 the hour of 1 30 having arrived the Santa Cruz City Council meeting of May 23rd 2023 is called order and the clerk will call the hall thank you mayor council member newson present Brown here Watkins is currently absent Brunner president vice mayor golder here sorry over Calentary Johnson president I am still here and miraculously here a quorum having been established this is the opportunity for anyone to address us on items on our closed session agenda we will be moving into closed session in a moment after any public comment on that and then we will return on or about two thirty two o'clock rather do we have anyone wish that with us today who wishes to comment on our closed session agenda miss bush do we have anyone online no one with their hands in hearing none the council stands adjourned in the closed session two o'clock having arrived the May 23rd 2023 session of the Santa Cruz City Council will come to order the clerk will call the roll councilmember newson present Brown here councilmember Watkins is currently absent Brunner president Calentary Johnson president vice mayor golder here miraculously here having established quorum we will proceed item two on our agenda we will take this up at about four o'clock this afternoon when some other folks will be able to attend we will now be on item three beach safety week I will recognize DC Lawson recreation supervisor of sports and beaches good afternoon walk in and thank you with me I also want to introduce fire captain Brian Thomas and Patrick Mason over at the wharf thank you for giving us the opportunity to give this presentation today thank you all for being here thank you this is National Beach Safety Week it starts the Monday before Memorial Day goes all the way through Memorial Day nationwide we see a lot of people coming to our beaches from all over so that's why we want to highlight that and let you guys know some of the preventative tips that we can share with our public before they go into the water so the PSA is the public safety announcements that we do at the end of 2021 we had a string of drownings that happened up north that kind of spurred us to revisit our PSAs that we put together we started in 2019 but last year we had a new one which was our know before you go campaign and we put that together in collaboration with multiple agencies just to name some of them forgive me if I leave some out Central Fire State Parks Cal Fire Harbor Patrol the Sheriff's Office UCSC California Fire Prevention Organization they were all pivotal in creating these PSAs in the joint training with the sole purpose of educating the public and increasing our operational ability between agencies those PSAs that we've created currently we have them in the dream in and the daily dreamer it's it goes out in their newsletter and a QR code gives them all the beach safety tips as well as our current beach hazards and everything and it goes out on CCTV later when they do the upgrade and Chief Odie is working with other hotels and visit Santa Cruz to see how we can roll it out in other communities and hotels in order to reach it further thank you sir so last year I asked council to inform their friends their family the public about all of our beach safety tips so this year rather than me telling you what those tips are we went down to the beach and asked the public if they could name the safety tips that you referred back to them so Bonnie if you don't mind playing the video swimming where to swim where to swim never swim alone assign someone to wash the water alcohol and water to non-dates make sure that the water be first lifeguard jackets safe lives observe signs and flags make sure to block the heat and sun wear your sunscreen and see what that is I'm here at the beach and ask what their beach safety tips are check if you share with me some of your beach safety tips sir no sir goodbye so those are the top 10 beach safety tips and it looks like the public nailed them all and included a few additional ones which is awesome and to go from there I'm going to turn it back to Captain Thomas to go over some of our marine safety stats from last year 2022 we had nearly a million visitors Santa Cruz beaches of those visitors Santa Cruz lifeguards made roughly 90,000 preventive action contacts 45,000 public service contacts 219 water rescues and 175 medical aids so to break that down what that means is we make an effort to try to contact at least one out of every 10 persons that enters our beach and I'll just segue into this winter was like one of the worst we've ever had and we've ever seen and the amount of damage that we had to our infrastructure and our coastline was devastating this summer the lifeguards are going to be addressing some of those new hazards by having a tower out at lighthouse point where we're going to be really focusing on education and preventive actions to the new cliff collapses and the hazards that are in that area and that's just one of the areas that we've been focusing but really the wharf crew and the amount of effort that they've been doing to rebuild all the damages and stuff it's just been incredible so we're going to pass it over to Pat thank you very much Patrick Mason maintenance crew leader on the wharf and beaches since the 6th of January to the 26th of April we've removed about 638.24 tons of storm debris from the beaches 1.2 million and change and we're still counting it's been a lot it's been a huge team effort there's one person on our team that we couldn't have done this without that's Mike senior parks working over here Joe Braga who's been doing this for over 27 years and um yeah thank you very much for having us and for listening and have a great rest of your day well thank you very much that's all we have for you guys but if you guys have any questions or comments for us