us financially stable in our reserves which is incredibly important for this department. I'm going to bring it out to council members for questions comments on this water budget presentation. Vice Mayor Watkins. Thank you mayor and thank you for the presentation Rosemary and David always impressed by your work and I always really appreciate how you brief us on a lot of the big issues that are impacting our community and our city and our decision making. I just I guess my question is more around kind of at the state level we're seeing you know more awareness more concern I think beyond what I feel like I've had kind of the average person or average kind of news source really report on and I'm wondering if you had any kind of if you could see into the future you know if you can predict what the state might potentially impose upon communities and how that could impact our forecast for the city of Santa Cruz. It's okay if you can't but yeah well that's very timely question because the state water resources couldn't troll horde met today and to look at emergency conservation restrictions and we have been working with the the state board staff and also with senator layered's office once the the proposal came out one day last week to talk about the potential impacts of those restrictions that seem to imply we would have to impose our stage two of our water shortage contingency plan which is rationing and enforcement and we actually worked with them and today they adopted a alternate compliance strategy that was sort of tuned to our reality maybe a few others will fall into the into that group but had to do with um water utilities the the the characteristics of these water utilities that will have an opportunity to sort of have modified requirements have to do with the um a really low gallons per capita per day for residential use which is ours is really low um a uh not being part of using any resources from the state water project or the colorado river and having a relatively limited amount of resource from an overdrafted groundwater basin and then um basically uh being able to demonstrate that their water supply was adequate for this year and through fiscal next year um or the water year next year so this is water year 23 coming up starting in uh October and we had to damp that to be able to demonstrate that we have an adequate supply to get us through uh this year and next year and I'm I'm confident that we can do that I mean obviously I did that when I was looking at supply recommendations to you um in April and talking to the water commission about that at the time so um I think that with respect to uh there is a huge concern at the state about the level of um water availability from you know some of the big state reservoirs and I think that the the you know for those of you might have been around in 2017 when I had did my budget presentation for 2018 and when a big part of my presentation was called the chickens come home to roost I think I remember that it's like yeah well the chickens on climate change and water supply in California and the west coming home to roost here right so a lot of the information that was um in some of the the survey results the polling results that I shared with you I think last time you know does indicate that people are getting the climate change implications on our community and water supply being you know a pretty obvious sort of um canary in the coal mine for what we might be seeing I think for us the really important thing is and the thing we're working on this year is really about getting additional supply available in our community so that our customers can continue their very conservative behavior but still have assurances that there will be water in the event we have really long multi-year you know back to back to back dry years yep I completely agree well I appreciate your work and your advocacy and your just communication with our state representatives and you know recognition of our unique situation here in Santa Cruz as well so thank you Rosemary thank you vice mayor Watkins any other questions or comments from council members council member brown thank you mayor and thank you uh rose mary and david for the presentation I don't really have any particular questions I just want to acknowledge the incredible work that you all do to manage a really complex and as we all know aging system and you know it is really overwhelming to think about all of the work that you know coordinating all of that work how much work needs to be done and I just I just think that we are in such capable hands I feel like there is stability even in the midst of all of the unknowns that we're looking at and I'm I was so thrilled to see I love these presentations more for the progress reports and and you know learning about and seeing what's happening on the ground and in the field and I'm just thinking about the one of the visits that we took to you know look at that you know the the need for the tunnel underneath the reservoir there and then the the other work that needed to be done at the river and it's just amazing to see the progress that's been made um on a project that I couldn't even wrap my mind around when you know stat water department staff were talking about it with me so um I just wanted to really thank you for for everything and it's it's great to get the updates and see the sound financial footing that you are keeping us on thank you so much and I I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge the really fabulous work of 120 people who work at the water department you know whether they answer the phones or they design projects and work with uh in construction or they take care of leaks that are happening or you know talking to billing meter reading meters um you know supporting the administration of the department and the financial management we have a great team and I'm really proud of the work they've done I think that there were times I think in the last couple of years when the level and the complexity of some of these projects was really intimidating and could have paralyzed the group and I think that through a lot of sort of fortitude and perseverance they really have gotten through it and I think they actually are beginning to believe that they can do this kind of complicated stuff and the water will still come out so we have a great team and I'm really proud of them okay thank you council member Brown