 Good afternoon, welcome to our 4 p.m. public portion of the closed litigation session of the March 19th 2019 meeting of the City Council. In this part of the meeting, the council will receive public testimony. Thereafter, the council members will move to the courtyard conference room for the closed session. I would like to announce for those of you that are here for the items on the 415 agenda, we have set up overflow at the Tony Hill room and the Civic Auditorium if that becomes necessary. At this time, I'd like to invite up any member of the public who would like to speak to any of the items listed on the closed session agenda. Mayor, sorry, can we do a quick roll call? I skipped that part, sorry. I'm sorry, I totally did. Council members, Crone? Here. Lever? Here. Meyers? Here. Brown? Here. Nathias? Here. Yes, Mayor Cummings? Here. And Mayor Watkins. Here, thank you so much for that. So our closed session item is a conference with labor negotiators. Is there any member of the public who would like to speak to us on this item at this time? On items in the closed session generally. I'm concerned that the last time you did this session, right before you went in, City Attorney Kandadi suddenly announced that the Ross camp was on the session. But he had not mentioned this in the previous agenda, nor was the public informed about it. Council Member Crone made the point, you can't have the public talking about issues on the closed agenda, about the closed at the open interval, if you don't know what they are. So my question to the council, to the city administrator, to the city attorney, to all of you is, is there anything on this council this time that you have not told the public about? Because the Ross camp was an issue of great importance to people, both pro and con in this audience. And we didn't know that it was going to be discussed in the closed session until the moment before you went into the closed session. Everything on that conversation should be struck because we didn't have any opportunity to comment on it. But in any case, I'd like to know beforehand now whether there are any little mistakes that have been made as well in this session. Thank you. Is there any other members of the public who would like to speak to our closed session agenda? SCIU negotiations, that's what the closed session item is. May I speak? Sure, you'll be given two minutes. We need a tent village away from town. It's a simple way to live, it's a cheap way to live. May I continue? So actually, you will have an opportunity to address us at 4.15 when we have our item coming before us on the next steps for homelessness? I pretty much said what I want to say. It's a very simple solution. Why make it complicated? Thank you, please take your seat. Okay, is there any other member of the public who would like to address the council on our conference with labor negotiations? Okay, seeing none. We'll go ahead and adjourn the meeting to the courtyard conference room where council will go into its closed session. May I just get a clarification from our city attorney on why it was okay to go with the Ross camp into closed session last time? It was identified as a significant exposure to litigation on the posted agenda and the Brown Act also requires an announcement of the topic if there are circumstances that are known to members of the public and to the council that need to be discussed in closed sessions. So as far as I'm concerned, the notice and the manner in which it was presented to the council, while certain people might not like it, was in full compliance with the Brown Act. Okay, we'll go ahead and adjourn at this time. Good afternoon, everybody. If I could get your attention, thank you. Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to our 415-425, March 19th, 2019 study session and meeting of the Santa Cruz City Council. I'd like to ask the clerk to please call roll. Thank you, Mayor. Council Member, it's Crone. Here. Clever. Here. Meyers. Here. Brown. Here. Mathias. Here. Vice Mayor Cummings. Here. And Mayor Watkins. Here. Before we begin tonight, I would like to also remind those that are here that we have set up the Tony Hill room in the Civic Auditorium for Overflow, so if we are at capacity in our chambers here, please do feel free to go to the Tony Hill room at the Civic for Overflow. I also want to remind the community of our council norms, in my role as the Presiding Officer, to one, be respectful, to engage in open and honest communication, be honest and truthful, address difficult issues, seek areas of common ground, be open to different perspectives, give the benefit of the doubt, role model good leadership, and be considerate of each other's time. It's my job as the facilitator of this meeting to ensure everybody has an opportunity to participate in our democracy in a way that is safe and respected, and to maintain decorum. And what I will do is go over our process and the expectation for the community. We will start with our staff presentations, then we'll take questions from the council to staff, and then we will open it up to public comment and return back to council for action and deliberation. So I ask that as we begin tonight's proceeding that we maintain respectful behavior. If I observe any type of speaking out in a way that doesn't exhibit that expectation, I will give you a warning, and if it continues, I will ask that you leave. And so at this time, we will move forward to our first item of general business, and that is the SCIU Local 521MOU, and we have Lisa Murphy here. Good afternoon, Mayor, Council Members. Lisa Murphy, your Human Resources Director. I'm very pleased to present to you for your approval the resolution adopting the tentative agreement with the SCIU employees, Local 521, attached to your revised staff report that you should have at your dais, is a summary of the tentative agreement, which in summary is a three-year agreement, with a co-increase in the first year of 4%, a co-increase in the second year of 3%, and a co-increase in the third year of 3%, in addition to several other economic items such as short-term disability, as well as multiple non-economic items. Any questions? I'm open to. Are there any questions from the staff at this time? I mean, from the council to the staff at this time. Okay, thank you, Lisa. Would you have a question? Go ahead. No, no, thank you very much. Okay, well, we're going to go ahead and open it up to public comment. Is there any member of the community who would like to address us on this item? This is the SCIU tentative agreement. Is there any member of the public who would like to address us at this time? Okay, seeing none, we'll return back to the council for action. Council Member Glover. Thank you, Mayor. I'd like to make a motion adopting the resolution of a tentative agreement with the Service Employees International Union or SCIU Local 521. Second. Okay, so we have a motion by Council Member Glover, second by Council Member Cron. Any further discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That passes unanimously. So the next item is our response to homelessness update and direction. Good afternoon, Suzy and Tina. And please. Thank you, Mayor Watkins. Good afternoon, and council members and members of the community joining us this afternoon. Here we are one week later, back talking about this issue again. So similar to prior meetings, we have several agenda items to go through, and we also have several speakers. So presenting to you today, in addition to myself will be Suzy O'Hara, the assistant to the city manager. We'll have the city attorney, Tony Kandadi, provide a legal overview. And we also have economic development director, Bonnie Lipscomb, helping with some of the siting locations. Thank you very much. Also, Fire Chief Jason Hayduk will assist with a discussion of an update on where the Gateway encampment currently is. So you can see from the agenda, we'll first review your last direction from the meeting a week ago, provide an update on where things stand with the Gateway encampment, walk through the legal implications of the Martin versus Boise case. And we've known that there's been a lot of questions or not full clarity around what this decision means for us, as well as jurisdictions across California and everywhere within the Ninth Circuit's jurisdiction, so we'll walk through that. And then the meat of the conversation will be item number four, and that's walking through the actionable items being presented to you this evening. I'm wrapping up with summary staff recommendations and requests for council direction. Okay, so first, just to recap the council's action at your last meeting a week ago. You have copies there, and everyone can see it up on the screen. So one in A, that is occurring, that is still on track again with the Salvation Army as the operator. And B, that is what will be the large substance of this afternoon's discussion, is talking about the small scale, no more than 50 bed pilot program to open by the deadline of April 17th. Item C and D are subsets of that transition away from the Gateway encampment. Number two on here actually will be covered this evening, even though there is a date of April 9th. So items three, four, five, and six are happening and won't be discussed. So really the majority of the discussion is around one, B. All right, Susie. All right, so, wow, that's strong, sorry. So Fire Chief Haiduk and I will be providing a brief update on conditions at the Gateway encampment. For the last two meetings, I've talked in great detail about the level of outreach and engagement as well as camp conditions. I'm not going to talk about that tonight or today. What I just wanted to provide a brief update on from the staff's perspective from the city manager's office is, we really have made strides in developing great coordination with the camp council. This week, for instance, we will be working with them on a significant debris removal that they are spearheading through coordination with the city. We will be bringing in tomorrow a number of refuse containers and really working to facilitate the work that they want to do around this. So last week, Megan and I met with the camp council. There was probably about 25, maybe 20 to 25 people there as well last Friday. And that was Fire Chief Haiduk as well. I'm really trying to engage with the council and set up a few different subcommittees that were focused on safety and really surveying the camp residents so we can have a better understanding of who's there and their needs. On those two fronts, the folks that we met with last week have been instrumental in really helping the city dialogue more effectively and understand their needs. So as I mentioned, tomorrow we're going to be helping with moving refuse out of the camp. The area that was noted last week, the kind of the triangular area at the top of the encampment adjacent to the levy has already been vacated. Those folks have moved into the greater footprint of the camp. So I fully expect a fair amount of coordination moving forward and quite pleased with that. So for those that are here, I just wanted to express my gratitude to the council and those that are liaison with the city on this. So in addition to the debris removal, we're also working on disseminating a resident survey with assistance from the camp council. Last week we gave them a draft. We're going to be meeting this week on really fine tuning that from the perspective of gathering enough information but not being too intrusive. And so I also want to express my appreciation for those that are here that are helping with us and I will turn it over to the fire chief. Mayor or council, thank you, Suzy. So we met last week, I think it was a very productive meeting and what we presented was not just what we wanted to do, but more importantly, the why behind it. The why behind the fire codes that are based on actual incidents that have occurred within our city, within our state, within our nation, within the world. It's our adopted fire code. So we took the time not just to tell people do this, but really why and what the impact would be for them individually as well as collectively within the camp. And our goals are not to impose a set of standards that are unreasonable or specific to this camp. But are the expectation and the standards that we put on anyone, regardless of where you are in the city. And so for the fire safety standards, we're really looking at the ability to have clear access lanes, no different than an exit pathway in a theater. So people have the ability not to try and navigate a maze. We also were looking at having separation between the tents. We believe that the footprint within that camp will allow for some minimum safety standards to be imposed. Then we also discussed the incident that we had with the fire inside of the tent. And the hazards of cooking inside and not to have any open flame devices in there. As well as compressed gases, there's a number of propane bottles that are being used for different reasons. And within an enclosed space, not only is it a fire hazard, but it's also an affixient. And so this is for their safety as well as the total camp. And we had really good feedback, I believe, from that. We posted those signs up around there. I was down there this afternoon and they've already kind of started rearranging some of the structures that are down there, removing some of the debris. And like Susie said, we'll be bringing in some containers to complete that. And this is something that they're doing voluntarily after we had that meeting, so I'm pleased to say that we're making some progress. And this is no different than the approach we would take with any business. We're not looking to close people down. We're looking to get education and compliance. And so we're following the same tact that we would do with any business in the city or any resident within the city. So I'm optimistic that by this weekend, things will be much better than they were last week. WebBOC is, I talked about it last week. It's that portal or that device that we can put all of our information in one place. We're still working on getting it up and running and being perfect. But it's much better than it was last week. We're getting information from the county side. We're inputting information from the city side. So we can track what progress we've done. We can also see what accomplishments have occurred. Vector control, we had a number after Dr. Leff and the county vector control came out and they were concerned about the rodent population and the transmission of disease within that population and then also outside of that community. We got kids from a number of different companies that were willing to come in and we are in the process of getting that PO done through the city so that we can start that. So we will have active trapping of rodents down there. A number of those will be retained and given to the county so that they can test them for any diseases to make sure that if we don't have a problem, we can confirm that. If we do have a disease that's identified, we can work on that. So I would expect that that work would be in place by this next coming weekend for that. Are there any questions? Any questions from the council? Thank you. Thank you, Chief Haiduk. So then the next segment of the agenda we'll move on to is a presentation from the city attorney, Tony Kandadi, talking through some of the legal constraints and legal issues that have presented themselves anew with his encampment. Yes, thank you, Tina. Mayor, members of the city council, we're going to talk about the Martin versus Boise case that's been bantered about a lot in the past several months since it was issued back in September of 2018. When that case was issued, the police department immediately ceased enforcing our city camping ban ordinance, which is codified at chapter 6.36 of the municipal code. Martin versus Boise is a decision issued by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that involved a lawsuit that was brought by homeless individuals that sought a court declaration that Boise's ordinance prohibiting camping on public property was unconstitutional and also seeking an injunction or court order that prohibited the city from enforcing its ordinance going into the future. It's worth noting that the ordinance in question in the Boise case was very similar, strikingly similar to the ordinance that's been on the books in the city of Santa Cruz since the mid 1960s. And so that's why it has an impact on the city because the city of Santa Cruz in California is located within the Ninth Circuit and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is directly below the United States Supreme Court, encompasses several western states, including Idaho. So that's why the Boise case is applicable here. In the Martin case, the Ninth Circuit relied heavily on a United States Supreme Court case from 1962 that struck down a California statute that classified narcotics addiction as a criminal offense. In that case, which is entitled Robinson versus California, stands for the notion that the Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment that's in our constitution prohibits the state from punishing an involuntary act or condition if it is the unavoidable consequence of one's status or being. In Martin, the Ninth Circuit applied that principle and stated this principle compels the conclusion that the Eighth Amendment prohibits the imposition of criminal penalties for sitting, sleeping, or lying outside on public property for homeless individuals who cannot obtain shelter. Essentially, the court is indicating that we can't criminalize a person's conduct if that conduct is inherently the product of their status. In this case, the homeless individuals sleeping on streets is the product of their homelessness. The Martin case makes this sweeping pronouncement, but then immediately offers some narrowing language that makes its application seem not so sweeping. So it's part of the frustrations of this profession is that the court's issued decisions and then it's our job to try to interpret what they mean when applied to different sets of facts and different circumstances. So the narrowing constructions were, the court says, we in no way dictate that the city must, to the city, that it must provide sufficient shelter for the homeless or allow anyone who wishes to sit, lie, or sleep on the streets at any time and at any place. The court goes on or holding does not cover individuals who have access to adequate temporary shelter, whether because they have the means to pay for it or because it is realistically available to them for free, but who choose not to use it. In order, we suggest that a jurisdiction with insufficient shelter can never criminalize the act of sleeping outside. Even where shelter is unavailable, an ordinance prohibiting sitting, lying, or sleeping outside at particular times or in particular locations might well be constitutionally permissible. So too might an ordinance barring the obstruction of public rights of the way or the erection of certain structures and whether some other ordinance is consistent with the Eighth Amendment will depend on whether it punishes a person for lacking the means to live out the universal and unavoidable consequences of being human in the way the ordinance prescribes. So this doesn't mean we're obligated to allow homeless people to sleep on our streets or on public property whenever or wherever they so choose, but unfortunately Martin doesn't provide that much meaningful guidance on how or to what extent we can regulate these activities. So it's left, we're left with the task of doing that and that, like I said, is how our legal system works, a higher court issues, a decision anticipating that lower courts will interpret it to different sets of facts and circumstances and that the law will be developed around the basic principles that are enunciated in the case. And the Martin case was only decided in September of 18, so there's not a lot of case law interpreting it so far, but there is some guidance and one case is a United States District Court case called Mirral versus City of Oakland. In that case, the plaintiffs were homeless individuals who established an encampment on city owned property that they entitled. The Housing and Dignity Village, they set up a camp and it was on vacant Oakland property in violation of Oakland's ordinances and regulations, just in the same fashion that the Ross camp is. The city decided that it wanted to shut the camp down and so it posted notices to vacate the illegal campground indicating that the site would be cleared and closed. This happened in October, late October of 2018 and the city's notice indicated that it would close the site on November 10th of 2018. On November 9th, plaintiffs who were residents or occupants of the encampment filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court basically saying that the city's contemplated action was in violation of their Eighth Amendment rights as interpreted by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Martin. And they sought a temporary restraining order and an injunction to prohibit the city from moving forward with the closure. Actually, the court granted the temporary restraining order that sort of preserved the status quo for a few weeks. And then I think on the 26th of November, the case was heard on their motion for preliminary injunction. The claims that were made in the morale case by the plaintiffs were that the city's attempt to remove them from the housing and dignity villages location on public land was a violation of their Eighth Amendment rights based on Martin. And also that the closure and the removal of their property would violate their due process rights under the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which is the due process clause. Interpreting, though in countering the plaintiff's claims, the city represented that any encampment closure would be conducted in accordance with a set of standard operating procedures that the city had prepared and adopted for purposes of dealing with these types of situations, which along with providing certain notice requirements included also offering the occupants shelter beds and resources both prior to and during the closure and an offer of assistance with moving their personal belongings before the closure or while the closure was happening. The court found that the plaintiffs were not faced with punishment for acts inherent to their unhoused status that they could not control. Nor were they unable to obtain shelter outside of this encampment based on the city's commitment in its papers and at the hearing to provide them with temporary shelter assistance prior to and during the closure. And basically the court said Martin doesn't establish a constitutional right to occupy public property indefinitely at plaintiff's option. So if you go back and look at the Martin case, it focused specifically on the available of temporary alternative shelter locations. It doesn't stand for the proposition that the city's obligated to provide some permanent housing solution in order to close and illegally established encampment like the Ross camp. Court found that the plaintiffs were not faced with punishment for acts inherent to their unhoused status. I'm sorry, I'm repeating myself. And accordingly, the court found that the plaintiffs did not show a likelihood of success or raise serious questions as to the merits of their Eighth Amendment cruel and unusual punishment claim, which is the standard for injunctive relief. Court also rejected the 14th Amendment's due process claim. Although homeless individuals on abandoned possessions or property within the meaning of the 14th Amendment, and that means that the city has to comport with due process requirements when it takes action to either take that property or to remove it from their possession. That means that it has to provide notice and give the property owners a chance to try to argue against the taking. So encountering the due process claim, the city presented evidence to the court that the enclosure would be conducted in accordance with its SOP, which required posting a 72-hour notice of closure at multiple visible locations on the site, storage of any property left at the site after closure, other than property that's deemed unsafe or hazardous such as food, soil clothing, biohazard materials, that sort of thing. Posting a notice of collected property at the encampment, giving information to the occupants as to where the property is being held so that they could come and claim it at a later time, and an offer of assistance with moving belongings after the closure. The court found that the city's SOP on its face provided adequate notice and opportunity for the plaintiffs to be heard before the property was seized. So turning back to the prior discussion about the Ross camp, the morale case provides the city with a roadmap for effecting a closure of that encampment in a manner that doesn't run afoul of the constitutional principles established in the Martin versus Boise case. So just very quickly, the legal requirements that are being developed as the city's standard operating procedure include notifying persons residing in the encampment that it's been declared uninhabitable and that will be closed, including posting notice to vacate, signage prominently at the encampment, offering shelter beds or alternative shelter locations and resources to individuals at the encampment prior to and during the closure as well as an offer of assistance with moving and storage of personal belongings. The extent possible documenting the identities of the occupants and documenting that notice has been provided in accordance with the SOP. Allowing the occupants to recede, retrieve their personal belongings before vacating the site. Documenting the conditions, including photographs before cleanup. Disposing of belongings that are clearly trash or unsafe for long term storage. Collecting, bagging, and labeling personal properties so that it can be reclaimed at a later date. Itemizing belongings collected include the location date and time of collection on an itemization form. Posting notice at the site with including contact information for retrieval of the property and then storage of the property for at least a 90 day period to enable people to claim their personal property. And lastly, a cleanup of the site once it's been vacated to remove trash and debris and hazardous materials or biohazards. One final point that I'd like to add is that complying with these constitutional standards is something that we're obligated to do under the law at the risk of exposing both city officials and city law enforcement officers to substantial personal financial liability. So it's not just a feel good thing that we're trying to do to say that we're able to respect people's constitutional rights, but we're following a legally mandated procedure here and I'm happy to answer any questions or respond to comments. I'll go ahead and pause to see if there's any questions from the council. Council member Kern. So it seems like there's a catch 22 here, a rock and hard place. How many, how much space do we have to provide? Do we do it, is there any, excuse me, any census count and then figure out if we don't provide, if there's 150 people, do we have to have beds identified or just places for people to go? That's one of those questions that I can't really answer definitively based on the facts that were presented in the Martin case and the way it was applied. We do know that certain individuals are not going to accept offers of shelter based on some very minimal standards that would likely be established for admission, including not using illegal narcotics on site and that sort of thing. We're not obligated to provide a completely condition free environment for people who don't want to adhere to basic rules of behavior for a shelter. But we do have to be able to document the number of people that were there and that shelter space was available for those who choose to avail themselves of it. Would it be safe to say that if 80 people said yes, I want to abide by the rules and get a shelter bed and we only had 70, what would we? Our plan is to locate sufficient alternative locations for the individuals that are out there. Okay, thank you. Councilman Myers, then Councilman Brown and then Vice Mayor Cummings. To the extent that they choose to avail themselves of what is offered. I was just curious about the temporary nature, sort of, is that temporary? Is there any guidance or any decisions on what temporary? For purposes of abating, closing an encampment, what we have to be able to demonstrate is that there is a reasonable alternative temporary location available on that occasion. We don't have to be able to demonstrate that it's shelter that will be available for any particular duration, but I would imagine 30 days, 45 days, something like that, at least to enable both the city to continue to work to identify alternative locations and to place people into available shelter services that we have, and to enable the individuals to seek alternative shelter options for them as well. Just to clarify, that the basis of the plaintiff's claims being rejected, the basis was a review of standard operating procedure and as we know, procedures and policies don't get followed sometimes. So I'm just wondering, and I understand your research was related to the case law itself, but if staff in any of your looking into this, has there been any, is there any indication that, I guess what I'm saying is that simply having the procedure doesn't mean that it's followed. And I'm just wondering if there's any discussion around that, anything in the proceedings of the case, discuss that, anything we should know because that's a concern of mine. I do think it's instructive to just consider the procedural manner in which the case was brought forward in which a lawsuit was filed before the city implemented the procedure that it had adopted and the court based its decision on the city, the city's representation in the court papers that it filed and in the argument that was presented in the court hearings, expressing the city's commitment to adhere to the procedures that it had adopted and promulgated. So I fully anticipate that any procedures that we establish for moving forward with the closure will need to be followed in order to protect the city from potential liability. Just a quick follow-up. So you're not aware of any follow-up complaints about procedure not being followed following this? In the Oakland case you're talking about? I'm not, but I'm also aware that the plaintiffs in that case had argued that the city had closed several campsites on prior occasions and said that the city had not adhered to those policies on those prior occasions and the city's response, as I understand it from just communicating with the attorneys who represented the city in that case, was that the city had been developing and was in the process of implementing a new standard operating procedure that was the procedure that was applied in this case. And so the city said, we're not saying we did everything perfectly in the past, these are the procedures that we're following now. Thank you. So just for clarification purposes, what would the consequences be if, for example, we were to close the camp with no alternatives tomorrow or insufficient alternatives? So, I mean, as Chief Mills will also tell you, the police department works under a set of adopted policies and procedures that are designed to ensure that its law enforcement activities are undertaken in a manner that's consistent with established law. And the reason, one of the reasons why they do it in addition to the fact that it's good public policy. But another reason they do it is that so long as they're following in good faith, clearly established laws, or at least they're not failing to adhere to laws that are clearly established that they can't do. I didn't say that very articulately. If there's a law that's not clearly established, but they're acting in good faith based on the belief that what they're doing is consistent with a person's civil rights, then they're entitled to qualified immunity to a certain level of protection from the courts. If someone is injured or if there's damage to property or something of that nature that arises from law enforcement activities, so long as the police department's acting in good faith, they're entitled to a level of immunity from civil liability for that. If the law is clearly established and we don't follow it, not only does the city have liability exposure, we could face significant damages, but the individual officers who are out there trying to implement it face individual exposure to liability for their own personal assets. And so not adhering to a decision like Martin once it comes out is not an option for us. My other question, in the absence of having, so for right now, for example, the Ross campus kind of our alternative for not having camps established throughout different neighborhoods within Santa Cruz, if, is that? Sort of a de facto encampment in the city that likely would not be here, but for the legal landscape that we're now operating in today. So if that alternative wasn't available, what would our enforcement measures be around people establishing in other parts of the city? So as I mentioned as part of the presentation, the law does not require us to make shelter space available for the homeless. It simply doesn't require it. But if we want to enforce regulations that restrict areas where people can set up shop on public property and camp, we can't tell a person who's homeless that there's no place in the city where they can sleep legally. So that, so it doesn't impose any mandate on the city to provide shelter space. It just restricts the law enforcement tools at our disposal against people who have no alternative but sleeping outdoors because of their homeless status. Councilor McClure. Thank you. Just this kind of question for you, Tony, and then also for the fire chief. Is he still in here? Ah, with the new easements and clear paths and structures set up for fire safety that you were just mentioning in the camp fire chief, how many tents does that suffice? Or how much space does that provide for tents at the Ross camp with the structures that you're getting them to make it if it were to be organized? I don't have a really good answer for that just because of the setup of it. That space was not engineered for what it's currently used at. And there's some issues besides fire separation. I could go back and look at that the square footage and tell you that this is what we do. The problem with the fire code is it's really designed for tents over 400 square feet. It talks about the ability to impose standards that you think are reasonable for a tent that's underneath that because they're made for transient occupation. They're not designed to be lived in for a month at a time or further just because they're designed what they're made out of. So I could go back and give you a better answer about what kind of clear separation we would want and how many people or how many tents we could fit in there with the idea that those tents were all the same size and the same shape that would be a much easier proposition. What we've asked the camp that's currently there to do is a bare minimum. It's there to make things better than what we have currently. But it is not what I would lay out if we were starting from scratch. And based on your estimations, how many additional spaces, just to reiterate, would we need to open up in order to effectively remove all people that inhabit the camp currently? Well, we're hoping that the survey, we can get a definite number for that. The problem with our existing structure that we have is that there's a nighttime population and a daytime population. They are not static from day to day. So we've done some surveys in the morning on different times. And at those times at that particular point in time, 60 to 70% of the tents were occupied. I don't know if that has changed because we have not gone out in the last week to look at that. So that's just a number and it's like the point in time count. It's a number that you get for that particular moment. I don't think that all the tents are inhabited all the time. Thank you. And then for city attorney Kandadi, what is the legal ramifications of, say we set a day that we're going to close the camp and we start to transition people out? What if new people transition into the camp during that transition time would that reset the number to the amount of people that are currently physically in the camp before it is able to be removed? Well, I think that part of our operational plan would be to ensure that new encampments aren't just set up as we're, so I don't think we will allow people to just come in and start setting up camp while we are in the process of vacating others. So we're just going to have to monitor that and enforce that as we implement the plan. So, but even with, say we just say we open up enough shelter beds to close the Ross camp and transition everyone in, that still will leave us unable to enforce said ordinances or regulations in other parts of the city because we have maxed out our shelter bed options and are back to square one. That's a good point. Dealing with the situation that we have out at the Ross camp does not change the legal landscape that we're in in terms of our ability to enforce our camping ordinance against people who are homeless. So, we'll enable us to address that nuisance situation that we have out there right now, but it doesn't provide us with a long-term viable strategy for restricting camping in different parts of the city on public property. That's one more. That's a great. So, in your opinion, in order for us to be able to effectively enforce laws that govern sleeping and camping in public spaces, we would need to make a drastic increase in our shelter bed and temporary bed availability in the city? That's one way of looking at it, but I think based on the narrowing construction that the court applied in the Ninth Circuit case, another way to look at it is if we are going to enforce an ordinance that prohibits camping on public property in a given instance, we have to be able to demonstrate in that instance that the person who is cited or who the enforcement action is brought against had an alternative. Thank you. Mayor, may I add just one thing to that? So, at the point in time that we're ready with new sheltering programs coming online at 1220 and with the program that we'll be discussing today, it's not just those two programs for which we will be looking at capacity, it's also the other programs that we have in the community. So, at that time, we would be looking to the loft, we would be looking to the VFW, we would be looking to the Laurel Street program as well. So, it's a little bit more complicated than what's online at the time of closure. And I'll just remind the community that we'll have an opportunity to hear from you, so please, if possible, keep your comments to yourself and when you have the opportunity to come speak to us, we'll allow for you to be heard at that time. Okay, I know we have more presentation, Council Member Meyers. At any given point in time, do we have knowledge of who will be in a bed or not in a bed or in a shelter or not in a shelter and when those decisions are made so that we can track to some extent the availability at any given time during a process of. Yeah, so one thing that we've talked about over the last couple of meetings is the development that the WebUC model is open and one of the major new characteristics of that model is we will actually have a point in time census of available shelter beds day by day that we will be able to provide to folks that are doing outreach either at the Gateway Encampment or out in the community and those will be real time filled based on whoever is engaging and whoever might have an interest in moving into shelter so that is a new kind of outcome of this process in coordination with the city and the county as it relates to maybe I'm interpreting this wrong but as it relates to figuring out exactly who's at the encampment at the time that we intend to move forward with the closure that information will also be part of the WebUC in terms of documentation so we'll be able to refer to that ongoing. And that will be for beds throughout Santa Cruz County. Yes, thank you. Okay, so this is me and I'll try to move forward through this pretty quickly because we've talked about this at Nazian but I did want to mention that as we have been going through this process and meeting week by week with Council on these two different programs I want to talk about this process of information gathering and discovering that has led staff to make a recommendation for this evening. So I wanted to give you just a brief overview of the distinction between a transitional encampment and a safe sleeping and storage program. So as you'll notice highlighted in green those are really the key distinctions who they are operated by whether it's self-governed or fully operated by a non-profit so transitional encampments there is an element of self-governance and really I think in an effective community building on behalf of the residents of the encampments that is an important piece of the picture that I think is important as we consider transitional encampments through the project charter that's one of the critical pieces as to what I've understood to the success of those programs. Transitional encampments are open 24-7 so folks have an opportunity to be there during the day as well. When you think about that within the context of a safe sleeping and storage program which you directed at our last meeting to really consider either of those from the perspective of the pilot the safe sleeping and storage program generally speaking is operated by either a non-profit or a city government or county government jurisdiction it's really a dust to dawn program in that open at 9 p.m. closed at 6 a.m. for the point the distinction between the two programs is really that and then also how does the program look and feel during the time that it's open transitional encampment that you might find on a public space or at a church or on private property throughout the community that is something that is there 24-7 there are structures there are people coming in and out whereas a safe sleeping and storage program is only open at night in large part structures are individual structures are removed during the day so what you would basically see during the day is space where there might be a storage container there might be an office container refuse collection hygiene port-a-potties etc but in large part apart from maybe operators that are coming in to clean and maintain the facility you do not see folks that are using the shelter as clients there during the day so that's the big distinction otherwise as we're considering safe sleeping and storage sites and transitional encampments generally speaking the rules are very similar in terms of rules of conduct that people are expected to maintain one of the big distinctions I think between safe sleeping and transitional encampments safe sleeping really does offer a very flexible day by day approach for whoever is interested in accessing it are able to use it so in having like thoughts about what optimal flexible model can we consider as we consider the needs out at the gateway encampment it really has I've had some crystallization around thoughts between these two programs that I kind of wanted to walk through but as you'll see in the slide generally speaking the programs are very similar in terms of storage offered on site infrastructure provided by the government agency that's part of the program one point of entry and exits and that usually is a manned gate that is being very well managed and then in terms of barriers to entry you know expectations around rules of conduct are pretty paramount but we can get into the nuances about what that means in terms of some of the barriers that we've been talking about with regard to substance use disorder etc so with that in mind I'm going to set the table for Bonnie who's going to come up after me to talk about site selection so between the last meeting and this meeting we really have put some deep thought into given the urgency of trying to close the gateway encampment within the context of Martin versus Boise and in partnership with the county through the giant action plan what is the appropriate model given the site constraints that we have right now and then also just giving this