 I will now call the March 10th, 2020 regular meeting of the Board of Supervisors to order. Will the clerk please call the roll. Supervisor Leopold. Here. Friend. Here. Coonerty. McPherson. Here. And Chair Caput. Here. And Supervisor Leopold. Chair, today when we do the moment of silence, I would ask people to think about the recent passing of someone who's not normally associated with Santa Cruz, but former San Jose Mayor Susan Hammer. She was a part-time resident here in Santa Cruz. She was an amazing mayor in San Jose who championed diversity in the arts, did amazing interventions around gangs. And I got a chance to work with her when she served on the UCSC Foundation Board where she worked to build a student scholarship. She was a great leader and she'll be sorely missed. Okay. So we'll do a moment of prayer or silent reflection and then followed by the Pledge of Allegiance. United States of America. And the degree of public support which stands one nation under God. Turn this over for a moment to Carlos Palacios. Yes, Chair Caput and members of the board and community. I wanted to announce first of all that in compliance with the guidance from the health services agency, we've done a couple of modifications to our board meeting. Number one, we've made available an overflow room in the new community room in the basement. So in the event, we're trying to avoid crowds of more than 50 people. So we're asking that if people want to they can go to the community room downstairs and they will actually can, we'll be live streamed the meeting and also we'll be allowed to make public comment from there as well. So if anyone felt more comfortable down there, it is available right now and we will take public comment from there that's being live streamed and it'll come over the television. We've also made available a comment via the web through the agenda management system and there's instructions on our webpage where the agenda is on how to do that. And we will actually read those comments during the meeting if somebody wanted to participate remotely in the meeting. And I'll repeat that this afternoon when we go into our public hearing as well. Okay. In terms of revisions and corrections, we have on the regular agenda, number five, there's additional materials. There's an attachment instructions for submitting agenda comments that's been added. On number seven, there's a correction. The item should read consider report on the existence of a local health emergency, adopt the resolution ratifying and extending the direct relation of local health emergency by the county health officer due to the imminent threat to public health from the novel coronavirus COVID-19, adopt resolution proclaiming the existence of a local emergency related to COVID-19 and take related actions as outlined in the memorandum of the county administrative office. There's also additional materials of revised attachment B packet page 22. On the consent agenda item 42, there's additional materials, revised memo packet page 970. On a item number 48, there's additional materials, revised memo packet page 1081. And then item 55, staff requests that this item be deleted and deferred until March 24th, 2020. That's item number 55. That concludes the corrections to the agenda. Thank you. Do any board members wish to pull or consent items to the regular agenda? We have none. Okay. And then we'll have public comment. Now is the opportunity for members of the public to address the board on topics that are on today's agenda, consent items, closed session agenda, and on topics that are not on the agenda but are within the jurisdiction of the board. If you cannot stay later to speak on regular agenda items, you may address the board at this time. Thank you very much. Good morning. My name's Olivia Martinez. I'm the lead internal organizer for the Santa Cruz County. And I'm here to talk about the Corona virus. And I want to thank the county and personnel for taking a proactive approach with the Corona virus. I know we're having a meeting this week to talk about the specific of departments and what they're doing. Some of the departments have been more proactive than others but I think they're following the strong recommendations from the CEO and from personnel. So that's really good. Our members have a lot of concerns and have a lot of fears around this. And the more we work in collaboration and have good communication with our members, I think that's going to be very useful for both of us. So I really want to thank Ajita Patel for working with us. And hopefully we get all the materials that we need for the clinics. I think the clinics are very nervous since they are the first, right? They're health providers that are working directly with the public. And so I'm hoping that we can get everything by this week. So thank you very much. Just wanted to give you an update. Thank you. Good morning, Gail McNulty. I'm a mother in the county and I also work for Save Our Shores. We had planned a plastics rally this morning in support of bold single-use plastics reform, which I know you'll be looking at in April. We canceled due to COVID-19. So that's not happening today, but I do have a few comments to share in regard to plastic legislation. I also would like to make sure that you're aware of the recent resolution passed by the Santa Cruz County School Board following the lead of San Diego, supporting youth climate activism in our county, including walkouts should students choose to leave them, recognizing the urgency of the climate situation. So I'm going to read a bit from a recent, well, this month's Rolling Stone Magazine. Planet plastic, how big oil and big soda kept a global environmental calamity a secret for decades. Every human on earth is ingesting nearly 2,000 particles of plastic a week. These tiny pieces enter our unwitting bodies from tap water, food, and even the air. According to an alarming academic study sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund for Nature, dosing us with five grams of plastic, many cut with chemicals linked to cancers, hormone disruption, and developmental delays. Over the past 70 years, we've gotten hooked on disposable goods in packaging. As plastics became the lifeblood of the American culture of speed, convenience, and disposability that has conquered the globe. Plastic contains our hot coffee and frozen dinners. It's the material of childhood from Pampers to Playmobil to PlayStation 4. It cloaks our e-commerce purchases and is woven into our sneakers, fast fashion, and business fleece. Humans are now using a million plastic bottles a minute and 500 billion plastic bags a year, including those we use to bag up our plastic-laden trash. But the world's plastic waste is not so easily contained. Massive quantities of this forever material are spilling into our oceans, the equivalent of a dump truck every minute. Plastic is also fouling our mountains, our farmlands, and spiraling into an unmitigatable environmental disaster. We've found plastic everywhere we've looked. It's in the Arctic, in the Antarctic, the middle of the Pacific, the bottom of our Monterey Bay Sanctuary. It's in the Pyrenees and the Rockies, and it's settling out of the air. It's raining down on us. More than half the plastic now on earth has been created since 2002, and plastic pollution is on pace to double by 2030. At its root, the global plastics crisis is a product of our addiction to fossil fuels, but big plastic isn't a single entity. It's a corporate supergroup. Big oil meets big soda with a puff of tobacco, responsible for trillions of environmental damage, trillions of plastics, or cigarette butts in the environment each year. We hope you will act extremely boldly, not just with what you're planning to look at next month, but with true measures that can actually protect our children's future. Thank you. Good morning. My name is Becky Steinbruner. I ran for County Supervisor in the Second District, and I'm here to congratulate you, Supervisor Friend, on your victory, but I'm also here to speak for the one in three people who did not vote for you. I'm not being a poor loser. I wanna make it clear. I wanna bring to you publicly the concerns and the wishes of all of those constituents that I spoke with during the campaign. They want you here to represent them, to be responsive. It is upsetting to see you multiply going to be on the Larry King Show as a political commentator, to go on Fox News when your constituents are asking for your help in their neighborhoods with crumbling rural roads, poor fire evacuation routes, insurance policies being canceled, and speeding that will not stop. Placing a dummy share of car in La Selva Beach has done nothing to help those people. They need your help, they need you to be here, paying attention to them, paying attention to us, listening to us and responding with true solutions. We want you to hold constituent hours that are at a time when working people can attend. Wednesday mornings from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. doesn't cut it. You've got to be more accessible to the people who are working hard to stay in this county and to have their businesses in this county. You've got to start putting out a newsletter, such as what Supervisor Leopold does, not just Facebook and Tweets, because many of your constituents do not go on Facebook. They do not use Twitter and all of those social media. They also are looking at Nextdoor. They also look just like emails, such as what Supervisor Leopold does. And we want regular town hall meetings, not before the Chamber of Commerce, not before the paid memberships of the C. Cliff Improvement Association and the Rio Del Mar Improvement Association with the people, the general public. We need to have our voices heard. We need to know that you're listening. And right now, one in three people does not feel that way. I want you to start recusing yourself from any decisions this board makes regarding wireless technology. Because of your conflict of interest, sitting on the board of Yardham Technology and Pred Bull, I ask that with great respect, because oftentimes I've seen you have not and you do have a conflict of interest that needs to be publicly recognized. So I want to also ask that you help the people in the estates drive to address the safety issues they have with their children. They've come here many times asking for your help. You need to help them. Thank you and congratulations. Mr. Chair, I don't easily say too much about this. This is not a campaign platform and that election's over. You can address the issues of the day pointed directly, but I think the vote has been done. It's said and done. Let's move on. Let's don't go back. Gee, I thought we had freedom of speech here. And when people can't, they can speak their three minutes. Thank you. And thank you, Becky. I don't want to use your time, but I had to do that because he does not respond to my emails. Thank you. Doesn't respond to my request either regarding wireless technology dangers. You know, without our right to health, we basically have no rights. And wireless microwave systems endanger our health ubiquitously from the cell phones at cell towers, the antennas, the 5G on earth and in space, the 4G on the utility poles all over. And it's profitable for corporations and you're making some money from yard arm. Supervisor friend, I do feel there's a conflict of interest here and in all good democratic process. I think it is required that you recruit yourself from wireless decisions. Today's the, I think it's the ninth anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. These nuclear power plants emit huge amounts of radiation. And you know, we were told how nuclear energy is safe and clean and so inexpensive you could hardly pay anything. And I also think to the nuclear disaster at Three Mile Island where Supervisor Leopold, you've said publicly when you had to be evacuated in 1979, I think at the age of 14, you said this was a formative political experience of life, this evacuation and that you spoke at an event on fracking and you rightly praised ourselves for being the first county in the state to ban fracking. I think we need to be in the leadership of banning wireless microwave technology as well. I have an article by Amy Worthington from 2007, The Idaho Observer and it's called The Radiation Poisoning of America. Very well substantiated. She refers to cell towers as nuclear bombs on poles and describes how the radiation, the non-ionizing radiation and the ionizing radiation have similar hellacious health impacts. And I'm going to leave the article for you, but let's talk about real health threats and remove those threats like wireless radiation. Thank you. Thanks, Marilyn. And next, is there any, do you want to call on the committee? Yes, I know I'm going to do that. Anyone from the public to address the board from the community room? And it looks like we have a long line there, huh? Yes, Chair Caput. Okay, go ahead. Good morning, Chair Caput. Good morning, members of the board. My name is Mytrea Maziarz and I live in the city of Santa Cruz and I'm also an employee in ISD. I was too shy at the employee awards to say anything, but I wanted to take this opportunity since we're also using this new facility here to give some thanks to our ISD management, Kevin Boling, our director, assistant directors, Tammy Weigel and TD McCann and my supervisor, Stacy Lake. And we got the gold for the general government category. So yeah, it was a real honor after almost working here 20 years. This is my third award. I got a couple of bronzes last time, so it's nice to be recognized and it's nice to have such supportive management. And of course, we love our coworkers in planning and we enjoy working with them. So thank you very much. You're welcome. Thank you. The clerk doesn't, the clerk will read it. We have someone else to come here. That's fine. Thank you. I didn't see you. Good morning. My name is Dennis Varney. I live in Aptos, California, on Via Palo Alto. And I'm here just to, as a citizen, a concern of what's gonna happen today on your vote of the Coastal Commission's ability to take over our property on the coast. So I'm opposed to the Coastal Commission and the Planning Commission going ahead with this proposition that it's gonna be in front of you today. That's my only comment. Thank you. Do I need to say the clerk will read into the record any comments from the community room? Thank you, Mr. Chair. There have been no live comments received on this item. Okay, that's fine. And that concludes public comment. The next item is our consent agenda. And I'll ask each member to comment on the consent agenda if they wish to, Supervisor Leopold. Good morning, Chair. First of all, I would like to offer my congratulations to my colleagues, Supervisor Friend and Supervisor McPherson on their successful elections. And I am grateful for the people who showed support for me in this most recent election. And more importantly, to see as many people as they did come out and participate in the election process where a stronger community when people become civically engaged. Just on today's agenda, just a couple items I'd like to comment on. On item number 35, I wanna thank the probation staff for this thoughtful use of the Prop 47 implementation funds. I think these are good uses of these resources and we'll make a difference in our community. On item number 43, the human services, this grant in the amount of $104,000 to be used for this emergency childcare bridge program services seems like an excellent use of funds. And I appreciate the effort to work with the County Office of Education to make this happen. Child care is definitely an issue that this board cares about. And that's it. Okay, thank you. Supervisor Friend. And nothing to comment on. Thank you. Okay, you're welcome. And Supervisor McPherson. Thank you. I think I can speak for our voiceless colleague over here. He's a little laryngitis, but I wanna express my support for Supervisor Coonerty's efforts to request more time for public input on the Coastery's Cotone property. It's a huge undertaking and it deserves more time. And I think it's gonna, the community will benefit if we have additional consideration on that. On item number 40, the deferral of the IV drug use report or needle exchange program. I understand under the coronavirus issue that we have a lot of health related concerns. And so this is going to be delayed, but I do understand the reasons why and I'm looking forward to discussing this item in the near future. On items 45, 48 and 52, these are all issues about public works type projects up in the Santa Rosa Valley, including water, sewage and transportation. I really wanna thank the public works department and everyone involved planning for addressing these issues that are very, very important for the Santa Rosa Valley. It's a really a quality of life type of a situation up there. And I really appreciate the efforts of our public works department in planning and environmental health to get these projects moving. Thank you. Thank you. And then I would comment, but I'll wait until later because we're gonna have on item seven comments on the coronavirus situation we have not only locally, but nationally. So anyway, I'll wait until that point. Thank you. Do we have a motion? I move the consent agenda. Yeah. We'll first and we have a second. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Any objection? None. Passes unanimously. We'll now turn to the regular agenda and that would be item seven. Report on the existence of a local health emergency, adopt resolutions ratifying and extending declaration of local health emergency by the county health officer due to the imminent threat to public health from the novel coronavirus. Also known as COVID-19, adopt resolution ratifying proclamation of a local emergency related to the coronavirus and take related actions as outlined in the memorandum of the county administrative office. Okay. Thank you. How are you? How are you? I'm here and glad to be here. Thank you. Okay. Good morning, chair Caput, honorable board of supervisors. My name is Mimi Hall. I'm the health services agency director for County of Santa Cruz and I appreciate your time and attention this morning. It's, this is a very important topic and I wanted to take just a few moments to provide the board and the public with the update of the Santa Cruz County situation in light of the broader situation this morning. So as we all know, this is a global matter and in a very short amount of time from the end of December till today in a number of weeks, we've gone from the emergence of a new disease to what we have now is over 110,000 cases confirmed in the globe around the globe. You can see that COVID-19 is quite widespread. These red circles show you where there are areas of outbreaks and this is quickly becoming what we believe will be soon identified as a pandemic. So in terms of what's happening in Santa Cruz County, we do have two confirmed cases to date. I'd like to remind everybody that this is very emergent. We learned of our first case on Friday evening and we learned of our second case. I think it was yesterday. All the days are kind of smushing together for me because I have a very, I'm not very aware of time, but I believe our second case was over this weekend and what we knew after our very first case is that even before our first case, we've been preparing for this and thinking about what actions we would take as a government and for our public, should we have a case in our community? And so in California, there are 114 cases. So we have two of those locally. And as you may know, we had two deaths in California. One was in Placer County and one was in Santa Clara County. I will say that the reason we are here declaring a local emergency, you can see the timeline right there is that we have to be in a position as a government where we're well prepared to deploy resources to ask for mutual aid and to also get some kind of reimbursement from the federal and state government in our actions to respond to this emergency. You can see that our health officer declared a local health emergency last week and this was, I believe it was a day or two, maybe a few days before we learned of our first case. And I'm grateful for those actions and I'm also grateful that the board has decided is entertaining also declaring a local general emergency. So I just wanted to talk a little bit about what we're doing in Santa Cruz County and what we're doing in the local public health department, which is our public health division. So we are responsible for monitoring surveillance, case contact investigation, lab testing, communication, emergency response, working with our healthcare system. What we have been doing is convening local calls for our healthcare system partners. So Tuesday mornings, 7.30 a.m. before providers have to see patients, we have a local healthcare partner call. The first 10 minutes of that call is spent giving the latest updates on lab testing, guidance on assessment, all kinds of things, because this is a quickly changing situation. And then we allow the remainder of the call, providers, administrators from the healthcare system to ask us questions on implementation. We also have Tuesday morning 8 a.m. partner calls and they're robustly attended. I heard that we reached maximum capacity this morning. So we'll think about how to provide more access for our community partners, but many partners join that from fire to education, to senior services, businesses, non-profits, you name it. And it's our way of getting real-time good information and guidance out to our community partners as soon as possible. We do have our department operations center open. We use the incident command system that's used at the local, state and federal level. And we provide our guidance and information based on consultation with California Department of Public Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As soon as we had our first case, we began consultation with the CDC and CDPH. One of the things that we're doing quickly is I don't know what people think about how we are resourced, but we're a very small public health department. It's for the last seven weeks our communicable disease team has been on overdrive in planning and preparedness, and now we're in response mode. So we are in the process of gaining extra help by hiring two additional epidemiologists. We're seeking a way to have some more dedicated time for our deputy health officer because our health officer, I don't think she's had a day off in three weeks, but we know that we, this will be a longer drawn out response and we wanna make sure that we have the resources to prepare for it. This is one of our meetings last week in our department operation center. So our department operation center is it's really a table we're planning operations, resource requests, communications. There are chiefs to each one of those and we all come together. We have our morning calls with community health system partners there. I just wanted to assure that even though the public has found out about these two cases just over this weekend, for us, we've been working for several weeks in preparation. The most important thing I wanna leave with you all today in this information has also been shared with all of our city partners and our community partners is there are five key messages that are very, very important. The first key message is, I'll name them all social distancing, prevention and preparedness, vulnerable populations, school and workplace actions and just staying home when you're sick. So for social distancing, you may all know that we have released guidance yesterday regarding social distancing. It's on our website and this is county guidance from the local health department, which is the official health jurisdiction for Santa Cruz County. We're asking the entire community to comply. So the guidelines that you will find online and our general social distancing guidelines for the general public as well as organizations and then furthermore, there are workplace guidelines. We're calling these interim guidelines because they're in place for a period of two weeks until March 22nd. It's very, very important that people heed these guidelines and do the best that they can in their home, their neighborhood, their faith community and their workplace to comply. So what we have right now is we have a situation where we have two cases that are travel related. Because of the circumstances and our proximity to Santa Clara County where there's a rather large outbreak, we have been advised by California Department of Health and CDC to launch our response as if we have community spread, even though we don't have confirmation yet. And so that's what we're doing. So these guidelines are intended and I appreciate the CAO's office on the board's actions in altering our meeting here today. These guidelines are intended to ensure that across our entire community, we reduce any opportunity for transmission. And the period of two weeks is the period of time that we would typically monitor anyone who has potential exposure to COVID-19. And I know it's difficult. It may have many, many impacts on families, on the local economy. I hope that the federal and state government will have some measures to alleviate those concerns, but our first and primary concern right now is protecting our community. So preparedness and prevention. We are asking everybody to be ready. Don't wait for government or your employer or someone to come in and tell you what to do. There's a lot of information out there. I encourage the public to learn about what they can do to prepare their household for working from home, having your workplace closed down, maybe having your children out of school for an extended period of time. Probably one of the most important key messages is our vulnerable populations. So some of you may know that there's no treatment for COVID-19 and there's no vaccine. We don't anticipate one to be available for quite some time, at least a year, maybe more. So similar to when we had H1N1, which was our last pandemic, what we do and every action that we take as individuals protects the people who have less ability. So in this case, our vulnerable populations are those who are older. If you're older and or you don't have to be older, you have any kind of underlying health condition like harder lung disease, diabetes, things like that. You are at more risk for serious complications and perhaps even death. So what we're doing through social distancing is we're keeping the amount of circulating virus in our community really, really low so that those people who may not have a choice and who are more at risk are protected. Schools and workplaces. There is school and workplace guidance that's released by ourselves in California Department of Public Health. We are asking everybody to comply with that guidance. The one thing that I want to let everyone know as a precursor is if we have a positive case in one of our schools, our health officer will recommend school closure. The ultimate decision is made by the school district, but we wanna take swift and quick action so that we can reduce the spread in our community. And above all, stay home when you're sick. If it's at all possible, if it's not possible, please practice really, really good hand hygiene and cough and sneeze etiquette. And if possible, if you see that someone is ill or you know that they're ill, please try to stay away from them. The resources that we have, we really work, it's really hard for people to go to multiple places. So at our website, sanacruzehealth.org slash coronavirus, we have our own interim workplace guidance and social distancing guidance. And on those documents are hyperlinks to the state and federal resources. I do wanna say right now, we're being inundated with calls from event organizers, from schools, from people who are fundraising, from people having meetings, asking us, do you think that we should not have our event? Follow the social distancing guidelines. That we are not here, we're not the social distancing police. We're asking everybody's help to comply because we don't have the bandwidth or the energy to provide that opinion to every single organization. Our opinion is everyone should follow these. So please do your best to do that. The other thing I wanna mention is that people can text COVID-19, all one word, no spaces to 211211. And this is different than the information that we've provided before. Previously it was said that it was coronavirus. So they have shortened that and it's COVID-19 to 211211. I just tried it. It's really good. You can also put in your zip code to have local information about what's happening in your community. Our community calls for community partners are Tuesdays from eight to 825. And if anyone is welcome to participate, we're gonna work on figuring out how we expand the maximum number of callers. And then if folks wanna join that call, they should email hsadoc.coordinator at sanacruzcounty.us. And that's all I have for you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Supervisor Leopold. Yes, first I wanna thank you for the presentation. I also wanna thank you and your staff for the hard work you put in already. And I know we're at the beginning that with the greater availability of testing, I'm sure we're gonna find greater prevalence here in the community. The one thing that I'm aware of and try to share with others is we have superpowers. The superpowers are not coughing into your hand, coughing into your elbow, having those safe social distance, following those guidelines, not going out when you're sick. And all the same preparations you would take if you were trying to avoid the flu. And so that gives us agency, it gives us a ability to control how this spreads. And I think we need to keep on sharing that information. I also appreciate the efforts that have been made with our local school districts. I know that you've met with the COE and the school superintendents last week to help prepare them. And I know this is an area of concern among many families in the community. So I appreciate all the different ways in which you're allowing people to learn information, the most recent information. I encourage people to use these resources because in any kind of public health emergency, good information will really be a lead to good health. And I appreciate the effort that everybody's put in. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Friend. Thank you, Chair. And also thanks to Dr. Newell for her work and Mr. Hopin and Mr. Placios. I feel like the communication to the community has been very good and very strong, which is an important thing during this time. One of the things that I have taken away from the information that you've provided or the county's provided is that we're gonna need flexibility from the community at large, from employers, from schools, because there's gonna be very real health, economic and social impacts associated with this. You could see a situation where service continuity is tough to maintain. You can see a situation where economic continuity for some local families is difficult to maintain. And so we need, the county can handle on the health side, but we need a much greater community response on the economic social side. Our ask is that every individual, every family, every business, every organization, every church think outside the box about how they can help their neighbors. So for example, if one of our schools should close or a few of our schools or a whole district should close, employers who have the flexibility could think about allowing well children to be at the workplace with their parents just for a period of time. There are many, many other examples and I encourage the community to feel empowered. You don't need to wait for government to tell you to do these things. You have all of these things within your power and we're asking the whole community to come together and assist us. What's a community that has a history of natural disasters and response to natural disasters? And we can look at this in that scope of addressing what the government can and cannot provide to you in the first three, seven or 14 days, how people need to be prepared for that, how employers need to be prepared for lack of continuity, even public safety in speaking to some of the local fire districts yesterday about how they'll be triaging calls to ensure that their employees are safe and they're to respond to the most pressing needs. So it's really a, if you have a plan for yourself and you have an understanding that the community, in my opinion, at least from an economic and social sense is going to be impacted for some time as a result of this, I think it's something that we can actually come through. And that's not just the health side. That's just the other impacts that are associated with it. But I really do appreciate because I imagine all five of us are just being inundated with questions similar not just to whether events should be shut down but what people should plan for and individually do. So the degree that you can, there's nothing wrong with over communication with the community and the degree that you can provide guidelines and information, I think, and allow empower people to make these decisions for themselves and their family. It's going to be very important moving forward. Yeah, so I would emphasize that people go to our website. If you have a cell phone, text 2-1-1, 2-1-1, and encourage every single individual to become familiar with the information that will be shared with you. Thank you, Supervisor. Thanks for working all these hours. Yeah. Thank you. And Mr. Chair, I certainly repeat what has been said about the coordinated effort for our response and preparation that gets absolutely outstanding. And thank you for what you're doing and everybody that's involved in the health services agency and beyond. And I just would like to make a different point that not only this county, but other agencies who's on a conference call with the University of California president, Janet Napolitano reaching out to all the university campuses. We're going to be hearing shortly from our Metro leader. It has been taking very strident steps to make suggestions on how we should handle this in the best way and the safest way. So everybody's in on this and everybody's very much aware of it. And if you know somebody who's not, well, let them know and give them those few pointers as you can for starts and then the website. And last but not least, this is a time of high anxiety and I understand it in our community and throughout the state and the world for that matter. But remaining calm helps too because when you become anxious, it doesn't help your, I'm not a doctor, but my uncle was, but stress doesn't help. So try to be as calm as you can and find out the information. And if you don't know where to get it, call us or go to the website. Let's try to stay as calm and collected as we can under some really trying circumstances today. And I want to thank you also. I think you've pretty much summed up with our efforts are all going towards and I appreciate the fact that we are being proactive and doing all we can. I know with school kids, they bring home a lot of things that go through families and all that. I have five kids and so we tell them to of course, wash their hands and everything like that. I know my wife went out to buy some hand sanitizer and they're sold out everywhere. So what I did at my house, I don't know if it works or not, but I think it does. We have a bottle of whiskey and I just have the kids rub some whiskey on their hands. So when they go to school, if the teacher smells a little bit of whiskey, they're not drinking it, they're just rubbing it on their hands. Does that help? I'd like to make, here's my message to everyone. It's a good closing message because we recommend that there be hand sanitizer available widely. There's a shortage. There's a shortage even for businesses, employers and healthcare facilities. So good old