it looks like that concludes um questions from council for uh water department budget thank you so much David Bowman Rosemary Menard and that does conclude our departments for today the presentations uh let's see and at this time I will bring it out to public comment if you are interested in commenting on fiscal year 2023 proposed budget raise your hand either by dialing star nine on your phone or selecting the raise hand feature in the webinar controls on your computer when it is your time to speak you will hear an announcement that you have been unmuted the timer will then be set to three minutes in addition to the public comment we will be hearing on this item two emails were sent to city council at cityofstandardcrews.com okay going out to our attendees our first member of the public for public comment and if there's a specific department please speak so for a specific question or comment our first phone number ends in 1-9-9-9 hi there welcome um good evening can I be heard clearly yes hi there okay hi my name is James Ewing Whitman and that was very interesting I listened to the whole thing took five pages of notes um okay I'm really glad that the time was spent on the water water is really rather important I was had a very close friend in 1999 who worked for citizens utilities in Felton when a brand new water treatment plan was being built and dozens were being built just like it all over the United States but this one had a lot of problems so fortunately that plant got fixed and hopefully the dozens of others being built at the same time were there is an incredible amount of money being spent on water as it should be um I'm going to maybe give some insight to what vice mayor Watkins had said um seeing about water into the future there was a ambag meeting on January 15th and I'm pretty sure Justin Cummins was also on the call and there was a subject that came up about the state and federal agencies aren't really talking to each other and they're not really listening to each city's independent needs so I'm glad that I hope that it seems like the situation's in pretty good hands that was really nice to listen to another comment I have I think it was Gelder made a comment something about people work from home and slightly concerned as we are public servants that we are not physically available face to face obviously if that were possible I'd be talking to you guys in person so otherwise this was actually fascinating um and I'm going to enjoy the five pages of notes and let's see what other people have to say thank you for this opportunity thank you for your comment our next uh member of the public is the name I am watching you yes hello have you ever heard and understand the phrase the bigger the government the smaller the citizen I'm thinking you haven't I've already voted no on measure f because I don't believe in continuous government expansion relative to my personal economy and I don't see a demonstrated willingness to engage in sound fiscal policy that prepares for the looming next recession or worse in the spirit of non-sustainability I would point out that according to the census 2010 to 2020 the population growth of the city of San Francisco was five percent in those 10 years and otherwise I read somewhere six and a half over the last 12 years according to your own budget analysis the last seven years alone we will have seen an increase in full time employees of 8.9 percent I expect for sure more city employee count has occurred than that over the equal 10 or 12 year period to be easily double the population growth trend I'm no accountant but using simple addition and looking over the actual revenues and expenses from 2015 to 2021 you have fully consistently overestimated both projected incoming revenues and very consistently overestimated actual expenses in budgets and that perhaps from department heads handbagging easily seen using actual final adopted budgets and actual file revenue expense data revealed by the following year I get the city actually came out of minus 34 million give or take over that seven-year period with some wild fluctuations I assume the general reserve fund took a beating but I didn't find that balance sheet anywhere presented except maybe for today's manager presentation I interpret his comments to mean the balances planned on being blown next year so it's more the same spending exceeding revenue in 2023 meanwhile over the last 10 years due to unsustainably astronomical inflation and fee increases property taxes are up 78 percent sales and use tax up 200 percent transit occupancy tax up 240 percent the windfall of which is apparently nowhere near enough for you as you propose piling taxes on those even higher somewhere in your mind you might consider that that tax party trend won't go on forever when the party is over it's over over no do over just an idea how about either proactively shaving your revenue estimates a bit lower since they're regularly too high or assign a priority budgeting of any actual surplus to replenish the general reserve fund if when and until reserve funds are sadly built if the pleaded below target to adequately handle the inevitable possible vast recession and boom bust when conditions don't allow tapping of that fund better budget estimates and this proactive policy change could prove to the public by hard fiscal controls that you can actually handle basic finances before permanently asking them for more tax monies to fund your dreamy government expansion spending plans even further the governor's emergency declaration is currently a first that's not a good excuse for uncontrollable overspending habit I ask is there any limit you would like to squeeze from the public thank you for your comment I'm looking to attendees if you would like this is the public comment period for the agenda item fiscal year 2023 proposed budget you can raise your hand by dialing star nine on your phone or selecting raise hand in the webinar controls on your computer and it looks like that does conclude public comment I'm not seeing any other hands raised okay we have we will continue our budget presentations with the rest of the city departments tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. and anticipated to go until about 5 p.m. tomorrow so given that we've asked our questions and at this time the meeting is now adjourned thank you so much everyone have a wonderful thank you good night good night