given the sense that we're trying to move quickly to improve conditions for our in our greater community but also our residents of the gateway encampment so with that that in mind I want to talk a little bit about what was noted in the agenda report we did have a meeting with non-profit operators in our faith based community today at 12 so just a few hours ago about 25 people came and it was really just opening dialogue with the city and partners about the level of interest and capacity to not only cite this type of program but operate and questions about how to make them the most successful that we possibly can we had a diverse cross-section of community members that came to the meeting faith-based non-profit advocates advocates and activists in the homelessness community and in large part I think there is very strong interest in supporting the city and the county through this process but also a very strong interest in developing a clear set of engagement and dialogue and really trying to help our community come together to look at options so nobody raised their hand necessarily to cite a program outside of a city parcel so I really did want to have an opportunity to see if there was anybody who wanted to jump on board that did not happen in terms of operator capacity I think it's going to be challenging to find an operator who can stand up a program this quickly and we can talk a little bit more about that as well I want to mention that I think there's been some concern that the Pacific Northwest programs are not successful within the context of how they are affecting homelessness in general we we talked about we talked about this two meetings ago but I think we given the pace of this I think it's important to say it again these the intention of these programs is to create alternative and innovative sheltering models that fit into the continuum of care not solve homelessness I don't think the Pacific Northwest West communities Seattle Portland Eugene that we are talking about are experiencing a relief around homelessness because they have these encampments open they are simply a different model that meets the needs of a different cross-section of folks in the community so I just wanted to be really clear that by virtue of comparing these programs to the Seattle program for instance we're not suggesting from staff's perspective that this is a silver bullet in solving homelessness it is not so the safe sleeping and safe sleeping program does offer and I alluded to this a second ago more flexibility in meeting a diverse cross-section of needs it also creates day-to-day opportunities for access so somebody who might come on Tuesday cannot come on Wednesday but then they can come back on Thursday so that's something to think about as we think about comparing the two models we can bring a safe sleeping and storage program on very quickly and I can talk about how that might work and also as I mentioned with this morning's meeting I do believe that our community needs a little bit of extra time in considering transitional encampments I've done a lot of work in thinking about how they might fit into the community we have engaged very deliberately with the gateway encampment residents as to how a transitional encampment might meet their needs I do think we need to engage with a greater cross-section of our community on this and really help with a process of creating dialogue about what this means in terms of impacts not only to the clients and residents of the encampment but also to the greater community and neighborhoods so with that in mind setting the table for the site selection we are a staff recommending for the council to consider a safe sleeping and storage program at this time and not a transitional encampment but really taking a deliberate pause and thinking about how can we best create success through the project charter process and bring our community together in dialogue and this is across the entire stakeholder demographic that I talked about at the last meeting from those with lived experience you know to those business you know neighbors who might also be and neighbors that might be affected by a program that we move forward with I think I cued you up already but a couple times so with that all in mind Bonnie is going to Lipscomb our economic development director is going to be walking through our site selection process thanks Susie and good afternoon or evening mayor and members of the council I'm going to recap a few of the just the process that we went through in identifying the initial past of looking at sites and previously when we came before you we were looking at it from the perspective as Susie mentioned of the possibility of potential transitional encampment sites and or safe sleeping program so as we go forward today this will be focusing on safe sleeping sites so just to recap the process that we went through and first I just want to acknowledge just the tremendous amount of staff across the city that has been engaged in vetting sites coming up with the parameters looking closely at each site for suitability across infrastructure making sure utilities water all of these things it has been a real city lift so there are no fewer than eight apartments including the city manager's office that's been involved including public works water fire department police parks and rec and am I leaving out it as well and planning so it is really been an all hands on deck and I also need to acknowledge David McCormick who's our asset property manager who's really done a tremendous amount of work going deep on each of the sites and making sure that it met the parameters that we've discussed as a whole city team so within and we really also focused within the city Santa Cruz city limits there are over 500 parcels including some sites that the city owns outside of the city but we really felt like because of we control the land use within the city and also from accessibility and as we're looking at sleeping sites we thought pedestrian access was important we really narrowed it down to you know the initial look of of 215 parcels within the city limits that are 5,000 square feet or larger thanks and then we further evaluated these sites from the last week when we came before you specifically for suitability for safe sleeping and storage sites so the coming around 9 p.m. in the evening or so and staying until the morning and then during the day we looked at compatibility of uses making sure that you know some minimal storage and sanitation facilities could stay on site but the site would largely return to whatever its use is normally during the day so in the process of looking at the 215 parcels you know we identified a number of sites and this is a recap of last week I think the one that we've added there were 16 critical water facilities that we discussed in more detail last week that just aren't suitable for any any any type of occupation additionally Dimeo Lane was another site due to its remote access that just wasn't ideal for the the type of use that were that we were talking about so from that we narrowed it down to six sites and primarily we narrowed it down to those six sites within the core area and we discussed this briefly last week but specifically we were looking at accessibility proximity to transit both the Metro bus stations and another map will show you the transit routes utilities to the site being able to have refuse service for pickup overall security safety public services police access nearby social services also within the core area being the primary urban area it's more limited habitat impacts and some of our out around outlying parks area that we are initially looking at and then the individuals remain part of the community and being part of the city core and so the six sites we identified the first site and I'll go through these in a little more detail but basically we took these six sites that we presented last week and we went back and did additional analysis and we looked further after the first pass at the actual infrastructure we get get to the site so we looked really closely at that we looked at access and proximity to the central core we used looked at usable space and just suitability overall for the intended use and again this time the lens was looking more specifically with a specific intention as a safe sleeping and storage site and then clear site control we had two sites that we needed to go a little deeper on whether or not they were completely within our control we had some use agreements we also had some some title issues that we needed to clear up on one of the sites and and we'll go through that in a little more detail so of those six sites we we through the further analysis narrowed it down to three and so I'll briefly just explain why we eliminated these three sites so the first site the former reservoir site owned by the water department it's not a good site for safe sleeping it's too remote for pedestrian access as you can see it's quite a bit of ways from most of the social services in town and just for pedestrian access it's pretty far to walk it's also it's an unimproved site and the drainage is fairly poor there and there's some adjacent conflicts so that site was removed the additional site we removed was lot three I'm sorry is site number three which is lot 17 and I'll go through these and if you need to have more questions about this this is the site that we have it's close to the Warriors arena it's actually adjacent to the Warriors and it's a long diagonal site you can't see it because the X covers it up but it's a site that we have some state right away issues and so we have unclear it's unclear to us if what we have to deal with on the right away for that site it also is we have refuse service for multiple users around the area that from loading and loading would have to go in through that we'd have to accommodate because the site's long and linear it does complicate things and then finally we have a use agreement with the Warriors for ADA and handicap spaces related to their their uses so it really limits it I think if you were looking at you know this safe sleeping area in theory we thought maybe that would work but when we actually looked at the timing and the timing of the use of the arena it actually still conflicts so we remove that site and then finally we remove the wharf yard and this is one where we're still trying to clear up the title on this site but separately from that so we don't have site control at this time separately from that it also has poor drainage it's it's essential for worth operations we thought you know look at it it's a large site maybe we could combine the uses on it but in looking more closely and looking at actually the massive amount of materials and pilings that they have stored on the site to actually make that site available would be would be quite intensive and probably not ready we couldn't make it ready in time for the intended purpose so for that reasons we remove these three sites from consideration which gives us three remaining sites and we'll go through those in a little more detail so the three sites that are remaining again is lot number two I'm sorry I keep saying that site two which is lot 24 and just to orient you this is the section of the northern parking lot north of depot park behind washington street and then site number four is east cliff drive right off of east cliff drive and then site number five is san lorenzo park and I'll we'll go a little more in depth in the next slides so here's site two lot 24 as you can see this is just a portion of the city parking lot north of depot park I'm only showing you a photo of the portion that we're considering for the safe sleeping site it's roughly 52 spaces we do have you know a couple concerns I'll go over through those in a second but this is just so that you have a visual of the area we're talking about so here's the portion of the site as you can see the total lot north of depot is about 125 spaces and so the area we're looking at is about 52 spaces opportunities on site we do have water on site it's accessible it's near to services and public safety it's paved and there's lighting on site so it definitely has has some benefits some concerns we do have 70 ucse permits in the overall lot and the whole 125 spaces they're not site specific but they are too the lot so we need to accommodate for that that's largely during the day we have 18 park park and ride permit holders as well so we are still looking at whether or not we can use the entire area that you see outlined in yellow there may be 10 or so parking spaces that we need to accommodate but we think was sort of a shared parking model shared use model that we should be able to accommodate on this site but we also have just to orient you to the key and what we've done for each of the site is that and it's a little hard to see on this map but we have shown the water storm water sewer the limits to the camp site and including a 25 foot setback we did that for all sites although some we may want to consider using part of the setback it's a requirement for near residential there's this isn't particularly residential site but we still wanted to show what a 25 foot and just for scaling look like on here there is some limited visibility to the site there is some potential traffic impact that we would need to look at for Laurel Street during the evening hours till morning we would be cutting off that access this parking lot connects to the other one with the private housing development that connects to Laurel and it is within a coastal zone this just shows you just we wanted to make sure as we're looking at this site with this type of orientation that we could actually make it work as a safe sleeping site so each of those white areas you have is roughly 10 by 10 this again is only just for analysis this isn't what the final safe sleeping site would look like we just wanted to see can we actually fit what we're trying to accomplish so we could fit up to and just the base area 27 10 areas there's up to additional nine that we could accommodate that's laid out here area for storage sanitation and a food and common area so that it is feasible to fit it on the site this site was actually the most constrained so we thought it was important just to make sure from an initial vetting that this would work okay so moving on so that's to the next site is site for this is east cliff drive and there's two potential locations here the sites are fairly large and this is the lower area that's adjacent east coast east cliff drive and this is the central location it's approximately 9200 square feet the water a meter it has nearby access electric is available nearby it is a flood resistant site for the two areas that we've identified and it's accessible and visible so the first site is the central location there are concerns and i'll show you then we can go ahead and go to the next one and so this one is just another potential layout of the area that we could have the main differences between the two is this one's a little more visible from east cliff drive they they both are roughly the same site same site analysis this is just more of a frontage location there are some concerns there's no formal crossing traffic pedestrian crossing so that is a concern that we were looking at on this one the site does drain to the river obviously there's some computing community impacts with the adjacent ocean view park and it is within the coastal zone and then the last site is san lorenzo benchlands and it's important to just clarify that the area that we're looking at is the south portion of the bench land south of the pedestrian bridge some of you will of course recall that we've had an encampment in the past that was on the north the north area this is actually this the south area that we were looking at for the potential safe sleeping area and looking at the site analysis for this it's roughly 8800 square feet as i mentioned this is you can see the orientation of the top it is south of the pedestrian bridge water nearby in the park electric nearby in the park it's near to services it's accessible and visible some of the concerns there are some wildlife impacts obviously this close to the river and then also as we'll talk about in a second to the upper areas the contingency site in the upper park area we have some concerns between the river and the pond with king fisher blue heron ducks and geese just overall we do think that the some of the community impacts are lessened by being in the southern area versus the northern area just because it's a smaller footprint but there are community impacts with major community events and celebrations that happen in the bench lands periodically flooding is also a concern and we'll get into that in a second and as you can see the site tapers down as you go south so it is a narrow site but we do think it's it's feasible and we needed to look at if because of the flooding and we all know that the bench lands flood what's the contingency site since this is a day-to-day looking looking from the safe sleeping program and so alternative site would be in the upper area of the just of san lorenzo park and this area as we look at has some opportunities the same as the other obviously the water electric it's flood resistant it's accessible has some increased visibility however it has some sincere serious concerns as well again it drains to the river the community impacts and specifically the park impacts to the adjacent playground lawn bowling and just the whole pedestrian cycling intersection network that that travels right through here so that's largely just an overview of the three remaining sites as I said this has been a pretty intensive all you know across all all departments analysis getting to these sites and well I didn't say it at the beginning this time I mean there are you know drawbacks to every site no site is the perfect site but we do think that these three remaining sites have enough balance and then for you to to seriously consider and if if you needed to choose a site that's one of these three could work as a safe sleeping site so happy to answer any specific site specific questions councilor McLean thank you thank you for that and for all the different departments working in overtime to make sure that we can move forward on this I'm curious uh there was that great rendition or example of how many tents would fit in lot 24 site two was that kind of estimation done on the other ones just because of the number of sites that will there are a number of beds that we need to open up being approximately an additional 50 or 60 I think our charge was up was it 40 40 to 50 people and so we did do a very preliminary one for for each of the other sites and the other sites actually are larger than the first site so we felt like just in without going into since we did not plan and lay out them for any sort of operational standpoint we just wanted to see if they would fit we focused on the first one that I showed you the others are larger and the it can accommodate more sites but the first site actually could accommodate 50 with a combination of largely single but even some double occupancy that's great and then just one more um so I went down and I spoke with the camp council I have a standing three o'clock Monday meeting with all of them just to talk about their perceptions one of their concerns with some of the sites that were proposed was the the idea or concept of privacy they've received a lot of abuse from people driving by on the freeway and just the general decency of being able to wake up and walk to the bathroom without having people stare at you so um one of the sites that they were interested in exploring was up in the Pogonip near the clubhouse the the retired clubhouse that's up there I had a chance to speak with the fire chief today and uh in his point of view that it is feasible to have a safe sleeping zone up there of between 40 and 50 people at the most um has that site been looked at and if so um what's the process yeah we looked at that site as part of the initial pass and the remote access and the difficulty of of getting up there and providing the services and everything that we needed was one of the reasons we eliminated that one okay thank you just wondering about lot is it 17 by the warriors um isn't the season over on March 23rd I don't know the exact season date um but we we have year round use agreement with the warriors for events and other purposes and events so we don't we don't control as a city that calendar the warriors control that calendar and so that looking at that site at all for a um a parking area RV parking area because that's that's what I've been hearing about but not not for tens uh not to my knowledge no we haven't been looking at it specifically for safe parking follow up question yeah just on that safe parking question has there been any sites identified for potential safe parking because I notice um that we're talking about in canvans and transitional in canvans but there's also the individuals in cars and I know that we're currently working on trying to find shelter space for people to move out of the Ross camp but has there been any exploration of safe parking sites so as it relates to the last council meeting we do have direction to move forward with making a recommendation for a safe parking lot city owned lot to support the afc program but also at the last meeting it was directed to add safe parking into the project charter for transitional encampments so as we kind of contemplate that process we certainly will be um also contemplating potential safe parking sites as well thank you had a question with regards to lot 24 um are there any schools or daycare or anything actually this goes for all the lots that are being recommended are there any concerns with them being in proximity to schools or daycares or anything that would you know um be concerning with um children being proximity where a lot of children are active I think one of the challenges of looking at the central core is that I mean you could say all of these sites are going to have some some impact to schools or daycare preschool facilities um these sites particularly being in city control and looking at the immediate adjacent uses we felt were the best suited with those in mind with those considerations in mind but we can't say that any site um is completely not impacted but also keeping in mind that the safe sleeping is a night to early morning program and so that is also a distinction between safe sleeping and the transitional encampment kind of that um uh consideration as to the number of folks using that shelter model during the day that might impact neighboring uses is quite different for a safe sleeping program okay give another question yeah and one more question regarding all the sites um with these safe sleeping sites is there any control and regulation of the like I guess my question is how would we be regulating the number of people that would be going into these sites because if there's no fencing or if there's no way to control people coming in it can it could potentially overwhelm those sites if they're only you know for example if lot 24 um has space for 24 30 people yeah so actually they're fully control uh fully fenced and controlled so um that is really the distinction the the fence stays up but the infrastructure um the I would say the semi kind of permanent infrastructure storage hygiene remains but for safe sleeping and storage the individual tents or if people are actually sleeping under cover outdoors that take that is removed each day but the lot the the programs are fully fenced um likely screened for privacy and then also controlled with a kind of one gate open access you know obviously considering our fire um martial requirements okay okay but that yeah I'll turn it back to to Susie and Tina and um I just want to say that you know we're at the point where we do feel like you know any of these three sites could be feasible but we really need feedback from you um to be able to do an additional analysis to these to the extent that you can give us feedback or direction today we would really appreciate that thank you Bonnie and so to that end we have this draft slide set up that we can come back to later when you begin your discussion where we can live input counsel concerns or areas for further analysis and your direction on it so we can really go through and get that specific direction on citing okay so now we're shifting to the next element of the agenda and this is talking about the shelter crisis declaration and um the slide looks familiar I just updated it from the slide that was presented to you last week but for those who haven't engaged so far what a shelter crisis is it's a vehicle under the California government code that allows municipalities to have a little more freedom to move expeditiously and have less than fully to code circumstances in order to respond to the shelter crisis that is ongoing in their community so with the finding that a significant number of persons are without the ability to obtain shelter resulting in threat to their life and safety this can be declared and it does things that you can see in the second and third bullet provides immunity from liability for ordinary negligence and allows some suspension of state or local rules and statutes when necessary to expedite the use of public facilities for um shelter it also allows the council to adopt alternate state health and safety standards now for just a quick history on this that there is a shelter crisis declaration already in effect for the city of Santa Cruz the city council adopted one in January of 2018 that document was in the agenda packet for this item just to refresh everyone's recollection on that um and then we did propose I believe at the March 12th meeting I'm okay for March 12th meeting of revision to that and the council chose not to act on that and then between that last week and this week we revised it again and and so I will take some time to go through this because a red line was not posted with the agenda item I know there were questions but um when working quickly you don't always have time to you know think through everything so I appreciate the council's forbearance and us working through it and we also had the opportunity um with having it publicly presented to get feedback from the community so that was actually very helpful so I will first pass around a hard copy for the for the city council to pass that please and then for the members of the community I will I have it saved Tina is this the one that's in our packet yes okay yes but I'm sitting around the red line and so this red line is off of the revised version we presented at your last meeting and so the red line shows what was stricken and what was added since it was presented and we thought this would be important so everyone can see so the major changes are in a few areas that that you saw referenced on the slide one is that we provided a few more whereas clauses just to tell the story a bit more fully around the city's circumstances and why these actions were being taken this was a language that was in that is in the original shelter crisis declaration that seemed like it would it would be helpful to have in there so that's punctuated throughout this for instance this whereas clause here just referencing the specific populations to that that make up our homeless community in this next whereas you can also see there's some minor editing just for clarity you know camp or lodge overnight that could be confusing so we just made it sleep and so you have a few of these this whereas references an idea in the original declaration about the city in the county working on this you know this has been a joint effort is a joint effort more than a joint effort all the governments in the county trying to work on this very difficult problem for us so that's some of the changes you'll see those references throughout and then this whereas so the one that was added here whereas of the provisions of any state or local regulatory statute regulation or ordinance prescribing standards of health of housing health or safety are so suspended per this this section authorizes the city to adopt substitute standards so this was an area that was in the original declaration that didn't come out sharply in the revision so we wanted to make sure that was in there and that's a direct reference to the government code and this is one of the allowances of shelter crisis and then you can see the language stricken here under the sequel in the california coastal act we felt that that was being misconstrued somewhat that there was just knocking down every regulatory component of this and that wasn't its intent but again we wanted to have a very flexible tool initially but this created some concern and we said it's not necessary it's not absolutely necessary so let's remove it because that was causing quite a few comments in the community the whereas here at the bottom this references the homelessness coordinating committee and the existence of a plan so again getting to some of that background I discussed this as well and this these are also be it further resolved clauses that were removed these are also referencing sequel in the california coastal act so that's really the substance of of the shelter crisis declaration revisions and either myself or the city attorney can answer any questions you might have if you have any at this time I just have one quick question the existing resolution that the city council has on the books does that currently mirror what the county has because if I remember correctly in January of 2017 the city and the county both adopted a very similar resolution no the way it worked is the city went first so we went in January of 2018 because we were dealing with trying to set up our three-phase plan and we thought this was an important tool to expedite that work the county declared their shelter crisis in later in the year with respect to the heap and cash funding so that was the state grants that came down to our community of about 10.6 million dollars and in order to be eligible to access those monies you had to have a shelter crisis declaration in effect so we have one so we have access to those monies on Watsonville did the same I don't recall the exact text of the counties I haven't looked at it in some time so I can't comment if it's similar or dissimilar from ours but actually there was one other thing I wanted to point out and it's this one it's this top be it further resolved right here so this was an inclusion in the version we added this to the version you received on March 12th and I just want to take a moment to talk about what this is and what this is is again we're moving very quickly and as we have a little more time to process and think about the intersection of this work our existing codes and regulations and processes wanted to be sure that we could move really expeditiously so what this says is that in moving forward any permits that are necessary would come straight to the city council to be heard whereas normally in the ordinary course of business they may go they may be referred to the planning commission or the parks and recreation commission or some other commission before it gets to you so what this does is accelerates that regulatory timeline again being mindful of the crisis to get straight to the city council for that to be heard and we thought this was important again trying to work on that April 17th deadline as well thank you council member vice mayor how does this differ from what's in the current crisis declaration how does this version it does not include this language so normally so in the in the previous declaration if we wanted to establish a camp it would have to go first to planning or to the coastal commission it really depends on the land use or type so it depends on what's the zoning where the property is what it's zoned for what's its uses etc so we would have to do that individualized assessment of the regular normal regulatory path for that when we did the 1220 river street a permit was prepared and I believe heard by the zoning administrator and administrative hearing by the zoning administrator so that so we did issue permit to ourselves for 1220 river street it would be the same so it really it's very site specific around the pathway and what would normally happen and under this we would it would not need to go to a zoning administration or to any um under this would come straight to this body council member matthews i had a question on the um possible suspension of state or local statutes regulations etc and it says if they are so suspended the government code authorizes the city to adopt substitute standards and i just have a general question about how that might be done and it does imply that there would be some standards absolutely and i can also talk to i in this conversation is interesting because sometimes we're very focused on the problem at hand the challenge at hand and that is moving and closing the gateway encampment and having an alternative but this this shelter crisis declaration can also apply more broadly so our sense of this is what we would do is if the city were to think there's a course of action where we wanted to implement this aspect or activate this aspect of it we would look at that site and we would develop site specific alternate health and safety codes that we feel we couldn't meet under existing and we'd bring that back to you as part of the discussion so that's how that would work so rather than just blanket adopting substitute standards really weighing where we are what's happening what are the facilities why do they need why do we need to have alternate on public health and safety and somewhat related and i i spoke to you previously about this near the end to be it further resolved that in light of the homeless shelter crisis described here in so almost the last paragraph i think it says the council hereby authorizes that any permits necessary for such facilities and then it talks about bypassing the commissions but it's not specific that um any such facility would require a permit process and that's something i want to bring up in the course of it just talks about any permits required which implies maybe there are and maybe there aren't so um anyway that's an issue i want to bring up later in the discussion well so aren't any further questions at this time does that conclude the presentation and we'll open it up to public comment almost almost okay thank you and so just in summation what direction we would be able to move forward with is i'm directing the city manager to implement a small-scale safe sleeping and storage program that's the recommended program model as susie discussed in depth to select a site and we've presented three and done a very careful initial vetting although of course more work would need to be done and then finally adopting the revised shelter crisis declaration and we do feel that this action is important for um for at a minimum that last component we talked about where permits would come straight to this body as opposed to going through various other levels of review just to have us build a move as quickly and as efficiently as possible thank you okay i do have a question that i'd like for you to try to answer for the benefit of the public primarily because we've received a lot of communications about this particular action and i would like to just i mean i understand the the differences between this resolution and the previous resolution that was adopted i understand the implications but if you could just summarize what the adopting this shelter this declaration of shelter crisis would allow this city council to do that's any different from what we have been doing i think it would be helpful because i think that's really unclear for the public okay um because we have one existing exactly we do the one that's existing does cover a lot of bases however it makes specific reference to where we were in our plans and projects and expectations last year so it references um like transitional encampment relative to where we were about a year ago so that was the reason why we thought we need to generalize this instrument so it does have broader applicability if the council needs to exercise that so that's one component another component it's also if the voice is different it's because the voice is different staff wrote the initial one and i i authored that and i based that on what was adopted in santa rosa and then our city attorney drafted the revised one based upon another municipality i believe city of san diego so if you're getting a legal tone there's a legal tone and then there was the other tone um and another difference with this is that last element about really clarifying the pathway for permit approval and having that be coming straight to your body um and being able to still have a public hearing but move quickly and i'll also say is that we didn't exercise the prior declaration we had it on the books but we found we were able to do everything within within the permitting the health and safety the temporary use nature of it so we didn't really flex that tool with this we've also had more time to really think about options and alternatives and so we thought it would be helpful to have something that had had greater clarity in areas and was more generally cast i hope that helps i can also pull up the old one if you'd like to see that no okay okay i just kind of wanted to get at the question of whether or not this is going to give us some sweeping new ability to establish encampments you know i think that's the the general concern that i'm hearing expressed and i want to be try to be clear about that um i do not believe so now i do think there might be community perception that's conflating the transitional encampment and safe parking ordinances that were tabled and the shelter declaration so at this time we'll go ahead and open it up for a public comment thank you for your presentation and work and quick turnaround i'd like to ask those who are interested in addressing the community to please raise your hands so that we have a sense of how many folks want to speak okay i will go ahead and ask that you self select to identify if you're interested in and speaking for just one minute if you're interested in addressing the council in just one minute if you want to quickly express your opinions to us i will go ahead and allow for you to address us first i will then open it up to a community presentation who has requested additional time and then back to the community for a full two minutes so if there's anybody who really wants to quickly i see somebody with a young child please feel free you'll be given one minute and any other folks who want to address the council with within the one minute time frame is welcome to address us first okay so right here hi please hi i am i just signed up my daughter for preschool we're on high street i'm very nervous about what's going on i feel a little bit better hearing some of the details like safe sleeping and not that the encampment is moving up there i'm nervous about what could develop from safe sleeping to an encampment i'm worried about lawlessness i feel for the legal restraints that you guys are under but i'm very concerned i don't feel safe in the parks with my child i don't feel safe um in some areas the preschool teacher told me that her car was stolen right off of high street that there are drug and encampment problems up there they steal tents from them um it's a big problem i feel for you guys i don't know how to solve it but i'm just saying i'm concerned and i'm worried and these people can't protect themselves so it's up to all of us to do that thank you thank you melissa free baron local registered nurse i'm here to address dr leff's recent comments at your last city council meeting the public has a right to know that the city and county have been running a unsanctioned um no accountability harm reduction needle giveaway on the levy needles in narkin by non-medical personnel and this has been happening since november since that camp cropped up we don't have a shelter crisis we have a drug crisis in this town really disappointed in all of you you've been notified i've asked to meet with various members of this body and been denied yet you will sit and pander to drug addicts at camp ross and give them a platform to keep using drugs and it's very upsetting that you would even even open up our parks again two of your sites the only sites you can come up with are two parks that were destroyed we've already been here camp ross is your example of a transitional camp that's not going to work okay your time's up i'm gonna give just one second before you begin if you could allow the speaker who is addressing us to finish their comments then they can have their full one minute um and then if you feel the need to um applaud after please do so but allow them to speak uninterrupted go ahead good evening i also have a daughter um in preschool on high street and i had heard that that was potentially one of the sites and i'm pleased to see that it's not but as i was standing here tonight and reading lots of comments online which is probably a very bad idea um you know everyone's talking about nimby nimby and and i agree and i was thinking you know great my daughter doesn't have a problem but what about somebody else's daughter what about somebody else's son and so given the um the sites that were suggested and the council is all here i wonder and i'd like to hear from each of the counselors if possible would you all uh agree to a pledge that whichever site that you select you'd make sure that it's within some with outside of some minimum distance from from children under the age of high schoolers half a mile a quarter mile i don't know you guys define the distance but you come up with some minimum distance that you say if these are children that are under the high school age we will guarantee that we're not going to associate this homeless problem you know around children that young we are you agreeable to that you can go ahead and pause time this is the chance for us to hear from you so we'll go ahead and listen and take your input but we're not um at a position to respond at this time okay thank you okay hello i'm natalex.kennedy at gmail.com 3469888 what i got to say is what we need is professional legal legitimate campgrounds with uh like they put the fencing around the post office and then they finally got real professional fences put in we should have fences like that we can put them in parks harvey west grant street san lorenzo but we should have a police trailer right out front that would also house a property manager that would allow people to pay rent and we could have outdoor kitchens we could have showers we could have uh restrooms even ones built up there so they're not just porta potties but uh we got to do something and if if you're gonna fail to set up legal legitimate professional camps then we need to start just letting people pitch their tent right on pacific avenue or wherever else if we dev if we offer no alternative thank you okay next speaker hi my name is carol reed i live downtown on myrtle street um i just want to say that you've selected sites i've heard one person in here talk about public comment i believe it was you and maybe one other short thing you're going through a fast process and i'm not hearing public comment i live downtown my car is broken into glasses on the street i walk by people shooting drugs it is a drug problem and the whole county needs to be involved we have sympathy but it's a drug problem too it's not just a homeless problem oh i'm tamera smith i live near the um delaware street area that was being considered and that's why i got my attention i'm not an imby though i don't want anyone to have to deal with an ill organized encampment that's going to impact their way of living it's not fair for businesses so it shouldn't be behind camp ross it's not fair on natural bridges where it's a sensitive environment and it's not good around kids or um you know i would say as the other fellow did through high school um but they're people i'm compassionate some of them have drug problems they need drug counseling they don't need needles some of them are students at the university that don't have a place to live they need to have safe parking hopefully at the university would make sense and there's just so many myriad different problems i'd like to say that the santa barbara model where i used i grew up i think santa barbara's doing a good job i would look at it i'd read the independent and i wish you guys all the best it's a super hard problem gotta do it right thank