here I think we were all terribly impressed and grateful but the vice mayor does have a question or a comment I just want to thank all of you guys for your incredible work and um everything you guys do every day is so important to the visitors to the beach local and tourists alike the only thing in regards to beach safety when they said no your flags if you're not from here how do you know what the flags mean? is there like a making it like a sign on the beach that says what a black ball is so they could mean multiple things and that's kind of that point that if you don't know that's when you go and ask the lifter what does that flag mean today so it's about uh regulating a certain unsafe event and uh you'll need to talk to the lifeguard on duty that day thank you thank you all very much enormously grateful to your good work we are on item four this is a mayor's proclamation declaring May 21st through May 27th as public works week and uh I'm going to Mr. Nguyen come on up it is a great honor and a privilege every year to acknowledge and find work of your team and all the public works teams in the public agencies in Santa Cruz County they do a terrifically good job we call on you every day whether it's an emergency or not an emergency to keep all of the various component parts of infrastructure which is essentially what cities do uh to keep that in good running order and to make sure that every part of our infrastructure is operational and when it isn't to be able to quickly fix it and repair it uh that helps make our city both a safe and sane community to be and I would invite you to make some remarks sir thank you mayor thank you council members thank you members of the public my name is Nathan Nguyen director of public works and this year's public works week is the 63rd annual and it's theme is connecting the world through public works thank you mayor and so we do do that every single day and of course we've had a very challenging year as well and I'd like to thank and recognize staff for the efforts throughout the city the storm damage that occurred our staff wasn't out there doing maintenance and working on CIP projects not just this year but leading up to all these storm events so I just want to thank them and thank you guys for recognizing our efforts thank you very much sir for the questions and comments I think I speak for us all when I say God love you all you do a great job for us thank you very much please pass that along to all of the employees of the department thank you sir we are on item number five and this is a presentation regarding the citywide housing project interactive map and I will invite our director of economic development and housing Ms. Lipscomb to address us good afternoon good afternoon mayor members of the council I'm Bonnie Lipscomb director of economic development and housing and I'm just going to intro the item for there's the first minute I know that Sarah Domondon who's one of our is our business liaison at the city this is actually her project and she worked really hard on this and we also have Rich Westfall who is great is coming and joining us so it's my pleasure to kick off this brief presentation on this interactive housing map we frequently are asked about the number of units in the pipeline both affordable and market rate and how soon they'll be completed we generally refer them to the amazing planning website that has so much detail you can get the plan sets you can get the dates you can get where it is in the approval process but we don't have like one place that has like a total database that totals up the number of units that tells you how many bedrooms each of the project has and how close it is to occupancy so actually it's vice mayor Golder reached out regarding the need for specific housing data related to two to three two-room units for families for Santa Cruz school district planning and I recognize you might want to go into a little more detail on your project but we did realize at that point we get these questions so often but this specific request from a planning perspective is they're trying to plan for schools going into the future with such an important need and we recognize that there's a lot of people who are out in the community trying to plan like what's being built what's in the pipeline and also just to know a little more detail about what's affordable and what's not and where these projects are in the community so what started out with what generally was a research project that Sarah graciously took on became just this collaborative citywide effort and we now have an interactive housing map and it wouldn't have been possible I'd say without the vision and the skill of these two both Sarah and Rich who are sitting right now as well as the foundation of the building blocks of planning's website with all of the great data so taking the database creating it and then turning that into a GIS tool with Rich's help and our housing team and other folks around the city so we're so excited you can now look at specific data including the total of the number of units in the pipeline where they are how many bedrooms where they are geographically you can zoom out for the whole city and get the total total unit counter zoom in to a specific geographic area and get the total unit in that geographic area you can go as deep as you want and it links to the planning project pages and you can look at the totals in real time and see where they are in the planning process if they have their approvals and then some estimates of when they'll be to occupancy we plan on updating this probably quarterly we're going to see how it goes this is our first sort of public airing we don't have it up yet on the website we're probably going to refine it over the next week and then hopefully post it post it very soon