fashioned hand washing. Most of us have access to soap and water. And I would say that when your kids come home, when anyone comes home, I have kids as well. As soon as they come home, even before COVID-19, come home and wash your hands, wash your hands before you eat. Frequent hand washing is the best thing. And if you're not able to wash your hands, refrain from touching your face. And the hand sanitizer shortage brings up, there are some people that are not happy because we don't have all of the supplies that we need in our healthcare facilities. We have our essential supplies across this community. So for example, N95 masks, surgical masks. So we ask people to be kind. We ask people to think about community and not blame others for a situation that pretty much nobody has control over, but trust in the fact that your medical community, your epidemiologists, your public health department is prioritizing the big picture to make sure that we protect everybody. We do not recommend that healthy people wear masks. There's a shortage of surgical masks in the nation and in the state. Reserve those for people who are sick so that they don't spread their illness, whatever it may be, to others. But these are general messages to remember, be human to each other. The reason that we're taking these actions are because in terms of social distancing and all of these prevention measures are to protect those who are more vulnerable than the vast majority of us will have an illness like a cold or a flu and get better. But there are some of us who won't and that's why it's so important to take care of our community. You bet. Thank you very much. I'll open it up to the public and if you have any comments on this subject, please come forward. Thank you. Bye, Becky. Good morning, Becky Steinbrenner from Rural Aptos. Thank you for the report. It's good to have good, clear information because that's part of the problem. There's so many different pieces of information out there that is creating concern and panic. So thank you for that. I had the good fortune of meeting with a group of rural residents, actually in Supervisor Leopold's district over the weekend as a ham radio operator and learned about a very out of the box thing that the summit mountain community is doing. The owner of the summit store has arranged and is in the process of putting into action when need be a system where people who are quarantined or are concerned for their health and don't want to go out can order food to be delivered to their home from the store using either an email or an app or something that he has worked out himself. This is the owner of the summit store working in partnership with the pastors of the four area churches who is now, those pastors are now reaching out to the community and they've got a list of volunteers who are healthy and are willing to deliver this food to the doorsteps of these people who cannot or are afraid to go out. So it's this kind of resiliency that our community is certainly capable of doing and I encourage other communities to take this kind of creative action to help out and work together with their neighbors. We'll all be fine working together and we'll do our best. So I would like to put that out and if you are in connection with any large community groups, I'd also reach out to the community emergency response teams because they are well connected in their neighborhoods. So thank you again for that report. I heard on national public radio this morning coming here, the same discussion and concerns about the economics of this. What will it mean for families whose schools are shut down and then they will need to stay with their children and cannot go to work? What will it mean for students whose schools are shut down and the schools themselves who are shut down? So the economics of this is quite staggering and I'm happy to hear that this board is considering funding from state and federal sources to help out with that. I will look forward to hearing from the Metro report how Metro and especially para crews are working to sanitize their buses to prevent spread for the vulnerable people that do use those services. And I was happy to see at the Aptos Library yesterday, they have made wipes available to all patrons so that we can wipe down the keyboards and the seats where we are all working. Thank you very much for your good work. You're welcome. Hi Marilyn. Hi, Supervisor Caput. Well, I have some thoughts on this. I noticed right off that the Trump administration allocated, I don't know how many millions or billions of dollars to the pharmaceutical industry to come up with some kind of vaccine, big money in this, regarding sanitizers I read years ago that they tend to destroy the beneficial bacteria and they're actually toxic chemicals and sanitizers, something to look up. And I think the best advice is to wash your hands with just plain old soap and water, not the sanitizers. Years ago I read an article in the Independent of England by Jeffrey Lane and he was talking about the wireless microwave technology tends to put, this is my lay person's terms, a charge on toxins and particles that are in the environment so that they stick to the lungs more. So there's this kind of interaction and synergistic effect from what I understand. Another thing that I've heard is that where this coronavirus was first discovered in China they had activated the 5G technology. So I have a question of what's the relationship to that? Does it have more to do with the 5G than the coronavirus? I don't know. I also heard there's a biochemical lab near that province of China and that was suspected that genetically engineered virus had gotten out. Lack of testing, I've heard on the news that just to test people for it, there aren't enough testing kits. So those are questions I have and also to recommend a book called The Invisible Rainbow, A History of Electricity and Life by Arthur Fürstenberg. There's a chapter in there on the great influenza of 1918, a whole chapter and what the author attributes it to is the activation during World War I of a wireless communication system that made people ill and a lot of the first outbreaks were on naval ships. It's quite a read and he makes a strong case with lots of documentation that it wasn't how viruses normally behave. Thank you. Do we have anybody in the community room that would like to speak? Mr. Chair, there are people there. They are hiding off camera and I don't think they're wishing to speak. Yeah, that's fine. There's somebody sitting in the back row but and they can hear us, I guess. I think there's someone else here. Okay. Anyway, that concludes, I'm sorry. Hi, thank you very much. My name's Tim Delaney and I'm from the summit community and congratulations on your win. I think you probably won the election, I'm assuming, correct? I came in first. Oh, cool. Right on. So anyways, I'll just get right to it. I am concerned about this virus that came out of China. And I look at it from the standpoint of on one hand, you have a socialist society over here. And on the other hand, we have a highly gullible American public. I know all of you folks are very nice and whatnot. It's wonderful, but I look at how this election went and here in the state of California, I sort of feel like, you know, I'm living in a Jojo rabbit society where the deep South, they got the message, they voted for Biden and, you know, they figured, okay, so we got a deadbeat father, a crook and a tax cheat. And on this side, we have a communist on the other side and he said, you know, forget it, we're gonna go ahead and vote for Biden. The state of California, a lot of you folks voted for Bernie Sanders. And that concerns me when you look at Wuhan, okay, the citizens of Wuhan over there, they're not very happy with their socialist government over there and they're coming in with their teams. Hey, you know, we need to like, you know, reeducate these people and get them to try to figure out how to show appreciation for the Communist Party over here and how they're dealing with this disease. So it is what it is. You know, I think everyone needs to wake up and snap out of it. You don't wanna drink from the Sinai punch pole, punch pole of Jim Jones, you know, the religious cult leader in the 70s. And you need to think about your freedom. When you're, when you have international travel and you have a disease here where we have no immunity, there's no vaccine, it spreads fairly easy. Sure, it's three to 5%, whatever, you know, for folks like myself might be 15 to 20% death rate. You know, good Lord, thank God it's not smallpox. So, you know, that's my warning to all you folks. You need to wake up to reality here. Don't give away your freedom. When you adopt socialism, you give away your Bill of Rights, you give away your body and your soul. That's what happens. And then we end up in a predicament like this. You know, when people can't speak, what are you gonna do? We're powerless. That's my message to all of you. Thank you very much. Just a quick point, super appreciation for the staff and for you guys on trying to get on this quickly. I just wanted to point out that every presentation I've heard that goes to even groups within Santa Cruz, everybody says thank you afterwards. And then somebody adds some point of what they specifically do, which doesn't go along with the guidelines like you're, like respectfully, like your whiskey comment, just saying. So, just trying to be careful of trying to add in personal knowledge as a response that isn't according to the guidelines. Like I've heard people after comments being like, oh, don't worry about doorknobs or oh, you can reuse medical gloves. Let's really try to stay with the best practices of this. So we try to contain this. Thanks. Okay, that concludes the comments. Chair, first of all, I just wanted to say that I meet regularly with constituents this week because of the social distancing guidelines. We're switching to an online Facebook live event and which Director Hall is gonna join me on Wednesday at 5.30. You can tune into facebook.com slash Supervisor John Leopold. We'll be talking about issues affecting the county and I'm sure we'll be talking a lot about COVID-19. I appreciate Ms. Hall's availability for that. I would be prepared to move the recommended actions on this declaration. Okay, do we have a first and second? Okay. And all those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposition? There is none. Thank you. And then we'll go now to item eight, presentation on the state of Santa Cruz Metropolitan Transit District as outlined in the memorandum of myself. Mr. Chair, Supervisor, thank you for the opportunity to be here today to present you our annual state of Metro. I'll cover some updates for you as I usually do, but towards the end, I'll talk a little bit more about what Metro is doing in response to COVID-19. Just some quick stats. Our budget this year is $52 million. We employ 300 people. We have 98 fixed route and commuter buses and they run on 26 routes, 41 paratransit vehicles. We serve the entire county population. We provide about 5 million trips a year and about 72,000 additional trips on our paratransit, which we brand as pair crews. Always interesting to talk about the percentage of our ridership that is from the educational institutions, primarily Cabrio College and UCSC. This year that is up, about 60% of our annual ridership is represented by those folks. We're also working on completing our AVL, our automatic vehicle location, or GPS, installation on our buses. That's going on right now today. It's been a bit challenging for us because we have so many different series of buses going back to 1998. We're trying to implement a very new technology on buses as all this, as 1998 buses, but that is moving along and we hope to launch that here in the next couple of months. And that of course will provide our customers a smartphone application for them to see where their bus is and when it arrives. And also for our staff to literally have pipelines full of data with which to try to manage the system even better than we do today. Just updating you on the topic I raised last year, which is our aging fleet. I mentioned earlier we have 1998 buses. They should have been retired long ago. They are still in our fleet and about 50% of our fleet actually needs to be replaced. That's about 50 buses that are on the road that are past their useful life. Those buses are more costly to maintain and they're less dependable hindering our ability to provide the service we hope to provide to our customers. So we're continuing to work on that, but that's a big challenge. That can be anywhere from 38 to $50 million to fix depending on whether we buy compressed natural gas buses which are the buses we've been buying since 2002 or we move into fully electric buses which range in price up over a million dollars apiece. To that end, we have four pro-terra fully electric buses that should be here by June of this year. And we're making our initial commitment and towards following the State California Air Resources Board mandate that all transit agencies in California become 100% electric by 2040. So we'll have our first four buses here. We just completed the electric infrastructure charging infrastructure in our yard. If you happen to be driving up river, take a look at our facility and you'll see some really beautiful charging stations right there up against the, near the street. So that's pretty exciting for us. We can't wait now for those buses to arrive. Additionally, this year we will, in the next couple of months, we will launch another smartphone application on our Highway 17 service, which allows our customers to pay for their fare via a phone application. That's important to us because we do have some crush load periods of time on Highway 17 in which that bus is on an ongoing and regular basis late because it takes so long to board our customers, many of which are cash paying customers. So we hope that will speed up our boardings and help us get to the other side of the mountain in a more timely fashion. So more on that, of course, next year when I come back and provide you an update. Now turning to Metro's response to the coronavirus, we certainly are taking that extremely serious and trying to do our part. We appreciate the county in providing their memo yesterday, which gave us some additional guidance. I will tell you that over a week ago, even prior to the first case in Santa Cruz County, I directed that our buses be taken up another notch in the cleaning that we perform on those buses each night by adding a disinfectant that is one that is we're told can kill the coronavirus. I was sort of drawing from my experience back in about 2005, 2006, when I was a general manager in Los Angeles and had to do something similar during the avian flu. So we're doing that kind of a practice nightly hitting all of what we call the high touch surfaces. Those are surfaces in which our customers will touch. For example, the stanchions within the bus, the hand straps, the backs of the seats, those kinds of things. So that's already been done. We're also doing that on our paratransit equipment. Certainly some of the population that we transport on paratransit are within that vulnerable population. So we wanna be very careful and do everything we can to properly sanitize those buses and vehicles. We're also closely monitoring the CDC website and other reputable sources, including the County Health Services site. We've participated in several webinars to date, primarily focused on transit and coronavirus. So we're gathering information wherever we possibly can, including from these webinars that are transit and non-transit related. We've provided for the safety of our employees and our bus drivers. We've provided all of our drivers, both paratransit and fixed route bus with hand sanitizer bottles. Those, and we've purchased gallons of the hand sanitizer so that when they run down, they can go to the window and refill those bottles so that they always have hand sanitizer on their person. We also have obtained a supply of the sanitizing wipes. As was mentioned earlier, both those products are becoming increasingly difficult to source right now. So we were fortunate enough to have some of that on hand, but we need to continue to get more and we're trying to be careful not to buy more than we need because obviously there's a need far and wide for those same products. And then thinking about our employees agency-wide, we're distributing the hand sanitizers with the pump actuator on it throughout the agency wherever employees can access those, be that restrooms, break rooms, other gathering facilities, front desks, those kinds of things. And the employees have been provided with hand sanitizing wipes to clean their own workspaces, computer keyboards, those kinds of things. So we've also directed our custodial staff to increase the frequency and how vigorous they're cleaning all kinds of surfaces at night at the various facilities as they go through there and adding, of course, the new level of disinfectant to their workload. Almost daily, we're providing all of our employees emails on the subject matter. We're not creating our own stuff. We're just replicating what we find on the county side and on the CDC site, just putting all of that prevention information out to our employees. And then our safety bulletin boards throughout the agency have all been updated and will continue to be updated regularly on all the information, both from the CDC and from the county. So we're trying to get that information out to our employees. And then this week, we will put the finishing touches on what we call car cards. These are, if you're inside a bus, you'll see advertising along the top of the bus. Those are called car cards. And so we have those being created, again, repeating the information about coronavirus prevention from the CDC website, both in English and Spanish. Those will hit our buses this week. They will also hit all of our transit centers where we have display cases so that our customers can see those in addition to other sources. They can also find information on our website. We've created a press release that talks about everything that we're doing to date to address prevention on our buses. And there's also a note on there from me updating the public about that. We're investigating other sanitizing methods. We've talked to some of the transit agencies across the nation that are doing some, what we call fogging, a disinfectant fogging of their vehicles. We have four of those on order, two for paracruz and two for the fixed route. And there's a lot of work to be done. We have to figure out what the protective wear is that our employees will have to wear when they apply that product and train them on it. So it'll take us a little while to move to that next step of sanitizing. But we think that is promising also. Finally, in closing, in response to the county memo that was issued yesterday, we have a meeting with our management team this afternoon to talk about what social distancing means and what crowds of less than 50 mean to the bus community. Obviously we have articulated buses which carry 60 or more people. We'll need to have a discussion about that and what social distancing means and crowd control means. Even on a fixed route bus, particularly in the morning, when we're transporting students up to UCSC, on a regular 35 or 40 foot bus, we'll have that many people. So we'll need to talk about that. So there may be an announcement, likely will be an announcement coming from Metro in the next couple of days about how we're gonna regulate that and be in compliance with the county guidance in that particular area. So Mr. Chair and supervisors, that concludes my presentation and I'm happy to answer any questions. Yeah, thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you for the presentation, Mr. Clifford. And as a member of Metro, I wanna thank you for being active in addressing the coronavirus issue. I think you've done what you can do and you're gonna probably do more. And I think, did you mention that about the closure of part of the Pacific Station too? Just briefly on that, yes. So over the weekend, we had an employee, temp employee who called in sick. And unfortunately went the extra distance to say something to the effect I may have coronavirus. So we went into immediate action. Obviously we're concerned about our employees and our customers. So we immediately closed down the customer service center. We closed down the entire facility, closed down the mini mart inside and locked it down until we could come up with a plan. Within two hours, I had the management team. This is on Sunday. I had the management team at our offices working out what we were gonna do. So we've already had a sort of our own EOC and we've been prepared to invoke that whenever necessary. And we did on Sunday. And the plan that we came up with was to keep it locked down, to relocate our employees that work at that facility elsewhere for Monday and to have a company specializing in disinfecting come in and completely disinfect the facility. So we did that yesterday. The facility is open as usual today. As we learn more about that particular employee, there is no credible evidence whatsoever that that employee came anywhere near anybody who had coronavirus. But we needed to do the right thing, particularly in this day and time. Very good. And on another subject, as I mentioned to a member of the Metro Board, the awful subject of unfunded mandates that we've had to deal with here in the county. Thankfully, some years ago, a couple of years ago, we had some of that returned, but there is three pieces of legislation in the assembly as I believe it's in the assembly only that would, in essence, cripple the Metro service if they, as they propose these bills to had free rides for those under 18, free rides for those over 65. And what was the other one? All college students. All college students. If that happens, you can kiss Metro goodbye as I was quoted and saying, I have a tremendous adverse impact on our operations. I think it would cost us between six and $9 million a year. I mean, it would really cripple our service. This just doesn't make any sense to me. And I'm saying this as a Board of Supervisors member. I mean, it's going to really cut the services to those who we really want to provide it for more than anyone. Those who are the low income that maybe don't have a vehicle that want to ride the buses. I mean, they can't support the system on their own. We have written a letter. We instructed our chair, Mike Rockin, to write a letter against this. I don't know that we should get into it as a Board of Supervisors, but I think it's really a big concern. We all know our transportation problems. We need more people to ride the buses, not less. And this would severely cripple our situation. I don't know if you have an update on that legislation at all. I think it's just been introduced in the assembly. Correct. It's still in the same state as what you just really clearly went through. We are working with the California Transit Association to come up with a sample resolution that we could circulate to all the cities and certainly to the county to consider adopting. But as you point out, this could hit us and hit us hard to lose those kind of revenues would mean no less than one third of our service would have to be cut. Now that's cutting service in an environment which everybody can board for free. And in theory, many more will wanna use the service which creates its other challenges. So cutting at the service and cutting a third of our employees, we don't take that lightly. This is legislation. I understand they wanna grow ridership. This is the wrong way to do it. Instead of making a mandate what the state could do instead is do a program in which they could fund it with new resources, we would hope in order to encourage agencies to institute free fare programs, but not mandated. We're don't broad brush the thing. We're not all the same. We all have different challenges and free works potentially for some agencies, but not all. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Yes. Thank you, chair. Thank you for the presentation. Thank you for your leadership at the transit district. I wonder if you could just give an update about where we are with our bus replacement and particularly our effort to go zero admission in our bus fleet. Right. So we'll abide by the state mandate. Now, because we're classified as a small transit property, we're given a little bit more time to go 100% electric. So for example, our agency, if we make purchases between now and 2026, we'll continue to make those as compressed natural gas buses. In 2026, any purchases that we make, 25% of what we purchase will have to be zero emission. And then from 2029 on, we'll have no choice, but 100% of those will be zero emission. Now, what's happening between now and 2026 is two things. We're gonna test the heck out of those four pro-terra electric buses to see what they can and can't do. They are challenged electric buses to date only go about 150 miles. This particular bus that we're buying may go as much as 200 miles on a single charge. But for our system, we need buses that can go 300 or a little more than 300 miles on a single charge. So there's some real challenges with electric, which is why we don't wanna dive in with two feet yet. We really wanna experiment and get to know these buses and how to maintain them and what they can and can't do. And for the time being, they'll go on runs that are 150 miles or less. But at some point, as you add more and more electric buses, you run out of runs that only go 150 miles. Now, in parallel with that, we proposed to the board and the board gave a nod to the idea that over the next two years, we're gonna heavily investigate hydrogen fuel cell buses. Now, hydrogen fuel cell buses are much more promising for a variety of reasons, including distance. So that holds great potential for us. The other challenge we have is if you look at our yard, there is no place to put 100 charging pistols in that yard. So we'd have to build another facility in order to be able to be 100% battery electric. Hydrogen fuel cell, however, has a similar footprint as our compressed natural gas facility does. So we'll test it and then in two years, we may come to the board and say, ask for permission to go for a grant to buy some hydrogen fuel cells to experiment with. So that's sort of the lay of the land I realize is sort of complicated, but we're trying desperately not to make a big mistake in this environment at a million plus per bus. That's a costly mistake to make. But as we change over our buses, we're moving to lower and lower emission buses. Yes, and as you may be aware, we added some, we added 10 diesel hybrid buses to our fleet for Highway 17. Our partners at Santa Clara VTA over the hill were taking their service levels down and had a number of buses they needed to surplus and they sold those to us for a whopping $1 a piece. So that was great for us. And, you know, hybrid diesel buses are electric buses that have a very small diesel motor that just turns a generator. So you're not putting out all of the pollutants that we would for any other vehicle. Not quite as good as our compressed natural gas, but better than our diesels. Yeah. Well, it's good to hear and I'm glad we're moving towards that. Thank you for your work. Thank you for that. Okay, that's fine. Thank you for the report. And I agree that the bus service and everything is of vital importance to everybody in the county. What would be the biggest threat against in the future for the use of the metro system in Santa Cruz County? I know it was mentioned by Supervisor McPherson, but do you see anything else that would be out there that you might be concerned about? Well, I think even before our latest challenge, the talk across the nation has been declining riderships, average declining ridership year over year, 4%. In this county, we're experiencing that on our non-educational institution ridership, right? So with UCSC in particular, their ridership year over year is growing, which is artificially helped our numbers remain relatively flat. But if you take them out of the equation, our general population ridership non-UCSC is experiencing the same decline as the nationwide. So that's our biggest challenge and we're participating in all of those forums through the various organizations that we belong to to try to understand better, why is that occurring and what are the things that we can do to try to address that. Now, some agencies are experimenting with microtransit concepts, which are similar to a paratransit type of concept where you have door-to-door service. We haven't jumped into that because it's a very costly proposition. So we're monitoring it, looking at what we can do. And maybe even this AVL date I talked about earlier will help us understand a little bit better where to place service to try to grow ridership. Okay, and I know there's a good bus service on the 91X and other buses going to and from Watsonville to Cabrillo. Have you ever looked at it? Maybe it was already tried, but buses that would go to from Watsonville to actually right to Aptos High School. I know they don't have school buses anymore and there are a lot of students from Watsonville that do go to Aptos High. Yeah, so interesting proposition. It's a little bit tricky for us because technically the federal regulations preclude us from providing school bus service. So we can't do that by law. Now, as you know, we do provide a lot of students service to their schools, but those are schools that are on our routes. So if we deviate and say this bus is gonna go specifically to this school, then we're at risk of violating the federal law on that. So we try to get as creative as possible. Sometimes detours occur in order to do that. I'll be happy to go back and just double check that and get back to you on it. And I guess it would be all right. I mean, I'm not saying you just go from Watsonville to Aptos High and then come back, but make it a stop on the way, let's say on the stop on the way to Cabrillo. Yeah, I'll be happy to take a look at that. Thank you very much. And I'll open it up to the public. Anybody has questions and please come forward. Thank you. Becky Steinbruner, resident of rural Aptos. Thank you for the presentation very much. I appreciate that. I also received the memo that the Metro Station on Pacific Avenue was closed. And I wondered about that. And what my question after hearing you was, was that employee actually tested for COVID-19? I think that would be good information too to know. I attended the Carrillo College Board of Trustee meeting last Monday and heard a member of the public who depends on Metro begging for the second time and she had a petition in her hand that the Cabrillo trustees look into working with Metro to improve the 91X and also the 71 service to Cabrillo to make earlier buses available for students and staff and also later. So the Cabrillo College trustees are going to meet with this person and try to agendize that and meet with Metro, but it is a problem for students and staff who need to be there early. The earlier buses are either filled and there's nowhere to get on or they're just not available. So I would like to see increased numbers of 71 which would also service Watsonville to Aptos High right there on Freedom Boulevard and include the 91X in that examination. I am happy to hear that the Metro is considering going more to electric buses and I would like to ask if it's possible to put on solar panels on top of the buses to have trickle charging that would extend their range per charge and also to include solar panels for charging at the charging stations at Metro. I'm happy to hear that Metro is considering hydrogen fuel cells. I'm aware of the passenger train that's coming here a hydrogen fuel cell passenger train. So that technology is moving into the realm of transportation as a possibility and I think it holds great promise. So I'm glad that Metro is looking into this in a long-term way for effective fund allocations. I want to ask if the bus, if Metro is at all looking into retrofitting any buses that could run on the rail corridor, those conversions cost about $10,000, I'm told you could run them on the rail and make it a lot quicker commute for many people who are stuck in that traffic on SoCal Drive. I would also like to ask that there be a study and made public of the new service that has to be provided for the Kaiser on SoCal Avenue Frontage Road. There is no bus service there now. And also ask that there be a new stops put in the Aptos Village area at Aptos Creek Road to service those new residents coming in there as well as the many special events and NICI Mark State Park users. Thank you. Mayor Linkara, retired teacher, I rode the bus here. I wonder how many of you ride the bus? Those on the Metro Ward or the CEO? And I am discouraged from riding the bus. And I'll tell you why. When people are on cell phones on the bus in a metal enclosure, the radiation is amplified. There's a card on pass out public health warning about wireless microwave technology. I picked up the bus schedule and it reads like a Verizon advertisement. Do everything on your smartphone. Do this, do that. Instead of putting money into bus routes, running more frequently or to needed locations, how much money is going into the toxic cancer causing microwave technology? You're advertising, do this on your smartphone. These are dangerous devices and anyone who looks into the independent science, we have a local doctor here, Dr. Carl Merritt. You can look up Dr. Martin Paul, P-A-L-L, Dr. Joseph Merkola on the known dangers. Very, very disturbing. I really wonder how I could find out how much money Verizon is giving to Metro or your paying Verizon regarding disinfectants. It's really important to look at the list of ingredients and what is known on the toxicity. Environmental working group is an organization that often looks into the toxic chemicals. When it says fragrances on a label, there can be like maybe 300 chemicals. And we know many people on your agenda, it says please be aware people are chemically sensitive, come to the board meeting, fragrance free. So when you're using sanitizers, and I can tell you, I feel horrible around these sanitizers. So there are problems here with Metro that I think discourages riders instead of encourages, thank you. I think you have to turn your microphone. No, your microphone, they wanna be able to hear you on the microphone. We'll go to recommended action then. I don't think there is any, I think it was just a presentation. There's nothing, no action requested. Okay, next we have an appointment. Number nine, consider final reappointment of Dan Quinto to the Emergency Medical Care Commission as an at large representative of field care providers for a term to expire April 1st, 2023. I move approval. First and the second, any comments? There are none. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposition say nay. There is no nay, passes unanimously. And item 10, consider the selection of Anastasia Manova as the artist for C-Cliff Village Park phase two public arts project, approve independent contractor agreement in the amount not to exceed $4,900, adopt a resolution accepting unanticipated revenue in the amount of 5,450, and take related action as outlined in the memorandum of the director of parks, open spaces, and cultural services. Thank you. How you doing? I'm doing well, thank you. Eric Serm with County Parks. In the COVID-19 response, I realized this is a very small thing, but it is a thing we need to keep in the forefront of hope and optimism. So I'd like to introduce Cynthia Killian, the chair of the arts commission for the county who's gonna introduce the project. Thank you. What are you about? Thank you, Eric. Sorry. This is a really nice thing to be speaking about today in light of all of the other things that seem to be very negative. The art commission is pleased to recommend for your approval today, a proposal for the C-Cliff Park public art component. And this is phase number two. The art selection panel comprised of community members, professional artists, county arts commissioners, and representatives of involved department. They met on the 16th of October to review the proposal and submit, they were submitted by two artists. With the selection panel on November 7th, the artists were asked to bring detailed drawings or maquettes to further define the project proposals. And each of these artists brought maquettes which were really beautiful and we really enjoyed looking at them. And then after much deliberation, the panel chose Anastasia Baknawowa and then we continued with the process and at the December 14th meeting, the art commissions and the commission reviewed the panel's decision and voted to recommend that board approve the selection of Ms. Baknawowa to be the public artist for the C-Cliff Park phase two project. The artwork selected by the panel and recommended by the art commission is original and the artistic merit and it is adding beauty to an otherwise unattractive restroom building. So now I'd like to introduce Anastasia and we're very happy to have a brief presentation by her and then she'll answer any questions afterwards. Thank you. Thank you. Hi there. My name is Anastasia and I just wanna thank you for taking the time to hear me today. I'm really excited to have my proposal considered for the C-Cliff Village Park phase two public art project. As a working artist, the opportunity to contribute a public art piece to the community is something special. So the proposal that I have is a painted mural to wrap around the three walls of the restroom building, the permanent structure that's gonna be at the C-Cliff Village Park. The design features a vibrant sunset over the pier and cement ship transitioning to waves and an underwater scene with sea creatures. I would like to incorporate the fourth wall with the doors in a collaborative community painting event where residents can add their mark to the piece, painting and sea creatures to complete the scene. And the materials that I plan to use are mural quality acrylic paints which are light fast and durable. I would prep the surface by cleaning and priming it and then finish it with a UV protective anti-graphy decoding. So the proper execution of the painting process would ensure that this mural would stay vibrant for decades. The reasons for proposing this particular piece is showing the iconic C-Cliff area. I think when a lot of us think of C-Cliff, we think of the cement ship and the shark population maybe, maybe some other things but that's what comes to mind for me. I also think that many residents of the neighborhood appreciate the coastal setting so that's why my focus is on the ocean. The design is also a sort of snapshot in time as the ship will crumble over time and the wildlife might migrate. But it's also everlasting because we will always have the ocean and the sunset. So what makes this a unique signature piece is the proposed image was designed specifically for the site and the structure with the community in mind. In my years as a professional artist, I've developed a personal style that cannot be recreated by other artists. And my work features vibrant colors, bold line work, a hint of realism and celebration of nature that is cheerful and fun. It can be appreciated from near or far and by all ages, making it ideal for a park setting. Are there any questions? Yeah, we'll open it up. Any questions? Supervisor Front. I don't have questions, I have comments which is, I mean, I'm excited about this. This took a lot of work to get the park to exist at all. Ms. Minot and a group from Seacliffe worked for a couple of decades to even get the funding for that. And then we've been doing it in phases and then the great work of the parks department to be able to bring in a permanent restroom. And immediately upon the restroom being presented, there was a question of how do we make it look beautiful? And you've done that. So I think that this is really the next phase and the commitment to the second district and that community. And it blends in perfectly with the new skate park that was just done both in design and style. And then there'll be parents that'll be hugging you like you don't know because they all have a clean bathroom that brings a youthful and a vibrance to that area that it doesn't currently have with this mural. So thank you for your work. Thank you for our parks and our amazing art staff and commission for this work as well. Thank you. Chair, I would just say this is a beautiful piece of art. I like that you got the sharks in there as well because that's their regular visitors to the cement ship. And to take a building that is important but doesn't mean a lot to people outside its function and to make it a beautiful addition to the community, take skill and talent. And this is real clear that you have those pieces and I look forward to visiting this park and being able to enjoy this art. So thank you for your work. Thank you. And you have a real talent and I wanna thank you. I think it's very important. And did I pronounce your name correctly? Oh, I'm good enough. Yeah. Okay. My daughter's Anastasia. Thank you. Yeah, thank you for it's a tremendous plus. I mean, this, it could just be another building. This is gonna be a real attractive focal point of the park. It's really something else that I hope we can follow throughout the county and other projects. So congratulations and your ingenuity in doing this really, really nicely done. Thank you. We'll put it up to the public. Thank you. Becky Steinbrenner, resident of rural Aptos. I am very grateful also for your good work and also to the parks commission for the good public process that they had in selecting this artwork and to putting real value on art in the public parks. Thank you. And I look forward to seeing it too. And I'm happy to hear that you're gonna put a special ceiling on it for graffiti. That's very wise and thoughtful. I would like to ask that there be or ask if there will be any space within the artwork for some kind of an interpretive panel telling us a little bit about you as an artist and also the significance of the features in your artwork tying it into the community and the history of the community that you represent there with your artwork. Thank you again very much. And I look forward to seeing it. Thank you. I got to run to a meeting, a building K. Can I say something really quick about the focus strategies presentation you're about to get or is this not the time? Super short. No. Okay. They're really good and you should support them. Bye. Thanks. Thank you though for all the other work you've been doing. Okay. Anyway, I'll bring it back to the board for nobody and anyone in the community room Hi there. Yeah. There is somebody. Hi. There's nobody that wishes to comment down in the team if you were right now. Thanks. Okay. All right. Bring it back to the board for the, yes we do. I'll move the recommended actions. Second. Okay. First and second. All those in favor? Aye. Aye. Any opposition? There is none. Passes unanimously. Thank you very much. Did you get on the board? I made the appointment. Eric. Sure. Okay. All right. That takes us to number 11. Consider report on the focused intervention team fit pilot program to increase services, engagement of eligible fit participants and reduce community impacts from aggressive criminal behavior, approve recommended program enhancements and direct staff to return March of 2021 with an annual report as outlined in the memorandum of the County Administrative Officer, 2019 fit annual evaluation. Welcome. Good morning. Morning board, Jim Hart, Sheriff Corner. And I have with me Eric Herrera from Health Services. And today we're just gonna spend a few minutes to talk to you and give you an update on the fit program. I just wanna remind you that the population that this team focuses on are high risk, high users of the jail and the emergency services system. They often act out with violence and they scare people and business owners and people who are visiting our cities and our unincorporated area. And the goal is to refocus these people into treatment and this benefits the public's safety and also reduces calls for service. And today there's a number of our fit team members here and they're all seated in the back. And we're gonna discuss with you today the background on the fit pilot. We're gonna update you on the fit client profile. We're gonna share some client experiences. We're gonna show you with you the results of the first annual evaluation and then recommend a few small changes to the program. And so Eric's gonna go ahead and start out here. Thank you, Sheriff Hart. I'm Eric Herrera. I'm the behavioral health director for the County of Santa Cruz. I just wanted to spend a few minutes talking about the background of the fit program. And this is a county program that was designed by the sheriff's office in collaboration with behavioral health and our county administrative officer. The team composition is three peace officers, three clinicians and one administrative aide. The team provides intense field supervision and in custody services at our local jail as well as fast track custody assessment, service and treatment plan development. Custody status is determined at the time of arraignment or conditional release. And there's a strong emphasis on community engagement and participation as well as an independent program evaluation. Since our last report, we had 33 additional clients added to the fit program for a total served of 78. After an initial surge of referrals to the program, ongoing referrals have stabilized at about five per month. This is consistent with the reduction in referrals to fit from our partner agencies. In terms of our client profile data, 56% of the clients have lived in the county for over 10 years prior to enrolling in fit. In quarters three and four, however, over half of our new fit enrollees with those who have been here for two years or less. The stable referral rate and increase in clients new to the county may suggest that the fit program is serving almost the entire eligible population. A counterpoint to that hypothesis, however, is that fit clients are currently predominantly white men referred from North County, not necessarily representative of the demographics of our county in terms of race and ethnicity. As fit moves forward, equity and access to the program is something that we should aspire to. Finally, it remains critical to understand that almost all fit clients suffer from substance use and are unhoused. We'd like to give the board two examples of actual fit clients that illustrate the challenging clients that we're targeting with this program. Client A here in the year prior to enrolling in fit was arrested 20 times and spent 125 days in jail. People reporting this client described him as making threats to kill juveniles at a bus stop harassing business customers and yelling at pedestrians along Pacific Avenue. After placement on fit, the client was arrested twice and spent 19 days in jail. Fit placed the client in a drug treatment program and upon completing the program, the client transitioned to a sober living environment. The client went 60 days without an arrest and received a fit completion letter on May 28th, 2019. The client has not been arrested since February 14th, 2019. I'll turn it over to Sheriff Hart to talk about our next client. So client B has been a little bit more challenging. He's lived in Santa Cruz for 30 years and has excessive 200 arrests. In the year prior to being placed on fit, he was booked into jail 11 times and spent 121 days in jail. In the 90 days prior to being placed on fit, citizens reported that the client was throwing chairs inside a business, was intoxicated while walking in traffic and causing a disturbance on the metro while he was intoxicated. Since placement on fit, the client has been arrested 13 times and spent 192 days in jail. Arrests included public intoxication, possession of controlled substance and resisting arrest. Every day for 10 months, the client refused substance use treatment offered by fit clinicians. Finally, in November of 2019, the client did complete a drug treatment program and went 60 days without an arrest. Since January, the client has been arrested twice. This person has been disruptive but less disruptive than prior to being placed on fit. This client highlights the challenge that although fit works for many people, there remains a population that is not amenable to change and the best we can do is stop them from causing harm to others. In terms of the annual evaluation, we would like to share the results which look at the time period between February 2019 through January of 2020. Fit clients are maintaining a decrease in arrests on average, cutting their arrest in half after joining the program. Jail days are now consistent with what our team anticipated. For clients with fewer days in jail, prior to joining fit, their average jail days are increasing as they sober up and our clinicians are able to work with them to accept treatment. For our heaviest jail users prior to fit, we're seeing a 30% reduction in jail days. In terms of mental health and substance use treatment, fit clients face several challenges. Overall, about 73% of the clients were assessed as needing some level of mental health treatment and about half of them received that treatment. Treatment days did increase from an average of only 0.9 days per month to over two days per month. We saw similar increases in substance use treatment with 21 clients starting a program and overall days in treatment increasing on average ninefold. One of the many challenges in trying to engage these fit clients in services is the timing and availability of residential treatment beds. Matching an open bed to a willing and locatable client has been a problem for staff within the current 60 day, no arrest exit criteria. In terms of closing fit cases, we can see here that 53 or 68% of fit had been, fit cases have been closed so far. About a quarter of those cases closed through clients completing 60 days with no arrests. We have readmitted five clients to fit, which highlights the biggest challenge the program faces, which is housing. Housing remains a major challenge, although 15% of fit clients have left the county for the 56% of clients who have lived here for over 10 years, there are a few options. The fit team has only been able to place four clients into either transitional or independent housing. To increase our ability to serve fit clients, including the demographic changes and the desire to have more clients, or to excuse me, to move more clients into housing and treatment and away from law enforcement in the jail, we're making the following recommendations to amend the program, which can be executed with the program's current resources. We would like to increase the criteria for a case to be closed from 60 to 90 days without an arrest. And we believe this will allow more time to link clients to critical resources, including housing, residential substance use treatment and primary care. We'd also like to increase the client case limit from 30 to 40. This will give our staff more flexibility to serve clients, especially those who require more time to be placed in programming or linked to housing. It will also allow staff to accommodate the few tougher cases that cycle through the program multiple times. The full evaluation of the fit program is attached in your board packet. Going forward, we recommend the following targets for the next year of the fit program. First, maintaining a 50% decrease in the arrest rate. Secondly, increasing mental health treatment participation by 20% and increasing substance use treatment participation also by 20%. Thank you for your time. And with that, we'd be happy to answer any questions. Chair, I think the... Supervisor Caput, I'll be reading some questions from Supervisor Coonerty since his voice is a little low today. First, this is Supervisor Coonerty speaking, Sheriff Hart. First, let me thank the sheriff and HSA and the CAO's office for their work on the fit program. It is just the kind of outcome driven collaborative and out of the box effort that we need for such a challenging set of problems. Please keep up the good work. He has three questions. First, it is concerning that more than half of those qualified don't end up being accepted into the program. If they are being addressed effectively through other systems, criminal justice, most or other programs, then it might be okay. So the question is, do we have any data on those individual arrest rates after not being accepted into fit? Not that I'm aware of. I'm not sure if James Russell or somebody from the fit team could answer that. Who's here today? No, they're not accepted. Yeah, you should come up to the microphone. James. Hello, William Burnett, I'm a Sergeant on the Focus Intervention Team. Can you repeat as does that question? You're looking for the answer? Do we have data on those individual arrest rates for those not being accepted into fit? At this time, we do not. And I think there's probably some factors that we need to look into as far as a lot of personal reasons why these people don't get accepted to certain programs as well. I think James can maybe elaborate a little bit more on that, but prior history with these individuals with a lot of these programs being privately run can inhibits them being qualified for the program. I guess my question is is so hard. If these are the most problematic people, are they being addressed through other programs or are we just, if they don't fall into fit, what's our strategy to deal with these people effectively? James Russell, Forensic Program Manager with Behavioral. Just to clarify your question, sir, are you asking about the individuals who don't meet the criteria to be placed on the fit team? In the report, there was recommendations to fit and then there's people who are accepted into fit for the people who are recommended but not accepted. Correct. What's the strategy? Cause they're obviously having a huge impact on the community. So I think I can address that. Wait, there's certain criteria that person has to meet in order to get accepted on the program. So we get referrals, but they don't meet, but those referrals are then vetted out and they're not meeting their requirements to get put in the program. Right. So how do we, do we know if these folks are being addressed through other programs and not being arrested or they're still just not accepted but still being arrested all the time? There's several programs and outreach groups in place. We have the hopes team. There's downtown outreach worker program. Hopes is now going county wide. There's a presence out in the Watsonville South County area as well with bilingual, bicultural clinician. In addition to that, there's some recent activity by Santa Cruz PD with the heroes team. Also with Watsonville PD with the care team. So there's a lot of outreach that is going on to try and connect people with the resources they need and engage them in ways that can facilitate them getting into treatment. And of course those individuals have been referred. We're also looking back at them later on to see if there's something that might have occurred that makes them eligible for the fit criteria. Okay. Second question. It is striking that one third of fit clients haven't been here for less than two years with 20% less than a year. And yet they have already been arrested enough to qualify as one of the most high-impact individuals in our community. We need data on why they came here. What made them stay and what it will take to get them to return to a place where they have more connections. The reality is that these individuals, even if they participate positively with our programs, have no chance of finding affordable housing or rebuilding their lives in this community. We need a robust effort to get these individuals to somewhere where they have a chance at success. Can this data and a strategy be developed going forward for these individuals? I'm sure we could gather some of that data. I think it's also striking the number of people who have been here as long as they've been though too and they're still living on the streets and going through everything they're going through. But if there's some specific data points that you're looking for, I'm sure that we can include that. Yeah. Why are they here? And then the third question. Does the fit program need a budget for rewards for positive behavior? For example, small gift cards for sandwiches or food. We have the sticks of jail time, but should we also be constantly rewarding good behavior with carrots for coming to an appointment, joining the streets team, not getting in trouble? Well, I think we're combining a lot of different teams in that this team is, it's focused on a very specific population of people who have caused a lot of problems for a long time. They're not amenable to treatment. And so that might have a benefit, but I would think that would be more in line with another program that's going on in the jail. I don't know if James Russell or Billy has any comment on that. I'll just say we have managed to have a small budget that has accommodated that for folks that are going to program. Hey, they need some clothes and other articles to help them be successful in that. It would be a nice little thing to tack into that budget to make sure it continues to be there. I don't know exactly where we carved that out of in terms of placing it there, but I know it was not originally included in the budget from the tax measure, I believe. Okay, thank you. I think if I could make one comment surrounding the budget in terms of the substance use treatment programs, specifically residential programs. For those folks who have MediCal as their insurance, we are under some pretty strict limitations from the state in terms of how many times an individual can enter a residential treatment program. It's twice within a year. And so with this population in particular, many of them are unsuccessful their first two tries. They may go into a program and exit the program after a couple of days. And then we try again and the same outcome happens and they might be ready the third time. However, MediCal will not pay for that third stay. So we're having to come up with funds to pay the full cost of that individual's residential stay, which could be 30 days. And that's a cost that the county has to bear. And we do not include that in our original budget for the FIT program. And it's certainly a future consideration for us if we wanna ensure the success of these folks going through services. Sure. I'm really encouraged by this programming to combine public safety with mental health treatment and to do it in a sensible, reasonable way is quite a challenge. And I'm really glad that we are under this program. I wanna thank you for the efforts that you have had. I too have a similar question to Supervisor Coonerty. I mean, I guess, why are the newcomers, so to speak, the two years, I mean, were they asked by somebody that was here to come? And Santa Cruz has a reputation by some that this is an easy place and it's not. I mean, we don't give more general assistance than other counties or whatever. But just to get an idea, were you encouraged to come here by somebody else or did you just hear Santa Cruz was an easy place to get treatment or get services, I guess. Those are two basic ones I'd like to know and some of the newcomers, so to speak. On that same page as 53, the most of these are white men in their 40s. And do we need to, is that reflective of our population, probably is our population makeup but I'm just wondering about it doesn't include women or people of color. I don't want to go out and arrest those folks for one reason or another, but is that reflective of the population makeup of our area or is it how close, I mean, I'm just wondering, are we overseeing women or people of color for any reason or who are in need of assistance or is that just the general makeup that it's just the facts as they are, I guess. It's, and just looking at the demographics, it's a little high on the African-American side. Our population is roughly 3%. Our jail population is about 6% African-American so it's about in line with our jail population. The Latino number is a little bit low but I think primarily this team, we focus on the North County area, City of Santa Cruz and then Live Oak, Soquel, Aptos is where a lot of the work's being done because that's where this population is at and I think that probably better matches up with the Caucasian numbers that you're seeing on there. Okay. I was glad to see on page 56 an increase in the amount of mental health and substance abuse treatment among fit participants. Did you attribute this to an intensive case management and I think that's what part of this program is about or more time in jail to sober up or is there a nexus of that? I think it's a combination of the above, both issues. As undesirable as it is to use jail as a resource in connecting people with treatment, it can be an important disruptor for that person's behavior and allows for a short period of time for that person to become sober for example and more amenable to treatment and the interventions that we're offering to them. It's very difficult to support a person entering treatment whether it be mental health treatment or substance use disorder treatment on the street when they're actively using. So we try to really use the jail time as a disruptor to that behavior and it often allows for enough time to pass that the person has some clarity and can engage more with our clinical staff to connect them with services. And one of the big gaps and we're gonna hear more about this in the next item on our agenda, the homeless issue, the lack of transitional housing. If it's pretty difficult to get that one way or the other is there anything that you can see that we are working on and maybe we'll know more or you'll hear more in the next item that we're going to address. But to get increased the sober living environments and permanent supportive housing, it's just hard to come by I guess in this area. Is that right? How big of a search do you have out there for supportive housing? I think it's this group of individuals are competing for the same limited resources that everybody else is in the county right now and it's a huge challenge for us and when you consider their clinical needs, it's a particular challenge for someone coming out of a residential program for example where they've achieved some degree of sobriety for 30 days and then they have to return to the streets and they're returning to the streets and having contacts with the same people that they were engaging in drug behavior before. And it's just hard for someone to maintain that sobriety when they're homeless and the resources around sober living environment, beds, transitional housing, supported housing is just so scarce in our community. I believe it's negatively impacting the impact and the negatively impacting the outcomes of the program. Well, again, I want to thank you for this. I mean, the amount of the reduction in jail time and the getting some of these folks on the right path, I don't think it could hardly be, it is measured in some respects, but how important this is and the reduction in the face-to-face confrontations people have had with some of these individuals has been reduced greatly and I think it's a worthwhile effort and I congratulate you for trying to carry it out. It's a very difficult assignment, I think. Thank you and I do want to acknowledge the dedication and the effort of this team. These folks that are here today are working with a very high risk, very difficult population of people to work with both in the jail and out on the street and they're extremely committed to this job and to doing the right thing and anecdotally, we're hearing from the city police department that they have felt a reduction in the amount of people who are acting out in the downtown and on the streets and so the police department is feeling it as well that this program is going in the right direction. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Yeah, first I want to just thank everyone who's on this team who goes out and works with what that many of us was considered some of the most difficult folks in the county and to do that day in and day out and to try really hard and know that there's a lot of failures as part of that and keep on trying takes a special kind of person and I appreciate the leadership and the commitment that everyone on the fit team has shown because trying something new, trying something that looks like it's yielding some good results, but also struggling for resources and just dealing with the difficult population is can be very taxing. So I just want to acknowledge the hard work of everyone on this team and looking at this information to me there's some really good information in here. The issues about housing are pervasive through lots of our program and being able to transition people into housing that can be stable and allow them to start a new life. And that's something this board has been committed to working on. We've approved projects and we're continuing to look at ways in which we can provide more housing. In terms of the metrics for success, I just wanted to ask some questions about the question about reduction of arrests because the reduction of arrests could mean less disruptive behavior or it could mean that people are in jail so they can't be arrested again. And so when I look at the list of jail days, it seems like those that haven't spent a lot of time in jail are seeing more jail days and those that are let's say habitual jail users are seeing less jail days. So I, and I understand from the presentation that we use jail, this flash incarceration, let's say as a way of disrupting behaviors. It's, we could have a longer conversation about if we're trying to disrupt substance use behavior as the jail, the best place to detox. But I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about why use a rest percentage of arrests instead of looking at jail bed days because are we, is one feeding the other? And that doesn't give us the best picture. Their rest may not be the best measure. Well, I can start off. I think when we first created the program, what we were hearing from local law enforcement jurisdictions were the challenges of these frequent contacts with these individuals. Multiple arrests, they were being brought to the jail. They were often booked and released at the jail and then returned to the street and then re-arrested again for multiple different types of issues. So I think we began the program with that as a proxy to have our baseline measures around arrests because that was one of the areas that we thought we could be most impactful with. And it was a separate issue from our use of the jail as flash incarceration or disruption for the person's behavior that the two weren't necessarily connected. If, and prior to fit, if we were arresting and jailing every individual, I think we might be having a different discussion, but because most of these individuals were booked and released, the use of jail days and arrests seem to be two distinct measures in terms of us evaluating the outcomes of the program. That's why we made that choice at the beginning. We can certainly reconsider that now that we have some more experience, but I think that was a major factor in why we chose to measure it this way. Yeah, I'm just trying to look, you know, as I look at the statistics, there's over 40 of the people who before fit spent two days or less in jail and now they're spending more time in jail. And so that's the question, is that leading to the lower number of arrests? I get, I'm not sure there's a perfect answer. Yeah, I don't think there's a perfect answer either. And I think in looking at the other data as the programs evolved over time, we were initially serving kind of the more well-known individuals in the community who had much more time in jail and probably their level of disruption in the community was much higher. And as a program has evolved over time, we're kind of catching people on the other tail end of the spectrum, maybe with less arrests, but with a greater familiarity of this program being out there, we have a chance to intervene early and this person doesn't have the opportunity to be disruptive in the community for those long periods of time that we're seeing with our early referrals. Yeah, well, I think this is something to look at over time to see whether it's the best measure. And to my colleague's point, knowing about those folks who don't qualify and just knowing something about what, if there's a possibility to collect some information to know whether their outcomes look particularly different, that might tell us or might lead us to invest our resources in different ways. And I think that's what we're all trying to do is figure out the best tools to be able to meet the need in the community. I do know from talking with representatives of Santa Cruz neighbors, they are very supportive of this program and they feel like it's made a difference. And so as a measure of public satisfaction, I took that as a good sign. And I look forward to this work deepening over time and collecting more information. And I again, want to just want to thank everybody who works on it day by day. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much and we'll keep going. Good luck. Thank you. We'll open it up to the public. You bet. We'll open it up to the public for comments. We have none. We do have one downstairs. Oh, down there. Hi. Hi. How are you? I moved. Yeah. I wanted to come check out the new facilities. There is one other person here. They're not choosing to speak. My name is Becky Steinberg. I'm a resident of rural laptop. Thank you for this presentation. And I want to remind the public that this is being funded by the measure G, half cent sales tax that was funded passed by the voters in 2018. I've attended a number of candidate forums recently and was privileged to hear the three judicial candidates speaking. All of them expressed the concern that those who need these services and are being given the referrals from the courts are not getting them. And this seems like a problem here with the FIT program. I heard over and over that there are some that do not meet the criteria to be entered into the FIT program. I want to know what those criteria are that are filtering out these people that have actually had referrals from the court to the program. What makes people not qualify? And they're being rejected even with referrals from the court to participate. I'm concerned that the women may not be receiving equal treatment and consideration. And I would like some discussion about that. I really want to thank Supervisor Coonerty, even though you're here with a bad voice and I think you should be home because you're sick. Why are we just releasing these people back on the streets with no place to go? I think what we have to do is, and Supervisor McPherson, you also brought this up, we're just putting them back out on the streets where how can you not go back to your old ways when there is no support there and you don't have a roof over your head. Why don't we put back in the mobile homes in Watsonville behind the Crestview Center where after the 1989 earthquake was, the temporary housing for people whose homes were destroyed, that area is all still bare. It is still plumbed. It still has electricity. And it is right there on Freedom Boulevard next to the services, the medical services. There's a garden there where people who have come through this program and are in transition could create some sort of a peer support community. Much like what is going on with the homes community in Berkeley, where people are entered in, the community accepts them, they interview, and they're there to support each other until they can move on and find permanent housing and services. The county has that land and it's all set up. What we have to do is bring in some mobile homes and this could be an excellent, very well located transition community for those. And in closing, I just wanna support the idea that perhaps this county could enter into an IVOMEC pilot program. It's a plant-based drug treatment, much like Narcan with cold side effects and is being used very successfully in Africa. Thank you very much. Anyone else? There is none. There is none. We'll bring you back for a motion. There's no motion needed. This is a report. Supervisor Caput suggested you move on to zone seven at this time. I'm sorry, there is a vote on this one. Oh, there is. Accept in file and approve a program enhancement. Move approval. Second. Okay. All those in favor, aye. Aye. Any opposition? There is none. Passes unanimously. Okay, we'll go to zone seven and maybe after zone seven a short break or what are we gonna do? None. Skip it. All right, let's do zone seven. Are we gonna have a quorum? Yes. I'd like to call to order the fully controlled water conservation district zone seven board of directors for our March 10th meeting. If we could begin with a roll call, please. Director Leopold. Here. Coonerty. Here. Caput. Here. McPherson. Here. Vanister. Here. Villicich. Here. Siri. Vidal-Gazales. Here. Chair Friend. I'm here. It's okay. Are there any changes today's agenda, Mr. Strudley? No changes. All right, it's an opportunity for all communications. Is there any member of the community that'd like to address us on items not on the agenda but within the purview of zone seven? Either here or in the community room. Chair, I would just like at this time just to acknowledge Mr. Strudley for his recent employee recognition award. I wanna make sure this full zone seven board note that we recognized you for your work. Thank you. Well deserved. We'll move on to item four which is the approval of the zone seven minutes. Are there any changes or comments on the minutes? Just, there's one part where there's an incomplete sentence someplace. It said regarding and it's, there's nothing there. Your Becky. Item under oral communications. Right. Chair Friend. I believe it may have been regarding groundwater recharge and a few other items. So we just need to put it in the minutes. Yes. I will make that much. Is there anybody from the community who'd like to address us on this? I'll move it for us. Is there a motion with the amendment? So moved. Second. There's a motion from Director Leopold. We'll give it to Director Bilicic. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? Passes unanimously. Now we have the consent agenda which are items six through eight. Are there any comments in the consent agenda for many board member? Any member of the community who'd like to address us on consent? Okay, so now we'll bring it back for action on consent. I'll make a motion to approve consent. Second. There's a motion from Director Bilicic. Such as second from Director Leopold. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? That passes unanimously. We'll go on to the regular agenda which is item nine. Is the Board of Directors a zone seven to consider the status report on the Pahoa River Flood Risk Reduction Project is outlined in the memo of the district engineer. We have the memo, the Army Corps report and letters from our congressional delegation and our zone itself and the Army Civil Works program, Mr. Strudley. Thank you, Chair Friend. Members of the board, we are moving forward with the Army Corps under the award of $1.8 million in design funds coming from this fiscal year's work plan which is a tremendous accomplishment for the district. As I've told you before, we have some very good momentum with the state but this helps solidify some very positive momentum with the Army Corps of Engineers with their commitment to start design. I've had some discussions with our Army Corps staff in the SF district office. We are starting to work towards mutually developing ideas for what that money will be used for initially and we strongly are gonna be encouraging the district office to use that money to start design and not let it get bogged down in other administrative or environmental needs. Although those still do exist, we wanna move as quickly as we can with the Army Corps and actually start designing components of the project. I can't tell you what those decisions are yet because they have yet to be made but we will be having those conversations with them beginning later this month on March 30th where we'll have a staff call with their management team. What this means is that the Army Corps will be requesting some funds from the local non-federal sponsors. So that includes Zone 7 as well as Modern County Water Resources Agency. The memo indicates approximately $630,000 split between Zone 7 and Modern County Water Resources. Subsequent discussions with Army Corps will be revising that number because the calculations is a little more complicated than what I originally anticipated. So the numbers more to the tune of about $970,000 split between Zone 7 and Modern County Water Resources Agency. This is well within the budget that is being developed right now and that will come before your board later this year. We are continuing, as I said, to move forward with our Subventions Authorization with the state. We have submitted a non-federal cost share report to the state which has been tentatively approved by Department of Water Resources staff. You will be pleased to know that under the calculations that DWR requested, the project qualifies for 109% cost share. So we have such wonderful protection provided by this project to disadvantaged communities, state transportation facilities. It actually results in a higher than 100% cost share. The limits of that program, of course, are 70%. So we easily reach the maximum level of cost share coming from Subventions. That report is now required to be publicly noticed. It will go on our website as well as there will be a notice in the Pajaronian. It will be under a 45-day public comment period that should begin this Friday, assuming all goes to plan with publishing that in the Pajaronian. We will be putting more irons in the fire with different grant opportunities that arise. We are still waiting for DWR to release their coastal watershed flood risk reduction grant offering, but we will make every concerted effort to land some money that will be in addition to our Subventions Authorization under that grant program and any others that come along that we are eligible for which includes the Urban Flood Protection Grant Program. We are moving forward with our CEQA Environmental Review. We had a very successful scoping meeting last month which was well attended. We received a number of comments which are we are in the process of organizing and responding to, but none of them seem to be obvious showstoppers or indicating some overwhelming discontent among the public or agencies responsible for permitting. So we are moving well through that environmental review process. And we are continuing to work with our program management consultant team in moving towards standing up a joint powers authority to oversee the capital improvements as well as the ONM existing as well as proposed for a new project once it's built. As I told you at our last board meeting, I anticipate hopefully bringing this item before you prior to our June meeting. So I think it's too early to assume any requests coming for a special meeting in April, but the earliest I think you may see something as a special meeting across might be during the mid to latter portion of May. If things don't go according to plan, it will just fall likely to the normal June meeting for adoption of a JPA agreement and other accessory information. We are working towards refining and finalizing the proposed rate assessments that would be brought before the voters in support of capital improvements and ONM. I don't have those rates to share for you now. We are gonna be first sharing those rates with the governance and finance committee. That meeting will be upcoming on April 9th. A number of you are part of that committee. And so you will hear an update from our team on what those rates look like and we can discuss likely public success and acceptance of those rates being calculated right now. And that's all I have for you and I'm happy to answer any questions. Thank you, Mr. Strathley. Questions from directors? Comment. Or comment, please. Dr. Bilsich. I just want to say how proud I am of you and chair friend and of course the whole board but to get the acknowledgment of our senators, Senator Harris, Senator Feinstein to get our assembly members Stone and Rivas to even get the president on board with his flexibility and trying to have this all come together and it's politics, but it's politics that is working. And it's great to see that and I just want to commend you and chair friend. Thank you. I appreciate that. I just like to offer that this is very much a team effort and chair friend, the rest of the board and your support as well as of course all the support coming from our assembly members, state senators and Congressman Panetta, a huge help from him and as well as some engagement from our senators. It's just such a huge monumental team effort. So appreciate the accolades but the accolades definitely go much farther beyond even this room. It's a team effort. Thank you. Well, Congressman Panetta has been instrumental. I mean, and with Army Corps of Engineers and it's, I mean, he's to be commended big time too. But thank you. Thank you. Other comments? Anybody from the community like to address this on this item or anybody in the community room want to address this on this item? Yes. Ms. Steinbruner. Thank you, Becky Steinbruner. Thank you, Mr. Stridley for this presentation and I want to applaud you again. I know it is a team effort but I was at the December 2nd special board of supervisor meeting when I heard Congressman Panetta say it was your good work that caught the eye of the Army Corps of Engineers leaders and helped move this out of its stalled, very long stalled state. So I can't thank you enough. Thank you. I was at the scoping meeting last month and it was very well attended and very well put on and organized and I want to thank you for doing that. Again, as you move into the design phase, I do hope that there will be some consideration of controlled managed aquifer recharge if you will with flooding and to really take advantage of the benefits of possible groundwater recharge as we also work to protect those who are vulnerable along the levee that we can make use of this project working with Dr. Helen Dahlke from the University of California at Davis and the agricultural businesses in the Central Valley that are putting this into practice with good success. So please consider that and I want to thank you again for your good work. Thank you. Anybody else from the community that'd like to address us? Okay, see none will bring it back to the board. I believe that there is an acceptance file on this. Yes, that's correct. I would move the recommended actions. And I will second that. So a motion from Director Leopold and a second from Director Bill Sitch. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? It passes unanimously. Thank you as always, Mr. Shredley and that will end zone seven. We'll turn it back to the board and the supervisors for item number 12. We'll go right into item number 12 or should we have? They're ready if you'd like, if you'd like to just go right into it. Put this up to the board. Do you want it short and just go into it? Go into it? Okay. We'll take a break after that. Good morning everyone. Elisa Benson, Assistant CAO here to introduce our study session today on our ongoing work with focus strategies to assess and develop an improvement plan for our homeless response system. A quick reminder of the overall work. We started this with a contract you authorized us to enter last February and have been working very diligently in the community with our partners and city colleagues to undertake this work. The purpose of today's briefing in a study session is to update you on our work since the October study session we had and we'll be focusing on the quantitative performance results that was part of our most recent phase as well as an update as to the progress and emerging recommendations from the ad hoc work groups we put together coming out of the qualitative assessment and the interim recommendations focused provided to our community. We'll also give you a preview of this next phase of work which is our final phase for this engagement around action planning. Before I introduce Kate, our partner here I wanna thank all of our community partners and city partners in doing this work in the last 10 months. People have been incredibly engaged, have been incredibly open and what we see is really just the heart of collaboration in this work and the willingness to take hard looks at what we do today and identify our gaps and our opportunities and it's been very impressive to see people be open and willing to do things differently and really working together to do that. It's been a privilege to be part of this effort. So with that I'm gonna introduce Kate Bristol. She's Director of Consulting at Focus Strategies as you know, a firm that specializes in the issues of homelessness and is working across the country in helping communities like ours deal with this very critical crisis. She will be doing a majority of the presentation. I will add some relevant content as we work through the slides. We do, there are three major sections of the presentation and we will take questions at each section break so you don't have to sort of get through a section to raise questions or comments. At the end, I'm gonna summarize really quickly the board actions. There's a slide at the end to remind us what's actually in front of you and then we'll have more time for questions, public comment and then board final action on this item today. With that, I'm gonna introduce Kate. Thank you, Elisa. Can you guys hear me? So thank you to the board for having Focus Strategies back again. Last time I saw you all was in October when we presented our initial deliverable which was a baseline assessment report. Okay, how do I go forward? I can get this. There we go. So this is forward, okay. So today, okay, you go ahead. As Elisa mentioned, we're gonna do about three main sections in this report out. First is just kind of a quick review of some of the information I presented last time which is the planning framework that we're helping you kind of drive towards which is a systems approach to ending homelessness. Then the majority of the presentation will be the data that we have analyzed to look at your system performance. We'll present some of the key findings from that. Then the work that the work groups have been doing around system design and implementation strategies. And then we'll talk about the final step of the engagement which is the action planning process that's gonna kick off this month. Okay. Just straight that way. Okay, so just a quick review. Last time I was here, I presented these same slides. They were in a different color because we changed our colors of our slide template. So the goal that we're trying to help you all move to is to get to a homelessness response system. And the idea here is that instead of having just individual and sort of loosely coordinated programs which address homelessness for some folks, you wanna get to a strongly coordinated system that is strategically prioritizing your resources. And you have a strategy to address homelessness for everyone. And so while we try to always be person centered and think about people really thinking about the systems strategy is to envision that you're gonna have a system that will have a response for everyone regardless of what their specific situation is. So this is kind of the why. Again, just you have some good programs. Every community has good programs. Programs alone really can't solve the problem. In an environment where you have limited resources you need to have a joint decision making shaped by shared goals and really know how you're investing your funds. I think particularly in a community like Santa Cruz County where you have actually a pretty sizable unsheltered homeless population relative to the size of your community which means you have even more resource constraints. And you wanna have accountability for all the stakeholders in the system. So when you have a system you'll know you have one. When you have shared objectives that everyone has agreed upon and all your resources are aligned to achieving some shared objectives and outcomes. And then your programs are designed to achieve those objectives and outcomes and you're analyzing data to understand whether those objectives are being met. So just for example, just to pick an example that might be one you wanna think about in your action planning. If one of your key objectives you're driving towards is to reduce the number of unsheltered folks in the community, people living outside or in encampments you might agree that the key and most important strategy is to have a larger percentage of those folks get to a shelter bed and have a higher percentage of them get from shelter to housing. And then that is the objective that you're driving towards and you're gonna measure whether you're achieving that objective. Then to accomplish that because you have multiple jurisdictions and a lot of stakeholders you need a clear structure and process for making decisions about the response that everyone understands so that every person gets a timely and calibrated response that gets them on a path towards housing and that is fundamentally what the system needs to be about. And so this is just a picture I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on all the details but I think the important piece about this is on the left-hand side you see a group of people who are experiencing homelessness and your objective is that at the end of the day everyone is in housing and you have a variety of ways you go about doing that. The other thing I just wanna say about this is I think and we talked about this quite a bit last time I was here is I think there's a tendency to get very caught up in the crisis response strategies which are outreach, shelter, all the things you do in the immediate crisis which is that dark blue circle all of which is really important but if it's not connected to some strategies to get people to housing it's not gonna help you in the end reduce the number of people who are experiencing homelessness. Okay and then this is just a quick review of the timeline of the engagement that we're doing so we started in March of last year we issued our baseline assessment report in August and I presented it here in October. We started the data work actually in July and completed the initial results in November we then went back and did some data cleanup which I'll talk about and so the results are now final in March and then in February and March also the implementation work groups convened and they've developed a variety of implementation proposals and so we'll start the action planning this month in March with the goal that your action plan is finished in June. Okay so stop for questions just anything on this first part? Okay thank you I'll go ahead and click now. She can drive herself now. Okay so now we're gonna get into the data and actually to just get started just to kind of orient people we thought we'd put up a summary of your 2019 point in time count which I focus strategies does not take credit for having done we didn't work on this but just to sort of give everyone kind of a baseline to start from this is your biannual count that's done every January in odd years so the last one was January 2019 and this is found a total of 2,167 people who are homeless in the community of whom 78% or 1700 were unsheltered and another 467 were living in a shelter or a transitional housing program and you'll see the majority of them were adults over age 24 actually a significant number of transitional age youth which is a youth 18 to 24, 27% and then children under the age of 18 or 13, 14% you also have 18% of the population that you counted were experienced chronic homelessness which means they've been homeless for cumulatively for a year and also have a disability and then here's your breakdown by jurisdiction again from the point in time count just I don't think not surprised anyone to see that the city of Santa Cruz has the largest number of people counted followed by the unincorporated county and then Watsonville. And the blue bar is the unsheltered the red is the folks in shelter so the unsheltered numbers are the more relevant in terms of thinking about jurisdictions because of course the people in shelters are in the places where shelters are and then the last slide here just again a little context about household type so this shows that of the 2,100-ish people who were accounted that was 1,440 households 90% of which are adults so either a single adult or two adults in a household and then 8.5% were families with children and almost 3% were people under the age of 18 who are homeless by themselves. Okay so now we'll get into the performance data so I think the pit count data is probably data everyone has seen is pretty familiar with the kind of data work that a lot of communities are just starting to think about doing and that is what you really need to be able to design a system instead of just thinking just about who is experiencing homelessness and what does that population look like? What are our programs and what is our system and how well is it helping us reduce homelessness? So if you look at the why of looking at performance data is it tells us how effectively the system is helping people move from homelessness to housing the relative effectiveness of individual programs and then it gives you the data you need to make decisions about where you wanna target your efforts or do you wanna target your investments? How do you wanna prioritize your resources and how do you keep improving? So the how or how we went about it we use a tool that we built a few years back in partnership with the National Alliance to End Homelessness. It pulls your own local data from the Homeless Management Information System which is your local data collection system that it's mandated by HUD. There's also a housing inventory that's mandated by HUD which is a listing of all the programs in the community and how many beds they have. And then we also gather data directly from the providers about their program costs to help us think about cost effectiveness. So the tool produces this analysis and it gives you an idea again of what you're accomplishing and then moving forward now that we have this baseline set of data we'll be able to use it to make projections and do some predictive modeling in the action planning phase which I'll talk about in the next section of the presentation. So as I mentioned this has been this work start in July the initial data gathering takes a while that was done in September. We did generate the initial set of results in October. What we typically then do is we meet individually with each provider organization. So we did that at the end of October and that's to show them their own data and identify where there might be some data quality issues or things that we might have misinterpreted. We also presented a high level summary of the system results in December to the providers. What we found was because there was a kind of a significant amount of data that needed to be cleaned up we decided to do another round of data work so providers were given the opportunity to clean up some of their data in January and so that's why we're now coming to you with the revised results now. So what's included in the analysis just so you know we're only able to analyze projects that put their data into your HMIS system and those are kind of defined by HUD. So it includes emergency shelters which are divided into shelters that operate year round versus seasonally. In your community it was a little tricky to make this distinction because you also have some shelters that open and then close and you have temporary shelters that are moving around. So we had to kind of decide whether to categorize them as year round or seasonal. Transitional housing is as I think came up in the last agenda item around fit are also temporary situations but of longer duration. You don't have very many of those projects in the community. Then rapid rehousing is a housing intervention which is a short term rental subsidy so people are assisted to move into a unit in the private rental market they get their rent subsidized for a short period of time and then they assume the rent themselves and then you have your permanent supportive housing which are units that have an ongoing subsidy and intensive supportive services. So you'll see what we were able to analyze was 35 different projects and about the vast majority of the beds in those projects were for single adults and then you see there were 158 units for families in the analysis. Okay and so then these are the measures we look at and these are really the key things you need to be able to think about and understand to be able to drive towards improved results. The ones that are bold and italicized are the ones I'm gonna actually show you some data about but these are all the measures that we look at. The first one is what's the quality of your HMIS data? If you don't have good data, it's still good to start and I'll talk a little bit about some of the data issues that we encountered here which were fairly common but you should not do performance analysis until you're waiting for your data to get better, better to just get started and then see what it tells you about what you need to improve. We look at beds and unit utilization which is are all the units in the system actually being used to their full capacity? The third one is really important when you're thinking about ending street homelessness which is we look at whether the programs in the system that you already have are accessible to people who are living outside or are the people who go into those programs actually coming from other kinds of situations like they might be housed but at a risk of homelessness. We look at the length of stay which is how long do people stay on programs and of course you want them to be as short as possible so that they can serve more people and then related to that do people when they leave a program, when they leave a shelter or a transitional housing or a rapid rehousing program, are they housed at the end? And then the cost for permanent housing exit is what did it cost you to get that result? Number seven, we actually weren't able to do in your community because we only had a year of data but we also would wanna look at whether after people get housed do they come back to your system which is an indicator that the placements that you're making into housing aren't sticking. So I'm gonna run through those four measures that are on the highlighted slides. So first on HMIS data quality you do have some challenges around this. They're not at all uncommon but this is really an area that it's gonna be important to keep improving on and I'm not gonna go into all the different details. There's some particular fields that are really important to know and capture accurately have to do with where people live when they come into a program and when they go and they exit. The other thing is not all of the programs in your system are entering data in your HMIS system which means that you're not really getting a full picture of what's going on. And then another thing that I think is particularly gonna be frustrating here is the way the programs are set up in your data system doesn't align to how they really work on the ground. So if you were to ask, well where's the such and such shelter in this data it might be merged with another shelter and you can't pull it apart because of the way it's set up in there. And this just tells us that you haven't really been using the data because if you had been using it to really look at performance you would have the project set up in a way that maps to the kind of reality on the ground so you could really understand a little bit better what it's telling you about your system. So the first actual measure I'm gonna show you was the living situation of people who enter homeless programs and we're really looking at are the available beds being filled with people who are living outside or art in a shelter bed. So these are what in the federal definitions is called literal homelessness. And this really measures whether your system is accessible to folks with highest needs who are living outside and are actually targeting those folks. So if you have a lot of unsheltered homelessness you really wanna high performance on this measure. And so if you're having low performance it means that you have people who maybe they have their own unit but they're on the brink of losing their housing maybe they're couch surfing and they don't know where they're gonna go next and those folks are entering your programs. Sometimes for good reason and often particularly if there's a domestic violence situation or some other situation you're gonna wanna allow people to move from a housed situation into a shelter but at a system level you really wanna kind of have that be as limited as is possible. And often people who are housed can be served in a different way than giving them a shelter bed. So that's where targeted prevention and diversion comes in and I'll talk about that a little more. So here is the first bar chart. So you'll see the bottom of the chart shows you the four primary types of programs you have. So you have shelters, THS transitional housing, RRH is rapid rehousing which is a short term rental subsidy program and PSH is your permanent supportive housing and these are the percentage of people who entered who are actually what we call literally homeless. So you'll see only 52% of the shelter entries as captured in the data and again there could be some data quality issues there were actually people who are coming from outside or possibly from another shelter and I'll show the detail on the shelter one on the next slide. Transitional housing had 79% coming from either a shelter or a unsheltered situation. Rapid rehousing only 53% and PSH 84%. And here's your shelter. This just breaks down the shelters. So you'll see again the 52% of people came from another shelter or were unsheltered. 9% came from an institution which could be they came out of jail and went to shelter. They came from a hospital and went to shelter. 