you hi my name is jennifer farley and i'm here just um hopefully to sway against the east cliff location i think it's not a good idea i've been living there for 22 years right near where the um you cross over the bridge to the boardwalk go ahead and pause it thank you and i live near the area where the boardwalk meets east cliff so it's kind of there and i can't even tell you how many problems there are around the neighborhood with theft with garbage with walking down and being scared i mean it's just unbelievable and the fact that there are so many kids in the neighborhood now and having it be so close to that really against it so thank you thank you hi my name is kevin rothwell i'm a 35 year santa cruz resident and i urge the city and the council to have a look at the basement of the locust street parking garage as a possible site for a um the um safe sleeping site and also a safe parking site and a storage site it solves a lot of the problems that you've been talking about and i think it's a suitable site take a look steve roar i was the guy that got upset last week i was concerned about the children being exposed so it looks like you folks have tried to mitigate that the best you could i appreciate that um like that little child that was brought up here they don't have any representation i'm not against homeless folks i've taken them into my house i'm not going to tell you about all the uh personal charitable things i've done but my god we've got to use common sense also number two we've got limited resources how are we going to control the migration of people that aren't from this area coming here to have a homeless handout needles whatever we've got to be able to control if there's people in this area that have become homeless let's help them but my god we can't control you know people migrating from eugene or anywhere else so we've got to think about you know limited resources also okay thank you thank you all right my name is Evan suroki in support of any and all those sites i say yes to my backyard to any and everyone thank you hello my name is uh daniel and i live off of east cliff and help manage apartments i'm wondering how the uh city is going to deal with the drug gang and registered sex offender problems it's going to affect the family's area even more than it does already and how they intend to deal with the mobilization of the community to in protest of it and the impact it's going to have on a centerpiece boardwalk when they see what's going on in the area thank you i'm the owner of the business that is on washington street where you plan to put the sleeping area right in the back of my shop and i'm just appalled um it's saddening the parking lot is full every weekend from beachgoers it's a very high-use area there's tons and tons of apartments in city neighborhoods all around right behind me it's unbelievable that you've chosen this spot please reconsider it seems like where it used to be down behind the county courthouse made sense all the officials in that building can look at it and see what you guys have created and keep it there until you figure it out please don't put it next to my business it will destroy my shop i will have to uh hi my name is julia mcdermott um i appreciate all of you for tackling this problem um i want to just put a human element on it um my son was a drug addict downtown for 12 years and would have died if a judge in this county had not gotten so sick of his vagrancy that he put him in a lockdown program with drug treatment and that is what got him sober he's 14 years sober today what they're doing what they're doing down on that levy passing out needles when emeline is less than a five minute walk where those addicts can walk over there and get medical attention and wrap around care it is completely uncalled for every addict i know and i know a lot of them from dealing with this issue my dad was 35 years sober numerous family members 15 20 years sober handing out needles when there are children around and you have a mixed population of drug addicts and truly homeless struggling people they need to be separated seriously oh um my name is mark a longtime resident of santa cruz and a homeowner parent um i have a lot to say but only a minute i want to go on the record that i'm opposed to everything discussed today i can't believe what i'm hearing i don't see any solutions and with no disrespect i know that's a hard job it's a hard problem but you're talking about what problems are we trying to solve here avoiding lawsuit it sounds like you have to have the same number of beds to that you're taking away to do that but we're talking about shelters that uh house maybe 50 people but the one picture that had the number of beds was like 27 the river street um camp that we had was like half vacant vacant i mean because people didn't want to share tents is that going to happen here and so what problems are you solving and it certainly isn't the problem of my children walking down the beach yesterday sunday and wondering what daddy why is that guy laying in a pile of barf with a needle in his arm thank you hi my name is mark um i'm a longtime resident of um east cliff area where site four is um i just want to speak specifically to that area um you know i have no answers for homelessness but that area there's no park and there's already campers on jesse street right there all the time it's already a very hazardous area for pedestrians with the traffic there as it was stated there's no good pedestrian crossing there as well as walking along the street as it goes along the river is very hazardous with people bikers on that on that piece of sidewalk and um skateboarders and just already is very dangerous area so i just don't see that as a viable area makes good evening city council my name is kurtis relevant i have a solution for these people this is a bubble santa cruz of the bubble if these folks have been in the ghetto where i'm from hey you just got the drugs coming now wait till the guns come wait till the criminals come it's on their way if you don't take it from somebody who been there 33 years clean and sober i'd know what drugs is i'd know how to deal with them drug addicts i was down there all day today preaching at them these folks are depressed depression lead into destruction and they don't care about your kids they don't care about your business dude it's enough of us in here to take one at a time under your wing lead them to a drug center lead them to a facility that would take care of them all they take a patient good evening council members um i'm a mom i'm a third generation santa cruz resident my daughters are fourth generation i appreciate the common sense that's been used to not have it uh put up by westlake elementary school where one of my daughter still goes it's in this day and age with megan's law and effect in california it doesn't make sense on having it even thought of as being so close to elementary school where they have a pre-k to fifth grade my other concern is the waterways i'm a surfer i come from a generation of santa cruz surfers having our children at the beaches with needles and um whether they're loaded or not with stepping on a needle is a huge concern for the parents in santa cruz who pay a lot of money for their kids to be doing junior guards and be down on the beaches and to have the waterways thank you possibly fund them out is not a good thing hi my name is seth van whore i'm on a father here that lives in santa cruz i have a two-year-old son i addressed this board last year for issues in my neighborhood and i'm back up here again because things haven't really changed i live on 329 spruce street and i there is a lot of drug cartel that comes from over the hill and from the bay area that comes down and the residents literally live in their cars seven days a week dealing drugs out of their cars the vigilant neighbors we call all the time the police just don't have the force to respond in time to meet them it's just going to bring a lot more traffic you're camped in nothing to do anything on our end of pacific avenue and it's just going to bring a bigger problem to this drug cartel that's on our street we frequent near lagoon every single week with our kid and that thing is going to get destroyed if you put a camp over near that place what we need is to handle the drug problem and give resources for these people to clean up their lives and get off the street otherwise we can't expect them to do that we can't just give them place to live in clean needles we need to bring a force in of money resource from this from the state or to help from outside police force that can give us more men on the field like the FBI or hi my name is alisha cool and this is isabella i want to point out the fact that one thing that everybody's missing homeless people are people just like the rest of you what we are is we're people without homes uh we can't afford it you know for whatever reasons we have barriers that doesn't make us immediately untrustworthy that doesn't make us scary that doesn't make us not worth getting paid in cash that we suddenly need gift cards um i'm not scary to be around children children are not scared of being around me we're talking about people without homes we're not talking about scary people and it's really depressing and disheartening to hear the way homeless people are described by some of our community thank you hi i'm susanne mclean i'm from the association of faith community thanks for all your hard work and deliberation on this i think one of the points that's being missed by the community is that the idea of a safe what are we calling it safe sleeping or the transitional camp is not what's happened at Ross it's going to have a structure it's going to have security it's going to have a lot more of those things that help us to feel safe and not afraid and i just wanted to make the point that i hear that that i hear that and keep going thanks thank you okay is there anybody else who'd like to address the council for one minute um and then we'll go ahead and have our group presentation then reopen it up for two minutes so you'll have if you're interested in one minute please feel free hi my name is susanne and i live actually directly across from where the pro site is i'm mother of two and i walk to work back and forth every day i have deep concerns about the proposed site and i wish they would reconsider and other as well instead i i have seen i understand i appreciate the the face of homelessness is very different but i think it's very legitimate concerns that a lot of people have in terms of their businesses in terms of all the different activities that would be going on i have concerns about taking my kids out at night i mean i'm concerned about walking by myself as it is in that area and i think this is just going to exacerbate all those issues a lot more and i really really wish they reconsider church parking lots there's lots of other options that you could use and make this a safe place especially for families that are homeless because i realize that's one of the most outstanding issues so thank you okay hi city council i think about this problem a lot too i'm over on the east cliff way i've rented apartments two of my 26 apartments i've rented to homeless people there there were good people one of them lived in the woods far out highway nine where it ended because he was afraid to leave in the homeless camp he said he couldn't even sleep in the rain with a tent for fear that somebody beat him up and take his stuff and i couldn't bear that i gave him a place he's a great worker a great person there are good homeless people but i can tell you on east cliff there's needles on the street my husband goes along cleans him up he got pricked by the needle he had to take terrible shots for a year to make sure he didn't have anything bad and uh the community there has more taken over and taken the community back from the drug users they'll tell drug users to move on we've got more people look the houses with single family homes thank you okay thank you i have several things to say first of all we're dealing with three different crises here a mental health services crisis a drug addiction crisis and an affordable housing homeless crisis and as long as you're lumping all those people together no matter what you try to do it will fail and that i also think what a great working model would be set up much like the state parks where people are on a sliding scale if they're on disability they pay a little bit if they're not they can work a few hours but where they can come and go and feel like they have a place maybe even their lot space is their address so they can apply for a job um but as long as we're treating everybody because i suffer from chronic homelessness i brought my children here they were born in Santa Cruz and um i don't have any criminal history i don't do any drugs so um we really need to see some supportive services thank you thank you my name is jeffrey stonehill and just wanted to say um i got here in 1970 very briefly living in the dakota apartments across from san lorenzo park it was a monster uh up until a few months ago people yelling all night long three in the morning four in the morning you wouldn't know about cars coming up at two in the morning three in the morning going to the park slamming their doors shouting loudly getting back in their cars skateboards coming down at two three four five in the morning to do whatever business they have in the park several tents with over 40 bicycles doing bicycle business in the park people screaming all night i love heroin um people defecating right in the middle of the park um i'm asking why don't you put the garbage in the can it's one foot from you it's my park it's my land i can do whatever i want uh people screaming and yelling all night long most of the people there are in their 70s and 80s a poor situation but anyhow i wish you luck on all this good evening i'll try and make my comments brief my name is bradley olin i'm a parent of two young daughters i live on the upper west side and i believe that there's a disconnect happening with respect to the conversation about safe sleeping spaces i think the public at least in this room in the community we know doesn't fully understand the ramifications of that kind of arrangement versus what's going on at camp ross and i think there needs to be a broader education that happens where we understand what's going on and how these camps will be run because let's face it those three sites that are left are all next to public spaces where children play and yeah maybe they're not playing at nine o'clock at night but right now from what i've heard i don't know how those overnight camps are going to be run all i've got in my head it's camp ross and so even if you say it's going to be regulated we don't know what that means as the public and we're all really spooked about it so i think if you're going to propose park sites and you're going to put it where there are lots of kids and families around you've got to bring us all into the fold and get us on board by helping us be comfortable with the safety thanks my temponaro product i live in the west side so um i know portland has kind of an interesting program to help with the homelessness they have a an incentive program for homeowners to put additional dwelling units on their property and if you offered something like that i'd certainly consider it to help solve the problem thanks so we'll go ahead and have our uh presentation presentation uh from uh Santa Cruz neighbors i'll go ahead and were you still were we still are we still up for one is anybody still up for one minute okay uh presentation from Santa Cruz neighbors if not okay go ahead for one minute hi my name is sunny and i sleep in that encampment i just helped a female elder who didn't have no place but got kicked out and i had a bed right next to me i opened it out i loaned it out and she was safe with her dog as well i cleaned up the encampment around my areas including some other tents that i sleep right next to you i do the work wherever i go on riding the bike i'm picking up the needles on these bike trails and all these little complaints with these bikers they're not stopping to pick up those needles with their safety i'm hearing complaints but they're not doing anything by their mouths put your put your mouths over there and help us out clean up the encampment if you want to volunteer please we need a little bit of help because some people don't know how to get up and about a drug issue every city is a drug issue so i i believe that concludes the one folks that are interested in one minute we'll go ahead and have the presentation that requested additional time i'll go ahead and invite deb elston up to go ahead and present at this time and you'll have four minutes thank you mary wadkins council members staff and to the neighbors for writing the emails and showing up i could probably talk an hour up here but i'll keep it for my time when you hear about an idea you need to ask yourself does this continue to enable those on the street or does it truly help them make the changes in their life's situation as you are taking action to help those that are homeless in our community i believe with a strong county partnership we will be able to help those who want help the city doesn't have to do this alone let's not confuse ourselves on addiction or homelessness neighbors throughout the city have been completely left out of your initial deliberations some council members have been to neighborhood meetings most have not neighbors must be at the table they have ideas you absolutely need to listen to neighbors before you bring proposals forward it may take more time in the beginning but this has proven to be more beneficial than getting the back glass of reactions that you have created neighbors throughout the city are truly frustrated with your current chaotic process you cannot use programs that continue to enable destructive behaviors and hurt the people in need as much as the community around them there needs to be accountability on all sides people who need help and those people who are trying to help our community cannot be drugged down to lower standards we already have neighbors moving businesses closing over this issue policies that don't cost anything need to be put in place to help set expectations in our community and responsibilities on all sides sanikers neighbors throughout the 18 years has been engaged in county white partnerships executive boards networks and discussing this extremely complex homeless issue in our community this is not my first rodeo here personally after the past 10 years of homeless research be fending homeless and looking for solutions i've even advocated for individuals getting the help they need i went back to look at dr robert marbot who is a homeless advocate an expert that consults with communities nationwide his guiding principles are one move to a culture of transformation to locate and virtual e integration as many of the services possible three you must have a master case management system four reward positive behavior five consequences for negative behavior six external activities must be redirected or come or stopped seven panhandling enables homeless and must be stopped many of these policies are started and need to continue maybe we should adopt a policy of compassion this policy needs to include everyone in our community families raising children businesses that contribute to our economic stability our community wanting safety safety and a thriving quality of life and yes our homeless bettering their own lives this policy of compassion almost done you go ahead i gotta i keep it pretty consistent with the time you're welcome to submit your your comments and we'll go ahead and last sentence i can't i'm sorry i'm very consistent with that for everybody i wish i could but i want to make sure that there's really an equity of voice so i'm pretty consistent on that standard so we'll go ahead and submit that and we'll read that okay thank you so at this time at this time we'll go ahead and open it up to any member of the public who would like to address the council for two minutes okay well i'm marco chairs from uh the dela viega neighborhood first off i think this council is full of people who are compassionate and are really trying to find a solution to a problem i think the issue is is that right now there's some conflation between solution well we'll go ahead and pause and just make sure that you have your time and so i think there's there's an issue in that there's a conflation between solution and action i think that some of these proposals that are made by some on the council are definitely actions but i don't know if there's solutions in particular i think these actions also have a cost associated with them despite the assurances from this council anytime any government body issues emergency declaration to bypass any um of the procedures or proposals that are in place to safeguard individuals and shift power from people to government it causes people to worry um in addition i think that there's some conflation about the populations of of the homeless i think on one hand there's a population of individuals who are have a hard time making ends meet who might be the working poor um who just need a hand up to be able to improve their lives and they have a desire to do so the other population is the population as described by the doctor from last city council meeting or through addiction or through some other issue are not quite at that point in life where they're willing to make that change i wonder about some of the programs or proposals offered by the city council and which of those population is being helped and so i ask the city council before you vote on anything to please consider am i voting for actions or am i voting for solutions am i voting for a policy that actually empowers people or hinders that or am i voting for a solution that just creates space for people to exist or actually help them to improve their lives thank you i can buy the next speaker just so you know you'll have two minutes Good evening to the city council i'm Howard Nelson 35 year resident and voter of santa cruz i want to bring to your attention and submit for the record a document from the united states interagency council on homelessness from may 2018 i don't know if it's in the record i send it as an email attachment but i don't know if you enter you know open attachments this addresses many of the proposed solutions that we're talking about tonight and says that while they're well intentioned and compassionate they may be misdirected and have unintended consequences they say creating sanction and campments and safe zones or other similar settings have proven to have a little impact on chronic homelessness you need to have stable places they can live with support creating safe zone environments are costly and money personnel and effort and it's better spent on permanent housing and support and safe zones are difficult to manage and maintain upgate security sanitation are all needed on a continuous basis what they do say if you decide to proceed with this these temporary safe zones once established you got to know they're going to be difficult to close they should be a plan for how these people are only temporary and they're moved on to permanent housing and other supports you need to regularly access the what your you know your outcomes are you improving things and they say to contact the united states interagency council on homelessness any city or county agency they'll give you help they're there and i'd like to just submit this for the record i'd like to invite the next speaker oh thank you council members my name is amy i'm a west side homeowner and parent as a parent i share a lot of the same fears as other parents who have kids running around downtown and on the beaches and at the same time i was here when the first i believe sleeping band and i can't remember if it was a sitting band happened and i remember thinking where are these people going to go they got to go somewhere i mean are we going to push them off of west cliff what is going to happen to people so what i appreciate here is i understand that this is a temporary solution to try to move the people at the ross camp to someplace that has more supervision more services more control and to be able to provide services to people in a in a more organized fashion let's say and i really support that i don't support closing the ross camp without an alternative for these people to go to and when i see the ross camp i'm both sat in and i also feel like there's some community there for people i think that when people want to get off drugs it's very difficult for them to try to get on their feet when they're constantly having to look for shelter clothing protection food i mean these are the kinds of things that are so basic that you need to have even if it's in jail in order to start to get off drugs too and i understand that most of the people they actually don't know what the population there is i did send an email to the council saying i think we need to do more canvassing of that population to ask who's ready to move to transitional shelter who's using drugs and alcohol wants to get off who's using drugs and alcohol and doesn't want to get off so that we know who this population is and what they specifically need and that will tell us how many people can go into this safe sleeping environment and i'm also concerned about the slave safe sleeping environment because during the day where do people go i mean i get to go home and take a nap when i'm tired so that'll end my you can check my email thank you the keith um the kenry and i've been um sharing food with people on the streets for 39 years and um have family members homeless i'm somewhat familiar with the issue um i do appreciate what some of the uh people were saying about bringing the neighbors to actually create the structure for each of these transition camps i think that's very valuable it would be it's very it's crazy just to put camps in a neighborhood where people have no input into how they're organized but at the same time i i support these three staff recommendations basically but we must look also at the fact that the number of people forced to live on the streets is increasing dramatically month by month and if something goes awry with the trump economics you know dream or whatever the heck it is and he's trying to put on everybody um the uh we could see three or four times more homeless people on our streets than we are now within the top before uh mayor walkins is out of has become a the next vice mayor whatever it is that happens to you when you no longer a mayor and um and so we have to kind of like focus on this thing so i used to get like three or four people a month maybe tell me they just became homeless where's the shelter it went to six people a month at the beginning of the month asking where the shelter is or six families now it's like that is the beginning of the month they tell you about how they lost their car got towed by the police they now live on the streets many of them are women and they're like 40s 50s and 60s we had a family that just came to us because their car was stolen on vacation here and now they're homeless have no possible way to get off the street here they can't get their family to get money to get back can't hook her up with uh with um chris to get a free bus ticket yet because he's out of commission currently and that we have we need to really get solutions thank you some of you you know me i'm richard louis collaboration and partnership are words um our united way ceo speaks of instead of giving money to the non-profit network of coming to santa cruz with action so i coach you to be in dialogue to see just what that means you're in santa cruz the barland bailey circus was coming to our county in our city those of you who haven't researched carry the vision carry the vision dot org i propose collectively carry the vision slash santa cruz with the leader over the hill where the county of of uh over there worked with seiyu created land seiyu had uh tents in a in their parking lot they worked together so carry the vision by design is could be like women rise for peace as you remember women rise for the homeless create the kind of initiative where we begin to listen the power isn't in talking heads the power is in the people who come here weekend week out you know and not only parents but nonprofits and i'll be sharing with some of you new collaboration software coming out by the bad guys facebook where where you can begin to have your passion come together with the people who you know building bridges 15 million so i'm homeless oh 82 years old but i'm happy i appreciate all of you i don't know if anybody knows the work that people are putting on just to sit there and if you ask your dad who is richard i'm i'm no i'm on the right table i want to leave thank you thank you thank you hello carol polhamis again how are you um i was a school teacher and school administrator for 35 years so school safety for me is paramount almost anything else and i especially want to thank uh mayor walkins last meeting and vice mayor comings for mentioning school safety um because it's it's really critical so um i'm kind of a numbers girl and i had a lot of time in my hands so by four o'clock there were 964 public correspondence pages submitted to you guys i'm sure you didn't have a chance to read them all they were pretty hefty out of the 964 two people were neutral seven were pro and 955 were opposed primarily to the transitional neighborhood camping which i'm really thrilled to hear as being tabled for the moment i tried to summarize because i did read a lot of the letters what the worries were and a lot of them were about suspending the rules around environment community schools etc that declaration of shelter crisis emergency would permit so many of the letters called to amend the shelter declaration to say that there be some kind of a buffer zone around childcare schools for school safety purposes and that there not be any transitional camps permitted on parks beaches and public streets without public review which would allow the community to express and you know talk about their concerns so i wanted to bring that forth i want to thank you for your work on this and see you next time hi i'm garret i uh the the essence of what i wanted to say is that more services will always equal more homeless it's uh it this is a dumping ground for the county's homeless we have all the services here that's why they're here they come for the services they anchor to the services and they're not going anywhere you add more services it might help with some people but others will take their place and anyway i wanted to read this uh using the 2017 annual homeless assessment report to congress santa cruz has 650 more homeless 470 more shelter than our share of california's homeless and shelter averages by population the city of santa cruz hosts almost all the county state and federal social services for the homeless in the county save for very few in watsonville add in the 40 plus NGOs many on the government take providing services plenty of mexican heroin and meth a culture and official sanction of tolerance aka lack of morals enforcement of law two brief revolving door of justice and here we are flooded to the public breaking point with homeless heroin meth addiction crime safety health and blight issues criminal homeless need to be given the choice of jail or jail with treatment release and probationary supervision it's a drug and mental health problem mostly a too many just here problem that the rest of the citizen contributors don't deserve in these numbers how many homeless services are in the aptos capitol so could tell scott's valley zero how many homeless 40 not no one even bothered to count and so killer aptos would be a waste of time any adding of homeless services invites and anchors more homeless here it is the major cause of the concentration created over time by the government of the extreme too many homeless problems every next homeless service added should be outside the city limits no exceptions including the NGOs who come begging for funds to provide yet more service thank you and please if you don't look at me hi council members i'm paul hodge i'm a 40-year resident of santa cruz and a landowner i think i have a concern about the location of the camp i know we've got to do the camp and i know it's temporary but i have a concern about the location of the camp of the sleeping camps in a residential area where people are also sleeping i like the idea of a camp in an area where people are not sleeping or residing near that camp at the same hours that the camp is active so that's something to think about i also like the temporary nature of it that you're putting a six months on it and i think it'd be good if you consider making a mandatory that you review it at the six months not just automatically roll it over that way you could look at the any issues or bugs in the system and um finally it would be good if once the camp is established that there would be able to be some kind of a triage people that could go in and work with the people that have a drug addiction problem which is not a crime it's an addiction problem and work with the families and the individuals that can't afford the housing and help them get into some kind of housing programs so that there'd be some more one-on-one inside the camp and i commend you for taking on such a big problem because maybe we could be exemplary for the rest of the country and how we deal with our homeless crisis because we're not the only ones so thank you Susan Worth Soquel well i'm going to be 70 april third matter of days and i too would be homeless if my dad hadn't died and helped me with the trust uh i live in a trailer in Soquel and is a 1972 trailer parts of it are uh biodegrading rather quickly and flooding underneath and some other problems dry rot but um at least i'm i'm surviving and it's because i was a waitress for almost 20 years a lot of these people were waitresses they made i made two dollars an hour that went into my social security that's why it's so low and it gave me an interesting attitude about men but nonetheless um here i am and i i went to penny you i go to penny you a lot on monday with paulie who's 92 years old and he's one of the people that set up the pogo nip what is it 640 acres something like that anyway a lot of acres i'm bad with numbers he set up the pogo nip 40 years ago it celebrated his 40th anniversary just recently and he says we need to build some permanent housing right in the pogo nip that's what he says for people he cares about people a lot of people in this community do we can't we can't keep just pushing these people around and making them feel like crap they're already so depressed just like kurt has said i i overheard him talking as i came up these people are depressed they've got issues we need to help them in every way we possibly can please now thank you guys i don't cancel uh my name is pedro castillo i live in verka street i want to thank you for the uh uh helped you guys have given us uh for our neighborhood and also i want to thank you for all the work that you're doing i know there's a real uh hard issue um there's a lot of people coming and coming uh you know moving coming don't move the camera you know it's all this going back and forth uh i guess hopefully you guys do the the best decision and um i know it's a complex issue and then it's hard to find a model they can work for uh everything um last thing sunday the uh santa cruz neighbors sent out an email of a report that was done in homeless in seattle um and then i mean it was devastating to see the problem they have there but also the report uh it showed the model that the island is doing um some people mentioned about you know the the uh the um uh uh medication treatment so i think there's there are other things that can be looked out so i'm gonna encourage you for and thank you for the work that you're doing thank you good evening my name is marina ire and um i have two two things um i would love for our city council to have a long-term goal a 10-year goal of how are we going to get permanent housing for these people in need maybe a goal of 100 permanent subsidized housing with um facilities things available to them that we can slowly slowly work on the homelessness problem i feel like right now we are enabling drugs and we are just adding to the drug problem we're giving needles we're not giving housing and right now santa cruz i was looking it up in one of the lists as of late santa cruz is listed as the 22nd most dangerous city in california can we please make it a goal of our city council to make it one of the top 20 safest cities in california it's such a wonderful city with so much heart and also to be a forerunner of caring for those in need instead of being a drug zone and asking for trend and and just making it so easy for transients to come here to enable this drug addiction that oftentimes leads to death i understand there's three debt there were three deaths in the camp um i'm i'm not sure how they were caused but if they were caused by overdose i i don't know if but if the city is handing out these needles is the city going to start to be liable for this and or if children are stepping on needles that the city is handing out and they are sick is the city going to be liable we're talking about all the liability and rights of these homeless but what about our citizens and keeping them safe my car was broken into last week my carport had 1500 dollars um the things stolen the person who's stole it the perpetrator stole our neighbor's car he was found a week later strung out um passed out in front of sorry i can't finish but you you're welcome if you have comments you're welcome to leave them the drug exchange program with the needles is saving lives period don't flood the neighborhoods retrain retain the Ross camp Lynn Wrenshaw has proposed a solution in a generic email returned by many critics of the Ross camp in it she suggests the city meet the minimum minimum come on any person if they're left out in the cold then it's a failure pro program you have to give shelter to everyone if one person who would it be who are you how are you going to change it take the time to team with the county to use the 10 million dollars the heap of money grant and encourage the county to do their fair share she in the form leather she generated proposes amending the proposal so that shelters cannot be placed in parks beaches streets and sidewalks without first requiring public and environmental review and how much are these permits going to cost so that the public exemptions will require fully maintain professionally staffed and secure shelter facilities perhaps so but where will the folks that are shelterless be if they're driven out from the Ross camp which ones are going to survive and which ones are going to die and you're welcome if you like to leave your comments good evening council i'm greg banks and i'm a registered voter resident of Santa Cruz and i my homes in the Ross camp and i live in reality which is a place that people ought to visit occasionally and i do understand all sides of this 20 sided coin and it's not a pretty situation but again it's reality and i do appreciate i had some other things to say but i spoke with the fire chief hi duck and reality happens people are human i appreciate what first responders police um i i appreciate when uh city staff comes out meets with us um city council members that i've talked to and those who haven't um and uh this is not easy but we're not going to go away too quickly unfortunately um it's an existential thing we're not here just to have a place to rest a place to sleep we want to live and perhaps even eventually thrive you know and uh self actualize and um yeah man work i've worked lots all over the world and um but right now i'm in Santa Cruz and i would have just left but when we're told to leave somewhere i'm gonna stick around and uh show what we do those of us who have skills but um i do appreciate everything also i want to say hey clean needles save lives um but heroin sucks heroin sucks bye i did on that last remark um i've spent a lot of time reading about this issue oh thank you i spent a lot of time reading about this issue because i just wanted to educate myself i was starting to feel guilty about the whole thing you know here i am saying we should make these changes to better me but i want to better everybody so i kind of went through lots of articles and lots of videos and one of the biggest takeaways that i got on it was that it's not simply a homeless problem it's a chronically homeless problem and almost everything that i've read about it has to do with drug addiction those are the people that are chronically homeless for the most part um and unless we get them help this isn't going to change so um and i don't think we're ever going to fix the problem i think it could be managed but i don't think we'll ever get rid of it completely so my proposal is since you guys always want solutions um reopen bench lands so you can have everybody in one spot secondly is to think long term and one place i forget where it was they actually had a lockdown facility for drug addicts that helped to get them clean monitored them when they got out helped them you know achieve success in life um and otherwise they have to go to jail and then the third thing is to give the police the ability to enforce the laws because right now they're not enforcing the laws so we don't feel safe if they were out there patrolling and doing their jobs we would feel safer but they can't their hands are tied because you're telling them not to arrest people don't even bother citing them because they just rip it up um also let's see the the site you have on washington is directly adjacent to the soccer field just so you know lots of kids um and one more thing please stop freaking us out with your ill-conceived ideas because it stresses everybody i know out including myself thank you next speaker good evening council release casby i've spent the last 10 solid years investigating homeless in all different cities and different places i want to say please go forward with these very moderate solutions that serve to assist poor people in our community homeless people are poor people who lack housing and have a little money to pay for housing i am extremely dismayed and discouraged by the neighbors descriptions of homeless people because these are lauded descriptions mean descriptions and yes bigoted descriptions but most of all they are uninformed descriptions these people with their lauded descriptions they're bigoted and uninformed descriptions are all self-described experts yes do they know that nine percent of the homeless people according to wikipedia several years ago are victims of domestic violence and that there are virtually no available transitional shelters for these women if these people are so full of compassion why have they not cared enough to build low-income housing for the 70 percent of santa cruz's residents who are born here and or grew up here who became homeless here because of escalating rents lack of affordable housing and low-income housing these figures are from the september 2014 association of communities uh and smart solutions conference county and city city officials don lane and many other homeless advocates please check the 2014-2015 grand jury final report recipe for failure etc etc if these people who care so much with their hate filled descriptions of people experiencing homeless why for the past 30 years have these same peoples these neighbors not cared more about massive war budgets increasing weapons trades around the world in the millions and the creation of cluster bombs that children pick up because they look like toys i have heard a fraction of which could go into solving our homeless and mental health issues these neighbors are not caring these labors have come out and forced snake because they are bigoted and they want to make sure that we keep the status quo i'll go ahead and remind the community that as everybody speaks they have their time without interruption go ahead you'll have to i appreciate one of the previous speakers comments about lumping the many and varied problems being experienced by our homeless population altogether every one of those people has a story and not knowing the details is what prevents us from helping them address their particular challenges unfortunately councils recent focus on enacting emergency declaration sought in order to speed