so with that overview I'd like to turn it over to the great team over there of Sarah and Rich and let them sort of give you an overview of how the interactive map can be used by the community thank you good afternoon thank you good afternoon Mayor Keely members of the city council thank you Bonnie my name is Sarah DeMond and I'm the business liaison with the business support team at economic development and just to provide a brief background on the project we did initially create a version of this map for the downtown scope to assist the business community members as well as existing and prospective businesses and sort of envisioning the changes coming down the pipeline from the 2-5 year mark the feedback we got showed the value and importance of visual storytelling for both short and long term planning so we expanded the work to include projects citywide with the objective of creating a visual tool for anybody speaking to the city's capacity to house our growing community with this in mind this cross departmental effort seeks to consolidate a wide range of living data into simple interactive map formats that allows for filtering and sorting as Bonnie mentioned while it's still in its early stages I want to recognize the existing and ongoing work from planning and housing as well as with Rich at GIS that this map builds upon it really has been a collaborative effort across teams and departments so I think everyone that's worked on this so with that I'll pass it off to Rich to walk us through the map okay I want to share my screen here my name is Rich Westfall I work in information technology alright so the application when it initially starts up as both Bonnie and Sarah mentioned the data that they collected or is available on the planning's website for project specific locations and with this that you have set up the initial view is the city limits itself along with let's see if I can close this along with a list that's on the left side of the application so as you're kind of scrolling through to go into any one of the individual projects and click on it that's going to highlight what you're going to see on the map to reset it back to the original view you would click on the project again at this point and then I'll actually put the map back to all the projects in it as you zoom in and zoom out the list that's showing up on the left will change based on what you see in the map view the numbers that are associated with each individual list each individual project in the list are kind of the numbers that you're going to end up seeing on the map you can kind of go into one of these and you can select one it'll give you quite a bit more information that you can go through and see if there's a way to there we go so this gets you more into those planning pages that Sarah and Bonnie were talking about that gets you into a lot of the data that the planning department has put out if you want to go back to the application itself you can zoom your way back out you can hit this home button and then it'll bring you all the way back out as well if you would like to filter some of the information not spatially by zooming in and out you can actually select this filter tool and this allows you to go in and look at the data that was collected for each one of these projects so if you want to look at projects that are currently under construction you can come in here and select this filter hit apply the map will refresh so will the list on the side that'll actually give you an idea of what projects are currently under construction if you wanted to filter something down a little bit more you can go in through and select time to occupancy if you want to see what's going to be potentially available as an estimate in the next year you can come in here and select that as well hit apply that'll filter down the data a little bit further show the list itself to reset the filter you can come back in here and hit this refresh button it'll bring you all the way back out to all the projects that are associated in the database you can export the data out so if you're not interested in looking at it necessarily in a map format you can push it out into a CSV file which is something that can be opened in Excel so you can look at all the data columns in that regard as well another tool that we have built in here is these housing calculations and these are over in the bottom right hand corner and the way that this tool works is that these values will recalculate depending on where you are in the map and what the list is showing so if you're looking to show the amount of housing that's going to be put in and give an area you can zoom into that area it'll show the housing and it'll show the number of affordable units and then it'll break out the units in terms of a single family studio or two bedroom by unit type you can also select within the list if you want to look at one individually and it'll give you that breakdown of the units as well that are there in addition to that there are your standard map tools that you have so zooming in and zooming out you can do regular address searches or place name searches that are within the city limits another standard tool is changing to base maps so if the gray is not something that you're interested in you want to look at more data you can come in here turn the aerial on or terrain so there's a bunch of different ways that you can actually try to visualize the data to get yourself familiar with where you are in the city of Santa Cruz also on the top we have a number of links or a couple of links one of it is to the downtown projects that kind of started this off and how we were going to create it as well as a pretty simple help that kind of goes through some of the steps that I went through kind of quickly so if you need to go back in there