20% of people were housed and 13% were living with family and friends and then you have another 7% unknown. So just again some folks are gonna need to come into shelter from those situations but if you could divert all those or the vast majority of those entries not have them go to shelter you'd have free up a huge amount of capacity for people who are outside. Magically you've now served a lot more unsheltered people and you haven't even added a shelter bed. So this is really important data to be thinking about. Is this similar to other places? I would say it's on the I'd say the... Let me just go back. The shelter data is a little low relative to other places. The others don't look too different. On the rapid rehousing it's low but a lot of your rapid rehousing is the VA funded rapid rehousing, SSVF which has a little bit different rules. So it's a little hard to say about the rapid rehousing. I would say the shelter is on the low side particularly given how many people you have who are outside. Following up on that it seems odd that the shelter has the lowest percentage of people who are literally homeless. And I guess is that normal in looking at these kind of metrics or is Santa Cruz different? Well no I mean I think so it's important to remember that when you look at the other three bars the transitional rapid and PSH. So they would be taking people both from the street and also from a shelter. So in other words folks might be going from shelter to transitional rapid or PSH. So that's why you'll have higher results. It doesn't necessarily mean they're taking more people straight from the street. But yeah this is not an unusual distribution across the program types. All right thanks. People rarely will go to transitional housing straight from unsheltered situations. They typically come from shelter. But I mean the measure about shelter is usually eye-opening in most communities because you would assume if you're running an emergency shelter everyone who goes in is coming from outdoors but it's not the case. And again there can be perfectly good reasons. Again unfortunately this data element in HMIS doesn't capture whether the household is categorized as fleeing DV, domestic violence. And so often those families, particularly families will be coming from a housed situation. So that's certainly a reason you're not gonna see 100%. Okay I did this slide. Okay so then the other one that's really important is what we call in our homeless jargon exit rate permanent housing but to put it in friendlier language. People who leave programs and enter housing. So when people leave your programs are they securing housing when they exit or are they going back to being homeless? So this really helps you understand the degree to which your programs are helping people and their homelessness. Helps you identify program and system design challenges and identify opportunities again to reduce homelessness without adding more beds. And so on this one we only show shelter, transitional and rapid because of course in permanent supportive housing you're not exiting there's no goal to exit people out of permanent supportive housing. It's a permanent intervention so it's not really that relevant to think about an exit rate for that intervention type. But these are your rates for the other three and these are on the low side and I'll talk about that more when I get to the end of this section. But shelter, 9% of people who leave are known to go to a permanent housing destination now. Again this is where data quality gets really challenging because you have a fair amount of unknown destinations which is typical because people might go into shelter and the next day they're not there and the staff doesn't know where they've gone so they can't enter a destination. But also a lot of, particularly when you operate a lot of seasonal shelter people will often come for a few nights and then they go and they go back outside. So if you're gonna invest in shelter of course you're investing in shelter because you want people to have a safe place to go but if you wanna actually end homelessness or at least reduce it, you have to be driving towards an ever-increasing rate at which people leave shelter and actually get to housing and don't come back. The other two are definitely on the low side. Transitional housing 42% is low. The HUD benchmark for this is closer to 80% that they think you should hit for transitional and for rapid as well it should really hit closer to 80% of people who exit those interventions. Those take longer. The links to stay are longer. The services are more intensive and you'll see when we get to the cost effectiveness they cost you a lot more. So you would expect a higher rate of a successful outcome. Can you tell us why? Do you have any sense? I mean that's to be at half of what the benchmark is. So it's, I would say it's a combination of, there could be a little bit of data issues here where the successful exits aren't being captured. It could be, it's likely that there's some degree to which that the programs are not, not as aligned as they could be with best practices around housing focused case management and really knowing how to get people out to housing in the most efficient way. It I'm sure is related to the challenges of your housing market although pretty much every community has challenges. And those would be the two main reasons. It's just really being able to be, deliver really those high quality housing focused case management services and then having some resources for people to make the transition out of programs to out of transitional to permit housing. Okay and then here's the cost effectiveness measure which is the last one I'll show. So you wanna know if your programs are yielding strong results in relation to the investments and a lot of times when communities think about homeless programs they'll just look at what is each bed costs. So what's the cost for each bed? We recommend that you also look at or more importantly look at the cost for each person or household that secures a housing exit. So that's a little bit more performance oriented and it helps you see whether your resources are being invested effectively. Now I will say that this is another place where I think another round of, as you continue to improve data quality these numbers might change quite a bit. So the budget information comes directly from providers and we try to get them all to provide it in a consistent format. It's the first time they've done it. So I think there could probably be some refinement around the financial data. But you'll see here again you have to start somewhere with data. So your ES is emergency shelter. We should have actually spelled that out. So for each person who exited shelter to housing it only costs 3,154 dollars. Partly because not very many people are exiting and partly because your shelters aren't super well resourced and don't have a lot of services in them. Your transitional and rapid rehousing are actually pretty expensive per successful exit. And particularly the rapid, in most communities it's not that expensive to get someone from homelessness to housing through rapid rehousing. Again, you have a lot of SSVF rapid rehousing which tends to be better funded. They just have more resources. Can I chime in really quick? I think these are the kind of data points that are really important to be using with our partners. It is the question of why? And for us to unpack this collectively and start to understand what could we do different? And that's the beauty of the data. It allows us to have these conversations in a focused way with a clarity of what we wanna look for at the next point of analysis. And as I mentioned, the interest of our partners in those kinds of conversations is extremely high. And that is, of course, then driving their interest in increasing data quality. So that is why, as Kate said, there's no point of waiting for the data to be perfect. It's much better to get started and have people start using the data to inform their behaviors and how they're running their programs. And us providing that framework for those conversations to happen. So I'm just gonna do just two kind of summary slides on the data section and then we'll take a question break. So these are just kind of the high level areas in need of improvement. So as I mentioned, you gotta increase your program participation in HMIS and improve data quality. The rate at which literally homeless people are accessing homeless programs is gonna be critical if you wanna get your unsheltered numbers down and then improving your ability to help people in the homeless programs to cure housing when they leave. And then I think this came up a bit as I was talking, but how do you compare? The things that we found that were quite similar to what we see in a lot of places is the challenges with access for people who are literally homeless. We do see in a lot of places similar, lower than expected numbers of unsheltered people who are accessing programs. And then another thing, which we're not showing the slides of the individual provider performance, but when we look at it provider to provider, you have some that are much more high performing than others. So that's very typical. Things that were a little more unusual here, as I mentioned, your exit rate to permit housing is pretty low across all the types, which was a little surprising. And then usually when we run these measures in other communities, it shows you that rapid rehousing is a more effective intervention than transitional housing on all the measures, which we did not find. Now, I will say you have a pretty small number of transitional programs and a pretty small number of rapid rehousing programs. So it's always hard when you have very small sample sizes, but most communities find that investing in rapid rehousing is a more cost effective intervention and gets better results. So we'll have to kind of try and help you unpack what's going on there. Okay, so other data questions? We'll open it up to the board. There's a couple of things here. The use of HMIS, I don't know the exact number of programs that don't use it. I'm sure it's like this in other communities where some use it and some don't. How do we encourage or how do we mandate? I mean, what are strategies that communities have used so we get better data, which will help inform this? So any program that receives the HUD Continuum of Care funding is under a mandate to participate. So there in the ones that don't typically would be programs that have a lot of private funding or they might have other sources of public funding that don't mandate. So there's a few ways to think about it. I think the stick method is if you have any program that gets any of your local dollars, whether it's from the county or a city, you should really require it as a contract requirement. So that's one way to think about it. The other way is just, again, this sort of continuing doing system planning work using data and talking to your partners about the importance of it and explaining to them why their lack of participation is sort of getting in the way of you're really being able to understand what the system's accomplishing, I think is really more the carrot way to go. And some providers won't participate because it's considered to be a staffing burden. So you also have to think about providing training and maybe some support to help people start getting up and running with HMIS. The other question I had is it was dispiriting to see those numbers about moving people into housing and recognizing that we don't meet those national standards by a great deal. You talked about there may be some housing case management that's maybe not following best practices or everything. And maybe this is how you determine the superstars versus the lower performing programs. But you also talked about small sample size. And I'm trying to figure out whether this is a red alert on working with our providers or whether we need to expand the resources to get a better sense of it. I think it's a combination of things. So I think of course it's very hard to get people into housing in any place in California, right? It's expensive. There aren't enough, you don't have enough permanent supportive housing, you don't have enough rapid rehousing, which is one of the reasons that people who leave your shelters aren't getting to housing, right? So I think providers typically they're very oriented around trying to help people who come into their programs get some kind of a placement into the next program that's gonna get them to housing. And the place where typically there's a lot of opportunity to improve results is all those sort of more intangible ways that we support people to figure out a housing solution just through their own acquaintances and friends and family and other ways or maybe there's some resource that they can tap into that's not part of the homeless system. So just sort of creating a system-wide value in culture that everything we do is around figuring out a housing solution for people whether they do or don't get a rent subsidy. And so that is partly working with providers on their capacity, but it's also thinking at the systems level, how are you gonna help them? Like there are gonna be folks who really can't get to housing without some kind of a financial support. So are there some kind of lighter touch things you might wanna create at a system level or anybody who gets into shelter has access to some dollars maybe for security deposits or a first month's rent. Maybe it's not a full on rapid rehousing six months subsidy, but something small. So yeah. I think actually C's getting into the next section of the report and what the work groups have come up with, so. I wanna not put a damper on your question. I think I just want, the last thing I wanna say, I think it's important to work collaboratively with the providers because it's not, what doesn't work is just to go to them all and go, okay, you gotta increase your exit rate or we're not gonna fund you. Like it has to be one of the reasons the results- It has to be a sense of intervention, not just- Well you have to, you know, collectively they make up the system so each of their individual performance is the system performance, but the system has to figure out where resources are needed to get the overall performance jump. Well we hire, I mean we fund a number of housing navigators, right? So we want them to be as effective as possible. Right, and maybe you just need more of them and maybe, you know, it might not be that they're not doing what they can but they aren't enough. And so actually when I get, that's actually the one thing we heard and a lot of the more qualitative work. Right, well then I'll wait to see. You're telling me to keep going. Okay, keep going, all right. So the second piece of work that's happened since we last saw you is we've been facilitating these work groups that started in September and these were convened because we had some interim recommendations in our baseline report and the four recommendations were to implement system-wide diversion practice and refine your coordinated entry system which is SmartPath, to build the capacity of shelters to deliver housing-focused services, to coordinate and standardize your outreach efforts and think about how to make them more results oriented and then to complete the work of the governance study group. So there's been one group work group convened on each topic. The diversion work group has been kind of co-convened by HSD who will run SmartPath. It's been a really great group. We've made a huge amount of progress. They developed a whole proposal about how they wanna modify the SmartPath process so that the first step is not that you get assessed for a housing intervention that you're never gonna get but the first step is you get what we call a diversion conversation and they don't wanna call it diversion. They're gonna call it a SmartPath conversation where you work with each person to sort of figure out if there's some path to housing you can identify that does not involve a housing subsidy because you don't have enough of those subsidies. So that proposal was presented in February to at a big convening of stakeholders we got some input about it on it to help refine that. We also did an introduction to diversion training in February so that group's been cooking. There's a lot of interest in integrating this practice this diversion practice into your system. The housing focus shelter work group convened and we had representation from I think every emergency shelter in the community maybe close to every almost 100%. That's also been a really great group and we really tried to focus with them on what are you doing now that actually works so that people leave your shelter and get to housing and how can we build up what you're already doing. We also did some focus groups with the folks living in the shelters which is a slide that'll come up later. So the things that the shelter providers and the shelter residents identified the top priority was more housing focus case management and advocacy in a shelter. So there's a lot of variability if you get into a shelter whether you have access to any kind of a case manager or even or more importantly a case manager that has the bandwidth and the expertise to help you figure out a housing solution. And there was just a lot of the word advocate really came up a lot particularly in talking to the residents and the shelters that they it's kind of random luck or just persistence if you're able to connect with a staff person who can really advocate on your behalf to get the things that you need particularly to get to housing. There was some interest in a flexible funding pool to support people to leave shelter to get to housing and then the shelter providers talked about needing more training and they were really interested in a peer learning collaborative around case management and housing focus case management. The outreach group has a little bit less intensively but that's also been a really good group that's been really talking about the mobile outreach you have which you have a there's a huge number of mobile outreach teams operating through a variety of different funding sources. The county funds quite a bit of outreach but there's also city generated outreach and also just nonprofit volunteer groups that are doing outreach. So that group's really been talking about what is the what makes outreach effective and what are we trying to accomplish with outreach beyond the obviously really important goal of just engaging with people and helping them meet their basic needs but then beyond that like what are you what are we trying to outreach them to what would be a strong result. And then the last group is the planning governance and communications work group which is picking up the work that happened a couple years back with the governance study committee. They've developed a proposal for a new governing body to design direct and evaluate your regional response and includes a whole set of proposals and that's a whole another PowerPoint but here's one slide from it which is this kind of sketch of what the structure would be that you really need some kind of a regional homelessness response body which we're calling a commission that holds the authority and accountability for the regional homeless response sets the overall policy, sets the priorities sets the targets and evaluates the results and then is informed by this what we're calling the community and technical advisory committee which is your experts in your community representatives who would make recommendations to the commission and then cannot emphasize enough the importance of the red box down below which is you can and I really have seen this in a lot of different places where we've tried to help with homeless system governance you can spend a lot of time trying to decide what tables you want and who sits at which one and what is the structure and if there isn't any staff to support it it's gonna be a lot of wasted energy because the folks who are making decisions need people to do all that legwork of kind of figuring out what are the priorities and bringing you things to make decisions about. I'm gonna chime in on this one a little bit so there is gonna be in your recommended actions an item about returning on that red box and how we are doing that just so we are looking at how different counties across the state are looking at staffing compliments in this area of work and so we have some comparative numbers and right now currently I'm working with Health and Human Services on developing an alternative county organizational structure for that red box and a key part of that out of the gate is developing sort of that job description and responsibilities for the director of that new entity and that we will be coming back to you pretty quickly asking for approval to go forward to classify and move forward on that position so we actually can get a jump on this and then we'll also be in one of the recommended actions is with your guidance coming back as part of the supplemental with a reorganization plan and a funding proposal for a stronger staffing compliment to support this work moving forward. Okay so the last slide on this section is just to recap what we heard from the people experiencing homelessness and we did focus groups in May and then again in December and this I think some of it's in our baseline report definitely heard from the people who are experiencing homelessness this sort of increasingly unwelcome feeling I'm sure also related to the fact that those numbers have been going up. For people who got into shelter the two really main things that they had to say that they really wanted us to hear is they don't feel like there's good information available to them about resources that they can access and that they really felt like case management or advocacy to help meet needs was inconsistently offered and available. Finding someone to help with advocacy seems to be based largely on luck or persistence and we really heard that kind of across all the different focus groups. Okay so the last couple slides are just about the next steps for the action planning but take a pause here. Keep going. Okay so we're almost to the end of our engagement the last phase will be this action strategic action planning process which is kicking off at the end of this month. We hope with some in-person convenings. Yes we are. COVID-19 allow planning for virtual convenings but. So that'll be the kickoff in April we'll be doing some predictive modeling which I'm gonna show a slide about and meet with some ad hoc planning groups. We'll have the draft plan completed. The goal is in May and then bring it back to you all to finalize in June. So the strategic action planning goals I just wanna sort of I think this came up in the last time I was here is you all do have a plan the all in plan is a terrific plan actually and really what it's the main component that's missing is it's a little thin on the implementation steps. So our recommendation is you build upon that plan you affirm the need for a coordinated regional homeless response system you integrate the work that your implementation work groups have already done and then oh two to three years plan, sorry that you really kind of develop something that's gonna be a two to three year timeframe that's very focused on actionable steps prioritized actions and assigned leads driven by data. So those are the two bullets about that really the goal is to take all in and do an overlay that's data driven and identifies some key action steps and that this would be a bridge plan that would get you through until your new governance structures in place and up and running and can do a new plan. So one of the key elements of this and kind of deciding on the action steps and deciding on the priorities will be doing this modeling work and again now we have your baseline data even with all the caveats about some of the data quality issues we feel like it's important to get started. We can take your the baseline swap data information about resources you have in the community and your priorities and we can model the relative impact of doing different things. So, for example, what happens if you add shelter bed capacity? What happens if you add targeted homeless housing programs like rapid rehousing? What if you added diversion? And what if you improve performance on these different measures? So this is just in a scenario that shows you just an example of something you could do and these are totally made up numbers. But in the first scenario you say, well let's add 40 shelter beds. And this is also illustrating that when you think about inventory and capacity you also need to connect it to these variables about who enters and who exits and where do they go and they exit. So you could add 40 shelter beds and you increase the rate of entry from literally homeless people by 5%. So instead 50% are unsheltered, 55% are unsheltered. And then the rate at which they leave shelter to housing goes up 5%. So it goes up from 10% to 15%. Those are kind of modest increases. And so we put that in the model and we'll tell you that that will result in a 3% decrease in your unsheltered population. The other scenario is maybe you add fewer shelter beds, 25, but you actually get better performance out of them. So you say we're gonna increase the rate of serving literally homeless people by 25% and the rate of exit by 15%. Well, that might result in a bigger overall increase. So these are the kinds of things you need to weigh, the relative value of adding beds, what are some reasonable targets to increase performance and not to set yourselves up with performance targets that you can't meet, but things that take a nice next step towards better performance. And so these are some of the questions that we want to engage at the convenings at the end of March. Like what do people want us to explore in terms of modeling to sort of inform that list of priorities as we move forward? And then this is just the timeline again. So this is just kind of pulling back in that the modeling will help really inform the action steps as well as the input from the stakeholders. Okay, I think this is you. So I'm gonna really quickly review the recommended actions before you today. As you can see on the page, one is just conducting this study session today. Then coming back in May with a progress report on the work of the work groups and actually sort of check-in on the drafting of the action plan. So you see that sooner than later. And then as I mentioned earlier, that presentation of a supplemental budget proposal with an alternative organizational structure to support the systems approach we are talking about today. And then there's as you guys know in your agenda packet, there's also an item within the staff report around homework bound funds. And this directs us to utilize the existing unallocated or unspent portion and trying to get that spent as quickly as possible through some additional work with other community providers. But just again, laying that out. So those are the actual actions before you today. Now we can pause for your discussion. Any further questions? We do need to do public comment and action. Okay, I'm gonna ask some questions for Supervisor Coonerty. Thank you for the focus strategies report. I like the direction we are headed and appreciate your efforts. As the modeling work gets underway, it would be helpful to know what would need to be done from a policy and operations perspective to end homelessness for families with children in 18 months. Yeah, I think that we can definitely look at that. I would say that the challenge of that will be deciding what ending family homelessness means for the community. So the numbers of families that we would characterize as the literally homeless families is pretty small. And I think you could definitely come up with a plan to end unsheltered family homelessness in 18 months. If you're gonna use the slightly more expansive definition of families that are couchsurfing, I think that's a bigger lift. But this is where some of that work around diversion and engaging your mainstream partners could come in and thinking about partnering with the school districts to do some diversion problem-solving work with some of those families. It's something you could also think about putting in your action plan. With regard to the work groups, how and when will the work group recommendations be implemented and when will they report back? So the work group recommendations, the current plan is that those are gonna roll into the action plan. So those would be action steps that you put in your action plan. I think the only exception being potentially the diversion and smart path work could kind of already maybe launch all on its own, because that's kind of the furthest along towards implementation. The outreach and shelter recommendations, I think need some further actioning. So they figured out a direction, but I think the actual action steps are gonna require some resources, which will roll into your action plan. And I'll just add to that. I mean, as we develop the action plan, as you know, we are doing our planning for our HAP funding from the state and aligning it with this work. So there will be some of those resources available. But some of the ideas around really examining and expanding our case management, our advocacy, our housing navigation capacity and understanding how it's functioning today. As we can see, it's not functioning as well as we hope, and we have some inconsistencies across our system. So I think it's probably realistic, as Kate has mentioned, that the articulation of those steps will be in the action plan. We're doing a lot of the preparatory work just by way of the work groups. We're not surprising anyone. In fact, this is coming from our system partners, asking for us to help do this lift. But so I think it is probably most realistic with the smart path diversion a little bit ahead of everything, but the other ones will really be fully fleshed out in the action plan. Okay, regarding the homework bound, I would like to add a direction requesting a report back in June during budget hearings, covering where this year's funds were reallocated and whether they were utilized. Got it. And then one last thing is in the staff report, it mentioned that the report back would be, sorry, May, but now it's in June. Our June agendas are really full, so we might have to schedule a special board meeting to have your recommendations because otherwise it'll get lost. Got it. Good, thank you for that report. A lot of work has gone into it. And I really think this is really the beginning of a concentrated effort that's really needed, has been needed for a long time among our departments in the counties and our partners, the cities and the nonprofit agencies that we have here. Historically, we've been working in silos and it hasn't gotten very far. And I really want to thank our CAO and the county for saying that we're going to lead this issue. Doesn't mean that we're responsible for the whole thing. And I think those participants ought to know that we're all, this is a team effort. But one thing, when does the reality check with funding come in to saying, when we're setting our goals, I mean, the governor Newsom has put out 1.4 billion he once committed to now there's a piece of legislation as well. And that was for one year or one time. And now somebody wants a couple legislators want to have $2 billion a year permanently. I'm trying to get a sense of, do we say this is what we want to do under the parameters with our clientele that we have with what is, we can anticipate coming from the state or do we say this is what we want and this is how much it'll take. And then fill in the blanks about where we're going to place our priorities. The funding mechanism is going to be obviously critical. And it's uncertain. So I want us to be realistic. I want us to be aggressive, but I want us to be realistic too about how much should we be asking for? Or I don't want that to limit our ideas, but I just want to try to get a sense of reality in this whole thing. As you can imagine, I can't speak to what the future ongoing funding from the state will look like. I think everyone is wanting something that's ongoing. So we have some level of stable planning assumptions as we build a system. From my perspective, as we go into this period of improvement and growth, we're not going to transform it overnight. And we are approaching this from an incremental, what can we fund? What can we support? And probably most importantly with work from focus strategies and what makes sense. So it is, you know, I'd love us to be able to like, you know, transform the system overnight. It takes time. It takes time to develop partner capacity. It takes time to bring skill sets here that we don't have. So I do think we have time to sort of work through that. And we're always in that balancing game of what can we afford? What makes sense? But what ultimately will it take to solve to end homelessness? That's a much bigger question. The way we're approaching it, I think is in a stepwise fashion. So we will make smart investments as we move forward, less fragmented investments. And hopefully we'll have something on going to support it over time. Well, yeah, I can understand that. And I just think it's great that we're at this point and we're being aggressive and getting off the framework of what we want to do and how we want to get there. But it's all gonna get down as we know. And understandably so. I'm just, do we project this is what we want or this is what we can afford under $1.4 billion or what we can afford under $2 billion? This is statewide money, of course, a year. I don't know how that fits in the process. So I just, you know, maybe we should say this is what we can do or what we wanna do with this much money or approach it that way. I'm not sure of how we should do that. But it's gonna get down to that in the end. Absolutely. Thank you for the presentation. I appreciate the way we're looking at this because so often we only talk about money. And we just say we need more. And it's illuminating to look at some of the data here in a way that we haven't looked at it before to show whether we're effectively using the dollars that we have, could we be more effective and be able to make some difference within the constraints that we have, but by using our dollars more effectively. And so if nothing else happens with this, we at least are put on a different pathway to evaluate how we make decisions with the dollars that we have. One of the things I'll also know is we could take all the state money and just build more housing. It wouldn't build a lot of housing, right? I mean, $10 million seems like a lot of money, but when you actually try to build an affordable housing project, you know, that doesn't get you very far. And given that we have over 2000 people that we've identified in the point in time, homeless census, to build that many units of housing, it would take many multiples of $10 million in order to make it. And so we have to be smarter with the money that we have. And I like the idea of a non fragmented system and that we're really looking at the next level of investment because right now there is a focus from the state legislature and there will be more money coming from the state. We would hope that they would replace what we had when we had redevelopment, which was putting about $8 million just into the unincorporated area a year that we don't have anymore. And that would really help us quite a bit instead of these one time funds. And then you have to wonder how you're gonna keep it going. I also think I appreciate she's left now, but city council member Donna Myers with here, that interest from our partners about this process. And you talk about the governance structure about how we as a community, right? As Santa Cruz County is working on these problems and that we have a shared strategy that it isn't just one jurisdiction addressing an immediate need and then someone else doing something else. But we have agreed upon shared strategy will actually help us leverage the dollars that we have a lot better. And so I think that this effort will be helpful in that. And I'm glad to see the idea from the CAO's office that we have to add staff so we can effectively support it and take the leadership role that we've always had more effectively to be able to support these strategies into the future because we know that there are lots of parts to this. And we shouldn't be about building bureaucracy but we do have to staff things at a level to be able to meet the needs of the four other cities as well as the unincorporated area. So I appreciate that work and commitment on the part of the CAO's office. I think when we get this meeting that happens at the end of March in whatever form it takes, I hope that there is active participation from our other elected colleagues because I do think that having us to have that shared understanding about where we're, what we know, where we wanna go, what we need in order to get there, will ensure that there's this collective effort instead of episodic pieces. Because the idea that I think you have charitably called it a loose collection of funding and program and one of your early slides that we need to be sharper on using our money and delivering the services that we need so we can move people out of unsheltered and into housing makes a big difference. This is important work and there's gonna be a lot of push from the ground up from the community who's demanding that we do more. And there's gonna be a lot of push also from the state down saying that we need to do it. And we see this with the responsibilities about building housing and ensuring that there's, I think it'll fall to us unfortunately to make sure that we have a good amount of affordable housing that more housing doesn't necessarily address the needs of this group that we're trying to move into housing because we know that that housing subsidy support won't, you can't get enough housing subsidies to move people into $2,300 a month apartments. That just isn't gonna work. And it's gonna take a community effort that's spread out across the county to be able to build things like permanent supportive housing to have more affordable housing complexes throughout the community. So it's a shared responsibility to not just fall on one part of the community but it falls on us all. So I look forward to the continued work that we'll have here. Thank you. Thank you for your good work. Board action. Oh, thank you. Public comment. Thank you. We're gonna start here with comment here. We'll go to the community room next. Yes. Good afternoon. My name is Ralfa Sonnenfeld. I serve on the city of Santa Cruz's community advisory committee on homelessness. First, I just wanted to thank the county and the CAO's office and focus strategies for putting this initiative together and helping our community move forward to solving and ending homelessness. I think I support all of the ideas and really appreciate that we're trying to be more effective with how we're spending our limited resources. One of the things I wanna talk about for a minute was essentially the scope of this effort. It's really been focused on our shelter and supportive housing services. And one of the things I think is important to keep in mind is that the indirect costs of unsheltered homelessness are incredibly high in our community. We're estimating tens of millions of dollars a year. The US Interagency Council on Homelessness is actually developing a methodology that will be standardized for all communities to be able to calculate what those indirect costs are. They'll be publishing that, I believe, in April. And that's a tool that our community can use to help evaluate effective programs. One of the effective programs that I believe will be instrumental in reducing the costs that homelessness have on our law enforcement jail system and even on our health systems is the outreach first model of law enforcement. And I would hope that the county moves more towards supporting this model in collaboration with all of our local jurisdictions to utilize outreach to increase the rate of our homeless people accessing our programs prior to enforcing laws on people for doing nothing other than sleeping outside. There are more effective ways to get people into shelter than by arresting or citing them. We're actually regressive in our approach by criminalizing the sleeping of people sleeping outside when they have nowhere else to go. So whatever our county can do to work with our partners in the cities to push forward that sort of model will make a big difference in the effectiveness of our overall system. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Marilyn Garrett. Criminalizing the poor is really unconscionable. You spoke a lot about funding mechanisms. In some localities, elected officials are adopting resolutions for a peace budget to fund social services and take money, a small percentage from the military budget. And I got sent this actually from my sister in Nevada city of what they're doing up there. But there's this pie here that shows the military budget about 54, 4%. And then all these little tiny slices of the pie for other services, education, housing, parks and recreation, et cetera. And you talked Supervisor Leopold about using the money we have more efficiently. But if you only have crumbs left over, you can distribute the crumbs as efficiently as you can, but it's gonna be inadequate for the needs. And I think this is worthwhile for the county to look at. And I remember years ago hearing someone from Share the Wealth campaign, we have growth and equity in this country, billionaires and people in poverty. It's a real, you mentioned system. We do have a system problem. As I see it, it's capitalism. And I'm gonna submit this again because it illustrates it so well. This young medic says feeling sad and depressed, are you anxious, worried about the future? Feeling isolated and alone. You might be suffering from capitalism. Symptoms include homelessness, hunger, unemployment, poverty, incarceration. It's a long list. We need a change in the system that makes it more equitable and human and so that people can live well throughout the society. And I referred before to when I visited the former Soviet Union in 1966 and visited my mother's cousin who paid about 5% of her income for rent, no homelessness, problems in every society. Of course, I walked the streets alone. I did not feel like I was in danger, free medical care. We could learn from some others. We have a system problem. Thank you. Okay, we're ready for the community room. How are you? Okay. Thank you. Becky Steinbruner, it's lonely down here. But a nice facility. Thank you. I wanna thank the consultant and CAO's office for this good work. The data examination is really illuminating and a bit shocking. So I really wanna thank you for bringing this good information to the public as well. What I'm not hearing is any discussion about the student population that's homeless. We have UCSC and Cabrillo College that have students that are homeless. And we need to bring them in as our partners for this solution just as much as we need to bring in the city of Santa Cruz, Capitola and Watsonville. So I hope that in this work group that they are also at the table. As well as the churches, the faith-based organizations are very willing, able and ready to help with any of our solutions and have a lot of very good ideas that don't cost a lot of money. I was curious about one of the earlier slides that showed the sources of the different jurisdictions that had homelessness. There were all the cities and the county, but up on the slide was the office of education. And I didn't understand why the county office of education was included in a slide with the jurisdiction. So I would like some explanation of that, if you would please. I'm wondering if the jail population was counted in with the homeless population. We've just heard a report from the FIT program and many of those people in the jail are homeless. It is a bit disconcerting for me to hear that the homeward bound funds have not been used and I would like Supervisor Leopold, I would like some discussion about that and look forward to hearing more about that, especially as budget time comes about. I am concerned that our county has been giving out a lot of money to organizations that are not providing back the data that we need as an organization as that the public should expect for what is happening. How effective are their programs? And so I think it would behoove the county administrative office to let those organizations know now, before budget hearings come about, I know the discussions are happening now, that it will be expected and demanded that they submit proper data entry to help us better run the problem, come to solutions in our county that are working. I think that we need to be including also the homeless themselves in this work group moving forward. I am reminded of the women's task on homelessness and domestic violence, nothing about us without us and we've got to carry that through with the work here. Finally, I will just say that we need to move the recommended actions with additional direction. You have a motion to second. Any opposition? There is none passes unanimously. All right, thank you. Now, is there a council? Is there anything to report out of closed session? No. No. And then we will now go to closed session and we can have a break after that, maybe for a few minutes, but yeah. Mr. Chair, we'll come back at 1.30. Thank you. And certifying CEQA negative declaration, determination to consider four ordinances to amend Santa Cruz County Code chapter 16.10, geologic hazard 16.2, all grading regulations 16.22, erosion control and adopt a new chapter 16.13, floodplain regulations as outlined in the memorandum of planning director. And I didn't say conservation and open space element. We're ready to go. Okay, thank you, chair. My name is David Carlson. I'm a resource planner with the planning department. I'll be given the presentation today. The county's local coastal plan is integrated with the general plan and was adopted by the board of supervisors and certified by the coastal commission in 1994. This project would amend the safety element of the general plan and local coastal plan, which addresses hazards such as earthquakes, flood hazards, fire hazards, erosion and coastal hazards. Provisions of both state and federal law require that the county update the safety element to address climate change and sea level rise. And the coastal commission has published the guidance document to aid local jurisdictions in these updates. What we expect to see in the future is a result of sea level rise and climate change is more coastal bluff erosion and more wave impact events and more flooding at beach level. Public interest in this project is focused on the amendments to the existing rules in the safety element for building on coastal bluffs and beaches. And that will be the focus of this presentation. The existing rules for building on coastal bluffs and beaches apply county wide and basically require new structures or major remodels of existing structures to be set back an adequate distance from the edge of a coastal bluff. And for beach level development, they require that new homes and major remodels be elevated above a predetermined flood level to be protected from floodwaters. Sea walls are allowed in order to protect existing development from a significant threat of coastal bluff erosion. So compared to the existing rules, the proposed amendments would take a different approach depending on geographic context. This slide shows the urbanized areas of the county coastline, including the shaded areas between the Santa Cruz city limit at the small craft harbor and the Capitola city limit. And then the shaded area between New Brighton State Beach and Seascape Resort. And then other urbanized areas in South County are shown outlined in green. In area number one, the proposed amendments would designate the area between Soquel Point to the Capitola city limits as a shoreline protection exception area where sea walls would be allowed throughout the area. For area two, for coastal bluff properties between the harbor and Soquel Point and the South County urbanized areas, the amendments would allow one future major project, either a new structure or a major remodel of an existing structure. Coastal bluff armoring would be allowed to address a significant erosion threat to an existing structure. And these rules would remain in place unless a future LCP amendment in the form of a shoreline management plan establishes a comprehensive plan for a given area that would guide how these areas should evolve in the future in terms of shoreline protection, public access and future development. In area three, for beach level development, the same one-time allowance for a new or major remodel project would apply. A limit would be placed on how high structures could be elevated on the beach and no new sea walls could be placed on the beach. And then in area four, outside of the urbanized areas in the rural areas of the county where very little development exists on coastal bluffs and beaches, the amendments would adopt a managed retreat approach. This means new structures and major remodels of existing structures would have to be set back an adequate distance from a coastal bluff without reliance on any existing or proposed sea wall and no new sea walls would be allowed. And so this slide shows an example of the existing county projects in the shoreline protection exception area at Pleasure Point and at the hook at the base of 41st Avenue, showing the type of sea wall incorporating public access that would be preferred throughout this area. And then this slide shows an example of how a simulation of how modern sea wall structures may look for two different properties in the shoreline protection exception area. Significant amounts of rubble from previous failed sea wall structures would be removed from the beach, increasing public access to the shoreline. The simulation on the right incorporates potential public access from the street and a stairway down to the shoreline. This table shows how a major remodel of an existing structure is evaluated to determine if the remodeled structure must also meet the required coastal bluff setback, triggers the one-time allowance, triggers evaluation of the existing sea wall, and also triggers the requirement for the deed recordation. So this is our existing, there's an existing web page on our website that explains how to do this calculation. It divides the structure up into four components. We evaluate the percentage work on the structural parts of those components. We apply weighting factors to those four components and we come up with a total modification percentage. And in this case, based on that percentage modification in column two and doing the math, this project would calculate out to 45% project. And then here's another version where I've switched up the percent modifications, a little bit greater scope project calculated out to 62%. So under current rules, a new home or a greater than 65% structural modification of an existing home must be set back from the coastal bluff a distance sufficient to provide a stable building site accounting for 100 years of projected coastal bluff erosion or a minimum of 25 feet, whichever is greater. There's no exceptions to this requirement and existing homes that do not meet the required setback and no room to relocate are limited to less than 65% structural modifications. The amendments would lower the structural modification threshold to 50%. However, the 100 year period would also be lower to 75 years and provide for a possible exception to the 75 year setback while maintaining the minimum 25 year setback. Such an exception would represent a potentially shorter lifespan for the structure depending on how rapidly the coastal bluff erodes. Compared to coastal commission guidance, the amendments would be less restrictive in terms of how the structural modification threshold is calculated. Referring back to those previous two slides, the coastal commission looks at each separate component in terms of their 50% threshold. It's not a whole house approach. If you reach 50% structural modification to any one of those four structural components, you are at the threshold of having to meet the coastal bluff setback and other requirements. I'm gonna come back to this slide and continue talking about coastal bluff setbacks for a second here. So currently the coastal bluff setback is calculated based on the current site conditions. If the bluff is armored, the armoring and the condition in the armoring is taken into consideration when calculating the projected 100 year coastal bluff erosion rate. The amendments would continue this practice and would apply the erosion rate to a shorter time period of 75 years to determine the required setback. Compared to a coastal commission guidance, the county's proposal would be less restrictive when the coastal commission processes a coastal development permit, they require the setback to be calculated without consideration of any existing armoring which increases the required setback compared to the county's longstanding practice. And so now I'll talk about the one time allowance. Currently the county threshold is defined to include all projects that cumulatively exceed the 65% threshold within any five year period. And every five years, the calculation would reset to zero theoretically. The amendments would limit the number of major projects that exceed the 50% structural modification threshold to one time only. There would be no limit on the number of projects that do not exceed that 50% threshold. Compared to the coastal commission guidance, again, this amendment would be less restrictive. Their calculation includes all projects since the adoption of the coastal act in 1977 cumulatively. And when the threshold is met, no more structural modifications are allowed at that point. Much of the armoring out there is degraded to varying extents because of wave attack and corrosion and settlement and other conditions along the coast. The amendments include new policies requiring evaluation of the condition of existing armoring in conjunction with a greater than 50% project. Necessary maintenance and repair would be required in conjunction with such a project. And updated monitoring maintenance and repair programs would be required to outline the ongoing work that would need to be done and what kind of permits would be required for that or not. The impacts of armoring on the coast include loss of beach sand and loss of public recreational beach area. The sand content of an eroding coastal bluff is prevented from reaching the beach when the bluff is armored. And the footprint area of an armoring structure takes up beach area that would otherwise be potentially available for public recreational use. The amendments would require for a greater than 50% project, these impacts from an existing armoring structure be mitigated. However, effectively adding sand to the beach or increasing the area of the beach is difficult to accomplish. The mitigations could involve other in lieu activities such as directly fixing or contributing to the repair of a coastal access facility such as a stairway. The amendments propose an option of paying in lieu fees to satisfy the mitigation requirement. The Coastal Commission has been doing this for years and we are proposing to continue this and adopt this practice in the county. The Coastal Commission has developed an equation for sand loss and the amendments propose using the same calculation, which is based on site specific characteristics where the armoring exists. The county has established a fee for coastal encroachments that currently applies to encroachments on county property along the coast. And the amendments would adopt this same fee for encroachments by armoring structures on non-county owned beach area as the recreation area in lieu fee. Many factors are considered in the calculation of the in lieu fees, including the sand content of the bluff material, the amount of armoring, the type of armoring, its footprint area on the beach. These sample calculations on this slide are for a typical 50 foot wide lot with varying amounts and types of armoring. These sample fees do not necessarily define the whole range of potential fee amounts. It's ultimately a very site specific and project specific calculation. Compared to the Coastal Commission's methodology on the recreation area in lieu fee, these county calculated fee amounts would be lower. Their methodology involves calculating the recreation area impacts based on real estate value of coastal property, which has resulted in much higher fee amounts compared to what the county is proposing. And now discuss beach level development. The one time allowance described above for greater than 50% structure modification would also apply to beach level development. However, because the county participates in the National Flood Insurance Program, we apply FEMA standards in the flood zones, including the coastal high hazard area on the beach. And we do a separate calculation to determine whether such projects need to be elevated above the flood level. So for an existing house on the beach, the calculation involves looking at the value, the cost of the project, the projected cost of the project compared to the existing value of the house minus the land value to determine whether that project, to that existing house would trigger a requirement to elevate that house above the predetermined flood level and on that section of beach. Once the structure is elevated, it meets FEMA requirements. However, the elevation project may or may not trigger that one time 50% structural modification threshold. Again, there would be no limits on the number of projects that do not exceed the 50% structural modification threshold. And that also applies to coastal bluff projects. The same requirements for evaluation of existing seawall on the beach would apply. And the primary method to mitigate the flooding and wave impact hazard to structures on the beach is elevation of the structure. And so once the structure is elevated, armoring theoretically is no longer required. So that is the basis for our proposed amendment of no new seawalls on the beach because over the long term, we project that as homes on the beach are remodeled and upgraded and elevated above flood levels that eliminates the requirement for that armoring. So the proposed amendments would continue our existing practice of requiring a deed recordation on the property deed for projects that exceed the threshold currently at 65%. So the proposed amendments would apply this requirement to greater than 50% projects. It would also expand the existing language by adding additional statements on the recorded documents. The statements include acknowledging the hazard, accepting the risk of building in potentially hazardous locations, waving liability against the county and indemnifying the county. The document would also alert property owners of potential future conditions that could impact future occupancy of the structure, including lack of functioning infrastructure, migration of mean high tide or other hazardous conditions. This is a key requirement in the county's effort to put current and future property owners on notice of potential scenarios and responses in the future in recognition of the potential impacts of sea level rise. So the next steps on this project after the Board of Supervisors approves it at some point is we submit it to the Coastal Commission and the Coastal Commission has a hearing on the project and may modify the proposed amendments. If that occurs, then it would come back to the Board of Supervisors for a hearing to consider any modifications. And so lastly, our recommendation is to conduct a public hearing today on the proposed amendments to the public safety element and the conservation and open space element of the general plan and local coastal plan, the proposed amendments to chapter 1610, 1620, 1622 and of the county code and the proposed addition of chapter 1613 to the code, adopt the attached resolution, adopting the CEQA negative declaration and updating and amending the general plan, local coastal plan safety element and conservation and open space element. And direct staff to submit the local coastal program amendments to the Coastal Commission for certification, adopt the attached ordinances amending the county code and local coastal implementation plan, including chapter 1610, 1613, 1620 and 1622 and direct staff to implement amendments outside of the coastal zone 30 days after adoption and within the coastal zone upon final certification by the Coastal Commission. That concludes the staff presentation and I have myself and the planning director, Kathy Malloy here to answer any questions. Questions from comments? I'll go with you first. Okay, well, how many people would like to speak on this? Okay. If you could just so that we get out in time, if you could hold, you do have three minutes in the beginning, but if you could do it in less, please do it so everybody can speak. Does that sound reasonable? Okay, go ahead. Hello, I'm Ali Chair of Sir Frider Foundation, Santa Cruz chapter. I'm here to touch on some additional problems that we've identified with the currently proposed update. I recommend you read the letter that we sent yesterday for more details, but just a few points now. The shoreline management plan between pleasure point in the harbor should be restricted to a timeline instead of being left open-ended. We prefer the implementation of recurved sea walls over revetments, which take up massive portions of the already shrinking beaches. Additionally, the shoreline management plan should include evaluation of managed retreat and relocation of structures and identification of funding mechanisms in order to facilitate these processes. We support the repetitive loss one-time rebuild allowance inserted elsewhere in the update and encourage it be implemented into the shoreline management plan as well. Please don't be bullied into removing these terms. As our shoreline weather and wave patterns change, it would be foolish and irresponsible to allow repetitive rebuilding in these high-risk areas. The update must also require that soft armoring and living shoreline adaptation solutions be evaluated. These are the long-term solutions that you are responsible for considering now before we enter emergency mode. Finally, I must again stress the importance of defining existing development and redevelopment as described in accordance with the Coastal Commission's definition, built before January 1st, 1977. We talk a lot about sea level rise in terms of homes and private property and public infrastructure because that's an important part of the policy work. But the beaches are a part that everyone in Santa Cruz values. We are already seeing spots where there is no beach at high tide. If this high tide becomes the norm, there will be nowhere to go. The beach is the part that belongs to everybody. Think of the tens of thousands of county members without private coastal property. The long-term decisions being made about our changing coastline should be something that every member of the community is made aware of and feels empowered to weigh in on. I must ask, if primarily homeowners associations and individual property owners are consulted, is it any surprise that the drafted LCP changes may skew towards their needs and perhaps the safety of their money and property? Thank you for your time to get today. We will be following the issue to the Coastal Commission with the full support of Sir Fryder Foundation headquarters. Good afternoon. My name is Steve Ray. I'm president of the Coastal Property Owners Association of Santa Cruz County with approximately 600 members, including 12 HOAs, representing over 1,000 parcels along the coast of Santa Cruz County. I'm here to speak to Consent Item 14. We have negotiated with the county and county staff and provided thoughtful input and reasonable input on changes which we feel are needed in order to clarify these documents. We've hired a use, a land use attorney, Derek Oliver, who will speak in a few moments and to advise us and assist us on how these LCP is potentially affecting the property rights of homeowners. Given the one-time limitation on major redevelopment and its significant impact on coastal property owners and its lack of clarity and inconsistencies between chapter 6.4 and 16.10, we're opposed to the Board of Supervisors moving forward with the document at this time without modification. Instead, we urge the Board of Supervisors to direct county planning staff to make, to take more time in refining these documents and to make our requested changes as outlined in the letter, the CPOA letter on 3.7 and letter from Derek Oliver, dated 3.6. Specifically, the one-time major limitation to redevelopment greater than 50% of major structures needs to be modified in the land use section. These also need to be moved to the one-time exception area or potentially delete this entire reference. The county staff has failed to adequately justify the need for the inclusion of this one-time only limitation on major redevelopment and structures. What CPOA has been told during in-person meetings with staff are inconsistent with what appears in the LCP. Therefore, we cannot support the document as it's worded presently. Thank you. Good afternoon, supervisors. My name is Robin Bolster-Grant. I'm a local attorney and have worked in the planning department for over 16 years. I realize the enormous time and energy that has been expended on this project, however, as you have all heard and will continue to hear from many of your constituents, there are serious concerns regarding the implications to property owners up and down the coast. It is not at all clear that everyone so impacted has been given the opportunity to weigh in and make their concerns known. I'm here today, however, to speak about the basis for delineating the shoreline protection exception area and what I believe to be a somewhat arbitrary process in developing such an impactful distinction. I represent the owner of the property at 2866 South Palisades Avenue, which sits immediately adjacent and outside of the mapped boundary, meaning that his next door neighbor can significantly modify, repair, or even replace his house as many times as he or she wishes while my client and or future property owners have a single opportunity to make such modifications within the next 20 years. I submitted a letter to your board along with an analysis prepared by a licensed geologist demonstrating that my client's property was improperly excluded from the exception area, notwithstanding the fact that his property meets all of the stated criteria put forth by the planning department, matching the pattern of urban development, protecting county infrastructure, development prior to the Coastal Act, similar geology and erodibility, seawall protection, and location within the SoCal Point area. Again, as noted in the letter prepared by the licensed geologist. It is noteworthy that the published county criteria do not appear to be supported by any substantial scientific analysis of the geology of that area or mapped flood hazards. Indeed, the county geologist's name does not appear or does not seem to appear anywhere in the county supporting documents. At last week's live vote community meeting, Kathy Malloy accepted the fact that the analysis may have been off by a parcel and invited my client to make his case to your board. Here we are. My client's property at 2866 South Palisades Avenue has been improperly left out of the exception area, although it does meet all of the stated criteria in the county's documentation. The county has already revised the exception area mapping once. I hope you will review our letter and supporting analysis and act to correct this mapping error. It is my further hope that you will allow for additional time before the amendment and zoning changes are approved. The stakes are simply too great to move forward, considering the nature of questions and concerns that have not been adequately addressed. Thank you. Hi, I'm Keith Adams with the Coastal Property and Partners Association. I wanted to clarify that there's many inconsistencies between the language included in the public safety element relating to coastal bluffs and beaches, land use plan section 6.4, and the implementation of the plan relating to geological hazards, chapter 16.1, which must be corrected and clarified. For example, in 1610.40 N2, it states allow a one time only modification, reconstruction or replacement of greater than 50% of the major structural components of an existing habitable structure within any consecutive five year period. In 6.4 safety element, it states allow only one major redevelopment replacement activity of greater than 50% of structural components due to damage from coastal erosion, without reference to within any consecutive five year period. These inconsistencies between the safety elements 6.4 and safety hazard code amendments, chapter 16.10, must be corrected. So there's no room for misinterpretation. Thank you. Mr. Chairman, board members, my name's Jeff Romundo. I'm president of the Pajaro Dunes North Association. We think we're almost there. We appreciate that the planning staff has been willing to work with us for over more than a year now to accommodate our concerns, while still taking needed steps to address sea level rise. We believe this local coastal plan and safety element is very close to something we could support. However, one issue remains that still causes us concern, and that is the proposed one and forever rebuild provision that we believe goes too far and is unjustifiably restricted in light of remaining uncertainty over sea level rise impacts and dynamics. We believe that there just isn't current justification for such a draconian limitation. We would prefer that the LCP allow for review of current conditions at some future point before imposing a permanent one and done limitation on reconstruction. Now, while most of Pajaro Dunes would be bound by FEMA floodplain restrictions under the LCP, a number of homes in the south portion are outside the flood zone and floodplain and would be bound by the county's ordinance. So it remains an issue for us. We therefore request that the Board of Supervisors continue this item and direct staff to work with coastal homeowners on reaching an accommodation along the lines recommended by the Coastal Property Owners Association that recognizes the realities of sea level rise while protecting private property rights. We believe it can be done and we look forward to supporting the county's final version. Thank you. Good afternoon. My name is Brett Sissney. I own a house on the coast, 4660 Opal Cliff Drive. In 2018, my project was approved by the county and then appealed by the coastal staff. The appeal was based on differing interpretation of the LCP. In 19 places in the amended LCP IP, the LCP addresses existing conditions first proposed shoreline armoring. The coastal staff interprets where the LCP says shoreline armoring to refer to all shoreline armoring. The county's intent is for the provisions only to be applicable to new or proposed shoreline armoring. The county has inserted new at three of the 19 locations. I request the board instruct the county to include new in the other 16 locations so that there's no misinterpretation by the coastal staff. I have a list of those locations if the board would like. Honorable Chair, supervisors, I'm Mark Massara. I'm an advocate and I work with property owners and your county staff on planning issues in the coastal zone. I support the LCP and the effort that your staff has gone to and urged that you vote to approve this. There's three big points that should inspire your support. First is just routine maintenance of existing seawalls. The second is you've heard about remodels and the third is the redevelopment of coastal properties. And I'll emphasize that since it's come up several times just in the last few minutes. Right now, the reality is you can't redevelop coastfront property in Santa Cruz County without waiving all future rights to your armoring or any future armoring. And that just underscores the delta between what the existing LCP appears to allow for and what coastal staff and the commission will ultimately approve. And this effort by your staff is to try to provide a level of certainty and assurances to property owners knowing what coastal staff is going to ultimately approve. And while it's true that the existing LCP provides for this appearance that you can do up to 65% of a remodel. The reality is very much different. Today, right now, coastal staff adds up all the remodel work ever done on a house. And if it exceeds 50% from 1977, they won't allow you to move forward because they're gonna call it a redevelopment. Your LCP will clarify that and provide certainty for all of the property owners going forward, but it does a lot more than that. It invites public access improvements. And that's the whole point of this thing. I represent, and I'm very sympathetic to the aspirations of property owners, but the reality is that the Coastal Act prioritizes maximizing public beach access, not residential real estate development. This LCP gets the county a long ways down the road to improving the current dynamic. Thank you. If we can have like the next two speakers up in line, we'll save some time. Co-Britain, that's a Britain Eye Critics, also president of the Pacific Coast Protection Association. The fact is is the Coastal Act states specifically that you can install a seawall to protect your property. Also, the state of California's legislation specifically requires you to protect your property, both for the safety of the homeowner, but also the people surrounding them. What's clear is that this is a huge overstep by the Coastal Commission staff and the Coastal Commission. They are essentially asking you to violate building standards, federal law, and the Coastal Act itself. What this should have started in the conversation from the very beginning was these people have the right to put in a seawall to protect their home. It shouldn't be the County of Santa Cruz being to make the determination that the Planning Department has the right to take people's property away or not protect it. Never should have occurred that the Coastal Commission found various jurisdictions that would do that is frightening. What's clear is gonna happen is that litigation is gonna occur. There's no two ways about it. So the question is here, is this board gonna violate various legislation, federal law, basic concepts? Doesn't mean that sea rise is not occurring. It is, but who addresses it? Is it FEMA? Shouldn't be the County. And one of the things I find very disturbing and occurs even now is that the County Council is being put into the position of defending the County at the public cost for things that are against public interest. Much of your code is not followed. Permit Streamlining Act is not followed. But instead of the County Legal Council being told by you all, follow the law. Follow these requirements because that's the public interest. Instead, I know they're put in the position of we're gonna be forced to defend at the public cost something that is against the public interest. So I would actually send this back with the discussion about with County Council, how can we follow state legislation now? And also tell the Coastal Commission they're violating, their policy violates the public interest. Their life safety, their economic benefit, just fundamental concepts. The federal government came in here with some policy that you all disagreed with. You'd push back on them because it'd be their policy and not necessarily legal. Well, it used to be pushing back in Coastal Commission not negotiating with this going, these people have a right to protect their home. They should protect their home. Thank you. Mr. Chair and members of the board, my name is Thomas Jameson. I'm a lawyer and I am representing William and Susan Porter. And I want to, first of all, I submitted a letter. I don't know if you got it. I didn't find it online. So I'd like to resubmit it. There are copies for all of you in case you did not get it or weren't able to read it. But in any event, what I'd like to do is present a different perspective than what was stated earlier. And that is that there is another alternative to this ordinance and what you're considering. And that is to do nothing. And what I'd like to do more than anything, I think, is just to issue you a warning about the terms of these amendments. And let's be, first of all, let's be clear about this. Really the county is doing the Coastal Commission staff's bidding and the Coastal Commission's bidding. The Coastal Commission has taken a position that many consider unreasonable. I personally consider it to be unconstitutional in three ways. And that doesn't matter. I'm not, the Coastal Commission