through policy changes that avoid public review and the typical vetting that occurs under established procedures is troubling the idea that housing mental health and addiction challenges are actually emergent by any definition ignores the past four decades of questionable decision making here in our community having said that i think most reasonable people would agree that for those individuals struggling to be housed circumstances in Santa Cruz could hardly be worse and while these individuals are struggling so too are the vast majority of our community population that have to live with the constant theft disoriented behavior environmental degradation disease vectors and occasional violence not to mention the not an inconsiderable cost of hosting maintaining protecting and supervising the housing challenged in my opinion shelters safe sleeping sites and or encampments should never be seen as an acceptable end state no matter the circumstances of those who occupy them they should similarly never be self-governing nor anonymous they should be focused on triage only and our efforts as a community should be focused on what comes after the shelter and that means more permanent housing lots of it and many different types including supportive communities and means tested deed restricted homes we all need to be clear this problem is decades old and will not be solved quickly we shouldn't be trying to enact ill-conceived solutions based on a loosely defined set of objectives let's make shelters of any kind unnecessary thank you josh stevens here i am just here to say whatever you guys do you you gotta act fast because this problem's just getting out of hand and i'm not even talking about the campsites i'm not even talking about like all these issues that everyone else is talking about i'm talking about the basic facts that is housing it's housing it's the huge equation of this problem here and like for example my one of my neighbors they don't they basically have to decide oh what bill do we pay do we scrap together this month what bill do we scrap together next month and it's just like that paycheck to paycheck life and then boom one of the housemates gets out on disability because and then all of a sudden it's just it's a struggle here it's a struggle to make it out here and that's the just don't lose focus of that matter in fact i understand that that is the platform in which some of our city leaders have ran on so i look forward to seeing what gets done in that regards and i really hope that something gets done before um our before we lose community because that's what that's the main part of this all why we're here today to build our community thank you hi my name kenny um i'm thinking about shelter when i think of shelter i mean got a roof over the top and uh so after the earthquake the city santa cruz put up uh tents and i think they were in the parking lots and uh so my thought would be like the kaiser arena that structure if we made some small ones you could put them in a parking lot like um at front and laurel it would look just like the arena how many people you'd be about the size of this building you could get 30 40 people in there to sleep now i know a lot of people don't want government to get in their face so we got 10 million dollars to use we could experiment with some kind of structure where they don't have to sleep in a tent the other part is i've gone into those bathrooms and they got the little urinal right here and then the ladies got to sit right right next to that thing why don't we build a building where people could go in and not look at what is in there you know we could help them out i don't think you guys can do it right away but i think we're gonna look at actually getting a building now that might bring more people in so be it hey thanks for listening to me i appreciate it i'd like to get a sense of how many more members of the community would like to address us on this issue okay okay so you'll be our last speaker okay go ahead thanks city council for your time and attention to this um my name is mike ire i've been here in santa cruz for about 10 years we came to santa cruz because we love everything about santa cruz obviously like most of us the ocean the mountains the community and i have a lot of compassion for solving this issue and it's a difficult one that we're not going to solve tonight obviously i just want to point out a several other people have pointed out that i feel like it's really difficult to attack the homelessness because as we all know they're and i'm not putting everyone into this group i promise i know that the every story of your story is different but there is a lot of drug use i think that we can all agree to that and i think that we also typically say illegal drug use or illegal drugs and i have a difficult time explaining to my children why drugs are illegal but then they're not illegal i guess i mean they're confused because we don't enforce illegal drug use and i feel like until we tackle that problem we're not going to be in a position to tackle the homeless problem because if we build a lot a lot more homeless camps i think that we all understand that there's a lot of people that will come to this area because it's a great area and we have lax policies on drug use and we'll get a lot of people that will come to this area that'll want to do that'll be drug users and so if we can't crack down on the on enforcing drug use of illegal drug use i remind you i don't know how we can attack this problem of homelessness we're just going to perpetuate it in my opinion i'd love to see us do everything we can to continue to make this city great and i really want us to find a solution that works for everyone but i also just really want us to focus on the component of this i know it's just a portion a percentage of a but that is illegal drug use and really think about if we can we can put attention there and efforts there to to make this a central part of this discussion thank you my name is ross newport i know quite a few of actually you actually i work at community printers um i work over at community printers uh we've had a lot of homeless people hanging out around the shop two weeks ago a guy came in at seven o'clock into the back room of the shop and stole my three thousand dollar bike two years ago i went out of the hospital got really sick uh was told i had to change my life i got that bike and i've loved it every day i've ridden that bike i've started to get better from uh from having it there were security camera footage so i was able to see pictures of the person who stole it went on to mugshot Santa Cruz identified who the guy was talked to the police about it and they're pursuing him right now uh but was able to determine that he's cited a lot at the homeless camp by ross i printed up a flyer five hundred dollar reward for my bike uh and started walking around the camp you walk around with a flyer for a five hundred dollar reward you get a lot of attention there so i talked to a lot of people i went around and realized that not only the guy who stole my bike living there but that there's multiple chop shops that are there multiple people running criminal enterprises on a site that is essentially sanctioned by the city uh i ended up finding the guy okay go ahead and continue you without an eruption go ahead right i ended up finding the guy at the camp wearing my jacket i confronted him about it he took off the jacket gave it back to me told me that in order to get my bike back he needed sixty dollars i said there was no way i was getting the sixty dollars to get my bike he walked in back into the camp over toward the area where the chop shops are which is in the far end kind of by the river street and freeway intersection and um came back about ten minutes later your time is up your time is up okay and you're welcome to email the council yeah yes thank you your time is up now thank you okay our next speaker congratulations on your seat i wanted to be a california state assembly woman back in when i was 30 years old but cps made sure that i my family was destroyed and there's a lot of children coming out of foster care that are homeless but uh what this gentleman said back here drug addiction and alcoholism doesn't run just in the homeless community it runs in the rich families as well as middle class and poor families so it's a problem and it's a problem everywhere um i i was listening to ksco radio and there was a gentleman on by the name of steve plage or something he mentioned that this county got 10 million dollars okay that's a lot of money that's a lot of money and it should not just go into your salaries and pocket books and the pocket books the salaries of the mental health building as well as the um uh homeless shelters to pay them that's enough money where this county could find a building there's so many do you know how many buildings out here are empty because businesses have left and closed down and every i drive i do food delivery for a living so as i drive around the city i see all these empty buildings and so i don't understand why this you y'all can't try to find a building to use it for the homeless and the other thing i wanted to mention was um so as i drive around and do my food delivery business i've been noticing the santa cruz police and the santa cruz sheriffs harassing and and giving the homeless people tickets now they know darn well that they can't pay these tickets and they'll eventually end up in jail your time is up and so you know they do that so they can get paid your time is up your next speaker i'm going to go ahead and we're going to go ahead and have the two uh folks here in the front and then uh one more uh speaker and those will be our last three speakers so after you go ahead mayor watkins council members i'm naggy ivy um my heart is really breaking for this community i've lived here for about 24 years it's a good hearted compassionate community it's a difficult conversation a speaker earlier urged you to vote for solutions but i think it's really hard to vote for a solution when we don't agree on the problem or really even acknowledge the problem it seems that we're conflating different issues we have a housing issue absolutely no argument about that but the ross camp is not a housing issue the ross camp is a result is a symptom of a pervasive and chronic drug problem in our community and we've all watched it grow over the years and it's a sad situation it's a disease addiction and like many of you in my family we've experienced that but in this community i think there's a fine line between compassion and enabling and we have to be really careful about how we move forward we need our leaders leaders to acknowledge what the problem is and i wish so much tonight that instead of looking at adopting a revised shelter crisis declaration we were talking about a drug crisis declaration i last night spent my evening watching seattle is dying and i cried because that's where our community is going perhaps we're already there but if we can't agree on what the problem is we cannot solve it with compassion thank you are you okay all right so the following four are our last speakers go ahead um i i'm not sure i mean i've heard this kind of circling around areas as a consideration but i was wondering about polganip as a possible place to have a camp and i guess i see that sort of from the camps that i've seen kind of the benchlands and then you know ross camp right now it's kind of hard and sort of those transient areas to actually establish a community which might actually be a bit at the core of a lot of these issues um i am cannot call myself a drug addict but i can only imagine if you don't feel you're part of a community there's not really going to be a lot of a takeoff point for that and polganip is a beautiful place and i think the more people sort of participate beyond i guess like the the church is bringing food and amenities and that sort of thing we could also make sure that there's efforts to do as much cleanup as possible because if i've hope in anything about centaurs it's the ability to get people to volunteer out of the spirit of keeping centaurs green definitely kind of seems like the spirit of the city so that's yeah i don't know i guess i have 45 seconds but that's pretty much it i am abbey i'm wondering how many people i just got here so i haven't heard a lot what was said but i'm wondering how many people that are that wish the ross camp would go away have actually spent time at the camp um i actually just came from the camp i didn't realize this would still be going otherwise i would have come here to make sure that none of the tents have been moved or taken down because i heard that there's been uh signs put on some of the tents um so i spent a lot of time there over this weekend i was there saturday and sunday i am willing to sleep there i go there alone i went there at night on sunday night i don't feel afraid i think there's a whole fear margaret i wish you could all go there and see it was so peaceful so quiet on saturday sunday yes there's drug use i doubted if it's more than 50 percent i think dr leff said it was less than 50 percent i'm wondering um well let me just put it this way if i was out there for more than a week i would definitely have heroin as my drug of choice and the way the people treat the people that are in the camp i would either go insane or probably take heroin so the thing is there is the compassion is bullshit you want to kick them out of the camp but yet you don't want them anywhere so you want them to disappear that's yes that's exactly what in you heard a yes there so that's exactly that's not going to happen that's really not going to happen so we need some solutions we need low barrier and we need high barrier we need all types of solutions oh i can speak longer because martina's in here i can get in my whole sentence thank you thank you good evening i'm scott cram and i believe you should adopt the revive shelter crisis declaration um there's a lot of people out there that don't understand what you're doing with that and don't realize that the one that's already in place gives you the same powers they're afraid this new one's going to give you so i don't see any reason why not adopt this because it clears up some of the language that the other one had kind of muddied um if you look at the fourth whereas in that resolution where it talks about the people that are affected by homelessness the children adolescents elderly and disabled people that's a national disgrace it doesn't just happen here in sanikers it's happening nationwide and it's a national disgrace that we have elderly people we have handicapped people we have children we have adolescents that are homeless in this country we're the most powerful richest country in the world and we can't even take care of the people that are here that's a disgrace so we need to do something and if passing this resolution will be a first step i think you need to do that secondly i think that you need to look closely at programs in the past do a cost benefit analysis to see where money is best spent where it actually gets to the people that that need the help instead of being eaten up by administration cost overhead cost faculty you know facility cost all that kind of stuff where where the money really gets to the people and can be put to the best use thank you thank you and mr. north you'll be our last speaker go ahead anybody else want to speak okay okay we've had a lot of organized nimbyism drug war hysteria needle mania and then fantasies of housing what we really have is a permanent reality of homelessness now what have we got here we have an alternate shelter pilot program in order for the ross camp to close or be significantly reduced because that's what this is really all about get rid of that ross camp that's the answer you see that that everyone is here for and that this council is playing with and that is an important consideration of that is say the ross camp really is an important place for people it's an emergency survival shelter and camp that was encouraged by police rangers and social services the staff's pilot program is far too small and limited it doesn't deal with the people that are going to be in the ross camp much less the broader homeless population even with the laurel street shelter the seventh avenue shelter the 1220 barbed wire boneyard river street shelter reopened and the 50 person safe sleeping or let's not have a transitional campground that would be too radical if it's actually available on april 17th none of these altogether will be effective for dealing with us so what are we really talking about it's a fantasy that these two city manager staff people are talking about and this is going to ignore whether folks will actually go to the location that punishes addicts establishes curfews and treats residents as prisoners or unruly children others will provide documentation of the staff's proposal while taylor de please the fearful simply doesn't pass the straight face test ignoring real numbers the alternative on april 17th is now going to be to flood the neighborhoods and the green belts with individuals camping alone or in groups that lack community protection and support the council must return to its wise decision february 26th to eliminate the ross camp closing date you can't do it unless you have the shelter you can't do it legally you can't do it sensibly and it just it's going to antagonize the very people in this audience that you're concerned with and please move that resolution council okay your time is up okay so okay right we'll go ahead and bring it back for action and deliberate deliberation it was brought to my attention that um we wanted to have a response as a response from our city staff in terms of some new information so please thank you mayor and council members i'm leba the director of planning and community development and wanted to um also add for your consideration some of the permitting processes associated with the three sites that have been recommended as the particularly the timing associated with those may help to inform the decisions that you make this evening so um there are multiple options by which we can uh prove these um uh safe sleeping sites and um the first um would be through if it's located on a public park the park's director could revise the hours of the park and um authorize this use that would be no hearing and i should mention you know we're we would explore any of these as the most expeditious way so just the options to consider uh the second would be a special event permit could be issued um with various conditions that also would not have a hearing the third would be there's a potential for an administrative or a special use permit um and that um depending on whether it's administrative or a special use permit could start with a zoning administrator um without a hearing but then could be appealed to the planning commission and then that could be appealed to the council in terms of the timing associated with that that is that approach um would benefit from the additional text that was added into the emergency shelter declaration crisis that said bring these things directly to the council because that appeal process can take some time and so to expedite that if we were taking the route of an administrative or special use permit the additional language in that emergency shelter crisis um would be beneficial for from a timing perspective and finally the fourth thing that needs to be considered is the coastal zone there are two of the properties in the coastal zone and whether or not they would have to go through a coastal permit or and a coastal exclusion so on the jesse street march um we could look at the parks director revising the hours we could look at a special event permit um with various conditions um and we could look at an administrative or special use the the thing that um could create some additional time on the jesse street march and the east cliff drive project as it's um identified here is that the coastal commission has direct permit authority on that site so either we would have two options we would go through the coastal commission for a um coastal permit or the council could direct us to through that emergency shelter declaration crisis um uh direct us to circumvent that process and proceed so that would be the the council's direction um and that site is doable we as bonnie mentioned before we were looking at the higher ground away from the marsh area but there's still permitting challenges associated with that depending on the route that we take particularly if we go through the coastal commission it could take some some longer a longer time period um on lot 24 north of depot park um a special event permit could be issued um no hearing for that and administrative or special use permit could um it could also be utilized um and for this one while it's in the coastal zone we would likely qualify for an exclusion and so that would not necessarily add to the time associated with the permitting for that and then finally uh the san lorenzo park site um the parks director would have the option um or a special event permit could be used um we could also go the administrative or special use permit route um and this is outside of the coastal zone so no coastal permit would be needed um it is um we would be looking at the san lorenzo park urban river management plan to evaluate how it's best conforming to to that and making sure that we're protecting the and the resources that we have environmental resources in close proximity and bonnie mentioned many of these sites have various constraints i just wanted to sort of highlight some of the permitting um steps and the timing associated with those as that may help inform the deliberations okay we'll return it back for a council action vice mayor coming i'm prepared to make a motion on the um declaration of a um shelter crisis okay are you only prepared to make a motion on that portion of the agenda yes just that portion okay do you want to go ahead and make that motion sure yeah um given the fact that some of these well not the scenarios presented to us today but in other circumstances that there might be um negative environmental impacts that should be assessed and for those reasons among others that the proposal of some of these camps should go through planning process i'm prepared to take no action on this item at this point in time with regards to declaring and updating the shelter crisis declaration so there's a motion to um not pursue the updated uh shelter declaration crisis by vice mayor Cummings is there a second i'll go ahead and second that um i too wanted to uh also think about how i'll second it for the reasons that i think you already alluded to and also how if we're moving forward and with the two by two with um an in concert with the county how are we uh taking the time to look at alignment in terms of strategies so um i would like to take that time personally so that's sort of the direction i mean councilmember brown and then council for this can i get some clarification um the motion is to take no action is the motion to defer this to a future date or just drop it to leave it as is is my understanding so to leave it the current shelter crisis as is the current declaration that we have in place as is i was actually prepared to support the revised declaration with additional changes having to do with the required permitting process um making it clear that any exemptions would be only for um fully managed staffed and secure facilities and um amending the declaration um uh expressly to involve the county and also uh that it would remain in effect only for one year unless renewed by a council um i would like to know from staff what benefits they see from uh or what the implications would be from staying with the existing resolution decoration uh as i understand it that would make it hard to move forward with what we're planning i think the predominant difference between the two is that language that director butler referenced about expediting the process so absent that um depending on what site council selects we will have to look at the normal trajectory of reviews and go through those normal processes so that will delay most likely or could delay um good thank you could delay um the ability to activate that site and open that up for a safe sleeping program and close down the gateway encampment so that was the one piece we felt actually helped hasten the ability to get something before public hearing at council and i'm get it open as quickly as possible council if i could just follow up i mean we did vote um just at our last meeting to um uh reaffirming our intention to close the uh ros encampment and i support that i support our move to uh um close that camp and find alternative um and safer options for those who are currently there um so i do support the idea of moving towards a small pilot limited secure managed uh safe sleeping and storage option as the necessary uh component for closing down the ros camp um so again i'm going to ask uh if we did not move forward with an amendment to um move any permitting process directly to city council that would um discard the target date that we had previously set for closing the ros camp am i correct in that so it depends on the site that you um kind of rises to the top in terms of council consideration so as director but butler mentioned each site has different constraints in terms of permitting and process and timeline so one thing that the council may consider in your deliberations is to get a little further along as to that site selection process so we can think about the shelter declaration within the context of the requirements to move forward quickly with that site rather than um kind of deliberating on that at this point but yes there is potential that we would it would move that april 17th date um either somewhat or significantly depending on the process can i can i just and then i'll i'm sorry i'll go ahead i just wanted to get a quick clarification on that because but the but the um assumption is is that the uh recommendations by the two by two with the additional bed space of uh 60 in addition to the increased capacity is not going to be sufficient but we don't quite know that essentially is that correct and that's why the additional site is necessary or is that the so the assumption is that we need those additional 50 beds so we need 100 beds that is the current assumption so we will be further evaluating the current census the sleeping census at the encampment with the help of the council the camp council but the current assumption based on our best knowledge to date is that the 100 beds is what we should be striving for council thank you can i just got some clarification on the language here because the vice mayor alluded to the issue of the potential need for environmental review but from your presentation and from the struck language here it can you remind me as to the removal of the two paragraphs at the bottom of page three that specifically remove the specifications that seco could be taken out and am i reading that wrong yeah so those right here yeah so i have it up on the screen and there are two companion um whereas clauses earlier in the declaration so here again this was that there's a very different voice with the existing shelter crisis declaration in this one the first one was based on uh the city of santa rosa this one was based on a legal document produced by the city of san diego and it had this stronger language but our sense in that reviewing the situation reviewing hearing the feedback about what people thought this might portend that it actually wasn't necessary that we would we would have regular channels where we could do evaluation or have exemptions especially because these are temporary uses so we thought well this probably isn't a tool that we would need to flex and because it did give rise to concerns in the community we thought it best to strike it out so there would need to be environmental reviews because of the concern that it was causing within the community based off of this language i just want to get a clarity on that not necessarily again this this depends on the site and um you know this is where we're working so quickly i do offer our apologies to the council week over week i mean it's every day we're exploring new dimensions and it's not normally done this quickly so we don't have everything fully um explained but as director butler outlined we actually do have a few different permitting pathways as well so i also want to kind of append my my answer of a moment ago about what would the existing shelter crisis be missing and marry it with your question um we could have we can modify hours and parks by the parks director we could issue a special event permit and we do have a precedent for this when there was the occupy demonstration in san lorenzo park a special event permit was issued for that um i i think what this really hinges on is the temporary use so really if we're just thinking 30 days which is what was proposed here i think we're in a very different um very different um class of review it is a very much a temporary use and i don't know if director butler wants to add anything else about um environmental review but i think that we we can operate and i don't think there'd be a high level of review okay i'm looking at the city attorney too and anything else otherwise i have one more question no that's that's right um statement the language that was originally drafted was intentionally very sweeping and we realized after talking it over further and listening to comments from council members and from members of the public that there were there were paths by which we could establish temporary um shelter programs and facilities um that would entail uh conducting some environmental review but would likely fall under um different categorical exemptions and so would not become a long drawn out process to evaluate in accordance with the requirements of sequa thanks and i know uh the the intention is not to have to use it but the ability to potentially use it if we need to to be able to move as quickly as possible and understanding the timeline that we're under and the severe situation that people are experiencing on the street the impact that neighbors are having with regards to issues in their communities i'm going to then make a substitute motion to adopt the revised shelter declaration second okay substitute motion um by council member clever seconded by council member crown okay so then we'll go ahead and vote on the substitute motion at this time is that correct or further discussion whether to accept the substitute motion okay we'll go vote to whether or to accept the substitute motion um does that allow for amendments to the substitute motion once it's considered yeah i believe so yes okay okay all those in favor in support of the substitute motion please say aye any opposed no no okay so that passes with council member crone clever brown and matthews in support council member meyers vice mayor comings and myself against so the substitute motion is on the floor to approve the resolution with the modifications that i believe will be suggested by i would like to add some potential um amendments to that uh one would be uh let me find them um that uh shelters not be placed in parks beaches streets and sidewalks without first requiring a public permit process the next would be um amending the declaration so it only allows public exemptions for fully managed professionally staffed and secure shelter facilities the amendment the declaration be amended so it expressly requests the county supervisors create shelter locations um i would amend that uh create um shelter or other homeless service locations outside the city and have the county bear its fair share of the responsibility for serving the homeless population and finally the the declaration remain in effect for one year unless renewed by council those amendments uh so three four and five i believe i can accept i just need more clarity on one and two if only had maybe part four i didn't make part four of the two parts one is that over there can we see them amending the declaration so that shelters cannot be placed in parks beaches streets and sidewalks without first requiring a public permit process okay so i'm just unclear as to what a public permit process entails could you or director butler clarify i would say that would just have to be and and i should say in that uh that that public review process could be handled directly by the city council rather than going through the lower planning processes i can accept that and the second one i'm sorry amending the declaration so it only allows public exemptions um of various requirements and standards for fully managed professionally staffed and secure shelter facilities so with that because transitional and KMM models have the aspect of self-governance but are overseen by a professional nonprofit and each of the volunteers goes through a specific uh and certified kind of training program that allows them to volunteer for four hours a week which creates that community and what we heard from the different members of the community with regards to the drug addiction issue if you ask the majority of drug addiction specialists one of the main issues solutions to drug addiction is the feeling of connection and community so and working away from isolation and kind of marginalization so i think that having the ability for camp residents eventually to be able to participate in some kind of a functionary role at the camp is important and essential so if that's taken out by only professional paid whatever the staff description you had it then that'll be uh i won't be able to accept that but i want to clarify so to make sure maybe we're on the same page apparently not okay councilmember brown so i will put another way would self-governance of some sort and engagement be precluded assuming there is a managed an operator that's managing the site this is a question councilmember matthews this language requires fully managed and professionally staffed and i should also say that it will have gone through a permit process and there will be conditions of approval for a permit i'm just trying to understand the distinction because i don't see how those two is mutually exclusive well i am not in favor of a self-managed facility okay okay councilmember yeah i just want to clarify that it's not self-managed because it's managed by a non-profit but there is responsibilities given to the volunteers in order to be able to stay at the facility so it requires buy-in and participation so essentially if i'm understanding everybody correctly that there is an understanding of a professional staff managing the camp yes okay is that but the inclusion of volunteer participation from with new participants for inclusion because then i can accept it anything in the world can have volunteers i'm concerned about professional management that's part that's a component that's part of it yeah absolutely does that work okay okay i can accept those do you accept those as well as the seconder of the motion councilmember i had a question about um well is there is a language that we can put in there that does codify or make sure that there is going to be an element of self-governance within the camp i think that as it comes up before us for deliberation we can decide on that within the permitting process of the camp and facility and then the group can decide i had a question for councilmember mathews when you said have county bear it's fair share what what exactly does that mean does that mean we're just asking them or we're um can't force them to do anything we are in a two by two process we're not going to not do something because they're not going to do something right okay okay so it appears that the friendly amendments proposed by councilmember mathews have been accepted by the maker of the motion the seconder of the motion okay so we'll go ahead and vote on that and then move on to the additional items before us and i've been trying to capture what i'm hearing i don't know is it down there on the tv in front of you so i just wanted to does this sound i haven't gotten third so be it further resolved that no shelter may be placed in parks beaches streets and sidewalks without first requiring public review and permitting process public review permitting permitting process thank you um be it further resolved that shelters must be fully managed and professionally staffed and secure and i didn't catch the end of that dialogue how was this i think what they landed on is when it comes for the permitting process that elements around self-governance would be considered within those conditions as a component of professionally run so let me just amplify a bit uh without first requiring public review and permitting process with conditions of approval to be handled uh directly at the city council level and then um the final was be it further resolved that the county santa cruz is requested um was there a afraid ways that you a way that you phrase that um amend the declarations uh expressly requesting that the county board of the county of santa cruz um uh create or locate homeless serving facilities outside the city limits and bear its fair responsibility serving services and this is just a statement of what we've already expressed and bear there for sure and bear its fair um responsibility of um meeting the needs of the homeless population of the response yeah thank you appreciate it's with an apostrophe of the homeless community okay and let's see what type of story i have population is there it's yeah i think councilor glover said that thank you okay councilmember mayors was there also a term yes excuse me you were right that the declaration remain in effect for one year unless renewed by council that's a change to some other language there is language in the revisions as it remains in force until terminated this this gives a sunset another um friendly amendment to the declaration which would state that be it further resolved that the city initiate a process for collecting demographic information necessary to the process of developing a sustainable and outcome-based homeless policy including such information as may relate to the work history residents and life history family criminal history eligibility for government or private support disabilities special needs and other relevant data related to the individuals to be served under the scribes shelters and facilities said information i can email this to you as well said information should be confidential as to the subject individual to whom it relates but shall be made aggregated and made available to the city council city staff and the public at large in a format that does not identify the individuals to whom it relates so yeah idea being that we're able to capture information on the people who are coming in and out of the camps understanding different aspects of their history so that we can better provide them the best resources possible and also understand whether or not given the fact that some people in the community are concerned with people who may be sex offenders at the camps or have some history that that information be collected as well so that we know more about the people who were serving at the camps and we have a friendly amendment by vice mayor Cummings it looks like a question by council member brown and i have a question as well on that i um vice mayor Cummings i understand where you're uh coming from and potentially going with that um that friendly amendment i'm just wondering if a resolution is the place to direct this action because the resolution would be kind of a blanket statement whereas this is this is requesting some information gathering that we and i think we can do that outside of the resolution itself um so i just don't know maybe staff you can suggest what i believe we've been directed to do this already already i think two meetings ago this was part of i believe the february 26th meeting i believe was at the last meeting thank you march and it really was around the the needs assessment gap analysis really understand standing the dem sorry the demographic that we're serving not to the level of specificity that vice mayor Cummings provided but i think we could use that language in further defining the process for which we'll get to um what we're what we might be calling a shelter feasibility study or kind of a gap analysis in terms of who who are serving and help us to serve them so just to follow up uh what would the appropriate uh action be for us to ensure that that language is included in the previous you know in further some further direction about that how how would we do that no if we do we do you think we need a motion because we're matthews and then yeah maybe an idea on that i think yeah um as a directive for all of that that's extremely specific and you have to figure out the capacity to collect that information i think the general direction was given previously um certainly some sort of information gathering could be part of a permitting process the conditions of approval could be for operations and gathering of information on individual served yeah so i think maybe we're talking about two distinct things what i heard vice mayor Cummings talking about was more of looking generally at our at our population at large and understanding the current conditions for which if we have unsanctioned encampments notwithstanding the gateway encampment that we have a better understanding of who is that population and how best to serve them that is definitely part of this what we will be taking to the two by two in terms of a needs assessment and better understanding that as it relates to individual programs certainly we can have that kind of more data driven analysis of how best to serve the clients that we're trying to attract and have that discussion with the council as we consider permits vice mayor Cummings to say i'd just like to say for the just one more comment on this and the the reason why this is being suggested is because of the fact that if this comes up again in the future when we have to declare another shelter crisis that this be incorporated and so it is a part of the process when we begin to move forward um but i'd be if the if staff is already moving forward with this i'd be happy to um remove my friendly amendment at this point in time okay so we'll go ahead and have the record reflect that the friendly member was withdrawn at this point okay council member crown just wondering how is that information collected that sound like a tall order what vice mayor put out there and who is are we contracting with somebody to come in and collect this information so that that those questions have not been resolved yet so um the process for which i would imagine this to take place is the county is has already entered into a contract with a consulting firm that's doing a systems analysis with regard to homelessness service in the county we are engaging with the county on whether this analysis could be added to their current scope if that is not the case we would have to return to council with some direction as to hiring any consultant to do this work okay so we um have a motion on the floor uh by council member glover seconded by council member crone with the incorporation of council member matthew's um information all those in favor please say aye aye any opposed no no okay so that passes with council member brown matthew's crone glover um in support vice mayor Cummings council member mires and myself voting against okay council member glover i'd like to move on the staff recommendation to direct the city manager to implement a small-scale safe sleeping and storage program as well as selecting a site i'm gonna second that but i wanted to ask what the difference was between the um any uh a small-scale safe sleeping and storage versus at the encampment but what what what is a small scale safe sleeping and storage where does that happen what i'm sorry where does that happen what is it uh so um maybe we could return to the slide that talks about the distinction between the two so it it's um virtually the same as a transitional encampment with regard to the population that we're trying to serve the um the amount of capacity that we're talking about so we were provided direction last week to provide sites for up to 50 individuals um in terms of rules of conduct and how those programs would be managed we would expect and especially based on today's conversation to have them professionally managed by a nonprofit or quite frankly the city would also have to be um part of that conversation in terms of