and refresh how to use the application you can come into the help at any time that's about all I plan to show if you're willing to take any questions thank you very much let me see if council members have questions or comments council member Bruner I want to throw confetti yay thank you this is such a great visual it's something that I know I've received a lot of inquiries about and also myself having to go from link to site to here to there it's just all in one spot and so thank you so much for finding a way to put it all together and to have all those filters and to have the map and the visuals excellent this is it's almost like why wasn't this sooner so one last piece is missing from those that are accepting applications there needs to be a button because that's really what everyone wants to know as well how do I apply for that rental where do I go where can I see the list of all of the some are city some are private developers and having to go to 10 different websites for rental applications is very cumbersome so if we're looking at this I think one more button that can take you to the rental application link would be super cherry on top thank you so much the questions comments Madam Vice Mayor I just wanted to thank you guys so much this is going to help a lot with Santa Cruz City Schools long-term planning and I really acknowledge the amount of work that went into this and appreciate you thank you Council Member Brown I'll add my thanks my appreciation and confetti because this is really an incredible tool having just recently gone into I had a project that I was working on and trying to identify all of the housing projects county-wide I can say that even before this Santa Cruz City is has a great and very transparent process or way of presenting those but you do have to go back and forth and back and forth and this is just it's really incredible and I hope that other jurisdictions in our community will be inspired as well further thank you very very much this is a step very much not just in the right direction but into a form of modernity that we need in terms of how we present this data Ms. Lipscomb thank you you folks thank you very very much we appreciate it good work as I indicated earlier on item 2 this will be taken up about 4 o'clock afternoon we are now on presiding officer announcements I have none statements of disqualification anyone wish Ms. Brunner consent agenda item 9 it relates to my employment downtown association you will be abstaining thank you any other additions or deletions to the agenda do we have any any additional solutions thank you city attorney report on closed sessions sir thank you Mayor Keely members of the city council this afternoon at 1.30 the council met in closed session there was one category of business on the closed session agenda and that was liability claims the claims are those of claimant Ezekiel Tidmore claim of Judith Lang claim of Justin Lang the claim of Debra Marie Gaudien council received a report from city attorney's office and the risk manager on those items they are also listed as item 12 on your consent calendar this afternoon thank you sir we are on council meeting agenda and calendar Ms. Bush do we have any items there you wish to bring to our attention I do not the consent agenda this would be item 17 through excuse me item 7 through 19 these will all be taken up in one vote you will have an opportunity to comment on any item or to pull an item from the consent agenda first let me go to my council colleagues and ask if anyone has a comment a question or wishes to pull an agenda item I do not believe so I think you can be recorded as an abstention on number 9 are there any other questions comments pull items off consent anyone with us today wish to make a comment on an item on the consent agenda or have the item pulled Mr. LaBerge please come forward good afternoon sir chair of CFSC item 10 the Darwin issue on the consent agenda we will take that item item 10 about we do this rather than comment on it I think there will be a little bit of give and take here so we will take it as a separate item that's great on the consent after we take the agenda item and the consent agenda in total we'll take item 10 up separately great thank you you're certainly welcome anyone else who's with us today wish to have an item on the consent agenda pulled or do you wish to comment upon it Ms. Bush do we have anyone online who would wish to comment on consent we currently have one person with their hand raised let's hear from that person good afternoon person online yes hello this is Garrett hey as to item 19 I was a little surprised at $216,000 valuation fee for ASR wells considering you already approved $127 million bond down payment actually over $250 million bond obligation with an interest so far some of which green lighted this ASR well program it sure seems like this proof of concept testing should have come before this and before signing up the public to debt I wonder if the results will be made public with the storage capacity and actual cost estimates of how much will cost to pump water in and then reclaim with what quality then to sell this water at what price to Santa Cruz per CCF recall I sent you a starter pack of dozens of questions you should have asked but didn't about the water bond so far I don't expect any answers but it looks here like some of those answers were never available anyway we only know bills will be due from what I can only infer to be about a 600 million total bond repayment obligation plus the gifts as to the sugar tax say why stop at soda how about cookies pastries cakes candy bars chocolate refined sugar itself and hands-free drinks and any product containing sugar do you think health education is important and the current acceptance of a plus size me being me fatty