staff and the commission is very aggressive in what they do and they've done many good things for the coast, but they are aggressive. So what I would like to say, I think that fundamentally in our constitution, there is the constitutional right to protect one's property. Now, if it's threatened by erosion, then there's a right to protect it with a sea wall. If it's a residence, let's look at it that way. And it can't be denied. Now it can be regulated, but not denied. The third, so that's one. That's a basic constitutional right, I believe. Another right is that anything that is exacted from a property owner has to have a reasonable relationship to the harm that's being considered. The beach mitigation fees and the so-called public recreation fee, which really when you look at it are the same fee, have reached, can reach egregious proportions. Your $500,000 sea wall may cost you a million dollars in mitigation fees and it's like you're buying your own property back for an inflated price. So I would like to suggest that the highest court in this state and no federal court that I'm aware of has decided the issue of the constitutionality of what the Coastal Commission is doing. And they don't always do things right. I know because I've won at least one case against the Coastal Commission. So what I would like to suggest is, let the Coastal Commission handle all of these appeals. I think there will be a number of challenges on constitutional grounds and that's gonna save you guys a lot of trouble when and if they're found out to be wrong. Thank you. Mr. Chair, supervisors, my name is John Erskine. I'm a partner in the statewide law firm of Nassaman LLP. I chair our Coastal Law Group. I formally served on the South Coast Regional Coastal Commission, albeit way back in my youth when they had regional commissions. And I served on the city council in Huntington Beach. For the last 30 years, I've been a boring land use lawyer and coastal lawyer. I represent the Rio del Mar Homeowner Association. Our firm represents several other associations. I personally represent the Solana Beach and Tennis Club, the Sunset Beach Beachfront community and a number of other property owners up and down the coast from Eureka down to the city of Coronado. We also represent the city of Coronado on Coastal Matters. I wanted to come up here today. I had to be here tomorrow anyway, even though I had to get up about five o'clock this morning in Huntington Beach to make the drive up here to give you some context. I think what everybody is telling you is this whole issue of sea level rise policy guidance and sea level rise LCP amendments is in a great deal of flux. I walked in a little bit late because as I was coming up your steps, I got a call from one of my San Diego coastal clients who just met with Senator Atkins staff. You probably are aware that SB 1100 has been introduced by Tony and that's gonna change the whole landscape of this whole process. So I would echo what others have said. I think there's no upside for you as a county to be the canary in the coal mine, if you will. Thank you. Good afternoon, I'm Charlie Edie. I'm a land use consultant and I represent Paaro Dunes, home owners association. I just like to say a couple of things. One is that we've had a really difficult time trying to understand all the nuances of this particular set of proposals. It's kind of like reading the Old Testament or something. Every time you open it up, there's something coming at you from another direction and it's very complex. And I think what you've heard and what you've seen, for example, in the letter from the Fenton and Keller attorney is that there's just a lot of things that aren't fully matriculated yet to a level that they need to be. And so we really strongly urge you to continue to work on this, but also to give your staff the direction to really incorporate some of these changes. I feel like they've done what they can do, but they've been trying to walk a tight line between what the coastal staff wants and what people like my clients want. And I think if you give clear direction to your staff, they can feel like you've got their back and they can go a little farther than they've been willing to go so far. The one and done is something that just continues to evolve. And I'd also like to just speak from the perspective of somebody who's written ordinances, zoning ordinances, and has spent a lot of time trying to figure out what they mean and implement them. Not the ones I wrote, but others, of course. And when you don't have something right, it's an absolute nightmare. And we see this all the time with various regulations. If you don't really have them crystal clear, the staff is never quite certain. The applicant doesn't know what's going on. Nobody can really change anything because you have to go back to do another general plan or ordinance amendment. So you gotta get these things right. And there's no rush here. And I think that there's a lot of good minds that are working on this. And I think you could take advantage of that to try to get something that really is a lot clearer and easier to understand and to implement. Thank you. Good afternoon. My name is Derek Oliver. I'm a land use attorney at Fenton and Keller. And I'm here today on behalf of the CEPA Santa Cruz. There's been reference to the two letters that I've submitted. And I wanna focus my attention as many others have today on the one time only rule. The Coastal Act certainly doesn't require that. And while I appreciate the comment about coastal staff appealing projects and what they will or will not appeal today, let's be very clear that the legal standard of review in an area where you've got a certified LCP is that certified LCP. So to the extent that coastal staff can point somewhere else and say that that is precedent and therefore you've got to do it here, taint so unless you make it so here. So just because the Coastal Commission may appeal a project doesn't mean they're going to prevail on that in litigation when the standard of review is the LCP itself. Again, that one time limitation doesn't make sense in the context of if a homeowner on a bluff can meet all of the LCP requirements and conditions such as the proper setback and sand mitigation fees and all those things that would apply, why is there any need for a one time rule? And Ms. Malloy and I and CPOA members discussed this and it was confirmed that yes, so long as a property owner can comply with all those requirements, they can tear down and build a brand new house as many times as they want under the County LCP. So there is actually no need for a one time only rule. So when pressed further, we talked about what she said she intended it to mean and the explanation was, well, this applies only in repetitive hazards areas where a property owner needs to recognize that after we've built and replaced and torn down a house that's fallen into the ocean or sustained significant damage due to other coastal bluff or geologic hazard related issues that they shouldn't be able to rebuild. That makes perfect good sense. There is a code section proposed for that in the updated LCP. Next, the explanation was that this one time only was to provide an exception where a property didn't have a sufficient area to meet the necessary setback. That again makes sense. So I left that meeting scratching my head as to whether the language truly intended, truly reflected what the intent was or not. And now as I sit here today, I see that the language does truly reflect what was intended, which is not at all the message that was conveyed to us. And so I think this needs significant cleaning up. Otherwise you're going to put a development ban where it ought not be and apply a one size fits all to a County that in the LCP itself recognizes, I think very importantly, that this is not a one size only County. So I would urge the board to recommend that County staff keep at it and to not approve this as is today. Thank you. Good afternoon supervisors. My name is Sam Blakesley. I recently wrapped up a year long fellowship in Sacramento working on statewide sea level rise legislation and planning with the state lands commission. And I felt compelled to comment today. I'll start by saying that if there's one thing I've learned in the past year, it is not that the hardest part of sea level rise planning is whether or not it is happening or how much and by when, but it is how to deal with the ambulatory nature of the public trust boundary and the high water line, which marks the boundary between public and private property in California and with which there is very little precedent to rely on. That said, I want to commend the County and the city for taking up these questions today and their proactive efforts to address sea level rise. But I do think the LCP as it currently stands is inadequate. My first point is there is not enough money to go around when it comes to holding back the ocean, especially if we respond in a proactive or a reactive way and while I appreciate the inclusion of mitigation, the County must make it clear that mitigation may be used only in cases where it is pre-coastal structures and those fees must directly benefit public access to the coast. Furthermore, I think we need to explore other creative mechanisms to fund adaptation and resiliency measures. I was recently shocked to read that of the 1,100 coastal properties, Blufftop and coastal properties in unincorporated Santa Cruz County, 90% or 990 of them are unoccupied for at least part of the year. I won't get into the fact that we're passing policies that favor the interests of people that may not even live here because I understand the implications to the tax base, but I am asking you to further consider creative funding mechanisms such as a vacancy tax for vacant oceanfront properties that could go and do a special fund. Not only could this help offset impacts to access and public trust resources that are being degraded by coastal armoring and sea level rise, but it could also supplement the sales tax that the county is not receiving due to the fact that those people may not even live here or spend their money here. My last point is that within the next few months, the State and Ocean Protection Council are going to roll out new statewide sea level rise planning principles in an attempt to foster consistent responses across the board. These principles essentially take the 2,100 projections for sea level rise and make it the new resilience seagull for 2050. This is because the sea level rise projections continue to get more extreme every year. The science surrounding the extent and severity of the impacts continue to evolve. And also because the state has a vested interest in upholding its obligations to the public trust doctrine and the Coastal Act and the values that support coastal access for all. And I suspect, as we've heard today, that specific legal and policy precedent for how to respond to sea level rise is not too far off in California and this response will likely favor and prioritize adaptive and sustainable approaches that do not involve any further armoring of the coast. In closing, I want to say that I understand the sensitivities around such important and long-term scenario-based planning and I hope that Santa Cruz County can get ahead of this issue and be on the right side of sea level rise like it's been on the right side of so many issues in the past. Thank you. Okay, we'll go down to the community room. Go ahead, sir. Is there anybody else after him? Hello, thank you for hearing. My name is Paul Coglin. I'm not a lawyer. I don't represent any homeowners association, but I'm a property owner here. I think what I've heard today here is that there's a lot of uncertainty about where this proposal will take us. I think that uncertainty carries with it a risk of a lot of litigation fees that our community, the five supervisors here will be involved in paying for. We have schools that need money. We have social obligations to homeless people that need money. We have a lot of reasons to spend the money we have rather than be chasing litigation that's probably better suited on a statewide level. So we've had someone from Sacramento talk here today. We've had many people that make me believe this is a grander problem than our small community here. It does impact our small community here, but whether we should be the lead person taking on the legal fees and the issues around this, I don't think's correct. I would advise you or recommend to you, the supervisors, that you have a choice. You can vote for it against it, or you can say that it really isn't within our venue to be incurring a legal cost that would be involved to pursue this to its end degree. Thank you for listening to me. Have a nice day. We'll go down to the community room. See if anybody's there. Mr. Chair, I'm told there's nobody in the community room. Okay. So no one to speak. We'll bring it back here. Back to staff for discussion. We'll start with, okay, sure. Thank you, Chair. Thank you to everyone who gave testimony. This has obviously been a subject in which there's been a lot of discussion at our board, at the planning commission, at public meetings. I know at my constituent meetings through my newsletter, a whole bunch of different ways that we've talked about this. And the, I appreciate the work that staff has done to try to wrestle a difficult issue because I think there's likely unanimity on this board that we believe in the impact of climate change. We recognize that the sea levels are rising. We're trying to craft a policy that reflects the unique nature of the geology of our community. And I know that when the coastal commission first came out with their sea level rise guidance, there was a lot of concern about what it means and what it would mean for communities. And I know I participated last July in a workshop with coastal commissioners to help them understand that one size did not fit all for the coastline of California. And we know even here in Santa Cruz County, the coastline looks different depending on what part of the county you're in. And we're the smallest land mass county in the state. So the pitch that I made then was that we need to look at the geologic conditions and be able to make a policy guidance that reflected that the different geology and the different issues. And I believe that that staff has done a good job in creating a nuanced policy document that reflects that different parts of our coastline require different kinds of treatment. And so I wanna thank you for all the work that you've put in. I know the two of you have put a lot of hours into this. And I'm appreciative of the conversations that have been taking place. I think that this nuanced land use reflects that the balance that I talked about with the coastal commission because we're trying to acknowledge. So for instance, on the sand mitigation fees, we, you know, this was a big issue when we first started talking about it. But when we look at the geology of our coast, sand is different depending on what part of the county you're in, in the district that I represent on the east side of Santa Cruz, the Live Oak Pleasure Point area. You don't get a lot of sand from the coastal erosion because of the nature of the geology. In the southern part of the county, that's all they've got is sand. And so we shouldn't have a one size fits all. We're also dealing with the impact of voter limitations that such as Measure J, which said we're gonna concentrate development within our urban services line. And we're going to not allow development or we're not gonna provide services to limit development outside that urban services line. And as a result of that, the urban core, which is a good part of our shoreline that is in the unincorporated area, there's development. And on the ends, which are outside that urban services line, there is not much development. And this policy reflects that because it says that outside these urban services line, we're gonna allow a natural process to occur. We're not gonna include armoring. We're gonna have that managed retreat that makes sense in those area. And it's along with what the voters defined as the limits in our community. I'm appreciative of the creation of the shoreline protection exception area because I think it does reflect both the historical use of armoring and the nature of the coast. In the case that we brought up about Opal Cliffs, there is never gonna be erosion where we're gonna get more beach there. What we're the sea, this as a sea level rise, it's gonna go up that large cliff and it won't result in more beach, but we can do things that support the idea of increased coastal access, which I also think this policy does a good job of because whatever we do, we can't restrict coastal access. We should actually be doing things to promote coastal access and support coastal dependent resources. And so the shoreline management area that we talked about in the other part of my district, which it says we need to do a little bit more study to sort of figure out what's gonna happen there and what kind of work could be done and what are the issues around the natural formations there, I think are important. I agree that we shouldn't have it to be open-ended. We should get to work on working on this shoreline management plan as quickly as possible. And the county has committed to seeking out the grant funds and we have already talked with the Coastal Commission and others to figure out where we can get the money to be able to do this shoreline management plan. So this isn't something that's just gonna lay out there not to be done. This is something that we're all interested in taking care of. You know, the biggest area of concern beyond those who think that we shouldn't have a policy at all. I respect that. I disagree, but I respect it is what happens on the euphemism of one and done. Because I think that becomes important. I do believe in the repetitive loss language that we have in here. Those properties which are degraded or eroded or destroyed because of coastal processes and waves, you have to acknowledge that the world is changing and that those properties you can't endlessly rebuild on. But our general efforts of this board has been to allow people to remodel and maintain their properties. When we did, when we changed our policy around legal non-conforming structures, we changed our policy in part because we found that people were not maintaining their properties because of the difficulty of getting it done. So we changed our policy because we think that's a community benefit to maintain those properties. When we recently did our permanent room housing policy, changes in our policy, part of that was to take these dilapidated properties that had fallen out of their originally intended use into another use and create a zoning designation so they too could be upgraded and maintained instead of left to deteriorate further. So when I think about our coastal sea level rise policy, I think we should allow people to maintain their properties as long as the sea level rise does not contribute to the degradation of their properties. So coastal processes or coastal erosion or waves that knock out houses, that's a different category than someone who wants to change their windows, add a story, add a room or something else. So I think this one and done policy is should, is really about those that are directly affected by the coastal processes, not just something that, because they happen to be on the coast, we're not gonna allow them to maintain their properties because I've heard a lot of testimony from homeowners who say, we might do something to our house, but in the future, someone else is gonna wanna do something to the house and we've basically limited them. So I think that we can find that balance about allowing people to maintain their private property but also protect the public access because I think there's language in here that is good and there's some support out there that when we allow things like armoring to take place that to create some kind of public access is a way to actually deal with the changing nature of the seas and the changing sea level rise because you can create different kinds of platforms for people to still be able to experience the ocean in a way that they wouldn't as the sea level rides and wipes out the beach. And we have some good examples where we've already seen that right down a pleasure point where we've created sea walls that have additional structures to allow people to enjoy the coastline in new and different ways. And so I'd like to make a motion and maybe I'll give out a copy of this if you could hand one to Susan that I'd like to add an additional goal to our public safety element that the county seek to ensure that public access to the coastline and coastal dependent resources is preserved when the loss of access and resources is due to inaction on the part of private property owners. Second, I'd like to modify the second paragraph in the public safety element section 6.4.1 to acknowledge that we may have more information in the year 2040 that would cause the county to change its land use goals and development criteria or allow for further refinement. Three, amend the public safety element section to eliminate any confusions in subsections A and C concerning when shoreline armoring will or will not be considered in allowing new construction or placement of a habitable structure outside shoreline protection exception areas. For amend the third paragraph of the public safety element section 6.4.1 to provide more flexibility in allowing property owners to rebuild or remodel non-coastal protection structures. For example, habitable structures if those structures have not been the subject to damage related to coastal processes such as wave action, sea level rise, inundation or erosion, unless it's subject to an approved shoreline management plan and make similar revisions to the county code 16.10.070 H1L. Five, amend the language on the public safety element sections 6.4.14, 6.4.19, 6.4.22, 6.4.24, and 6.4.25 to reflect changes outlined above or other sections as appropriate. And six, amend the language of the county code 16.10.070 H1 subsections B and C to eliminate confusion as to when and how established shoreline or coastal bluff armoring will be considered in determining minimum geologic setback. I think these are important changes that could really make a difference. I guess I would make one more addition to this is that the county staff consider the question of the exact location of Soquel Point based on the information that was provided here. First to second, and we've had public discussion and we can bring it up for a vote. All those in favor? Let me clarify now, so you might understand like the number four, to provide more flexibility that would mean that the one and done is not part. Okay. It would only happen when the property was affected by the coastal processes like wave action, sea level rise, inundation, erosion. That if someone has a property that is not affected by that they can remodel then based on these structural elements that we that are in the code. That's an important element to me. And I agree that's a, you know, it's just as one size doesn't fit all. I don't like, you know, the one and done for that. So I appreciate that. And I just want to make a statement that this has been a really difficult thing for our planning staff to go through two. And I think they have really made a great outreach effort to try to get agreement as closely as possible as we might expect to make this happen. So I think they're there to be commended for that. I was ready to continue this, but I to go for continue this, but I think this reaches the issues that are concerned to me. I do think what we do here in Santa Cruz County, the coastal commission is going to say this is how they did, if they accept it and they haven't accepted two of these previously, I guess it'll be what we do in the state. So I would, I see this as same what we think we need as you have proposed. And so I'm pleased with that and not I would rather have us set the policy rather than have the coastal commission do it. So I'll be supporting this motion. Yeah. And it would be helpful to have this come back as soon as possible so we can move on to other pieces of the county planning business, preferably by June. The question I have is it completely undoing everything you've done? If you don't mind, can I take this opportunity to clarify something because what was said in a public informational meeting did add to some confusion in terms of the one and done policy. So just going forward since we've got everyone in the room to so that they'll know what we meant, I'd like to provide that clarification. So we know that it's very complicated. There is a lot of nuance. That's why we put the guiding principles in there to sort of explain the approach because every single situation is a little different. We've had a lot of projects on the bluff since the recession and every single one of us different. So we're trying to provide a framework that works. The one and done is obviously it's outside of the shoreline protection exception area. So it's structures that are on lagoons, beaches and in what we're calling the shoreline protection management plan area. The whole idea is to try to come to a common understanding of what the word existing means and what the word new means. Because under the coastal commission, as we've stated, since they'll tally it up since 1997 and if you change over 50% of one component, they're gonna call you new. And you can't rely on shoreline armoring to protect new structures. So our policy is significantly different than that. We would wanna start the clock upon certification of this element and everybody gets a new structure. So it's greater than 50% of major structural components or complete redevelopment or replacement that counts toward that one time. You can do as many as you want, less than 50% of work on the major structural components. So lots of repair, lots of maintenance, lots of remodeling could happen. But if you ever went over that, then you would be a new structure. So for that new structure in the future, you could not rely on shoreline armoring. So that is what we, when we crafted that, we thought it was significantly different and more accommodating of new homes along on coastal bluffes than what the coastal commission is currently doing and what they seem to want to do. And so we crafted something that we thought was context related and nuance and different areas of our coastline and that's what we came up with. So clearly we haven't met the mark. I think it's gonna take quite a bit of time to come up with something that maybe we think the coastal staff and coastal commission might accept, but we'll certainly try to, I haven't seen what your motion is, but we'll look at it and we'll go to work. Okay. Vice, I'm ready to vote on, you're already, all those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposition? We have none, passes 4-0. Supervisor Coonerty went home sick. We were happy with that. Not about him being sick, but we had a COVID announcement this morning and so we were glad that someone who wasn't, well, was not here. Okay, now we go to item 15, which is considered mid-year financial update for fiscal year 2019-2020, as outlined in the memorandum of the autumn. Pardon me, I'm sorry to interrupt. Treasure tax collector. I just passed. Could you, I didn't hear the motion. Are you going to do more study on this or did you just pass it and it's gonna go on to the Coastal Commission, because it's gonna have to be revived. That's correct. The direction was to come back in three months with these revisions. Okay, thank you for clarifying that. Excuse me, I have another question based on what I just asked. Will there be another public hearing after in the three months? Did I hear a yes? Up in the revisions. Are you gonna have another public hearing? The process, it will have to come back to us. They may determine that needs to go back to the Planning Commission as well. Okay. And so it'll be a publicly noticed meeting. Okay, and you'll send it out to all the property owners and everybody else. I can't guarantee that we will send it out to the property, what kind of outreach we will do, but it will be a publicly noticed meeting. Okay, thank you. We're supportive team, we're team finance. Okay, item 15, we're ready. We're ready to go? Great. Good afternoon, Chair Caput and members of the board. Edith Driscoll, Auditor-Controller, Treasurer Tax Collector. The agenda item is the Midyear Financial Report for the County of Santa Cruz. I'm presenting this item in compliance with the county budget principles, which outlined that the county should regularly monitor budget conformity. The report provides information on the status of the budget at the mid-year of the fiscal year. It's a brief, high-level review, and I'll have time for questions at the end. This report, combined with the CAO's presentation later in the agenda, will provide a comprehensive mid-year fiscal update. Brief overview of my agenda, we'll look at general fund revenues, general fund expenditures, general fund reserves, and talk about where our fiscal reports are. So first, let's talk about our complete adopted budget. As reflected in the adopted budget book, page one, this mid-year report focuses on the status of the general fund. During your board's budget hearings in June 2019, you adopted a spending document that encompasses many fun types besides the general fund. To re-familiarize yourself with the various elements of this entire budget, I am highlighting them here. We've already spoken about the general fund, and then for special revenue funds, that includes housing, roads, fishing game, parks. Then we have library and county fire. They are the less than county-wide funds. We have board-governed special districts and other agencies that include flood control, mosquito abatement, and park CSA 11. Your internal service funds include fleet service center, information services department, duplicating and risk are all considered internal service funds. And then enterprise funds, which includes CSA 7, Buena Vista post-closure expenses, as well as those at the Davenport and Freedom Sanitation. All right, switching focus to just the general fund, I wanna highlight the sources of the revenue for the general fund. As you can see on this slide, the county's largest general fund revenue source is Intergovernmental Aid. Makes up 47% of the revenue, or $269 million. We have received to date 44% of this revenue type. Intergovernmental revenue traditionally is received later in the year, as it's primarily paid on a reimbursement basis from the federal and state government. This revenue type is monitored by my office as the level receipt of these funds help keeps the county maintaining a strong cash flow. If everyone awaits and does the reimbursements at the end of the year, it's a struggle for me. Intergovernmental Aid, since I just spoke about that being our largest fund source, occasionally I'm asked who makes up that fund who gets most of that money. Intergovernmental Aid, as I mentioned before, is our largest general fund source. For your reference, human services and health services combined receive 65% of this aid followed by public works at 16%. General fund total tax revenues. Taxes in total are the county's second largest revenue source. As you can see, the actual receipts of the different tax types are slightly higher than this time last year, which is positive for county cash flows. However, the amount that the property tax increases each year is limited by Prop 13, which was passed by the county voters over 40 years ago. However, as you know, Prop 13 limits the tax growth on many properties. Once a base year is established for a property, the growth is limited to no more than a 2% increase each year. This property tax growth is kept low until there is a change of ownership. When the property is sold, the sale price becomes the new property tax base that the county can receive taxes based upon. The base may be higher or lower depending on the real estate market at that time. What does not change is the percentage of property taxes that the county gets to keep. I'm asked this question periodically, how can it be that the county only gets 13 cents on the dollar for every property tax dollar it receives? This fixed percentage has been in place for 40 years as a result of Prop 13 passing. By comparison, our neighboring counties of Monterey keep 15%, Contra Costa 13%, El Dorado 23.5% and San Luis Obispo 29%. I take advantage of San Luis Obispo a lot because we're both combined offices and they get a lot more money than I do. All right, tax delinquency rate. Since taxes are a significant revenue source, a review of the property tax delinquency rate is important to estimate when the taxes will be received. Currently, the county's delinquent rate is 2.2%, up slightly from last year, 2.1%. A property becomes delinquent when taxes are not paid for a year. You can see on the chart that during the recession, when many properties were in foreclosure, we reached a high of 5.6% delinquency. 