us again going into the business of operating a shelter so one of those two bodies would be moving forward with operations the distinction between safe sleeping and transitional encampments is really the time of day for which people would be expected to be on the facility the um safe sleeping is really a dusted on program say 9 p.m to 6 a.m and then people would be expected to vacate the the area and then come back later than that next evening um in terms of the rules of conduct they would be very similar between the two the distinction um also is that safe sleeping although there are some programs that i've seen in my research where there is some level of self-governance it would be a fully professionally managed program um we would um based on actually council direction from several meetings ago um security would be required um and in addition to that it really is um you know intended to be accessible by foot day day for folks and then also be fully flexible in terms of who we are allowing in as long as they're um adhering to those rules of conduct where would it be that's up to you guys are you saying that it's in the it's going to be in the sites that have been um identified by the well those those are the sites that we would like for you to deliberate on this evening so just for clarity my understanding is that if we are pursuing a safe sleeping site then the the ask from staff is for the council tonight to choose one of the three sites as the interim sort of pilot location that reflects yeah recommend a preferred site recommend a preferred site council member miahs and i'd council and i've heard that this would be a site that would be for at this point for 30 days is that correct is that your recommendation so we're looking for the site and then the facility would be a safe safe sleeping and storage and right now the recommendation is 30 days is that correct yeah so tina did allude to that so at this time i think it would be beneficial for the council to consider this as a 30 day renewable kind of month by month program based on several factors um we are not getting to um the results that council has been considering over the last couple meetings as with regard to a very deliberate six month say pilot but i do believe um if we have the ability to on a month by month basis really evaluate the effectiveness of the program really think about um how um questions around compatibility um are taken under consideration um really think about what those performance metrics should look like from the perspective not of only um clients of the safety sleeping program but also um safety concerns in the neighborhood i think it is beneficial for the council to consider a really short term program that we will re-engage with the council on a month by month basis to ensure that we can keep moving forward okay i just want to let the folks who are here know what we're doing and what when this might end um because they came for something else that was supposed to start at seven o'clock can we give them an idea of what possibly when we might be finished deliberating here we could we could move we could move this right along if you'd like at this point it's just a matter of us deciding which location if a location is selected and um and uh and and moving forward with the interim site so we could i mean we could essentially wrap it up in about five ten minutes or we could go thanks i just want to let them know thanks want councilor mayas i just have one additional question will the site will the however many sites based on the site will those be offered to folks at the ross camp as that is scheduled for closure i'm understanding correctly got the priority for for these absolutely sites yes thank you and if i could and then i'll and the recommendation based on sort of all the different considerations was the san lorenzo site is that clear from staff or am i so i might have to yield director butler on this but um i don't think any of the sites is absolutely preferable i think what we have determined over the last few hours as we've been sitting here in these discussions is that the jesse street marsh um site requires a coastal permit it's kind of outside of our jurisdiction and so it will require more time from that perspective i do believe that lowers it in terms of its our ability to move swiftly on it so we're down to lot 24 and the san lorenzo park benchlands neither of those sites um is um ideal obviously but i do believe both of them can be implemented in about the same amount of time okay councilmember mathews and then councilmember clever um we are talking about a 30-day renewable and uh in reference to i think it was donna's question um being made available to those who are currently at the ross site if they agreed at the conditions this is a this is a clearly managed relatively high barrier yeah as it relates to rules of conduct absolutely so if i so now we're down if i'm hearing you correctly in terms of the two that the council could prioritize our site two and site five essentially yeah yeah that's correct okay councilmember clever thanks and to my understanding neither of those sites will provide enough space in collaboration even with the salvation army and the 1220 river street to accommodate all of the people at the at the site uh speak specifically the ross camp is a correct assertion no i i don't believe that's a correct assertion i think between river street camp 50 sites at either lot lot 24 or the benchlands in addition to um capacity that might be at our other sheltering options that is the our kind of our target number that we expect to um be trying to achieve to close the encampment and and 50 so just because we didn't have the tent layout like we did with lot 24 you would anticipate that there would be a total of 50 if we open up both the sites or 50 say at the san lorenzo benchlands no i think either site we can um we can likely i mean we have to get down to the granularity here but um the intention is to fit 50 individuals at either of the sites not combined and what is the feasibility of since i've dry spoke with the fire chief about and also the people at the camp the feasibility of exploring the pogonet um at this time i would not recommend moving forward with the pogonet we put a ton of consideration into the pogonet for the a year and a year or so ago for the purposes of the river street camp um that uh requires um it's it has accessibility issues especially for public safety personnel am our personnel the road all the way up to the the clubhouse is quite challenging um in addition just the level of accessibility quite frankly for folks who are mobility impaired i think would be extremely challenging for folks i mean this really needs to be a site that people can access pretty easily so that would not be my recommendation at this time okay so given the information does the council member want to move with a recommendation to pursue a safe sleeping site at either of the two locations to entertain a motion to move this along yeah uh i go ahead council member uh my concerns with lot 24 just so you can add it to the slide is the proximity to the gentleman's business that spoke there he is yeah absolutely so wanting to make sure uh that there's enough kind of thought put into it so that whatever concerns he has are taken into consideration with that space uh i think that if we can i mean the my only concern there also is the proximity i know that there's an issue with the density at the Ross camp and so if we're trying to cram 50 people into a place where only 27 10 by 10 10 mock-ups could fit i'm just concerned about the density there um other things i like that it's centrally located i like that it's a pre-existing lot uh that doesn't have as big of an environmental impact so that's a positive aspect to it and it's pretty close to transit since it's downtown so that is a benefit also the San Lorenzo benchlands uh both sites lack privacy i think that's a big issue for the people that are there luckily we'll put up the mesh netting so that's a possibility um San Lorenzo park is the proximity to the playground as a problem that have been voiced by the community but it has a bigger footprint i think so we'll be able to have less density and it's not directly located next to a business councilmember guver one one point of clarification so the slide that um Bonnie um showed with regard to lot 24 uh really reflected what i would consider a transitional encampment configuration not necessarily safe sleeping configuration so for other dusted on programs there is the potential of having a large pop-up structure that actually houses a number of people in a small space in addition to individual tents so in terms of density density and kind of how best to fit that within this context i think there's more flexibility than we're currently demonstrating and envisioning um and those dusted on programs typically do allow for a myriad of different sleeping situations and it's not all individual tents and those tents that we would also allow could not be huge i mean we they'd have to be pretty um nominal in size okay so um were you yeah um taking into consideration uh and the community and making sure that there's the inclusion of community conversation around it it seems like lot 24 so i'd make a motion to establish a safe sleeping site at lot 24 okay there's a motion by council member clever to establish a safe sleeping site at lot 24 is there a second i'd like to hear other council members um yeah uh weigh in i mean i personally don't want to see it in a park i think that this would if we're going in this direction this would be the best place is the degraded excuse me it's an asphalt area it's not in a park um and i think it would be a better way to go if if other council members are i don't know what you're going to um propose if anything and we're going to leave it here like this and just move on to our next meeting is that a second i'll second for discussion okay so we have a motion by council member clever a second by uh council member crone um further discussion council yeah another consideration is it is immediately across from the um soccer field that's used during all daylight hours uh i am and it is also a heavily used lot um both for the um parking permits and the residential areas the apartments nearby and public parking during the summer time so there's a lot of demand there um and on the other hand the one by the uh san lorenzo park um my concern about that is for lack of a better term uh the fallout during the day time i mean the san lorenzo park has been so impacted by um let's just say negative uses chop shops and drug dealing and all sorts of stuff over time that's made it um really unusable for long periods of time um it's clearly there's no no good site uh if there were we would have found it so i guess i'm gravitating to 24 kind of against my best instincts but i think we are looking at it as a a 30 day temporary renewable thank you i just realized that we have uh members in the audience that are providing their own solutions or suggestions and we haven't even spoken about them yet so uh there's one here about the locus street garage that someone brought up during public comments and then i saw another suggestion out there about actually positioning the transitional space on the soccer field which is named after scott kennedy founder of the resource center for non-violence and who i believe would be open to closing his uh uh his soccer field to allow for us to do some transitional or temporary sleep spaces so um with the staff i would ask the question um what are your thoughts on the locus street garage and uh put in on depot park uh or scott kennedy field i am looking for a public works director up to maybe wait in thank you mark to wait in the locus street garage i mean i can say generally the the lower level locus street garage that entire garage is used very very heavily i think it's maybe fully subscribed with parking permits if not nearly subscribed um so i i think that it was taken out because of one of our initial criteria we're looking at conflicting uses and we already have de facto contracts with people to park their vehicles so but before you do if i may uh just in the interest of time and then the interest of also many many options to consider um and considering the kind of the item before us i'm wondering if we could potentially have this conversation offline or revisit it at a future time given that there's many many sites to explore then i would uh change the motion to move the conversation of the establishment of a safe sleeping zone or a transitional encampment or safe parking program to the april ninth council meeting and um make sure that we secure the language that the ross camp will not be closed unless there is ample shelter space for those currently living in the camp at that period of time is that is that a motion that's part of the no that's withdraw my original motion and then put a new uh one on there that says we move the decision making to april ninth on these issues i second okay uh so um i suspect had we given uh director duttall an opportunity to discuss the loka street garage i don't i don't think we would i think we'd have a strong suggestion not to consider that at this time um and in addition to that um i think we would also have significant challenges with depot field so it would be my strong preference for us to try to move forward i think april ninth is too close to when we're trying to make a difference with regard to the encampment and then also with um trying to open up the river street program and this program at the same time we are moving forward with a salvation army and we would essentially be postponing opening that program and serving our community and and not moving forward quickly so i you know i i do think it would be beneficial for the council to try to do this tonight would that help if you heard from our uh public order yeah so based off of that uh staff recommendation then i'll stick with my original motion to uh instruct staff to look at the or to implement a small scale safe sleeping and storage site for up to 50 people or 50 450 people make that solid language um and to use lot 24 with a community input and problem solving process to address the issue of the proximity to the business okay so that's the original motion that was made by councilor glever and seconded by council and i would call the question just in the interest of time here second that so the question has been called at this time uh no further no further discussion okay so we'll okay so if the question is called then we will vote to uh accept the motion as is at this time correct vote to call the question vote to call the question right and if we don't call the question we could entertain a clarifying uh i believe if you vote to call the question then you just have to take the vote after the vote is made to call the question okay so we'll take the vote to call the question all those in favor please say aye aye all those opposed no no okay so that uh fails with councilmember brown matthew spice merecomings and myself phoning i'm sorry that the question was called councilor crone glever and uh myers voted in favor councilmember brown matthew spice merecomings and myself voting against so we can go ahead and revisit the conversation around the motion at an interest of hearing whatever you wanted to address i'd be happy to do that thank you i just want to affirm that this is for a 30 day period renewable in 30 day increments um is that that was understood in the discussion but i'd like to have that included in the motion is that agreeable yeah my only uh concern with that is the lack of continuity like i understand 30 days is a comfortable monthly just like a rent kind of structure but i think there should be some kind of continuity to be able to get good data so it's not just a month of data and then if we decide to close it because it's a bad month for whatever reason which i don't imagine it would be but like why not do it for 90 days and then reassess or 60 days but why why 30 days because that's how it's been described to us up to this point so i think we can get to some of your questions when we go through the permitting process as to what those performance metrics would look like and how to best collect data for which you can make an informed decision so i think for you know the intentionality around the 30 days was really just to have more touch points with the council and more touch points with the community quite frankly in terms of how the program is fitting into the neighborhood um in consideration of not only the clients we're serving but also those potential impacts either we or perceived with the adjacent uses yeah i can accept that but i do just want to make sure that and maybe my seconder will approve of this but i want to make sure that there's a language in there that says that we will not close the Ross camp until we for sure have the shelter space available because yeah for some for some people it was a little bit unclear in the last minutes or in the agenda reports so i just want to make sure that there's the 50 beds on top of the 60 from the 1220 and then the salvation army yeah and i think that's in the previous direction from last week already to make sure that it's a language yes right and that is the language that was adopted last week okay so it looks like we're there so we'll go ahead and vote on the motion made by council member Glover seconded by council member crone with the clarification asked by council i asked for one clarifying point sure we did hear a presentation earlier in the evening on the adoption of some standard operating procedures to ensure that the camp is closed in a way that's consistent with martin vs poise in the in the line of cases that have started following it so i was wondering if the maker would incorporate the implementation of a standard operating procedures sure guide to bring back to the council for consideration of future meeting as well that was yeah okay so it looks it sounds like that was implied that's officially now being incorporated okay all those in favor please say aye that was opposed no no that passes with council member crone glover brown matthews in support uh vice mayor comings meyers and myself voting against okay so that will conclude the item i think we got there and we'll go ahead and take a brief break and reconvene for our delayed and apologize i apologize for the delay for the evening the remainder of our evening session so we'll take a recess we have maybe 15 minutes i would say five minutes okay 10 minutes 10 minutes to eat okay we'll get back thank you good evening everybody i'm going to go ahead and call our meeting back to order um so the last item on today's agenda is a study session on transportation demand management as a reminder the order will be a staff and consultant presentation and that will be followed by questions from the council and then we will take public comment but this is a study session in which there is no real direction or action asked of the council on this item so i'll go ahead and turn it over to our staff to kick us off good evening council and public general public care uh jim burr and claire fleece are here from the transportation division public works and uh we have a brief staff presentation to kind of kick off the study session for transportation demand management we'll refer to it as tdm over and over tonight most of the tools we'll be talking about tonight are targeted not broadly at tdm but more about stretching our limited parking supply in the downtown district um the parking district is uh up on the screen surrounded by a blue border it's a very unique area in town it has a whole separate set of parking requirements different from the entire rest of the city the two main ways they are different is that in businesses and projects in the downtown district do not need to provide their parking on site um nor even within 300 feet like that which is a rule outside of the district also the parking required for businesses are greatly reduced from like 25 to almost 90 percent of what's required outside the district so it's um easy not to see that line when you're thinking about the city but it really is a very different area and again a completely different set of rules and regulations around parking the district was established in 1956 primarily to collect fees for consolidated parking this really is an aid urban design it's better land used it's better for a pedestrian shopping experience and it's a more effective way to build and use parking the parking fund is supported by parking fees and rents it has its own budget with no impact to the general fund as far as i know it's never had an impact to the general fund for almost five decades certainly over four the district was primarily funded by businesses through the deficiency fee however over the last dozen years or so the more and more projects have been brought from free parking to paid parking the green lines on the bar chart here excuse me on the line chart show some of the major times that we've either gone from free to paid parking or increased the pricing the thick blue line across the top is the occupancy during our peak time study which is typically done at the busiest time of the year just before christmas and you'll see that line is fairly consistent across the years doesn't really react to the small price increases that we've been careful to add over the years we do have most of our facilities as paid parking now and that enabled us to bring the pricing strategy back to you in september and launch into that next stage that we had adopted back then although the district has always been self-supporting as i mentioned by the end of 2022 it'll be fully user funded in other words the businesses will be completely out of it the sun the deficiency fee has been sunsetted and it steps down over a couple more years here until the end of 2022 parkers at that point will truly be covering the entire cost of parking of the 3000 spaces downtown the 3000 public spaces that we manage almost three quarters of them are in structures and lots and again that's the blue line up top i separate that out just to show kind of the consistency over over the decades the orange line below it is private parking we do not control that and it's hard to say exactly what's going on with that but if you've been to if you've been to the trader joe's lot anytime over the last few years you know that you can't really park there and leave you could be towed and maybe there's other larger lots like that where that's happening at any rate the district doesn't control it and and therefore i separated it out so we see these high occupancies in the peak time studies more importantly we collect data daily it's real time data and we're converting to that we'll probably stop doing the peak time studies there they served a purpose at one time in one point in history but but not so much anymore our smarking data shows us that in 2018 our three main structures the so-called front was for 80 days it exceeded the 90 capacity at the locus structure 230 days and at the cedar walnut structure almost 300 days 296 most of those are weekdays i can i could note so we're you know consistency consistently seeing these high occupancies and this really lends itself to our effort and increased effort in the area of tdm i have one more slide for you this is when i started in 1994 these are city employees proudly wearing their cruising commuter t-shirts and it just shows you know the city has been working out in tdm for a long time and claire is going to point out some of the some of the landmarks and and and where that has gotten us but we'll continue that commitment so good evening as jim mentioned i'm claire fleece i'm a transportation planner for the city and to orient you to what we're going to talk about for the rest of our presentation we're going to talk about what tdm is uh talk about where we are right now where we're starting what things we're about to embark on and then give you a brief brief overview of what some of the best practices are and how they relate to what we already do as a city so transportation demand management the slide probably looks familiar i showed it to you about a month ago when we adopted the downtown tdm program it's just a general term for strategies that result in the more efficient use of our transportation resources these include using alternative modes such as transit carpooling biking walking they include shifting or consolidating work schedules telecommuting and many other things that result in fewer people parking fewer people driving during peak hours and more people using alternatives or choosing not to travel during those times that we know were really impacted i'm sorry this is not close enough again just another way to show it our whole goal is to meet people where they are in Santa Cruz and shift people from driving alone to considering and then using other modes of transportation or choosing to travel at different times thereby overall reducing our single occupant vehicle trips which has the resulting benefit in downtown of really conserving our parking resources which we know are impacted transportation and parking are so intrinsically linked but tonight we're going to be really talking about the transportation demand management side of that and how that relates to reducing our parking demand this is one of my favorite quotes as you guys have probably heard in public correspondence a couple of years ago the planning commission and the downtown commission had a joint meeting and we invited some folks from some different transportation firms to come present and this is a slide that kept they pulled from there and it's a quote by Andres Dwayne who is a really prominent urbanist he started the congress for new urbanism and it says of course there isn't enough parking if he gave away free pizza would you ever have enough pizza and this reiterates back to really needing to actively manage the resources we have we know we have limited roadway capacity we know that we have limited parking capacity and looking at that and seeing what are the carrots and sticks that we can use to influence behavior we've been really successful at that to date I think we have a plan going forward that's going to enable us to continue being successful and just bridging off the graph that Jim showed earlier continuing to increase our parking pricing and bring more paid parking online has been a core element of our TDM program going back many years now so overall transportation and parking are not the point and that's something that I want you to remember as we talk about that why we're talking about transportation and parking is because people want to get to places and we're talking about transportation and parking as it relates to our downtown because we have an amazing downtown we have a downtown where people live and work and play and recreate and come to stroll and window shop and meet friends and have a sense of community no one comes downtown because they want to go to our parking structure they come downtown because they want to go to a restaurant or to their job or to another place that is important to them so you know we like to joke that we think we're doing a good job when you don't have to think about us when you don't have to think about transportation and parking because the system's working right now we're talking a lot about transportation and parking because our downtown is thriving our vacancy rate is low employment is high people are interested in coming and living downtown and that's creating more and more of a pinch and it creates a really good opportunity to talk about what are the transportation elements and the parking elements that we are going to implement moving forward to keep our downtown a really amazing place to be it's also important to note that our downtown is not static it's always changing some of you may remember this slide from this past June because our downtown is always changing we know that we're not planning for today the choices that we're making right now are going to be what the next generation of people in Santa Cruz is going to see just as you know they weren't expecting cars to be the main mode of transportation in 1888 we're not thinking that that's going to be our our long-term method of transportation for everyone as much as it is now and that's why we're investing so heavily in alternatives you'll see you know the final the final piece from the earthquake is now being filled in is under construction right now so again our downtown is always changing and what we see on the street right now isn't the same that we're going to see in 10 years so really keeping that forward-looking lens and not just thinking about how to solve the problems that we see today but thinking further than just today tomorrow next year into the next 10 years next 20 years etc so things to be proud of in our current mode split which is how we refer to how people get around a mode could be driving biking walking transit carpooling etc to orient to this chart the united states is blue Santa Cruz is red we're much lower than the united states as a whole in the percentage of people who drive alone the state is from the american community survey one-year data it's the most recent data that's been reported as you can see here our drive alone rate is currently citywide at 61.1 percent you may note that these numbers are slightly different than what we presented last month because that was just a survey of downtown workers these are citywide numbers hugely important here is that you may notice our walking number is drastically higher at the united states as a whole we're at 9.9 percent which is phenomenal but even more phenomenal is that 13.2 percent of people who state that they commute by bike to work that is the second highest bike mode split in the united states of america that's something that has continued to increase year over year as we've continued to invest in transportation alternatives namely in biking and you can look around our community and you can point those facility improvements out left and right you can see the cycle track in front of the boardwalk you can see the green lanes that we've put in you can see them recently completed branch four to creek bike and pedestrian bridge and you can see that corresponding to those investments that you have made the decision to make we have seen our bike ridership rate increase drastically and this is something that i hope you'll tell all your friends and make sure everyone knows about because it's something that we should be really really really proud of and that we should continue to increase i'm going to go ahead and pause we'll go ahead and let you know that this is the time for our staff to present without interruption from the community we will open it up for public comment but if you could please not make any comments while we have our presentation okay go ahead so uh just to follow up on that slide you saw our drive alone rate is significantly lower than the nation as a whole and biking and walking where we really want to be doing well we are excelling and this comes from decades of effort this is not something that happened overnight this is not something that last year we decided that we wanted to excel at it's because we've been making hard choices on what to invest in for decades on decades and decades long you know before i was born and moving forward hopefully after i die we'll still be making the same great choices and it's resulted in real changes so leading into uh just a brief overview of best practices on tdm and my goal for this is to orient you to what some of the tools in the toolbox are and directly relate that to the things that we're already doing and what we have upcoming so you can relate the upcoming presentations to knowing what we have going on right now and what we have forthcoming so an overview of the best practices and i'll i'll go into these in more detail and there are many more of these but this is just a brief selection pricing having the user pay for parking drastically increases how people choose to get around making alternative options available also makes it more feasible for people to choose not to drive and use an alternative mode density and diversity having a downtown district like we have means that you can make many trips many destinations from one single trip making it easier having a land use mix there's been a lot of research that shows that having different types of land uses together rather than just offices in one area and just single family homes in another area influences transportation choice and information also providing great way finding on how to get around and making people feel more comfortable in that way so parking pricing the first thing here when people question that they have to pay to park it makes them directly link that financial decision to maybe thinking another mode might work for them our parking pricing just increased to eight dollars a day and i know for me even when it's raining i think could i could i put up with the rain and ride my bike just a little ways and save eight dollars some days i choose yes some days i choose no it depends but it does make me have that thought there and that's what the research shows for other people as well the best practice is to have the person paying for parking and using that parking resource pay that full cost of parking and at your september 11th meeting when you approved our updated parking rate strategy that's exactly what you approved we are sunsetting our parking deficiency fee over a five-year period what that fee is amounted to is businesses subsidizing the operation of parking and in sunsetting that we're shifting the full cost of parking to the user in line with the best practices of tdm at the same time right now with our downtown commission we are working with a ad hoc subcommittee on updating our in lieu fees offering an alternative for developers to providing their parking on site to instead pay into our overall parking district resulting in less parking overall and a more efficient use of parking rather than provide parking in every single development and not use that valuable land area for housing units or other productive uses we could use our shared parking system in that way and really make our transportation transportation demand management program stronger alternative options first off we're really really proud that we will be rolling out our downtown tdm program expansion with your vote last month we are currently working on developing our eco pass program we are working with jump on a contract amendment to get bike share passes to downtown employees just today i received our bike locker cards that we can start giving out to people and we're really going to be able to expand the options available to help people choose alternative means rather than single occupant vehicle to just get downtown as i mentioned also investing in complete streets and bike and pedestrian improvements that make people feel safe choosing other modes and make it feel like it's achievable to them and closing gaps in the network really influences mode choice bike share something that i'm really proud of and i hope you all are as well that we've rolled out the increases transportation options for our community and then not forgetting transit shared mobility options and carpooling further our downtown we have a park once and walk strategy so even if you are driving downtown you might be hitting six different businesses during that time maybe you're going to work and then you're grabbing cup of coffee you're going to lunch you're going to your eye doctor you're stopping the grocery store you're going back to work and you're going home that's one trip instead of six and so having these mixed land uses is something that really supports our tdm strategy so just a highlight i couldn't forget bike share small snippet we're still seeing over five trips per bike per day so far we've had over 200,000 rides it'll be our one-year anniversary in may may is bike month and i'm hoping that we crack that quarter million in the first year another best practice approach is to use a district approach to tdm and really look at how you use parking revenues to really improve the downtown environment that makes choosing alternative modes work better we use our parking funding to improve project feasibility allowing that opt-out of providing parking on site and then investing those in living fees or deficiency fees or revenues in other district improvements parking revenues right now fund streetscape improvements our street scrubber as well as multimodal improvements we use parking revenues right now to sponsor bike to work day as well as our bike lockers and some other transportation demand management elements i'll also get more into shared parking facilities and how that supports at tdm and as jim mentioned in our downtown we do have reduced parking requirements so within downtown our parking requirements are 25 to 75 lower than outside of downtown so one of the strategies is to have lower parking requirements that's something we're doing um shared parking you may have heard me use the term pancakes pint pancakes pottery pints and pillows uh our downtown is entirely based on a shared parking approach so we have all these different land uses so one parking space turns over two to four times a day on an average two to three and you may have someone coming downtown in the morning to go to breakfast at ulna avenue cafe and they park they have some pancakes they leave a family comes downtown mid-morning to go to petroglyph they paint some pottery they park once then they leave after their trip someone else comes down parks in that same space to meet their friends at 99 bottles for a pint after work they have a pint they leave they drive away then someone who lives downtown comes home they park in that same space for the fourth time that day a different trip and they then go home and they sleep on their pillows so pancakes pottery pints and pillows if it helps you remember anywhere else outside of our downtown these businesses would provide four different parking spaces an average of 300 square feet per parking place that's taking up a lot of land area in the downtown because we have a mix of businesses that operate at different times for different uses our parking is used much more efficiently than anywhere else downtown leading to an overall smaller footprint of land area dedicated to parking the proximity of these uses and the availability of consolidation of facilities also makes our downtown much more walkable in that these these uses are located much closer together much different than if you would go to the capitol mall and we're having to walk from one place to another a big buck store that's further away and then finally for TD I'm providing wayfinding and information and making it easier for people to know how to get to where they're going how far it is and how long it will likely take them as you know right now we have a wayfinding project underway the construction documents are almost ready right now and we're looking forward to rolling that out that's going to be integrated with walking wayfinding parking wayfinding um bike wayfinding and the RTC is also implementing a bike route signage signage program at the same time so we're really going to be increasing the awareness and information available to people helping them choose how they're going to get around and influence their transportation behavior finally uh this slide you've seen as well in our downtown specifically as we presented in February we've done multiple downtown employee commute surveys with hundreds of downtown employees participating in those our current mode split for the downtown specifically is on the top and we are um committed with the goal to reducing our single occupant vehicle trip to below 50 percent we think this is achievable with the investments that we're going to make and it's not going to happen tomorrow but tomorrow's not what we're planning for we're planning for the years to come and knowing that these incremental changes that we're making are going to get us moving in the right direction in closing for our presentation we know that TDM is a critical component to our overall downtown we're committed to continuing the work that we've been doing on our TDM program and we're excited for all the programs that are going to come and with that said Gemini's presentation is complete and we'll be available at the end for questions thank you so much for your presentation and for your hard work for our city um are there any questions at this time from council members for our staff three quick questions um my first question is if you don't mind how many um commissioners are with us tonight from various commissions I see a couple yeah thank you so much for coming really appreciate it glad you're here and feel free to weigh in on stuff too um just wondering uh three questions one was uh Jim you said going to stop doing peak time data why is that maybe I missed the reason I'm sorry with with modern technology we have the ability now to collect daily uh real time data and uh with the addition of the meters on Pacific Avenue now we have 100 credit card meters they have a full back end software package that will be able to analyze much much better and just checking this one busiest day of the year anything could happen we could have a snowstorm we could have a rainstorm we could have a you know a snapshot will change you know it's not uncommon to see a 10 percent differential in traffic volumes from day to day uh and so um I don't know what the exact number is for parking but there's probably a fair amount of variability in there and um when you said 9.9 walk 13.2 bike how many were the percentage of busing looks like 4.3 4.3 and my last question is um when the eco passes become a reality so we can get it up to 13.2 yeah so we're estimating right now and working with Metro we've had our kickoff meeting there and we're estimating a September launch of that program for a couple reasons uh the first is that we'll be after the summer peak season where there's lots of um transiency in employment and so getting the word out to a course out of employees who are likely here for a longer term will make the rollout of that program be a lot more effective also it's probably going to take that long to get all the back end and ordering and everything up to speed and also launch a marketing campaign in advance of that and we want it to be subsequent to when UC students are back in school so they've already received their bus passes from campus um and have those in their hand already so to increase the likelihood of program success September is the short answer thank you thank you and October is kind of when the school starts late late September so you have to be I guess rolling out in October thank you mayor all right and if there's no additional questions we'll go ahead oh i'm sorry cancer okay um we can come back if there are some questions thank you for your presentation at this time I will um turn it over to vice mayor Cummings who will introduce some of our guests thank you so um members of the community approached had approached me with regards to wanting the session to take place and to bring in a couple other people who've been working in um transportation and urban planning one of whom is Patrick Siegman Patrick Siegman has more than 20 years of experience as a transportation planner with an emphasis on minimizing the impacts of growth trained as an economist he has specialized expertise in cost benefit analysis and financial feasibility studies he's led the transportation component of more than 70 city-wide neighborhood district corridor and campus plans and communities across north america including berkeley oakland san francisco hayward palo alto napa ventura pasadena and watsonville his projects have won awards from the congress of the new urbanism the american institute of architects the american planning association in the society for college and university planning he plans for downtown berkeley and oakland his plans for downtown berkeley and oakland led to the successful implementation of comprehensive policy reforms including removing minimum parking regulations traffic reduction requirements for new development and performance-based park pricing parking pricing so welcome to patrick siegman in addition to patrick siegman we also have professor adam miller ball adam miller ball is associate professor of environmental studies at ucsc his research bridges urban planning and environmental economics and addresses some of the key challenges in transportation energy and climate change policy his current work examines global patterns of urban sprawl and car ownership the effectiveness of local climate planning efforts and the design of carbon trading programs his broad interest in transportation planning and policy particularly parking management programs to reduce vehicle traffic and emissions so welcome adam miller ball as well good evening and thank you for inviting me to come tonight so i'm patrick siegman um so it's it's really fun to be to be back once again in in santa cruz um i i guess i've been visiting since the 60s i grew up in palo Alto visited here many times with with family in part because my big sister went to uc santa cruz and so the the other experience i had recently was i i led the economics of downtown parking study from about october 2016 to probably april of 2018 when i was working for my old consulting firm nelson nigard and uh since um since then my other colleagues at nelson nigard have carried on with that study but i learned a lot during that during that project and some of the mapping and existing conditions work that we used on on that study or that we prepared for that study i've included in my presentation tonight um so i want to walk you through both though some strategies which i think can be good potential ones for santa cruz um not only for downtown but more broadly for reducing traffic um and improving transportation transportation choices throughout the community so let me see if i can bring these there we go that should do it and maybe sure thing you can do that too no presentation is complete without at least one technical glitch it is that's the one powerpoint on there this computer then i should sit here no you go in there so this this presentation goes through some of the connections between parking and transportation policies and broader issues like housing and housing affordability like economic development and also the connections to traffic vehicle trips and and pollution and some of the ah there we go let's see i can see it now since i can see that screen we don't see it we can see it way back there all right yeah it looks like we got a couple screens up should i go ahead okay great so i i gave this an ambitious title strategies for increasing prosperity and housing affordability and social equity while reducing traffic and pollution which is perhaps more than we can you know tackle in in one study session but i thought i'd try and i i think it's worth thinking about all of these things together because they are so linked but you know it's also worth considering that we have done remarkable things in the past so that happens to be my hometown of Palo Alto and in the picture and when my mom and dad came to Palo Alto they bought their first house my dad was a grad student she was an elementary school teacher they paid about sixteen thousand dollars for that house and at the time it cost 25 cents an hour to park on University Avenue in downtown and now today that same house would cost me over two million dollars and it's free to park on University Avenue in downtown actually it's free to park pretty much everywhere in Palo Alto and Americans park free on 99 percent of all trips so basically we've completely solved our affordable housing problem for our cars and the the that's both striking given the housing problems we have but it's but it's also worth thinking that well what if we started working on reversing that or at least making it so that housing was reasonably priced and parking was priced but not necessarily free so I thought I'd take you through a little bit about introduction uh existing conditions including um what I've seen about downtown parking inventory and occupancy how emerging technologies are affecting demand for transportation the transportation choices we have and and parking and then a toolkit of strategies some of which Santa Cruz is already doing in part but which could perhaps be expanded and so again it's a toolkit to consider and of course parking and transportation aren't unending themselves but they're for your larger goals a lot of the goals that we heard about in working on the downtown parking study that you know businesses really need to be able to meet payroll they need to be profitable this year um a lot of people perceive a parking shortage right now in downtown especially at the peak hours on the other hand we've got to make progress on reducing motor vehicle use including trips if we really want to make progress on on climate change because it's such a big share and of course people in Santa Cruz really want better transportation options and social equity matters and especially when you start talking about changing the status quo especially something like parking that's often been free um you have to be thinking about social equity but the good news is there are a lot of cities out there that have done a lot certainly Santa Cruz is a place where I can go to other places in the United States and say hey here's how you could follow in Santa Cruz's footsteps do these things for bicycling and get to Santa Cruz's level of bicycling um but there's also a lot of strategies from around the country and around the world that I think are not in use yet at least not in full use in Santa Cruz and could be adopted so this is a chart it'll be too small to read on the screen I'm afraid but it's a chart of 10 cities that we studied for a project called the Pasadena Traffic Reduction Strategy Study and we looked at what did a lot of these cities have in common because they were all places that had managed to become really economically vibrant and prosperous and at the same time reduce traffic and one thing we found is that parking policy reforms compared to status quo American policies were really key in all of them for example nine out of ten had eliminated minimum parking requirements entirely in either some or all areas of the city a lot of them had price parking many of them eight out of ten had maximum parking requirements so I won't try to run through this whole chart but just to say that there are lots of strategies and you don't have to pioneer and nothing I'll show you tonight is completely pioneering it's all been done successfully elsewhere before and when we think about social equity just take the example of housing you know a basic question to ask is well should should you subsidize housing for cars or for people and housing of course everybody needs it it's a basic human need parking subsidies on the other hand they're a matching grant program effectively right you have to be able to afford to purchase and own and maintain a car and if you can't for example half of the people who make less than $10,000 a year don't have a car in their household then they can't qualify for that parking subsidy right because they don't have the car to be able to use it I always remember when I was a student first studying parking I had a $500 rattletrap car Stanford was kind enough to build a $50,000 parking space in today's dollars that I got to park in for free meanwhile my friend Sebastian who was on scholarships and working and had no car he got nothing and so it's not necessarily the best choice and there's a lot of ways we can change that but basically on equity what we see is that wealthy people benefit a lot more than poor people on average from parking subsidies they just own a lot more cars they drive a lot more so on existing conditions it's worth looking at parking existing conditions partly to ask can we get better use out of what we have already so if you think of a parking system one aspect is the number of spaces the quantity and the other is management right policies regulations prices and you can ask well you know do we have a downtown parking supply problem right now or a management problem sometimes it can be both so one thing is that it's important to to collect good data Santa Cruz does a much better job than many cities in in collecting data things can can can still get better and there are some gaps but we were able to get a lot here this we prepared this with what was at the time the most recent occupancy data we had for for the garages and the main point I haven't showing you this is just to say the peak parking demand in downtown Santa Cruz occurs on weekdays from 1 to 3 p.m. early in the morning late in the evening it's much lower so if you want to simultaneously reduce traffic and pollution and also reduce the need to build costly additional parking focusing on reducing weekday parking demand from 1 to 3 p.m. or thereabouts is a really good thing to focus on right and similarly if if somebody is parking during that period they drive the need for more parking potentially but if you add one more car in the evening that doesn't add need for more parking so what does things look like well we we took the peak time parking data which is useful in part because it covers all the parking public private on street and off and we mapped it and this is the peak hour um December 2015 what you can see here is lots that are less than 50 full we put in green lots in red are 85 percent are more full um and one thing you see here is this was basically busiest hour of the day week before christmas on a weekday so it's one of the very busiest times of the year it's the busiest month um you still had on an overall basis for the whole downtown supply exceeded demand but their spot shortage is on some blocks right so like the locust garage it was 91 full the the cedar cath card i'm sorry the um just to the south um cedar church is it the the um that one as well was was effectively full like over 90 but on the other hand there's there's still ample parking for example the civic center the civic auditorium parking meters those were 76 empty the river front garage still had spaces available um and and spaces to spare what tends to happen of course is that the least convenient parking in in the least convenient and the most expensive parking tends to empty out and so a lot of the times the challenge is to shift some employees from the high demand locations out to the lower demand locations using pricing and management right now the locust garage more than half of the spaces at peak hour are filled up with employees so can you relocate them this is the uh peak parking time data showing just the public off street garages for the peak time parking survey last year um and what you see there is at that time the cedar walnut garage was full effectively just you know 10 vacancy rate um which people start to think they're really hunting for the last spaces um but on the other hand you had 110 vacant spaces at the same time in the river slash front garage um and that civic auditorium lot was still empty so what can we do to redistribute demand especially employee demand out to the less convenient spaces and what does that look like on the ground well first impressions right curb parking on the busy blocks is mostly full much everywhere and then you go to the garage and it looks like that at the same time of day right and so that drives a perceived parking shortage by people who don't know the system really really well um and you can't solve that perceived shortage just by building more spaces because you can't build more spaces on the street in front of the shops now overall um the peak time parking survey it gives you a consistent measure of demand for the whole system including those areas for which you don't have any automated data so those those meter lots the river front garage the the counter wasn't working there accurately when we looked at it um and so just mapping the peak time parking survey data for the last 15 years or rather charting it here what we can see is you hit a high of about 4,300 cars parked in 2008 and then the recession hit actually the recession had just started before that retail vacancy spiked by 2010 things were down by about a quarter retail vacancies were much higher than um now we get we get up to 2018 there there's never been a year where demand recovered back to that 2008 peak and you're down about 10 percent from then just a point of information is it I thought we said 3,000 public spaces so this is public and private together the number public and private together so this is total number of vehicles parked in the in the downtown and it's covering the same area every year um and so by this data the number of spaces that you have sitting vacant at the peak hour has increased by more than 700 since 2008 now it is important to note this is both the public and the private on street and off and it is a snapshot so it's a it's really good to calibrate this with other data it's also good to use these manual counts as a reality check what we saw for example when I checked I believe was the 2015 data at that time the automated account data for the riverfront garage was showing regularly over 100 occupancy sometimes like 125 percent occupancy which would imply that you have hundreds of cars inside the garage circling because every space is full um what that usually tells us is that the calibration for the garage needs to be redone you know but even in a well managed system counters are are off sometimes so it's useful to have both those data sources but looking at this though you still have this perceived parking shortage and of course there's more um uh development plan downtown so it's important to still have tools um to manage parking and and to redistribute demand and to provide people with better choices um but so what could explain the the drop in demand and also what's a really effective tool for changing behavior well all else being equal when the price of parking goes up demand goes down now that's real price changes meaning inflation adjusted right if your price increases only just keep up with inflation that has no effect on behavior parking price elasticities sorry to get a little bit technical but basically for commuting trips about a one percent increase in a one percent increase in demand will get you about a 0.4 to 0.6 percent decrease in parking occupancy in in parking demand um it's less for non commuting trips and basically it's it's higher for commute trips because people are going to the same destination every day they're often traveling at at hours when there's more transit available um but we see this over and over again um so given that you've had um apparently demand dropping despite 10 years of economic growth and despite things like adding the warriors arena um probably reaction to parking prices has something to do with this so that's what it looks like when you when you charted out and when we were doing our projections our forecasts of the future of parking in in uh downtown um the model we built assumes an elasticity of uh 0.3 meaning a one percent parking price increase reduces demand by about 0.3 percent um so it's more conservative than many of the commute studies we've seen but another thing that makes people really feel like there's a parking shortage downtown is that there's a wait list for monthly parking permits and it's and it's long i i um i forget the exact figures about how many months but for many garages i believe it was in the range of nine months to wait for a permit well here is the data um from the waitlist survey that staff conducted in 2007 and what we found is that the vast majority of the people who are on the waitlist already drive to work alone and they park downtown every day so or at least every day that they work um 66 percent of those are already parking in some city parking facilities and another 12 are in private lots or garages uh and so what's going on well basically half of those people already have a permit for a city lot but they'd like a different lot or garage then the remainder they're not waiting for a place to park they're waiting for a better price if you look at it the daily rate is eight dollars which works out to 176 a month if you work full time the monthly permit's only 45 so it's effectively a 75 discount from the regular parking prices and so if you were to let everybody on the wait list buy a permit right now you you actually wouldn't get significant new demand in downtown overall but what you would get is a loss of a lot of revenue because you would take a lot of people who are currently paying eight dollars a day and you would be giving them that same that same commodity for 45 dollars a month um so one of the options I would suggest is to look at well how can we change these incentives um we can see the the sources of requests looker and amazon account for about 20 of all the permits requested um so you have a lot of people who are often well paid six figure income software programmers um who are waiting for a 45 dollar a month permit um not sure who actually in those cases pays for the parking whether it's the employee or the employer um but so just some key takeaways I think that right now looking at the data you really have a parking management problem rather than a supply problem it's a matter of the least convenient spaces are underused the most convenient spaces are overused and you need to shift some employees and residents out to the underused ones and I won't I won't reiterate those but I do want to turn next to really thinking about how emerging technologies are starting to change parking and transportation around the united states and let's start with ride hailing so lifts and uber um they are gaining in popularity really rapidly especially among young people so this is the pure research surveys three years ago um getting to four years ago now 15 percent of adults had ever used uber or lift and now we're up to 36 percent and in most people under 30 most adults that is under 30 have used uber and lift or their competitors and especially in places where you can save money by losing using less parking or save on parking hassles by using using less parking people are using it a lot what it's actually doing in san francisco is it's adding traffic congestion to the streets in downtown especially but it's reducing parking demand it's now up to 15 percent of all the vehicle trips that go from one point to another within san francisco and so what's happening to parking in san francisco is that demand is dropping um this is the city's um parking tax revenues which is imposed both on the public parking garages and on all private parking transactions um they had expected and projected that revenues would rise substantially because we've added so many jobs and because prices were going up and instead it's been dropping for the last four years at about one percent a year or more so instead of getting what they expected we have you know double or or so digit increase in revenues by now it's dropping and we're seeing this all around the united states san francisco says ride hailing is the primary reason it's true elsewhere so ace parking which does a lot of valet parking operations and and just regular parking management operations for companies all over they've seen declines really substantial ones especially in hotels restaurants nightclubs places where people go out to have a few drinks and have some fun especially because they people can avoid drunk driving so what it means is that a lot of the revenue you thought you you might get may be eaten away especially as parking prices go up and the other thing is that self-driving shuttles and taxis are are actually now a reality in certain places and it i think it was william gibson who said the future is already here it just isn't widely distributed yet and so for example this is the navya self-driving shuttles in scion switzerland they've been running for about three years now with out of the incident or accident they started out just in the pedestrian precinct now they run out to the nearby train station as well their first shuttle in the united states went into or they're first on public streets in the united states went into service a couple years ago in las vegas so this is 12 passengers there's no brake pedal accelerator pedal or steering wheel there is a stop button and there is an operator who basically is there to reassure people press the stop button and if needed and actually he also has a for emergency operations he there's a joystick that he can take out from basically a hidden away box in order to the other thing right the thing is that self-driving shuttles are much easier because they don't have to master the whole world all they have to do is master one route they run that same route over and over again hundreds of times and so that's why these have been able to go into operation there's about a hundred of these in operation worldwide that is this particular companies easy miles another competitor so they've been shuttling for a couple years now to and from dallas cowboys games and texas rangers games and they've got about 200 shuttles in about 20 countries so this is really coming and now they're reaching the point where they're running without operators in some of their their shuttles so it's truly self-driving and well then the next step is into self-driving taxis the technology is still expensive enough so the so that most people can't afford the car and the companies want to be able to maintain it um but so waymo has started operating in in chendler of zona they began commercial operation in a limited area and then they expect to expand out they just got permission to run on on public streets with no driver at the wheel here in silken valley as well and so this technology is is advancing pretty rapidly and you can expect it to be arriving um usually not as fast as the the people making claims will say you know the people hyping it but nonetheless it's clearly coming and especially the self-driving shuttles are really ready to go like sacramento state just got theirs davis just got their grant for a self-driving shuttle and why does this matter so much well with transit about 80 percent of the cost is the driver so self-driving vehicles mean that the cost of transit and taxis is going to plummet and we don't have any comparable breakthrough on the horizon for reducing parking costs so in the past it might be that we could run a bus we could afford to run the bus every 30 minutes with self-driving technology we can run the same bus every six minutes for the same price and that's pretty transformative the effect on parking demand lots of people are doing studies and and speculating basically though all of the estimates are for very substantial decreases in parking demand and some are saying well if half the fleet is shared you're gonna get a 90 percent reduction in parking demand others vary nobody knows yet but things are clearly heading that direction and pretty fast so then that leads us to potential strategies and it's useful to start out by thinking well all right what is it called to add one more space for example what is the cost to add one more space to downtown Santa Cruz by building a new parking structure because it's the cost of adding one more that really lets you look at the pension potential for savings so the proposed cedar cathcart garage using the low end using the the low end of the cost range for a cost estimate that was made a couple years ago works out to 66 000 per space gained that's conservative I think because not only are we using the low end but also construction costs have gone up pretty substantially since 2016 nationally I think by 13 percent so how much revenue do you need to generate to break even on the cost of building and operating and maintaining a 66 000 parking space so it's about $420 a month for each space for the lifetime of the parking structure so how much money does the city lose if it builds a new parking space just to accommodate a full-time daytime employee who buys a monthly permit maybe one of those amazon employees on the wait list well $420 a month cost minus a $45 monthly permit fee is $375 a month the only way this this works with the finances of the downtown parking district is that in order to build that new garage you have to raise a lot of rates and what ends up happening is there's a lot of cross subsidy going on where the people paying short-term and hourly and daily rates are subsidizing the very low-cost monthly permits and then also the garage doesn't pay for itself on its own you have to take the revenues from the cars parked on the public streets and devote that toward the new garage so what this tells us is that anything you can do to reduce parking demand for less than $375 a month that is anything you can do to get for example a daytime employee to to take transit or bike or walk is a bargain right then you can free up that space and use it for a customer who's going to pay a much higher hourly rate so there are lots of strategies I won't try to take you through all these tonight but they fall into basically four categories you know managing the curb parking managing city-owned and operated garages and lots regulating private developments and then generally improving choices and the curb parking is really important both because it dictates what you can do off-street without causing problems and also because it if you can solve the on-street parking shortages in the busy areas it gets rid of a lot of the perception of of a parking shortage and one thing of course that you're already working on it's already approved and and the the meters that take credit cards and have wireless connections are being put in on Pacific maybe are already in on Pacific Pacific Avenue that is downtown is installing smart meters and then being able to do what we call performance-based parking pricing so basically you're trying to charge the right price for curb parking and the right price is the lowest price that lets you get one or two vacant spaces on each block most of the time so that price can vary by block by time of day and the usual strategy is you pick a target range in this graphic it's 65 to 85 percent occupied as this is the sweet spot and you check every month or so if you're above 85 percent occupied on that block then you you raise the rate if you're within the target range keep it the same if you're below 65 percent you lower it and so this is a potential strategy that of course you're you're working on implementing on Pacific Avenue in the core but that I think could be a really good one to extend to the rest of downtown and if people like it extend it to all the meters on the streets and everywhere in the city everywhere you have shortages and then of course returning that revenue to the district where it's generated to pay for public services is a good way to make that popular and it's perceived as as fair and of course parking revenues in downtown already stay downtown but I just want to highlight the experience that that we had in in san francisco with the sf park program which I advised on san francisco did it for 6000 curb spaces as well as more than 10 000 spaces in garages with the same general policy changing by block and by time of day the city had some great federal funding to study the effects of this very carefully and and with academic research is doing it indeed adam miller ball worked on quite a bit of it the technology you need to do it is definitely the smart meters on the curb that are wirelessly connected take credit cards because that's what gets you your your occupancy data and your revenue data the occupancy is an estimate but you can once you get enough data where you check the real occupancy on the street compared to the meter payments you can estimate how many cars actually parked because of course there are always some people parked who have who don't pay but so in order to do this in the rest of downtown you would really need to roll out that kind of wireless smart meter one of the strategies that san francisco used is time of day pricing and i think that could be really valuable for santa cruz as well basically you charge a low price during the hours of low demand at a high price during the hours of high demand so on this particular block in san francisco their highest price was noon to three p.m when they're charging three dollars and fifty cents an hour by contrast demand drops off after three p.m so they drop the rate to two dollars an hour that's something that that is really effective at reducing peak hour demand especially getting employees out of out of a metered space at peak hour and on the other hand it doesn't chase away customers at times when you don't need to chase them away so if somebody wants to come for lunch and stick around to shop if demand is dropping off anyway there's no no reason to have a high price pushing them away and one of the things is that you really don't realize often what the right price for a block is until you've experimented this is the marina district i'm sorry this is fisherman's wharf area and in san francisco and what we wound up finding to our surprise is that the right price on one block of bay street was 25 cents an hour right around the corner the right price was four dollars an hour and it turned out that was because the four dollars an hour was the the hottest restaurants in town and the 25 cents faces a blank wall on a bit and it's on a busy street nobody wants to park there so actually employees use the 25 cents an hour parking and a lot of but but you know you really won't know until you experiment and a lot of what might happen is that um if you had this city wide or or downtown wide the lots at the fringes and the metered spaces at the fringes on the street would go way down in price um the results parking search time went down by about half people looked for spaces there were fewer tickets and citations because it was easier to pay and easier to find a space and sales tax revenue went way up in the pilot areas where the this was implemented compared to the rest of the the pilot uh the control areas so you had 35 increase in sales tax revenue in the pilot areas where this was in place versus less than 20 in the controls so it's not just about you know managing trips it's also about getting better economic vitality and then in residential areas like this this might apply especially to projects outside of downtown it's really important to protect residents from spillover parking so you can in some areas one option is you charge non-residents the right prices for curb parking if there's any excess after residents demand is met use the revenue to benefit that neighborhood you know in Laguna Beach near the near the beach if you're a non-resident you might be paying three dollars an hour whether resident pays 40 dollars a year one really important thing though is don't issue more resident permits than there are available spaces and this is especially important if you're adding apartments to an area that currently is only small houses the the city of Tucson what they do is they say if you have two legal parking spaces in front of your property then you can only have two parking permits for the street for that property no matter how many new units you build on your property so that's one way to do it but but don't do what Boston did in Beacon Hill they gave out 5,000 resident permits for an area and then years later they went and counted and discovered they had less than a thousand on-street parking spaces right so it's really important to to limit it this way so that's managing curb parking city operated lots and garages well the first I want to say the the projections that I've done using the model that I I built and I built many of these over the years for different downtowns and campuses the forecasting the plan development as as proposed by the city including the the loss of parking spaces due to various projects and then taking into account the effect of the planned parking price increases that have already been approved by city council last summer what we see is that those price increases will reduce demand enough so that even with new development and the loss of some existing parking spaces within downtown you'll still have a surplus so the this is something that you should certainly look at my calculations review them check them but it's really important to remember that when the prices go up at a rate higher than inflation demand goes down all else being equal that's a significant effect and we've seen in many communities before that they raise prices to build a new garage and discovered that demand fell so much that the new garage was no longer needed and I think that is likely to happen here but still it's important to keep working on all the things you could do to solve current needs and future needs so focus on reducing demand in the peak hours this kind of time of day pricing that sf park did on the street they also did off street so the garage is there the performing arts garage their peak hour like Santa Cruz is noon to three so they charge four dollars an hour right after that demand drops right way off and so they drop the price down to a dollar an hour I think a strategy like that could work really well for for downtown another thing is to consider switching from charging discounted rates for monthly permits to charging for employee picering just by the day administratively it can be more difficult but especially with the modern technology that that you have in a lot of the garages and the technologies that are available to do this in lots and and even on street it can be a really good way because basically the problem with a monthly permit is that once you bought it it's like an all-you-can-eat buffet right you drive every day and it doesn't cost you anything more um when you switch to charging by the day you can see results like the gates foundation had they went and they switched and they started charging 12 dollars a day capped at 120 a month well when they put that in people could basically save money every every day they didn't drive and their drive alone rate went from 42 percent driving alone to 34 right that's like a 20 25 percent drop in the total number of vehicles parked the um two things that come up with that though is of course some of the people who purchase monthly permits are maybe low income right they're there and then some are very high income some of them are programmers with six-figure incomes so one option right is is to um get rid of the monthly permits which would end those subsidies for the people who can't afford to pay and then provide transportation help to low income people just like PG&E has lifeline rates for electricity service a second um that that may be politically more feasible is that you phase out your below cost parking rates over time where you could just let all the existing permit holders who have those 45 to 11 month permits renew at existing rates but then you charge full cost prices to the new buyers um and so what that would do is be it'd be kind of similar to the the pension system which has lower benefits for for new hires and with that way through attrition you gradually phase out the below cost rates so that's city lots and garages regulating private developments right minimum parking requirements are really a critical topic and one where I think uh Santa Cruz could make a lot of progress um at least progress toward goals like making housing more affordable and really these these requirements they're government regulations right that tell every land use developer and every owner of her property how many parking spaces they have to build at a minimum so this is Dana Point California this is what four parking spaces per thousand square feet of built space looks like um it's a lot of asphalt the the the requirement for downtown for all commercial uses is here in Santa Cruz I believe is 2.5 spaces per thousand square feet so downtown is better but even even so it's a lot of square footage for every square foot of of land it's basically four spaces per thousand works out to 1.3 square feet of asphalt for every one square foot of actual building space now restaurants are often 10 or 20 parking spaces per thousand square feet required so what's their purpose we we we rarely have anything required by a zone and code zone and codes are mostly about limiting things right limiting height so my hometown at the purpose of these parking requirements is to alleviate traffic congestion opetus similarly Napa similarly San Diego to reduce traffic congestion and improve air quality so they had higher ambitions for theirs well generally what these requirements really are good for in a practical sense is to avoid spillover problems right so that if the parking in front of somebody else's business fills up they don't fill up all the parking in front of your house on on the street where you live but why did they think that minimum parking requirements were good for reducing traffic congestion I mean after all we've had these things for about half a century and most of California and clearly congestion is worse so really it was an economically illiterate theory the regulations were set to ensure that virtually all spaces all destinations had access spaces even when parking was given a way for free downtown Santa Cruz of course is exception but I think the rest of the city this is how the requirements were set they prohibited or they discouraged parking fees and actually it's really hard to charge anybody for parking when everybody is required to build more than is needed when it's free because there's no nobody else who wants to buy your parking because they've got too much of their own but then it made it really easy for traffic engineers to prohibit parking on street right so like this happens to be Las Vegas parking's prohibited and that way they could add more traffic lanes so when you're on the sidewalk you can have an 18-wheeler at your elbow as you walked on the street and they got more traffic lanes which they hoped would solve the congestion but there were a lot of unintended consequences right like one of the things is that in this environment if you try to cross the street to shop you'll die and you got a landscape that looks kind of like this this happens to be Milpitas typical minimum parking requirements I don't think Santa Cruz's are all that different outside of downtown well the unintended consequences cost of parking got hidden in the cost of all the other goods and services we buy so that results in higher parking demand more driving more congestion more pollution and we all end up having to pay more because we have to build more parking in bigger roads right and we wound up getting higher rents higher taxes basically we're paying for parking in all of our roles except our role as a motorist and how did this affect housing affordability well Oakland two economists studied what happened when they put in their first regulation in 1961 only one space per unit required for apartments so construction cost went up 18 percent units per per acre went down by 30 percent land value went down by a third imagine if you're an economic development director and you came to your council and said I got a regulation that's going to do these three things they probably wouldn't have passed but that was higher cost get passed along to tenants in the form of higher rents so Seattle they found that the parking subsidies increased monthly rents by about $250 per month for every apartment and parking is vastly oversupplied um and it's very very clear from the research now these costs get passed through and result in higher higher costs uh here in san francisco where i live now uh two uc berkeley professor studied it it increased home sale prices homes with parking sell for a lot more than homes without 24 percent more households could afford housing if they didn't include parking and 20 20 percent more could qualify it for loans on condominiums so allowing people the choice of whether or not to buy parking when they when they rent or buy a place is a really good way to increase affordability that's not to say that you shouldn't allow people to buy one but if it's optional rather than mandated then a lot of people can either have an apartment instead of being homeless or they can buy their first place and one of the things we see now is san francisco is completely eliminated to all minimum parking regulations throughout the city and so we're seeing things like this apartment just down the street from me um that construction you see is the conversion of the bottom floor garages um into two new apartments um and they are simultaneously seismically reinforcing the building a lot of communities around the country now have removed minimum parking regulations either in some neighborhoods like downtowns and near transit or citywide so sacramento san diego san francisco fremont hayward buffalo has gotten rid of them citywide um so especially as housing costs rise people are really focusing on this and um you do have to manage the curb parking though right otherwise you'll have spillover parking problems and a lot of complaints so to give you an example the gaya building in berkeley uh this is a a new new project berkeley now by ordinance um requires the separation of the cost of parking from the cost of actually renting an apartment so this building has a fee of 150 a month they also require that car share spaces be provided to car share providers at no cost in any new apartment building downtown or condo um they also require free transit passes like the the discount transit pass program you just created for downtown for new residents and so the gaya building 91 apartments 42 parking spaces built they wound up with 237 adult residents with 20 cars and this is mostly a market rate building it's a mix of students and downtown workers l view requires the unbundling of parking costs from uh office spaces from all commercial space um so you can do it there too and that helped them reduce their drive-alone rate from 81 percent to 57 percent as they built a lot of new offices in what used to be a bedroom suburb other thing you could do is to require a parking cash out benefit for employees which means that if an employer subsidizes parking for the employees then they're required to also provide that cash to any employee who doesn't drive so for example if somebody wants to live downtown walk to work then they have to be given the cash value of the parking space now one option is to do what san amonica does and simply enforce the existing california state parking cash outlaw um in san amonica when you renew your business license you have to certify you're complying with the state law and the state law basically says if you have more than 50 employees and you pay for any part of your employees parking then you have to offer that subsidy that parking subsidy in the form of cash to anybody um at your your firm who doesn't drive um another way you could do it is to require that whenever um a company pays for uh a city parking permit that they have to certify that they are complying with state parking cash outlaw so i don't know i don't know which businesses 41 percent of the people on the wait list said that their employer paid for their parking um so there may be some of those companies should be complying with this law which is not well known about and rarely enforced and then another thing you could do is actually go beyond state law for example you could say anybody who subsidizes parking for their employees and buys a city parking permit has to offer the cash value to the ones who don't drive and it has a really strong impact so for example if the employees are offered 165 dollars a month in cash there's about a 30 percent decrease in uh parking demand and and driving um that's from an academic study by professor don't shoot at UCLA we put that into effect with Genentech in south san francisco they're out in the office park east of 101 and over six years combined with some other measures we got their their um drive alone rate down from 77 percent to 55 percent so there are strategies for regulating private developments and that's close to the end of course you're already working on providing the deep discount transit pass for all downtown employees which i think is a really powerful way to do it um actually providing the the the free transit pass as to every employee in a group um that kind of universal access has proven in several studies to be the most cost effective way to go so i think you made a good decision there um and then review and expand your local transit networks as you can either contribute funding or add your own shuttles um consider a self-driving shuttle pilot program right like here's one that an arbor has just started up of course you can keep improving your your um bicycle programs you've obviously done a lot um and especially these kind of protected bike lanes have a much greater effect than the older um unprotected bike lanes that are seen around town and i know