5.6% of the properties were not paying their property taxes. Unpaid taxes affect cash flow as those general fund dollars are not received when budgeted. In addition, Santa Cruz County is on the teeter plan for apportionment of property taxes. If a property is in default, the county fully apportions the money due to the special districts in the cities giving them a smooth cash flow. In exchange, the county gets to absorb the cash shortages and the penalties and interest later earned. If a property remains in default for five years, the county may auction off the properties. The tax sale auction for this year was completed this morning. As of about one o'clock this afternoon, 65 of the properties were sold, bringing in $617,000. Of that, only 287,000 pays off taxes and the remaining 331,000 is returned to the property owners. TOT rate, one indicator of our local tourism economy is the county's TOT collections. As you can see, our TOT revenue has increased each year. We have exceeded the prior year's collections to date by $82,000. Remember this chart, the amounts on this chart do not include city TOT. The county's current TOT tax rate is 11%. Now, I also get a lot of questions about TOT. So I tried to provide more detailed information this year for you, giving you a 10-year comparison where we were and where we are. The 10-year comparison provided here reflects that our number of providers has increased and so has our TOT revenue. In 10 years time, revenue has increased more than 255% and the number of TOT certificate holders has increased more than 400%. With the category of unmanaged properties showing the largest increase in both the number of properties and in the tax revenue. As the report outlines, unmanaged properties includes Airbnb customers and all property owners who make their payments directly to the county. As opposed to managed properties which include properties listed and managed by companies such as Bailey properties. Management companies pay the county directly on the owner's behalf. The county has a revenue collection agreement with Airbnb and receives a monthly check because Airbnb collects that TOT on behalf of the customers and provides it to us. They're unmanaged. We have to draw the line somewhere and we were trying to provide as much detail as we can and so we tried to differentiate the two. The county has one business tax, cannabis business tax. Cannabis business tax receipts for the last three and a half years are reflected here in this chart. The rates in effect during these years were 7% gross receipts tax. The cultivators and manufacturers also pay a gross receipts tax that was reduced from 7% to 5% commencing January 1, 2018. The county's interest rate has begun to decline from our high in late 2019. Not reflected in this chart is our February rate which was down to 1.95. The county investment pool is a short-term liquidity pool that functions as a buy and hold fund. As the report reflects, our pool high was 913 million with a low in the last 12 months of 726 million. My fiduciary responsibility when investing funds is to look first at the safety of the investment, then the liquidity of the investment and then third the yield. Investments are made to align with the county and the school's cash flow needs to meet cash outflows for bond payments, payroll wires, other large transfers. I would like to address the uneasiness we are seeing these last few days in the fiscal markets. We see concerns about potential economic slowdowns, oil prices and the effects of the coronavirus. Stock market investors are fleeing stocks for safety which often means buying US treasuries. Although we do not make stock market purchases, we do invest in treasuries. These investments are currently providing a very low rate of return because of their great demand. However, they do offer the safety and liquidity the county needs. We purchase and own US Treasury notes, two to five year notes, as well as US Treasury bills, 12 months. We will continue to market the markets closely and to keep the CAO informed as the county goes through this time of financial market changes. When monitoring budget conformity at the major report, you must also examine expenditures. A high level overview of the expenditures are provided here. Souries and benefits as the county's largest expense is at 56.5% spent, which is very similar to last year at 56.4% spent. Because of controls in place with the county's fiscal system, departments are not able to expend beyond their budgets without board approval. Reserves, your board adopted a fund balance reserve policy of 10% to be reached by 2021. This goal was achieved early and is expected to be maintained into fiscal year 2019-20. The major report includes a detailed chart of the various categories of reserve funds you have and the amount of each, totaling $56.7 million of reserve funds. Your board's commitment to maintaining a 10% reserve helps us maintain a strong fiscal position as we continue to weather these unexpected fiscal challenges. As a reminder, the county continues to emphasize transparency and making financial information and reports available online. So too has the auditor controller, treasure tax collector's offices and the CAO's offices. More than 10 years worth of annual county financial documents, budgets, proposed budgets, et cetera, are available on the main county website with links from my office's website. We also provide investment reports if someone wants to do research and look at previous years. Specifically on the auditor controller's website, we have a data tool to access current financial information on various tax receipts that are updated monthly and summarized in quarterly reports. In summary, general fund revenues are at 44.15% of budget, which is slightly more than this time last year at 39%. General fund expenditures are at 50% of the budget, which is similar to last year at 51%. Property tax delinquencies are low, interest rate earnings are decreasing slightly and the future of those rates are unknown for the next few months. The item recommended action is to consider this report. Please accept and file this report. Thank you and I'm available for any questions. I really appreciate the information about the TOT. It really shows that where our TOT is coming from and I know we're gonna be talking a lot about that this year, but to see that so much comes from those unmanaged properties is pretty significant and the 10-year changes is every one of our revenue funds should grow that much. Yes. Thank you for your work. On going. Thank you, Mr. Risco. It's a wonderful report and my only question would be in regards to the monitoring of the current, some of the economic changes that have been occurring just this week, the upcoming expectation with the Fed is gonna do as well. Would there be another check-in between now and June? Should there be a projection of a drop in some of our significant producers, TOT being one of them, which I think would be a reasonable expectation given what people are doing with travel? Certainly, I'd be happy to provide that. We've been checking in with the CAO about weekly, meeting weekly, and our investment officer daily as we are trying to figure out what the future might hold. I would be happy to bring back a report focusing on specific revenues, if you'd like. If you notice something that is definitely off of the projection in advance of when we're making our budgetary decisions in June, it would be nice. Certainly. Thank you. Yeah, I'd just repeat some of the concerns. The revenue on vacation rentals, 635,000 and 2,009, 4.2 million in a decade. If you wanna know where some of our housing stock is going in, our regular rental market, you don't have to go very far. There's some questions, but it ties into the next item. So I do appreciate your report, though. And I just wanna really thank the CAO and really the department heads. I know they've been put online and on warning. Hey, we've got some real possible belt tightening comes when we get to us in June. So I appreciate their, what else can they say, but I appreciate them recognizing the situation that we're in that we're gonna have a pretty tight budget session come June. I like math, but you have a lot of numbers here. And if you make one little mistake, it could be a huge thing. Who overlooks all of your figures to make sure you don't have a decimal point in the wrong place? Sure, so a couple of different areas. One, we do an annual financial report that's audited by an external firm. So we have a firm who comes in and audits our financial report. It's turned into the CAFR, the county's annual financial report. And again, those are available on our website going back at least 10, if not 15 years. In terms of budget, we work very closely with Christina Mary, the county's budget manager back and forth with numbers. We are of course are human, everybody's human, but we are so automated now. It's very difficult to have something not get caught. Right. I guess, well, Carlos remembers about 10 years ago, the city of Watsonville was overpaid for the library fund, a certain amount because of a decimal point being in the wrong place. And we had to pay it back. So I think it's been paid back by now. Well, one of the great things is your board approved a contract in the last year or two. We now have a software system that does all of our monitoring and calculating involve our bond payments. That's the most critical charge I have is to pay your debt. I have all the trust in the world and your judgment. Thank you. Okay, back to the public, have any comments? We do, and then is there anybody on the community room? No one in the community room, but one staff person. Okay, we do have a comment. No, no comments in the community room. Thank you, Becky Steinbrenner. It was too lonely in the community room. So I came back and I couldn't hear the timer. So thank you. Thank you for this report. It is a lot of numbers. And I, regarding the transient occupancy tax, TOT, in trying to better understand myself, the funding for the county, I see that for every $1 that is paid in those fees, the county gets to keep it, which is a big difference from what the state taxes are. So to encourage getting more of those, and I appreciate that this county has made the effort to make a contract with Airbnb, so we're assured of getting those funds. I have been here and heard owners of vacation rentals come and say that they used to be with Airbnb, but they changed to a different platform that does not have this agreement with the county. And that platform was not paying the fees. So what I would like to ask this board to do is to insist that any vacation rental like Airbnb doing business in the County of Santa Cruz come to the same agreement as Airbnb did with this county so that we are assured of getting that money. And those property owners are not caught in a bind when they change platforms thinking that it's all taken care of. And as I've heard here, it hasn't been and they get penalized. So I would like to ask that this county enter into agreements with all vacation rental property management, Airbnb type things, so that they are all automatically paying the TOT tax monies to the county. Thank you very much. Any other comments? I'll bring it back. Well, I don't, I would just say that people who get into a business operation should understand what their responsibilities are. And then that may be paid by a third party or you may need to pay it yourself, but you're in the business. You should understand what you're doing. Okay. Do we have a motion and a second? I'll move recommended actions. Okay. We'll vote on it. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposition? Passes four zero. And that takes us to number 16. Consider report on the general fund mid-year budget with update estimates for fiscal year 2019-2020. Updated requests for FY 2020-2021 and an updated five-year forecast schedule public hearing for March 24th, 2020 at 9 a.m. and to consider approval of lease financing by the County of Santa Cruz and the Santa Cruz County Capital Finance Authority in order to provide financing for certain critical public capital improvements and take related action as outlined in the memorandum of the County Administrative Officer. Thank you. Okay. So Carlos Palacios, County Administrative Officer. This is part two of our mid-year budget update and the report will be given by Christina Mauri, our budget manager. Just wanted to provide some introductory comments. This year, we knew going into, was going to be a moderately difficult year, meaning that we were going to have to do some belt tightening. And that is what we're finding that because of revenues starting to slowly decline, they're still increasing, but at a much slower rate. And we knew that and anticipated that. And yet some of our costs have been going up and particular costs around infrastructure. We've had a lot of culverts, storm drains, bridges that we're having to help fund buildings. So infrastructure costs, we knew that was an issue. We also have been incurring more costs for the homeless services that we've been doing. Although Measure G is covering part of that, we've also had to cover part of that through the general fund. And so we also knew that was coming. And then of course, some of our employee costs are going up as well, including health benefits and per's public employment retirement system as well. So those three factors, we knew going into this year, we're going to make it a somewhat difficult year and it has turned out that way, but we're able to manage it. We anticipated this and we're gonna do some belt tightening and we will be able to come through it without any major reductions in service. So I think I feel good about that. Our staff feels good about that. The one caveat to that is that what's going on with the COVID-19 virus and the economic turmoil that's happening right now in the world. It's unclear what's gonna happen, whether this is just a short-term blip or whether it'll be a longer-term problem with potential of a new recession. If it does turn into a recession, then of course we're gonna be facing more difficult decisions. So far, no one knows. We are anecdotally hearing that the tourism industry is seeing major declines right now throughout the, not just here, but throughout the whole country. And we're very dependent on the tourism industry. That's one of our two main industries here in Santa Cruz County and in the Bay Area. So it's something of concern, something we're gonna be monitoring very closely. But the budget report you're gonna hear is that with what we know now, we are managing, we're belt tightening, and we're gonna be able to get through this next coming year with major services intact and including some expansion of services as well. Go ahead. Thank you, Carlos. Good afternoon, Chair Caput, members of the board. I'm gonna give you a brief budget update. Christina Mallory, the county budget manager. Is it, should be on, maybe I just need to get closer. Okay, thank you. I'm gonna use the arrows, that's better. So we're gonna cover just a brief update on the state budget, our economic outlook. Carlos has already given you a little update to that, the general fund budget, which is where you have your most discretion. And then we're gonna look ahead. We've got an update to the five year forecast and then sort of how we're gonna prepare for the future. So in the state budget, just to give you some highlights, the state budget has a healthy surplus of about $19.6 billion. They have a healthy rainy day fund and a fund for economic uncertainties. They're also planning to continue to reduce liabilities and pay off debt, particularly they're paying off some of their unfunded retirement liability. And they are continuing to do investments in the emergency response and preparedness. They have economic opportunities for K through 12 and early childhood education. And of course, housing affordability, they're investing again to fund housing for the homeless crisis. Our economic outlook prior to the most recent events, our employment rate is down to 3.9%. Our job growth is up 1.1% with an average of 1.5% growth expected through 2023. Salaries are expected to rise by 1.8% per year. And our real gross domestic product is projected at 2% through 2021, slowing to one and a half percent by 2022 and 2023. So we gave you a preliminary forecast in December. Since then, we're happy to report at least up till recently. The revenues are on the rise, about a half a million dollars more. We're seeing growth in our cannabis business tax and our transient occupancy tax. We'll have to see in months to come, whether that holds. Our departments are seeing less costs overall by about a half a million dollars. So we're expecting better budget savings by about a million dollars. So we'll have about 5.7 million to carry forward to 2021 rather than 4.7 million. So here you see a breakdown of our primary growth in taxes. The auditor gave you the forecast as it related to our actuals mid-year. These are our estimates for the entire year based on our anticipated growth. And you can see the, you don't see much growth there in property taxes because there is a reclassification that occurred in taxes. For the redemption and penalties has been reclassified to fines and forfeitures. But we are seeing the majority of our growth in property taxes. And then we have, we are seeing a little bit of a decline in our sales tax for major G. The initial forecast was that we would receive about seven and a half million dollars. And we're estimated to receive only about 7 million. Sales tax is relatively flat. Not much new growth there. Transit and occupancy tax. We're seeing about a half a million dollars in growth. We'll have to see if that holds. And cannabis business tax, both the regular for the dispensaries and then the cultivators and manufacturers is where we're seeing the increased growth as we license cultivators and manufacturers. I'm Ms. Mallory. Can I ask a question now before we get off this chart? Sure, absolutely. Help me understand why we're the sales tax 1% is not seeing much change, but the measure G sales tax is off by a half a million dollars. So when we, when we did the forecast with HDL for the major G sales tax, we didn't have the experience of our own district tax. So it was based on other experiences throughout the county. So they did their best. They estimated about seven and a half million dollars. And we've now received a couple quarters of actual major G. And it's just coming in lower than originally anticipated. That's the only reason the forecast was originally off. All right. So we can rely on that going forward though, the seven million. And then the sales tax, we haven't the sales tax has been relatively, the 1% it's been relatively flat. We haven't seen a lot of growth. We've seen as some new businesses come on, there's been others that have dropped off. So we haven't seen a lot of growth there. Got it. Thank you. So, and then deed transfer tax earlier this year, we had a little bit of a bump in the deed transfer tax from refinancing as a result of the recent rate declines. We may see an additional bump in deed transfer. Maybe that'll help offset some of the loss we may see on the transient occupancy tax. So we'll see how that goes. But overall, we're only seeing about a 1% growth over our original budget estimates there, which isn't much. It's about a million six in years past. We've seen quite a bit more growth. So we mentioned in the preliminary forecast that we are looking, we have several critical capital projects. Things are starting to fail. We have several parts of our infrastructure and facilities that are that are getting old. We haven't made the necessary investments to keep them up. And so we're recommending at this time, it's a good time because rates are low and we have debt service that's declining. And so we are looking at financing some, what we call critical capital projects. We're looking at putting together some navigation centers for our homeless. We need matching funds to the state funds to do that. We have our public safety power shutdown. We realize that we need to upgrade some of our generators. We have some funding for that, but we don't have all the funding for that. Our juvenile hall projects, we have several large projects that are funded through some state grants. They've been delayed and the funding is getting quite old. So we're gonna, we'd like to include funding to match that original funding and this new financing. And they're gonna use that old funding to pay for some of the stuff we need to do right now. Which the auditor is really happy about because she has to file on those each year. And then we have various other county facilities that need upgrades. And our main jail has a control and surveillance system that's over 20 years old that's in desperate need of an upgrade and a replacement. Then there's a couple other public safety projects, the DNA lab and the sobering center that needs some matching funds. And then we have some infrastructures. Carlos spoke earlier about our culverts. We have had several of those fail this year and we're needing to have some additional funding there. And then of course a minor amount for our park project matching funds that are already in process now. So it's almost $20 million in financing. The good news is the rates are fairly low. And we've been working with our financial advisor and we're gonna be bringing, we'd like to bring an item back to your board on March 24th. So we're asking that you set a public hearing today in preparation for that. So here it gives you an update. So Carlos spoke earlier, we did anticipate that we had a budget shortfall on that year two of our original two-year budget was projected to be about $7.5 million dollars. We've of course had some additional information that our health services department received. And they're looking at an increase above and beyond of about a million and a half. And then we have some other cost increases. There's some adjustments at year end and some additional deferred maintenance this year from some culvert failings that we have that we need to address. And those cost increases overall are about $10.8 million dollars. So in order to balance the budget, the good news is that we do have better general revenues. We spoke earlier about property taxes. They're starting to decline, but they're still growing. So we have some growth there between the property taxes, the transient occupancy tax, hopefully that holds we'll have to see and the cannabis business tax. Those are the big winners. And those are estimated to bring an additional $4.4 million dollars. And then we needed to fund the balance from our department reductions. So we asked our departments, as we noted in December, for a 7.5% cut to their general fund contribution. We reviewed many of the proposals and we'll be bringing those forward to you in May. And they range anywhere from 2.5% to 12.5% to generate the $6.4 million dollars needed to balance the budget. We are anticipating, we did put a hiring review in place in December. And we are anticipating, even though the majority of programs and services are preserved and intact, we are anticipating a couple position eliminations. Wrong way. Sorry about that. And here you'll see the primary revenue growth anticipated for 2021. Overall, we're expected about $4.8 million in new revenue growth. You'll see there, it doesn't reflect nicely because taxes have been reclassified to fines and forfeitures. The majority of that growth you see in fines and forfeitures isn't real growth. It's really in property taxes. But you'll see the majority of that, the revenue growth is from the property tax growth. And you'll see a little bit in our governmental revenues. That's the public safety proposition 172 revenue growth. Can I ask that when this goes online, that you put a little asterisk, so people don't think that we're just gonna look to find people more and more? Yes, not a problem. We can do that. We will get accused. So looking ahead, the general fund is anticipating shortfalls through the next five years, through 24, 25. The five year forecast has been updated based on our most current estimates. We do update that the projection could be, the deficits could be anywhere from three to seven million with a possible shortfall of eight to 12 million if the revenues declined further. Our forecast relies on the budget, the county department saving approximately $5 million each year above and beyond the budget, which is historically what we've done and what we've been able to do this year. If we're unable to do that, then we'll have a greater forecast, a greater deficit. Of course, the driving, one of the driving costs is our rising retirement rates, which I'm gonna cover in a slide shortly. And we know that our recession is overdue. We've had the longest recovery period ever. And it's anticipated that it's, some of our economists are saying, as a result of the novel coronavirus that's possible, we may come into a recession sooner. We'll have to wait and see the next few months. And here you'll see a picture of the actual expected or anticipated general fund budget deficits. The black line there on the bottom is our best case, assuming we have budget savings each year that we can carry forward. The red line is our worst case. If we don't have that estimated savings to carry forward and or if revenues decline further. And here you'll see a picture of the CalPERS employer rates for the various groups, which is one of our primary cost drivers in the next five years. This is, these are of course the rates. We've spoken about this before, is facing all agencies invested in CalPERS. Retirement rates are anticipated to double by 24-25 since 13-14. So we're right in the middle of that timeframe right now. We've had and seen some of our highest growth in those rates, but we still have a couple more years to go. The general fund net cost increase has anticipated to grow from 24 million since 13-14 to 58 million. And rates have been impacted primarily from the loss of investment earnings during the Great Recession, decreases in the projected investment earnings from seven and three quarters to 7%, which could be reduced lower and changing demographics. And this chart shows the rate increases for each of the units, which indicate that the miscellaneous group rates increase from about 24% to 30%. Safety increases from 34% to almost 45%. And share of safety increases from about 47% to 58%. So the retirement cost increases are reduced by employee contributions ranging from 7% to 12%, depending on the bargain unit and the date of hire based on whether hired before or after when pension reform occurred. We have the different tiers since January 1st of 2013. So in preparing for the future, we of course have our strategic and operational plan that will help guide our priorities. We have continuous process improvement that will help create efficiencies and we have performance measures that will assess effectiveness. Reserves will provide support during the recession and revenue options will preserve core programs and services. And in summary, our county revenue growth and savings are limited. The budget reductions proposed to close the gap, the majority of programs and services are preserved and some staff eliminations will have to take place. And we have a hiring continued hiring view in place so that we can anticipate placements for those staff. And the recession of course is overdue and expected. So we ask the other thing is I do, I know the auditor mentioned this but I would like to mention because this does come up is that we are, our reserves are currently at 10%. We have $56.7 million in reserves that will help us in the event we get to a recession and it will give us a softer landing. So I'm happy to answer any questions but we ask that your board accept and file the report and set March 24th for the public hearing for the capital financing. Any questions or comments from the board? Yeah, I wouldn't mind. I appreciate the actions we've taken and with the foresight that our executive team has had and seen how we're gonna meet some critical situations. My question has to do and I know the financial advisor we're gonna get some advice from he or she in the near future but it has to do with page 549 on your report of our critical capital projects that we need and then on 544 of our previous presentation about our boundaries which are excellent. And I'm one who wants to keep us at the 10% level but I also know that if we let some of our main facilities and these critical projects continue to deteriorate such as the main jail control and surveillance system we're gonna be paying more in the near future if we don't do something about it pretty soon. So I think our financial advisor will give us this a presentation about this comparison but I think we're in a great position to investigate if we should bond for some of getting some of these projects done and possibly if we could have, there's 10 critical projects listed here if we could have the top three or five or something. I don't know that we need to do all 19 and a half million but I think it's with the position we're in and even though there might be a slowdown coming up I think that if we see our facilities deteriorate further we're gonna be in worse repair than we otherwise would be. So I just would like to have that and I think it probably will be part of the presentation that we have but if you could have that in mind and get us maybe down to not the full the critical crack capital projects but let us know which are the most critical that we need to address as soon as possible. We will be bringing that back. Right now interest rates are historic lows. So we just issued a library bond a couple of weeks ago the second issuance on measure S and the rate was I believe 2.8% which was just an incredibly low percentage and rates have even gotten lower since then today they're lower. So it's a historic good time to issue debt. The other thing is that our debt service is only at about 3% of our general fund which is very conservative and very good. The debt service on this if we did the 20 million would approximately be about $350,000 bring us to about 3.5% debt service on our general fund. So it's still being a very good position. If I could interrupt that if you're in that 6% or 7% range you're pretty good aren't you? I think that I think so. We're in excellent position in terms of our debt service level and these projects are all very, very critical. They go they rent they vote and go from obviously the jail generator and also there some of their critical equipment in the jail that needs to be upgraded. But also this building leaks some of our other buildings are having infrastructure problems that are roofs and HVAC systems and so forth. And then we also have a fair amount in there for future navigation centers. And so that's we know that the navigation center here in Santa Cruz and one we're thinking about in Watsonville will be we're gonna get state funds. We hope that we won't have to use all of this money but we anticipate there's gonna be a significant matching requirement to do that. And that's part of our overall program that we were talking about with focus strategy going through the navigation center. So we're trying to provide some flexibility to make sure that we have the capital we need as well for those navigation centers for the homeless as well. So but we will evaluate that and we'll look at it hard again and see if there's any of those projects that we could reduce if we can we will. And I neglected to mention earlier that like Carlos said it's a really good time for us to bond because it is so cheap. And we have our debt services declining. So we have some debt costs dropping off the books in 2122. So we have an opportunity to capitalize that first payment and not pay anything until 2122. So that's why it's really only gonna cost us even though the cost is much higher than about 3,400,000 that's sort of the net cost that we're anticipating after that other debt drops off the books. So it's a really good time. And in the future we'll have even more debt drop off the books. So our debt services relatively low even after this. I would just say we went through maybe a 10 year period where we did not invest in capital or facilities. And that's because the board and the staff prioritized services to the community. And so those were some difficult choices but I think they were the right choices at the time to make sure that we could keep services on the street. But eventually that bill comes due. And when you have a rainstorm and your building starts leaking it's very clear that that's the kind of things that you have to do. I would look forward to a complete list of all the things where it says various sites. I hope we'll get a detailed information. I think this board made some very good choices coming out of the Great Recession to build up our reserves to provide that cushion because we knew the day of the recession was going to come. It improved our credit rating which means that we get to borrow this money less. And we don't have as many staff. And as you can see the staff costs of pension and health that their drivers. So the county family has done more with less. And then we need to make sure they have the facilities to be able to be effective in what they do. And I do think it is a better time to borrow now than it will be. So look forward to the information and when it comes time I'll make a motion. Mike's on. The 1% sales tax. How does that compare to when we had the recession 2009-2010? Is there a big difference? That's a good question. Yes, it's recovered. The sales tax actually recovers much faster than property taxes. So within a few years the majority of our sales tax recovered. I wanna say, I haven't looked at it in a while since it was back in 2009 but I can get that information for you. Okay, thank you. Chair, I just had one more thing. There's likely gonna be a ballot initiative in the fall called schools and communities first. And I've heard one estimate that that would bring about $45 million to Santa Cruz County. Have we done any kind of analysis or look at what that would mean for Santa Cruz in that split role tax initiative? I could only say it's certainly been the topic of both my auditor's group and my treasure tax collectors group. Fiscally it would bring in more money but the process it would take to get to that point we're a little leery of how many years it's gonna take for us to get to that point in terms of being able to take on that extra workload and get staff trained and get your systems ready. But if that were to pass, your commercial property is my understanding would get reassessed more frequently. Yeah, properties over $3 million I think would get assessed every five years. Basically my understanding of the initiative and at least the proponents have talked about that kind of money and we can't obviously bank on that. There's one thing we saw from a last week's election is how people feel about taxes has definitely shifted in California. And so nothing could, you can't predict well what would happen with initiative like that. Although there's been a historic, homeowners have carried the weight of property tax changes in this state for 40 years and some leveling back up that large property owners picking up their share would help us all out. Supervisor McPherson. One thing, discuss the issue of unfunded mandates when earlier with our Metro director and we had a lot of those and Governor Brown graciously really pushed to have a big part of that return to local governments. But for my CSAC discussions there's probably about $800 million worth of those statewide is I haven't heard of anything that Governor Newsom or any legislators want to try to return that to us at this point. Is anybody else? We haven't heard anything and we're still owed about a million eight. Million eight. Yeah. Okay, thank you. Any comments from the public here in the chambers? Thank you, Becky Steinbrenner resident of rural Aptos. Thank you for this report. Over the weekend I was reading the materials and read the report that came before this and thought we were in pretty good shape. And then I read this report and thought, oh wow, this is really troublesome. And I remember hearing from Mr. Palacio the warning that this tsunami of debt was coming. But somehow I and I think other people thought measure G was gonna help stave it off a little more than it looks like will happen. So I did read in the material that departments Countywide were asked to come up with a 7.5% cut and what that would look like. And I haven't heard that discussed here. I hear that there will be staff reductions but I haven't really heard how that will affect the public and what we as the public can expect and see change. I appreciate your comments Supervisor Leopold. Sorry I'm gonna wake you up. It's been a long day, hasn't it? That the bill comes due when you prioritize for so many years the bulk of the money to go to services and you neglect capital improvements, the bill does come due. And I'm hearing that all over in the second district certainly that people are getting really tired of paying high taxes and having roads that are crumbling. Having roads that their fire departments are telling them are too dangerous to come up with their heavy equipment. And I wanna see a prioritization to the capital improvements in this County that all of the taxpayers depend on. Yes, we do have a homeless problem. And I'm hearing this morning that you encourage hiring on more staff to address and deal with the homeless and yet there's gonna be a reduction in staffing that may affect the capital improvements and the public services that everybody depends on. So toward the homeless I want to implore that you work more closely with the churches. They are there, they have the people. And let's see if we can't be a little more creative about this than just throwing more and more money at it and again neglecting our infrastructure. I wanna see how I didn't see any discussion in there about the CSA 48 benefit assessment that was just passed by the voters. Where is that in the budget? I think I heard Proposition 172 mentioned but I would like that clarified. And yes, it may be a time that it's cheap time to go in debt but it's still debt. And if we have another great recession and tourism is affected, we will be in trouble. Thank you. You're welcome. Okay. Any comments of none from the community room? No comments from the community room. No live comments. No live comments received either. Is there a motion on item number 16? I would move the recommended actions. We have a first by Leopold, second by Friend. Is that okay? Okay. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposition? Passes 4-0. Thank you very much. The next meeting will be Tuesday, March the 24th at 9 a.m. back here at the board chambers. Thank you.