you're working on that and of course in in the short term it may just be paint but in the long term you can build really beautiful streets like this one in in the Netherlands where you're really comfortably separated and you're you're closer to sidewalk level so just to to sum it up i think the challenges that that we have is to manage parking and transportation for the next few years and then as self-driving shuttles and taxis really take off that effect on parking demand will be profound and so the challenge is to manage the next few years and get through that um and then with time a lot of the garages will empty out one thing of course is that um parking lots and garages always tend in a system always tend to empty out from the least convenient spaces to the most so it's important to keep an eye on what's going on with your least convenient spaces and and um the the make sure that you're making good use of those so pricing like the curb parking pricing i talked about is an important way to get to that so there's a long list of strategies i'll of course leave these these slides with you and with that thank you for your time thank you so now is the time for either questions or we can move right along to our second part of the presentation my question yeah my questions are going to be relevant for both okay we'll we'll go ahead and move along and um we'll ask our second presenter to please come forward i have to you have to bring up all right okay i can start while it's coming up so thank you mayor thank you council members um it's uh it's a real pleasure to to to have this invitation to speak before you this evening um as the as the vice mayor mentioned i'm an associate professor at uc santa cruise i teach about environmental economics and urban planning and i wanted to keep this this really short and i'll be happy to go into more detail in the questions and a lot of what i'll do is just to reinforce some of the ideas we've um we've we've heard earlier so there's two there's three things that i'd like to to focus on um but this evening the first is to give a little um um there's a reinforcement in the economics of parking and both on how prices can be a tool to to to manage demand parking is really the number one it's by far the most effective tool in this transportation to management um toolkit and then secondly talk about how the the economics of supply and then really really quickly on some of the the future which reinforces a previous presentation so prices cost and the future so let's start with with prices now parking we might think that parking is kind of special but it's really like any other good like we don't run out of orange juice like when you get a Trader Joe's we don't run out of strawberries even in the in the winter rather that the price is a tool that keeps that supply um that demand in line with supply there's never there's never a shortage people don't come and say like i went down to Santa Cruz and i could never find any any orange juice but this is a tool that we typically use for other goods um even with like my um where i grew up in in britain we're facing this political crisis of brexit well some of those impacts are going to be ameliorated by prices like the prices are going to rise as a maybe there's a crisis um will affect the company of the country but there will be fewer things that go um um that that are in short supply this my point here is that parking is not something special parking is not immune from these like principles of economics um and we see this pretty much everywhere that whether you look whether in in large cities like seattle um portland um smaller towns like aspen um these there's a typical range for the 10 percent increase in parking charges reduces demand um by one and three and three percent and that's really on the the conservative end as a senator is i think this really dramatic increase in prices has just gone into effect so i think it'll be really um interesting to look a year out and two years out how this does actually um translate into a reduction in demand so um this is uh very much of this was mentioned by patrick seigman there's uh there's a range in elasticity and these studies these comprehensive studies that are tried to take examples from lots of different cities they come over broad range but minus point three so a 10 percent increase in price reduces demand by three percent is the most common value there's also ways that a city can get the policies that a city can take to try and make demand more responsive so try and make people um look to alternative look to jump bikes look to transit look to walking um instead of driving what is that so certainly better better substitutes so the programs that the city is already doing so that the jump bikes it's an amazing success the ecopaths will help others as well um enforcing the state cash out law but also removing these deep discounts for the monthly permits that we just heard about if you don't if it doesn't cost you any less to drive one less day a week why would you do that um so these this monthly um permits and also the deep discounts that are given to these monthly permits one of the factors is pretty good will be um constraining the price response and we we heard about this sf park um experiment uh i want to highlight some of the research that i did on this um we're with colleagues and we found that even one quarter changes increasing prices by a quarter had an impact on demand but it took a while like people need time to kind of figure out where the proper the parking costs are where the alternatives and so it's really these cumulative changes um over a couple of years um that made the program um the six the have a successful impact that that we heard about so now i want to say a few words about costs of parking so what about what's the supply side in terms of the cost to build a parking space so we heard um from Patrick Seatman some of these um these estimates of what this actually means and um for for say a new garage and the the farmers market lot but i want to walk you through some of the the reasoning how we get to this really dramatic configure so capital cost versus in the mid-range of the the the staff estimates it may have gone up since then but 35 million dollars 640 spaces but you don't actually get to keep not all of those are new there's more than a 100 spaces right there in the lot so we're actually only getting 514 net new spaces and so if you divide this 35 million um by 514 you get a capital cost per space of 68 000 those are pretty generous assumptions on financing and i think the the bond um forecasts um the the the the staff prepared were were would have been much higher than this so what does this mean if we're amortizing this over 30 years um of four percent that's um that's three that's nearly four thousand dollars a year per new space 15 dollars a day you add in so many to actually operate these these spaces so you get about 18 dollars um so this is going to be independent of Patrick Seatman's assumptions but this is um really much in the same ballpark but even after that five-year rate increase that you that you approved taking a monthly permit up to 75 it's only three four um dollars and 40 cents there's this daily subsidy at the margin and that's really the important thing for each new space you're building that's a subsidy of 14 dollars and 60 cents so where does this extra money come from well of course it's for meter revenue it's the um from on-street parking which is essentially free to provide the streets are paid for but that is revenue which is incredibly flexible this is something that the city can use the pretty the the council can decide for any other budget priority they use whether it's um investing more in the TDM programs which the city is already doing this could be money that goes to affordable housing it could go to any other budget priority it could go straight to the general fund it could go to policing it could go to anything and so the principle here is if you want more parking that's great but you should subsidize what you want more of so if you want more housing then use that money to subsidize housing and so these these four approaches which is um the city's typically used from requiring on-site parking through minimum parking requirements now with the downtown approach right now is well to require parking but allow the developers to build off-site but then subsidize it through public parking garages the third approach is to well just tell the developers build how much parking makes sense for you this is not the public policy priority the public policy priority could be to get more housing and so use that subsidy directly for the housing instead or to increase um inclusionary housing requirements or then the the most um kind of like um I mean from a traffic reduction perspective and just cap the parking have a maximum and then subsidize the housing and as you go down from these four we're going for towards a downtown with less parking but also with cheaper housing because the construction costs are less and also because the rents are going to be less it's important to remember that even though I own a car a lot of people we speak to own cars this is a large minority in Santa Cruz that do not own cars like 14 percent of renters a smaller percentage of owners this is citywide in downtown this is a much greater percentage these maps are prepared by um so some some students of the project last year this is census data the yellow area is downtown and this is areas were up to a third of rent of people sorry not not just renters do not have a car right now um and the the students also did some surveys that these are outside of downtown but a lot of the parking that is being built right now is going to waste they were ended overnight counts these developments like Cyprus Point Pacific shores Chestnut Townhomes and they found that in most of these cases just over half maybe up to two-thirds of the parking is occupied on the weeknights that they did there but they they did their counts and so this is another indication that a lot of the parking that we're spending a lot of money building or forcing developers to build when they could be providing more inclusionary housing is going to waste so really quickly the the future the autonomous vehicles it's a subject close to my heart I do a lot of research in this area this is hype cycle like autonomous vehicles have been in the news right they've been like autonomous vehicles are going to take over now the last year where they're not going to take over and this is what we see for a lot of products like um but they kind of go up in this um wave and um deep learning is now at the top um um but autonomous vehicles are kind of on the on the way down in this hype but in so this it's not necessarily two years away but it's certainly like in the longer term this is going to become a reality in in cities and this is a big problem for cities this is a governing magazine detailed study but look to the impact to cities general fund and parking budgets from the um from the reduction in parking demand and we're seeing this today with uber and Lyft and in the future we may see even more with autonomous vehicles so some the quote I like that if you have money to invest and you should short parking garages it's time for a big short in parking airports are seeing this many cities are seeing this already but the parking revenue is on its way it's on its way down I did want to highlight the the the data needs um certainly I think we have much less data on the overnight parking occupancy how much spec capacity there is in the system this kind of one or two year impact of the price increases that you just approved or you approved in in september it'd be useful to study these but also what is the real estate economics like if you require less parking how much more inclusionary housing can you require um what's that there's a trade-off between these these two and I wanted to finally leave you the message that um I'm glad to see there's some some commissioners commissioners in the room um my students um presented some great designs for protected bike lanes last night to the transportation and public works commission um we've been working closely with the chair of that commission and I'm certainly at your disposal but there's also some really interesting student projects I know but staff are a stretch very thin and we'd be happy to um to help in any way on this type of analysis um so thank you very much for your attention and I'd be happy to take any questions ever now um or in the future thank you thank you all right thank you for your presentation so that concludes the uh staff and guest presenters portion of the agenda is there any um questions from council members at this time the council go ahead okay council member brown I guess I so thank you for the presentations and um really appreciate your flexibility on starting late um and I'm sorry that I had to wait for for our previous agenda item to finish um so I guess one of the I'm I'm really interested in the this so two things that kind of themes one around um kind of perception of parking shortage and then the potential for use of parking subsidies for other purposes and um so I'm just wondering if you could talk a little bit more either of you about um it's right now the you know the way it's framed for us is that you know we we have these parking requirements the parking fund is self-supporting and we don't really hear a lot about what other you know how we might re-envision our parking subsidy you know what our parking fund as a source of revenue for alternatives so if you could just and so housing was on the list but I mean if just examples from the studies that you have looked at other communities where that's happened how it's been effective if at all um would be interesting to hear a little more about let me give it a try and maybe adam can add um it's really a policy choice to decide how to use public streets right they're they're finite spaces um one of the first questions is how much of a particular street do you want to use for storing private automobiles and then there's the question of well what should you charge and and um where should that money go um it's worth noting that um in most cities and I don't think Santa Cruz is an exception streets are often paid for local streets that is are often paid for in large part by sources like general funds um some street projects are also paid for by things like um impact fees on on new developments um and so different cities will say very different things about how to use curb parking revenues san francisco dedicates all of their parking revenue by law to the transit agency to support muni service um and that means that the city's uh parking fund there the the lots and the garages have to pay for themselves just using the fees from the people who park in those lots and garages um there's there's no use of curb parking revenue to support the and subsidized monthly permits for example um berkeley uses um parking revenues in part to make streets cleaner and and safer as do many other cities pasadena ventura um but also they use it to help fund homeless services um so there's lots of choices there um the um and another thing on on getting you know just getting rid of the perception of parking it's really important to just look at all the parking you've got that's underused including a lot of the parking that you kind of lose track of because it doesn't have automatic counting on it um and see all right how can we get better use out of that one thing that um cities like sacramento and san clemente and dana point do is they have worked really hard to to offer strong incentives to private parking lot owners to open up their lots to um public parking at sometimes just during the day um but they they offer incentives like agreeing to take over liability insurance enforcement and maintenance um and um to allow the private owner to still keep the fees and that can be a great way to find underused parking that's private and put it into use um and the other thing of course is in any city that gets rid of minimum parking regulations a really healthy private market market for parking springs up so in san francisco if you had one third of your apartment spaces parking spaces empty at night you'd be renting them out like crazy right so that could happen here in sanacruz i had a question for professor millard ball um you it seemed like the revenue from a parking fund can be used virtually anything is what you suggested is that how is that um so so certainly that the the meter revenue is at least to to my knowledge um but there are no legal constraints and how that meter revenue can it can be used many cities they put it in the general fund um some cities um use public benefits but i'd be corrected by by by staff if there's specific legislation that applies to to santa cruz um but that's actually very um but there's there's cities that use it for street cleaning there's other cities that use it for the policing um the cities that use it for um for other to go to the general fund or to senior services and um and maybe maybe there's a some something specific applies to to santa cruz but i'm not aware of it thank you i'd like this maybe the city turning away and on that and find it are the restrictions on our parking fund for what we can and can't use it for my understanding as a parking fund was created as a as part of a parking district that initially uh at least was used to establish some of the parking structures that have um been constructed in the downtown area and also to pay debt service toward repayment of those funds actually i was i was on my way um out the door in the back of the room and part of the conversation caught my ear on this on the monitor back there and that's why i came back into the meeting for this very purpose um but it's not to have a discussion about um alternative uses of the revenue to the extent that a parking district generates revenue in excess of what's required in order to provide and maintain um parking facilities that are in existence and to the extent the city council makes a policy determination that those revenues are not needed to improve or increase parking facilities with the use of the revenues then um under the parking district law of the state of california you are able to um place those funds into the general fund so so that's an option to the extent the the council makes a determination that there's excess revenue um for that purpose so beyond that however it seems to me that um the universe of potential uses for your general fund is really not um within the scope of a discussion on transportation demand management i certainly think it's worth um pointing out that there may be excess revenue and that it may be available for other uses but i don't think this is an appropriate form for the council to discuss um what you might uh appropriate that general fund revenue for okay council member um matthews and then by yeah um as i understood the presentations they were based on historic measurements downtown um i think there's actually two parts to my question um and i think probably both of you are well aware that we anticipate losing in the relatively short term 225 plus or minus parking lots that are privately owned leased by the city will disappear to private development um both losing spaces and creating we hope a good deal more um density which will have some parking need associated with it um it's impressive how the um parking demand has been relatively stable as uses have increased but also as i think you probably both know um we have relatively recently updated our downtown plan to to allow for in the um predictable future 500 or so new housing units and um obviously not everyone has a car etc and a lot of that reduced demand has been built in but um i wonder how you would um see the future of that kind of shrinking of existing supply and i think a pretty increased density um downtown um so that's one question i'll pile on all my questions um the other um i really am interested in urban design and it seems to me a great big surface lot in the middle of downtown is by no one's imagination the best use of that land and that um the uh idea of some kind of um mixed use activated streetscape shared use in a parking district uh is more forward-looking so i would just like your comments on that but that's really an interesting question i'm glad to have the chance to expand on it and i think the the key point is that the economics of like how much it costs to add a new space and how much of that is covered by parking revenue doesn't change whether you take out three quarters of your parking supply or you like don't change your parking supply at all that replacement parking um or additional parking um or both is still costing $68,000 a space and that is not funded by by parking revenue and so there's a and so there's a choice there like so um do you do you want to continue to subsidize parking or do you just want to say hey we want to mixed use development on this parking lot or do you want to um to improve the urban design and do it without subsidizing the the parking um so that was the first way that would be the first um where i'd respond and the second way is that that's what prices can also be very useful for the the price mechanism as a way to make sure that something doesn't run out and so that increasing the the pricing is kind of a signal that the something is becoming scarce so maybe when it gets to that point but say private actors or the city can actually start making money off um of parking and not subsidizing it then that would be a great time to say yes this is the time for to to increase the supply and whether that's as part of new developments or but hopefully as part of a shared supply um in in downtown so the price tool can be very powerful um powerful here does that answer the kind of um and maybe i'll ask our public works director to my my understanding of the way your presentation was that the price per space would would be figured for amortization on the revenue generated on that facility but in a parking district you're saying no anyway i'll ask actually um yeah you had to have that one garage pay for the price of that that space it would be very expensive but because we have several garages and several facilities we spread that increase over all of those so actually the turnover in all the spaces but that price increase actually pays that down fairly quickly so it's not 63 dollars and dollars that you or 68 thousand dollars that you need for that one garage it's spread over all of our parking facilities because we've just raised we didn't just raise it at that one garage we've raised it over all of them the other thing about price sensitivity i would just say um supply and demand that obviously works but if there's a very constricted supply increasing that price you won't see a change in demand until you get to a tipping point and um we saw that at the at the center street garage the two story garage that was free and we used to have three hour parking and it was full all the time a lot of employees would use it and and move their cars every three hours we went to paid parking and it's full it's still full and we raised the prices on that from 50 cents an hour to a dollar an hour it's still full so there's just a shortage that's a very central garage it's very active and so your theory said that should have dropped off by you raise it 10 percent you should have seen a drop in in usage but in this time until we reach a threshold where there's extra supply that sense of price sensitivity we haven't reached that yet i would say and then the other risk we have is if we get our prices too high then our our customers will go somewhere else i mean there's capitola where or or those are the things that we have to keep in mind we we don't want to chase all our customers away and then not have demand either so further for the restaurants and the businesses downtown all right we still will have a little of some public comment and but before we do i saw a hand here councilmember glever and then councilmember grumb great thanks um just wanted to get some clarity on the um statement by director deadl uh and kind of cross-reference that with what we heard with regards to the presentations so i know that we just heard about the center street garage and how it was free and then it went to 50 cents and it went to a dollar but there was no change but i think if i understood the presentations from our guests correctly there needed to be kind of a dual action of encouraging or putting employees or people that live downtown into the less used lots as the data suggested and then leaving those other spaces filled for people that are coming downtown for business or pleasure or whatever that might be is would you say that the non change in the uh use of that center street garage was because of the uh non moving of the other usages or do you think it's because as director deadl suggested it's because of the lack of supply i think what we've seen in in the data is that as in many areas it's it's the least convenient parking in a system that tends to empty out first right when when there are excess spaces the the spaces you find going empty are either in a less convenient location or else they're they're higher priced so for example in the data i've seen the river front garage that tends to be underused whereas the the locus garage right in the heart of things is super full right and the the the monthly prices for both of those garages are the same in terms of you know the 45 monthly rate so there's no incentive to choose the less used garage compared to the more used and i think as well with um meter parking when i when i look at the peak time parking surveys it's always the kind of hidden away meters at the at the edge of downtown so for example down by the warriors arena behind civic auditorium that go underutilized and it's just what we'd expect to see that it's it's those those less convenient spots harder to find that empty out first and so i think if if you ask well where did those 400 cars go the 400 viewers since 2008 a lot of that's happening around the fringes and the edges um and that we've had that experience elsewhere so i think that the strategy of charging the lowest rate that gets you one or two spaces available on each block is a really good way to balance those things out you'll wind up with much higher prices on pacific avenue in the core right and maybe 25 cents an hour at the fringes it's the same thing with the garages and especially with those garages in the heart of downtown where more than half the spaces are being occupied by employees with 45 monthly permits getting some of those employees out of there so that customers can park and you don't need to you don't need to raise the those daily customer rates um to let a lot more customers park happily and raise more money for the system um you could say that the next time a luxury condominium project is built we're not going to let the owners of those condominiums buy 45 a month permits to put their cars in city garages you could say they're going to pay the real marginal cost so there are a lot of ways um to both better manage what you have um and also get more revenue to fund any any needed garages without putting any more cost on customers thank you and then just one thing i saw some head shaking over here so i want to give you a chance of you disagree whether whether it be uh director deddle or claire i don't know i would just say it's it's we have a pretty unique parking system because and i typically agree that the further away typically you would have a lower cost parking option you see that in san francisco but uh the riverfront garage is a classic example it's it's further away used to be free to free two hours on the bottom and we used to sell 16 dollar believe it or not 16 dollar a month permits and we couldn't sell them in the riverfront garage and they were 35 in all the other garages and when we went to a higher rate we made all the garage pricing the same um just because we had businesses come down we had more demand and we're sold out on on permits in the riverfront garage in fact we have a waiting list there as well as the other areas now can we do a better job on on night you know and overnight for residential i think yeah i think there's an opportunity there um our demand curve drops off about six or seven o'clock at night and we have capacity so there is a way to tap some of that excess capacity in the evening but during the peak monday through friday between 10 a.m and 6 p.m we're pretty solid it's pretty busy downtown it's hard to find sometimes it's hard to find a place to park so um we're putting in new equipment in the garage and riverfront and we're going to be putting that throughout the system we'll have a lot more flexibility looking at different types of permitting options do we get a per uh per use type option we'll look at that um we did uh take our permit rates we know they're low we took them to the downtown commission several years ago and and they want it didn't want us to raise them so much so there's this a little tension there and trying to say what's the right price but i think uh i think we're moving in the right direction is what i would say thank you helsberg do you foresee a day when we will have flexible pricing like by the warriors arena that whole i think it's lot 17 or by the civic where people can park for 25 cents or 50 cents or whatever an hour when they're not you know in in order to get the cars out from the pre you know the spaces and specific avenue sure sure you know it's it's interesting because we used to price all of our parking differently our on-street parking was even different we had different color poles i don't know if you remember we used to have the blue poles which were the longer periods which were 25 cents an hour and then we had the orange poles that were 50 cents and and then the council used to get a lot of concerns because people would visitors would come down they didn't know how much the parking was and so we were directed to look at more standardizing our parking rates so we could we've kind of gone back to make it more convenient um and what we have is is the first two hour try to get turnover we do it by rates as opposed to um ticket so we try to we have one price and then it goes up after the second after the first two hours of the same price and then the after that it's it's double so it turns over encourages turnover on the street but you can look at variety of parking methods and pricing and when you have an event it's much more expensive you just have to sign it really well so people aren't confused and they know what they're paying that's we're trying to keep you know we want a pleasurable experience for our customers that they they know what they're going to pay for parking so there's all the funds go into the um parking fund no the all the tickets go to the general fund all of the all of the um parking revenue in the district go to the parking fund but all of the citations throughout the city go to the general fund you have a ballpark estimate of how much uh revenue comes from tickets and how much comes from uh parking you know i can get that for you i don't have that i don't have that in my in my hand right now so if there aren't any more questions one more one more question um there were just um stats about our usage and stuff so i'm just gonna ask jim and claire if you have anything to add or not kind of updates because it was interesting that apparently our occupancy is cooler now than it was even just a few years ago i guess that's where i'm going with this question right um i did see when i separated out the private for private use um i did see a slight trend upwards our downtown has intensified um say the old sentinel newspaper building next space um you know our each square foot downtown is getting more intensive and it could be that um people are becoming more reliant on the public supply um 10 10 pacific didn't build quite enough parking and so we have that residential piece uh and so even with the price increases over the years we haven't seen any any elasticity anywhere near the point three that's a national average so we didn't use that in our calculations when we brought you the rate strategy um back in september we used a slightly lower lower number we had uh all of those calculations um run by a third party uh economics parking firm and um we feel pretty good about those um and just to follow up on mr. dettles observation on the lot three we don't sell any permits there so that's entirely a customer reaction where we saw it was basically zero elasticity with the price raising that helps just a kind of a good question go ahead i'm gonna actually go ahead and ask councilmember meyers and then i'll go back to you okay so i think i think i had a similar question although my brain is fading um so what i've noticed in our downtown is i mean there's a big shift in the amount i believe of employees that we now have downtown so we now are attracting companies that people often would actually drive over the hill to access for employment so um so is that i mean so we're our parking is there is a consistent demand and we'll and it will continue to grow uh as we add more housing and as we add probably more employment opportunities and office space is that not correct in my very primitive understanding of how we we move about the world those are the estimates we use we we didn't look at any growth for residential because often residential will build their own parking but we looked at the pipeline projects again i didn't come prepared to talk entirely about the model i'm mostly tdm tonight but um we did look at the pipeline projects for um anticipated sort of solid projects we think might happen over the next uh five to seven years and um and we did estimate um based on existing uses now if self-driving cars take over tomorrow those numbers will be wrong uh we don't have a crystal ball so we we used what we had uh and so we estimated based on the actual use of the public facilities from what's from the built environment today and and use those same ratios as we move forward so that's how we estimated our future so you're really working towards our future exactly we so today has been planned already right so i mean we're what we're living with today was planned you know whatever 20 years ago and that's why we have what we have and economic goals were that hopefully less people start stop driving the hill and and we have a an economic sector here that actually can attract that type of business here so that is the kind of downtown that we've built um at least over the last 20 years in the recovery absolutely and and we did uh as we talked in february we did talk about those those office workers also being our best opportunity group and we will we're hoping to make some inroads uh with the with the carrot side as well as the stick okay so um city manager i just wanted to add one comment with respect to the it was pointed out that uh you know parking is used and parking phones are used for sort of broader uh policies to support the downtown to support the city and the city has historically done that as well and has been the goal uh like for example uh with respect to some of the maintenance that we do around downtown the bathrooms facilities that are provided the street cleaning the trash collection uh all those are supported by the parking district and in addition it's been a long-term goal of the city to maximize our facilities to provide for mixed use development to have higher and better uses at our facilities uh and to have fewer facilities since the consolidated parking so that we don't have as many surface lots as we have now in order to put those properties to higher and better uses and then when we do uh redevelop those facilities to maximize the use for those facilities like housing and of course the libraries that the obvious one too were uh the goal that was to try to to build a modern state of the library and to maximize a partnership in order to be able to accomplish that at a site that worked um and then we have some additional further goals with respect to the affordable housing project over at pacific station and trying to meet the needs for building and maximizing the the amount of affordable housing there with respect to the parking as well okay councilmember crone and then we'll go ahead and open it up to the public the downtown streets team do they are they out of the parking fund at all i think yeah i think we pay some from the doubt yes portion of it yes and that's 325 000 is that or i believe that's the correct number i don't have it with me tonight and another question i think that's a total but i think we split it amongst several several funds refuse parking jim i have another question for you um how do we explain that if this is correct this is uh i think mr. longinati uh gave us this downtown parking occupancy fell from 84 percent in 2008 to 71 percent in uh 2018 what i'm missing something what what accounts for that i'm not sure what you're looking at i'm looking at the thing parking demand that he um handed out as part of our packet tonight um is that the long term is that the peak time study overall parking surplus now exists with some hot spots of high demand in many underutilized lots and garages downtown parking occupancy fell from 84 percent in 2008 to 71 percent in 2018 you know i would need to look at the data that that that that statement is built on and i can't respond to it without having that in front of me okay thanks it doesn't actually sound accurate no i'll ask him when he comes back up um mr sigmond i was wondering about perception of of no parking you know i've lived here since 1983 i've never had a problem parking downtown never and and i just think it's a mind i don't know i just have never had a problem park finding a parking space in our downtown um can you talk a little bit about people's perception and how can we change that yeah yeah well i think it you know often if you know the system if you if you know where you're going and you know where where you can often find spots then then oftentimes you know you you can do well and also if you're if you're just a patient person that that helps too um but if you are for example um on a waiting list to to get a monthly permit and you'll say there's a shortage of parking because you can't get that 45 permit right now even though you may be parking every day right or you may be saying well i really wanted to park right in front of my favorite store or very close and and so that person drives around looking on the street a lot of times people prefer to park on the street it's it's easier to get to it's more visible it's perceived as safer um and so oftentimes um garages can be perceived as as you know lonely and and especially late at night right um and so those two things the wait list and just wanting to park close can lead to that perception of a shortage and also it's really important that when you look at the system you look system-wide not just at the spaces that you can count with with automatic garage counters but at your whole system including the edges because oftentimes um when demand for the overall downtown shrinks which is what your peak time parking surveys show that that shrinkage in demand it's happening at the fringes right and and i think it is also happening in the riverfront garage when you when you have really good data collection for all your parking um then then you can really see the the patterns even better one one thing to really consider is to get a license plate recognition technology on your parking enforcement vehicles that comes with the option of automatic data collection included and that can be used to automatically collect data for streets and lots and so on as part of the routine parking rounds Berkeley and Davis are both working on that and that will really give you the information and another thing is to look at well do we have situations where people are buying a monthly permit in the public lots and garages because it's just cheaper than the the parking they can get privately um you know what's for example there's a lot of people from st. George's residences on the wait list i don't know what the fee is in their own garage but i do know there's one there's one apartment project in lower pacific that i believe has $200 a month parking fee um there may be some of those people would rather pay 45 to be in the city lot um so you know one of the ways that we often get much better use out of those underutilized private lots right is is to um stop being the best deal in town at the city lots and the city crashes thank you i'd like to take a moment now to um allow for the public comment we're not taking any action tonight um but if there's any members of the community that are interested in speaking to the uh to the council on this item i'll um ask if those who are interested in briefly addressing the council please step forward first and you'll give be given one minute and then we will um allow for the requested additional time from um a organization to go and then return to other community members who are interested in speaking for longer than one minute so is there any member of the community wants to address the council on this topic at this time and you'll be given one minute if you could please line up to my left could i get a point of clarification if if you wait you can get two minutes but if you don't if you go now you get one minute yes okay i would just encourage the council to look at um the data um that the presenters have gone to the trouble to present to us i really think that what we're looking at is and what's been even though there's a lot i don't understand it's abundantly clear that this is about managing and creating what we want to see and i really think that there's no question with climate change coming on that we need to shift um and what we need to do is get people into those outlying fringe areas um and so forth i just also want to say my friend has two cars and i walk everywhere and take the bus so i never get in his cars but he is forever moving his cars and he has absolutely no problem ever getting a space and i could tell you where but i kind of want to keep him a little under the radar i'm a little paranoid but it's in the downtown area he we never have a problem thank you matt ferrell i um just wanted to say that uh i appreciate the presentations this evening i think that a lot of these policies these gentlemen present are uh well founded on research i think the examples presented though tended to be larger metropolitan cities berkeley and arbor and that i think what we need to be really careful about is we need to test these theories in our own communities because i really i know for instance in the city of redwood city i think they had a peak parking pricing strategy for on street and the city abandoned it or stabilized on street parking prices because of customers reaction to that volatility in the parking right so not saying that we can't look at these things but we need to be careful about our expectations because i'm not sure they all have the same impact everywhere thank you my name's kurt simons i uh i have a business downtown i've paid for parking for all of my employees for over 20 years and it's it's been dirt cheap it has been a benefit i can offer my employees but we're part of the problem we allow our employees to come downtown and park and take up the parking spaces for the customers and that's what i want to try to change is allow parking for our customers and have incentives and i i'd love the presentation tonight it was very informative about options and the city is already doing a lot to improve the demand management and i just want to encourage that hi i'm susan kevaleri um i found the presentations to be really very interesting especially about the future of santa cruz um i just want to point out that the city passed at a climate emergency resolution that last friday over 2 000 students protested in 125 countries that's 1.4 million young people it was the biggest day of climate action according to 350.org yesterday the co2 level was 414.79 parts per million we are in trouble and cars are not our future thank you thank you are there any other additional members of the public who would like to address the council for one minute okay we'll go ahead and ask now to have um mr launch naughty come forward and you'll be given four minutes for your requested additional time not a problem um hello council members i'll give you a brief won't be four minutes because you're weary um i just a couple points uh the excess parking revenue uh that could go into the general fund that was an exciting point for me to hear that tonight um i often see you folks struggle to just find 30 000 to add to some worthy worthy program well the revenue that's going to come in on account of the price increases that that this council passed last year would pay for according to the city staff would pay for 2.9 million per year just in debt service on the garage so if you don't build a garage there's some money that could be used for housing for homeless programs for what have you um i want to say too that i think that uh i don't think it'll be controversial to propose that developers need to offer their tenants the option of paying for parking spaces separately from their apartment or condo isn't that just basic american choice um adopting the practice of unbundling parking from the from the cost of the unit i think that's the hidden uh affordability benefit that that we really need to pay attention to and will also lower vehicle ownership and you know i i as far as i'm as far as the presentations tonight i'm they were wonderful i was i'm kind of a nerd and so i loved it but it really comes down to this do we build new parking spaces that cost us over 400 a month in debt service and then sell those spaces for what 45 a month or 70 a month i mean no business per and i'm kind of socialistically inclined i would say but a business person would never do that why would you build more capacity that you know you're going to lose money on it's it it seems absurd to me i think it comes down to that so we need to find these other options and we know that they're there and that that's what we had we learned about tonight so i hope we can agree on that i hope to see uh there's this council agendize in in the future and end to this idea of building a garage i hope you will ask the staff to negotiate with the calvary church who really wants to build affordable housing on their lot but doesn't know how to find a way but i hope you will ask staff to explore uh conversation with the church to partner to build uh parking on the ground level and affordable housing above that on their lot and uh i think that we're at i think that we're at a point you know it's 2019 and we have climate change why are we subsidizing autotrips can we make that just a principle we're not going to subsidize autotrips anymore thank you question for mr longinati could you and the question i had for um the parking people downtown parking i can see fell 84 percent to 71 percent how do we account for that where'd you get that stat from um so that was uh that's the way i read the uh the data from 2008 to 2018 from the that census the christmas time census okay thank you okay so now we'll reopen the um public comment to any member of the public who uh didn't address the council and would like to take two minutes to address the council please if you can't line to my left okay good evening i'm scott graham um you know i think you should look very seriously at doing something other than building a parking garage um given the numbers that these guys presented and the fact that car usage is going down the there's all sorts of empirical information that younger people are not buying cars they're either using rideshare cars when they go on long trips or they're using uber and lyft and things like that bicycles uh public transportation so why would we want to spend a bunch of money that would have to be paid off over 30 years on a some a project that 10 years from now will be just a giant uh albatross and it doesn't make sense to do something like that and if you can take that kind of money and put it into something meaningful like housing we have a housing crisis here we don't have a parking crisis at the moment but we definitely have a housing crisis so it would be the best use of any money that you have instead of it going towards a parking garage you'd be going towards housing and going towards programs and get people out of their cars you know i mean that that's money well spent getting the bus service back to what it used to be in the 70s we had an incredible bus service here in this county and now it's just a shadow of itself so i'd like to see that come back also thank you good evening i'm brett garrett and i really appreciate the two presentations one of the things they've told us is how to do free tdm parking a cost for parking is we've been told the most effective effective version of transportation demand management so if we are if we're paying for tdm and we're also paying to build more parking lots that's kind of working at at cross purposes so it would be more consistent just to focus on tdm and as we raise parking rates that it's tdm that makes money actually that's it's great i love the concept of having better monitoring so that we can have an app for santa cruz like i think they have had at some point in san francisco where people can look on their app and they say here's where the spaces are available oh here it's two dollars an hour and here it's 75 cents an hour i'm gonna go park where it's 75 cents and there's a spot right there and i know it's there because my app says so i i love the idea of having more monitoring where people can see what's available and what the prices are i want to say if we're observing zero elasticity i believe that just means the price is too low raise the price higher and you'll start seeing the elasticity i don't buy the argument that that that the higher price means everyone goes to capitol instead because if if you're parking if you're part charging five dollars an hour and the garage is still full that means empirically that people are still coming to santa cruz and those are people that are willing to pay money for parking they're probably willing to pay money in the stores too businesses will love it thank you thank you good evening i'm thrilled to see that downtown employees are now able to get their hands on deeply discounted bus passes but the funds shouldn't stop there commuter benefits mandated for large employers should be the ultimate goal incentivize all transit use today we've been talking about transportation demand management but it sounds more like parking demand management to me like where's the transit where's talks about getting people moving in terms of tdm we as a county have closed down soquel park and ride highway 17 direct bus service and we wonder why we have an aptos strangler in our county you know the part where in mid county traffic gets to be the worst our one and only local express bus 91x tries to have it both ways 91x by being a local and express by skipping straight to cabrillo when leaving santa cruz but then stuck moseying at dominican on soquel and throughout moracy and on 41st it's an express bus it can't be both um one time i got frustrated with metro and they're bunched up scheduling at cabrillo how basically three buses come within a time span of 15 minutes and then there's nothing else after that that i decided to patronize mst with their express bus it and gave 350 when my free cabrillo pass could have been used i gotta say that was a nice experience they've got wi-fi usb ports for your for your experience while you're aboard their commuter bus and it's just it's a pleasant experience now basically what i'm trying to get at is you can't market transportation if it's not appealing so it needs to be worked on lastly jump is great but it is starting to get middle with by uber for example if you go outside a service area it's cuts at speed and half thank you good evening my name is bald morgan i'll probably take less than two minutes tonight thank you very much for allowing us allowing this presentation it was a breath of fresh air it was creative it was dynamic i enjoyed it um it's very different from what i've heard before in this council when we've talked about parking um and i think it's needed so thank you for allowing these two wonderful presentations i also want to thank you for initiating the eco pass concept i think that's a terrific concept i think it's the future and i want to say congratulations for making that decision i have a son who's going to be 18 years old he goes to santa cruz high he's never talked about owning a car nor have i mentioned anything about a car i take him to school every morning he takes a bus home every day he sometimes takes a bus to soccer practice on the weekends it comes back on the weekends when he does soccer practice with a club we're at depot park where i sometimes get him depot park parking lot 24 in the one south of depot park is rarely full that's one of the fringe parking areas that's being referred to i park there often don't tell folks i often don't pay it's five dollars a day i park there sometimes and have a nice pleasant two-block walk into the city my other son who's going to be at santa cruz high next here has talked about an electric bike we live in live oak so we do need to commute downtown he's talked about an electric bike he's also learning how to take the bus with his brother he is at a theater production company a private production company called all about theater on washington i park on washington street also just south of of laurel i've never had a problem parking i don't have a problem parking downtown either mr crone you mentioned that so i don't think there's a parking issue downtown thank you very much and our next speaker hi debbie bolger um i would like to see the city stop subsidizing parking i'm very concerned about climate change and i think the price of things affects behavior uh i was also quite excited to see the autonomous vehicle shuttles uh tonight and i'd like to see one go up and down mission street and come downtown and maybe it could learn that route nicely and whenever i'm not able to walk downtown anymore perhaps i can take that shuttle so thank you so seeing um no other members of the public interested in speaking to us we'll go ahead and return it to council if there's any further questions and i'll just thank those who were able to stay and um in recognition that we started a lot later than anticipated so i appreciate your patience with that vice mayor comings and i think i just wanted to add or thank all the presenters for coming tonight and for your time i had one question for staff which was um i thought i had heard you mentioned in the beginning of your presentation that you're now tracking or have the ability to track in real time the movement of cars and the parking that's occurring and i'm just curious where that technology is now in place so we um we uh did a purchase order with a company called smarking and they uh it's a third party vendor and they collect and then um they collect from multiple like we have the luke machines and the surface slots we have different equipment we have gmg and we have different equipment all over the place um and they are able to collect the data from that and then um we have access to it through a through a portal so it's um and it's it's real time it's it's every day and it'll it'll help us make much better decisions here in the future uh the second piece of that is we do have the meters on pacific avenue they were installed um uh in early january and so we're just exploring what the what's sort of the back end of that information looks like so this both of those technologies just came on line this year or is it just smarking we've had in for a couple of years we're still working the bugs out of it um uh and the data is not it it's it's not that friendly yet but um definitely we can get it download it convert it and and mess with it in that point but we're uh we've had it for a couple of years at least yeah thanks brown well it's a question that i don't think can be answered here tonight but i i do just want to acknowledge that what i'm hearing is uh some um i don't know that i'd say disagreement but we're hearing different statistics about that that lead us to different conclusions about the need for more parking than the need to replace parking spaces um the goal and some of that's about goals for the future but i'm just having a hard time like like how do i decide whether or not we actually have uh you know need for more parking right because some of the some of the numbers i'm hearing say yes we do and some suggest maybe not and absent any clear data i'm going to go with the the end of one my my small survey sample of me my experience most resonates with the idea that no in fact we don't if we look at the periphery and we look at least less convenient um or maybe out of the way site so i guess i'm just trying to figure out how we where we can get our hands around or minds around data to help us make a decision that is going to have an impact uh with cost and otherwise um um so clear maybe you can yeah that's that's a that's a multiplied answer in a lot of ways um one if you want in-depth data on parking and parking supply and parking occupancy that's a great question to ask tonight what we presented to you was on transportation demand management and that's what we came prepared for so if that's the question that's a great question to ask and we're happy to do that it'll take a while because there's a lot of spaces a lot of data and we want to pull it together in a way that's understandable so that you can make those decisions that's part one part two parking is a huge policy choice uh similar to on pacific avenue where we installed the new meters and we set policy guidance for occupancy standards that we were going to look at parking pricing as it related to falling within a established 65 to 85 occupancy goal if you would like to set an occupancy goal for downtown and accept the corresponding parking pricing changes that go along with that that's a direction that you could take um likewise you could take many different directions on that but parking supply demand pricing occupancy those are all policy goals that you have the ability to direct on what we have been operating under right now and the guidance that we've had in the past is be sensitive with parking pricing to the many many many small businesses that we have downtown that are incredibly sensitive to parking pricing changes and you've probably heard from many of them when we do propose parking price changes we've also heard loud and clear from this council and previous councils to be sensitive to low income workers and the balance between having the users pay the true cost of parking and also recognizing that 50 percent of our downtown workforce works in retail and restaurant and that's a very price sensitive employment group um the idea of subsidizing parking for one group and saying that driving for that group is good but for you know tech jobs that are now not driving over the hill parking is bad that I think that sends a mixed message on where we stand on our approach to transportation and parking policy although it is a policy choice that you can make um it's a really long way of saying that there are a bunch of different parking policy choices that you can make and probably the easiest way would be to start by directing us to bring you information specific to parking if that is the question that you're seeking to ask thank you and council member i'm going to go back to your comment early on I think it was you Claire I don't know maybe it was someone else that no one comes downtown to visit our great parking garages they come down for all the uses and it may be you know go to ma on a weekend afternoon and hang out and have a great time it may be you're living downtown maybe you got a nine to five job I mean all these um maybe you're visiting from or said I don't know all sorts of things um what I would really like to see and I think it stems from my experience of being on vision Santa Cruz after the earthquake and thinking what do we really want long term for our downtown to be it's not that it's a parking lot here uh you know second story offices here trees along the sidewalk etc so personally I would be much more interested in and I actually had written this out um looking for some mechanism for the council with our staff and maybe some consultants to step back and look at the kind of future we we think about parking and other infrastructure with a series of study sessions and really engaging all the stakeholders because I don't think we're hearing from our downtown businesses here and retail is changing it is sensitive as we know that the office needs the property owners work hard to fill those second story offices and so I would personally like to see some mechanism to look at what are the trends for downtowns generally and our downtown particularly we know we're going to be adding hundreds of units of housing and to my mind that's just an enormous opportunity I think there's a big demand for that we hope we keep our ground floor commercial vibrant we know they're struggling for a bunch of reasons um we want to keep some of the great civic spaces vibrant I count the museum and that but I count the farmers market and the library and the civic auditorium and the river I mean all of these are parts of our downtown looking back in time with planning there a million documents and policy statements say we need to connect our downtown to the river we need to connect our downtown to the beach area because it's not a big area really and I would like to look at what's the economic situation what's the revenue we get from downtown in our taxes what are the jobs that exist downtown what do we need to do to preserve those what what is the potential for housing what sensitive we I I think we probably all agree we want to maximize the affordable housing how do our policies related to parking fit into that I I think probably most of us would agree we're looking at at some kind of a mix of market rate and affordable subsidized housing we have so many different activities even in the commercial sector going on not to go into them in great detail but everything about our commercial sectors and our transportation and our housing needs has just gone through so much flux and I I think we can't deny we're going to see a lot more evolution quickly in the future so my my personal interest rather than looking at TDM or parking is looking at the big picture what do we want it to be we are not Boulder or San Francisco or Santa Fe or picket pick city you know we have some certain givens here and let's really envision for the future and I think some of these transportation needs will the answers will become more clear when we when we think about what's the the city the downtown core that we want and connecting it broader out to the community so that's just my view of where I'd like to step back and take a bigger look and I'll just say that we'll be having a series of study sessions and we can take your input and you're welcome to send that to myself or city staff when considering there we go our hand at this time done and there is an ongoing conversation around constant study sessions learning and visioning as we move forward and so we'll take this input into consideration councilmember crumb maybe Claire or Jim Mr. Longinati said excess parking revenue that can go into the general fund 2.9 million dollars in debt service in the garage is that sounds realistic that statistic that we pay 2.9 million on on that service for a new garage we do not pay 2.9 million we we pay currently about just over between four and five hundred thousand on debt service on the soquel front structure that will be paid off in 2027 the 2.9 is the was the in the parking rate strategy for the next parking structure okay thank you and Patrick you said 200 dollars somebody's paying 200 charging 200 dollars for a parking space downtown at Pacific Avenue who's that is that a new is that a new structure I would have to know that is a existing apartment building it's that it's the south end of Pacific Avenue the the my sorts of information for that was an email message from Martin Bernal and and let's see is it 10 it's not are you talking about 555 Pacific they said this this was built I think 2003 I think it's considered a couple blocks south of Laurel the the I'm sorry I'll just have to look at it no worries the the the the pointy made which was a good one about that was that on that project what happened is the residents were allowed to purchase residential parking permits and by whatever your standard policy is in in order to park on on the street and so they said well why would I want to pay 200 a month to park in my own garage which is close to the the real cost when I come park on the street for a couple dollars a month and that created the spillover parking problem so it's really important that if you do the separation of parking costs from housing costs that you don't allow those residents to then have unlimited permits in the residential district or to buy 45 a month permits in a city garage thank you last question Adam miller ball I know you you studied the uber lift thing and you just had a article that went viral on the self-driving cars and how it's going to create a problem in the future do we have an uber lift problem right now in Santa Cruz that's a great question I think it really depends on what you mean by a problem certainly it's providing a mobility service for some people who found it hard to get around to people who don't have a car people who might be unable to drive for for any reason is it also like increasing traffic I mean we haven't had the detailed studies that San Francisco has done but I'd be surprised if it hadn't increased traffic is is that a problem well that's that's hard to answer because it's all giving people a great benefit but it's also having the great benefit of reducing parking demand one of your students did the uber lift on on campus just going across campus do you remember what those statistics were by any chance I can't remember off the top of my head so like several thousand cars were being called just to go from like oaks over to Stevenson or something I can't remember the numbers but certainly yes a student did an analysis of uber demand and UCLA we can see this in extreme is 11 000 trips a week by uber and lift from one part of campus to to another and that's partly I'm reflecting the very the high cost of parking that people find alternatives is cheaper to and to to get an uber or lift and or a scooter for that matter or hopefully people could take a jump bike then to then to pay for parking in so people adapt thank you very I um I know we're not making motions but I'd like to calendarize something for the April 23rd meeting I'd like to revisit the September 11th 2018 library garage decision of the Santa Cruz City Council number two I'd like to bring back for discussion the monthly parking permit program to avoid subsidizing driving and number three I'd like to explore pioneering with excuse me partnering with Calvary church on the construction of a ground level parking with affordable housing above at the Calvary lot for April 23rd I don't have okay well we have a motion by council member Graham I would in light of the content from tonight and the opportunities that it's presented I would second that motion okay I don't have the calendar ahead and I would not prefer to agendize things this way and go a different direction so I personally won't be supporting the motion council member brown and then council member Matthews I would like to see all of those items discussed on an upcoming agenda I understand that it may be difficult to get them all agendized for April 23rd that is a pretty quick turnaround time but I do I'm not so I do want to support the intent of the motion and ensure that these are not items that get lost although I understand that April 23rd might not be realistic to put them all together as a package in light of other things we're doing and the information that might be needed so I'm just trying to figure out how to support this in concept and say and fatally that I would like to see those discussions and deliberations move forward at the council soon what about just revisiting this September 11th 2018 and pause you and interrupt you because I had already acknowledged council member Matthews go ahead I thought she was asking me a question I'm sorry I'm very much opposed to this I think this is another example of trying to make a rapid drive on a narrow agenda without engaging all the stakeholders without bringing in the deep body of knowledge and and studies that have been put in I mean we're talking about the library now and I think it's really a disservice to the work that's gone into that project we have not talked about how the how housing might be integrated into a mixed-use project at that site particularly the other issues that you brought up I think again it's just a rush to judgment on on narrow issues without giving adequate time for our staff to prepare good information and present it in a holistic manner I I think there's just a wrong way to approach this I think knowledge did the city attorney really quickly did you have anything to add to this conversation before we continue I was going to suggest if it's not direction by council to place an item on a specific agenda then it could be based on the preparation of and submittal of a staff report and discussed in the context of our normal agenda review process as an alternative to council direction unless the council direction also specifies you know who is going to be responsible for preparing the staff report what the entire scope of the discussion will be that sort of thing and the council can also work on that with the staff or as that's right individual council members can present on their agenda materials and ask that they be added to a future agenda as well okay council member and then council members council member brown would do you accept 60 days to bring those back I guess my preference would be that we work on these with with staff to ensure that they come back at a time when we can they we actually get the information that we need to make those kinds of decisions so putting a 60 day timeline on it doesn't necessarily mean that we're going to get what we want in order to be able to make those decisions what is it that we want so I guess I'm just if we can you know can can I can I would before we do if you could go through me that would be I would prefer that as protocol thank you because I mean you know it's hard to really answer the question because this is the first time I've heard of the what you're recommending I don't really have a good sense of how long it'll take I mean it would be really nice to be able to have some time to understand what you're proposing what it means and what it's going to take and then we can come back and give you a sense of that but at this point like I said this is the first time I've heard of it and so I have no idea and we have no idea what it would take you know and how long it would take to to gather information and bring it back to you so I would appreciate having an opportunity to look at it and understand it and and then to come back to you okay okay councilor math I'm sorry vice mayor coming then next okay she's been waiting yeah sorry is there a second the motion was there a motion there was it okay well then I'm going to propose a substitute motion which is this I move we direct the mayor to appoint a time limited task force of council members to work with staff in proposing a program of study sessions and public outreach for a holistic review of the issues and trends affecting our downtown to inform the community and council about actions affecting the future of downtown this discussion should include current information trends and major opportunities it may include but not be limited to subjects such as housing both market rate and affordable commercial activity such as retail office tech food and beverage entertainment and services revenue and jobs directly related to the downtown core connection of downtown to the san lorenzo river and main beach area civic and community functions including farmers market library civic auditorium museum and transportation allow time for outreach to stakeholders and community groups to identify key issues and opportunities for city action to strengthen our downtown over the long timeline so that's my motion okay so we have a motion by council second second by council member mires so we'll go ahead and vote to accept the substitute motion at this time all all for clarification in order to vote on this one I would like to understand I understand the intent and I am fully supportive of the idea the concept I'm wondering about what we mean by a short by short term task force when might we see when when are you envisioning these study sessions being rolled out are we talking about the next you know the four budget hearings for the fall I mean it would just be helpful for me to know before I vote either way okay you know how's my math may I answer yeah um and invites me this is a huge deal and I think we haven't really taken a big view of our downtown in a long long time um you know when the great recession hit it was everything that we could do to just scrabble together and recover from that and um you know that's largely been achieved we can say but we we face so much change so I see this mayor appointing a task force of three to work with staff you know they are they are putting so much effort now into the housing and homeless issues I think we have to be realistic about the demands but I'd like to get some good thought from planning and I'm gonna go ahead and pause for just a second I'm looking at the city attorney um I was just gonna say that for for the sake of consistency yeah um I've previously advised that the council can't take action tonight um but it can agendize the topic for a future discussion I think council member Matthews um motion could be framed uh to bring back an agenda item um at an upcoming meeting to establish a subcommittee for um along the lines that was proposed okay okay okay so we'll go ahead I'll make that my substitute motion and just an answer to your question it's a big issue it will take some time but I can see a task force meeting with staff um coming up with a program for study sessions and outreach and I see this is something that would occupy the better part of the year frankly but my god it's the future of downtown it's like we took a year for the housing project you don't do this in a couple of quick meetings and get good results out so that's what I would see it's a major effort for the bulk of the year and there's and there's a lot um for us to do right and so I um we'll now acknowledge vice mayor I just want to make a comment on both items that have been proposed and I I shared the similar sentiments of council member brown that I'm interested in both of these issues um I have been hearing um oftentimes at these meetings that there are a lot of things on our agenda that we need to we need to put forward and prioritize and that there's a calendar which we need to um start we need to set forward and prioritize what we want to do over the next course of the year and I think that a number of us on the council have been waiting for that opportunity to occur so that we could actually begin to see where these different items falling out so we can plan for those and as a result of not seeing that calendar um these types of actions I've been taking have been occurring where we've been um having numerous long meetings on particular items and not really seeing the scope of you know what are all the issues that we need to deal with and what priority do they need to come in and so my preference would be to not support either of these two motions that have been made and instead um would like to hopefully see us have this planning session because it's now almost the end of March and if we want to be able to put these plans in play before the summer hits I think that um it'd be good to have a session where we could prioritize um what we want to get done. Okay well there's um just in response to that I'll just briefly say is that it's been um my job to do the best I can to manage the agendas given the turnaround and council direction and what we've found is very frequent requests for immediate turnaround which makes it difficult to allow that time and so given that we've had the 13 hour meetings we really haven't had that opportunity to have that strategic planning and I'm very interested in doing that I think this really is encompassing that this conversation is and so I too would be supportive of moving in that direction I think um there will be a series of study sessions coming up and there'll be a series of presentations coming up um in an effort to uh better understand the complexities of the issues impacting our city as well as to help us come together as a council to look for a movement going forward so I think we can at that time have a process that's going to allow for um the council to weigh in and direction in time and then in timeline expectations so I um I'm supportive of um the concept and I would also like to prefer that we move forward in a more holistic approach in um at this time. I know that you were intending a while back to have a longer strategy what retreat workshop whatever is that on our it's on the radar we have a meeting set to plan that a date or not a date for everybody but a meeting for us to plan that at this time to establish a date and forward with the sooner rather than later sooner very much sooner than rather than later yes um I just want to make a couple of comments too um yeah I mean I think this is um I guess I'm starting to find myself to be a little bit frustrated um number one at the late hour that we have these substantive comments and discussions um I'm seeing a sort of pretty obvious playbook of sort of rollbacks and um I uh so I'm just going to put that out there um and um we talk a lot about building housing for people I keep hearing the word housing every time I'm in this room I hear housing and I think this is the most important place this downtown and this vision that we can build and to say we can you know work with an entity which is a private entity that we don't know what their plans are um and call that done as our housing for downtown is just a missed opportunity because frankly there there is many opportunities downtown but if we are laser focused on trying to avoid something in one site to do something in another I think we're missing an opportunity and we're not going to end up with the housing we need to provide for a lot of the people with that we're here this evening earlier talking to us about various issues so um I have a great interest in looking at what council member Matthew's outlined um this the downtown decisions we make in the next two to three years are going to be what impacts this community for the next 10 to 20 years and uh it's I understand we need to have our priorities set as a council but we also have to stop rolling back we have to stop rolling back everything that's been done um in the last year year and I'm feeling like that's kind of what underlies a lot of this uh pressure is that you know there's a certain list and that list has got to get done before we talk about anything else and I'm just going to put that out there and I hope that we can come together and try to to facilitate a conversation with our community bring in experts and actually have um a process around discussing our downtown and the future for it thanks okay so before we go too off we'll go ahead and check in I'm sorry I just see you over there and I'm slightly concerned I think it's getting a little bit late for me too um my understanding is that there is a substitute motion and a second right the council will have to vote on whether to accept the substitute motion after which if it is accepted then you can vote on the substitute motion if not you go back to the main motion okay council member clever and then we'll go ahead and move on the motion yeah it was just on some of the things that council member Myers just said um uh I'm confused because the timeline that the reason why I was supporting this motion that was really put forward by council member crone is because it sets a time specific thing where we can begin talking about them I don't know if there's any action that pertain to any of them I think it was to discuss the issues so there's no action associated with it it could be another opportunity for us to talk about them secondly the motions in themselves include conversations about affordable housing so I'm a little confused as there being a seeming a complaint that we're not talking about affordable housing but one of the motions is to look at partnering to for the development of affordable housing in the downtown area and I'm also concerned by the statement or the assertion that there is some conspiracy to roll back all of the things that were done previously because these are we're getting new information from new sources that weren't presented before and it makes it so that we can have a conversation about the things and as count the vice mayor Cummings mentioned we have not seen any form of any kind of schedule regarding anything that we can expect to see on any upcoming agendas it's a total blank canvas that we have to guess on every week when it comes out on a Friday so if we want to transition into a place of co-working into a place of a feeling of mutual trust and belief that the things that we put forward will actually get onto an agenda then I think that we need to a prioritize that meeting which is good to know that you're having a meeting to schedule when that meeting will happen but I feel that that even that process has been very a very muddy transparency to be under understand what's going on and I think that we should move as expeditiously as possible in figuring out ways that we can reallocate money that is proposed for something if we can turn that into affordable housing and transition it away from parking then we should be moving on that conversation as quickly as possible just as we're moving quickly on addressing the issue of homelessness because they're all connected anyway thank you. Okay I'll go ahead and just add that I would welcome as mayor who sets the agenda any conversation with the council members or review of the process in terms of agenda setting at a future time because there is a process that we have in our handbook in terms of how that flows. So at this point we'll go ahead and vote on the substitute motion and then return to the original motion if folks are still in favor of that. Okay so all those in favor of the substitute motion please say aye. Aye. Oops. Okay. All those in favor of the substitute motion please say aye. Aye. Aye. Okay and those opposed say no. No. No. So that fails with council member Brown, vice mayor Cummings. I'm sorry. Okay yeah council member Crone and council member Glover and myself voting against and council member, council member Myers and council member Matthews voting in favor. Okay and so we'll now return to the original motion council member Crone. Yeah the hour is late it's true and I don't feel like I'm totally on my game but I don't think Martin Bernal there has been a month that has gone by when I did not discuss the library the separation or the fact that we don't need a garage and we wanted to separate the library from the garage and you and I have gone back and forth back and forth for over the last two years and five months so and I would ask other council members what exact information do we need to have something on the agenda that has to do with the library garage and do we want to revisit the September 11th 2018 motion that was made by a previous council and we know that the past election was about this issue how can we what information do we need to go okay let's separate those two and have discussions about each one separately. I'm assuming that this is not the time to have that discussion. I assume that council member Crone was framing the motion that he had made previously. This is a response to my comment about needing more information but what information just so we know it's what's out there I don't know that I that's something that we probably can't discuss is that correct I don't know I mean I can I can start making a list. You can't have a substantive discussion about an item this evening so that it doesn't seem to feel so you could you could however direct that it be agendized for a subsequent meeting. My understanding of council member Brown's comment was that she didn't believe setting a hard date on the on the hearing that there was enough information to to support that aspect of the motion so was looking for more flexibility with regard to the scheduling. That was my understanding of the tenor of council member Brown's comment. Okay so there's a motion by council member Crone a second by council member Glover to return at a specific date. Would 90 days be acceptable on bringing these back within the next 90 days? Honestly my preference would be that we have this conversation in the context of our goal setting meeting that we have yet to have that and I'm not sure why that is the case but I'm not at I'm not asking that question I'm just not sure why just put it out there. Don't no need for explanation about it but I'd really like to have that conversation in the context of our priority setting and I wish that could happen like yesterday but here we are. So that would be okay thank you I'm gonna go ahead and ask that you please stop. Can we get an idea when the goal I'm sorry and I'll just I'll just say that the the read that you can you're playing politics with our lies you could go ahead and leave now I am leaving okay have a good evening they are just trying to do the city's business Martin and Cynthia we could go ahead we could have somebody ask her I don't know where our sergeant of arms is but okay you can go ahead and leave now I'm not sure where our sergeant of arms is. Okay we'll go ahead and pause the meeting until. Go ahead okay we're gonna go ahead and pause the meeting then and we don't have our sergeant of arms here I guess to escort this person out. Okay so so at this point I'll just briefly say one of the things that has been difficult for me as mayor is having the time to actually plan that out and because I can speak I think from what I've heard from our staff that majority of the time has been spent bringing us to this place in terms of the work we've been doing on homelessness so the capacity just really hasn't been there and not for lack of interest I'd say so given that that would be my my preference clearly to move forward in this direction of a thoughtful planning process where I think we as a council can hopefully find our highest common denominator as we decide to move forward with a number of different issues but that's not the motion on the floor the motion of the floor is something else. I think I'll withdraw it but can we get any indication of when our goal setting session might be but what month as soon as soon as we can get that schedule right so typically you know typically whenever we have well we have a work plan that we do every two years and actually it expires so we're actually due for and we review it every year we're due for a review of strategic planning in a new work plan and priority setting and typically with the new council too we we do in the team building sessions and we do strategic planning sessions and this time around as the mayor stated we just have not had the opportunity to do it because it's all been other issues that we've been consumed as typically the people in my office who do the work we started some of that work we had some initial discussions with the mayor and vice mayor with some options on how to do it look we reviewed some consultants some various approaches we've had some discussions but have had to essentially abandon that because we've had other priorities and I I've heard that from council members we know we've done a lot of preliminary work with respect to the schedule with respect to items but we need to sit down and and typically it's with the mayor and vice mayor to plan out those sessions so we've been talking about scheduling the time to do that so I think that the process would be to schedule a meeting with the mayor and vice mayor who could then work to plan out a process that can then be brought forward to the council and the council can then you know bless the approach and then move forward from that so I think we're trying to schedule a meeting here soon and we can try to bring something back in terms of process certainly in the next few meetings right and we've yeah okay okay is it with the motion has been withdrawn okay all right we'll then go ahead and adjourn the meeting at this time good job everyone