isn't really helpful I say that even as a somewhat fat person but it really is all about portions since sugar isn't exactly a poison apparently then this is a pleasure tax a pleasure revenue source sugar drinks have been around for centuries and what just now the council figured out it is the eighth sin after slot although let me might figure in this somehow the question is where does the money go and what service are you providing an exchange for what my guess is are you don't say and nothing every dollar you extract doing zip can be acknowledged as an ineffective punishment of some people who do employ moderation I suspect that cool old fevered last salute people could lose some weight in Fresno if they wanted to without this as an initiative here I missed the part where Fresno is Santa Cruz who is representing who where I suspect anyone who cares about this doesn't drink such products as otherwise none of their business and everyone else would rather not pay more for nothing in return I'm guessing the public tolerance for new extra taxes restricting their freedom is less now that when the economy was cruising in 2018 the last time this came up with low inflation back this up to a few in the government who think they know best trying to regulate every aspect of people's lives claiming a serious public protection while for sure if nothing else they're just gorging on the public's pockets and if the public really wants to re-drinks they probably will just buy them somewhere else I don't consume any sugary drinks but do indulge now and then and you know well I value freedom and occasional enjoyment more than a government who really just wants more of my money seemingly every meeting thanks thank you Mr. Phillip anyone else and Ms. Bush having heard all a motion to approve the consent agenda with the exception of item 10 with the consent agenda with the exception of 10 second by the vice mayor clerk will call the roll councilmember newson brown I winner I with the exception of item 9 calentary johnson mcgolder I I consent agenda is approved with the appropriate notations we will take up item 10 this is an extension of a loan and please come forward Mr. let me make sure that everyone here understands what we're dealing with this is to authorize the city manager to execute any legal loan documents necessary and in a form approved by the city attorney to extend the terms of existing Red Cross funded loan in the amount of $75,000 to CFSC for the property located at 223 Darwin street for 30 years with 3% simple interest and deferred payments that is the recommendation of staff we've heard this item on a previous occasion and it was directed to come back to us at this meeting Mr. LaBerge good afternoon and thank you everybody for providing me an opportunity to speak to this issue thank you mayor the word precedent implies a convention established by long practice that's the definition of the Miriam Webster dictionary of precedent the unique circumstances of CFSC saving much needed AIDS housing in Santa Cruz at the city request in 2012 we're seeking the promise loan forgiveness as the opposite of a convention established by long practice this indeed is a classic one-off situation CFSC was recruited by the city in 2012 to save the Darwin house Perlman house project when SCAP can no longer financially support that all important AIDS housing in Santa Cruz we at CFSC are a break-even nonprofit established in 1981 we have over 60 units of affordable housing in Santa Cruz county this is a affordable housing month of May and I'd ask the council to consider the plight of nonprofits that are break-even nonprofits to provide affordable housing especially supportive housing for the mentally ill in Santa Cruz in January 2012 the board minutes of CFSC reflect and I quote two debts $75,000 and $105,000 all of which are forgivable with service render to end quote the two summaries of the loan presented to the CFSC board in 2012 promise forgiveness and I quote again repayment of grant forgiven of terms of grant met the unique circumstances the very unique circumstances of coming to the city's aid in 2012 to provide support for this precious resource are clearly a unique one-off situation this does not set a precedent the 1993 modified promissory note makes clear that the loan and interest can be forgiven in fact in 1993 the city council sitting in your very same seats authorized forgiveness of that loan so this is not a precedent this is a one-off situation where our nonprofit came for the support of the city in a time of need to save precious aid's housing the forgiveness comes at no absolutely no economic cost to the city however the promise forgiveness with that promise forgiveness CFSC can provide future housing support for necessary need affordable housing populations so once again the issue at hand is this authorized forgiveness does it set a precedent that puts the city at risk in any way it costs the city no money it does not create a precedent the city attorney sitting to my left can assure the council that it provides no legal precedent so there's no reason that I can understand especially in this month of affordable housing that a nonprofit such as CFSC which has very little profit margin to 60 units of housing in this county did not have forgiveness that was authorized in 1993 and I'm here to answer any questions as to that issue Questions or comments by council members I do have a question you begged me to answer this question from what you just said Mr. City Attorney the gentleman alleged that if I asked you the question of whether it sets a precedent you would say it does not I think he accurately stated that it would not set a legally binding precedent thank you most of the pleasure of the council is there a motion on this seeing and hearing none I'll make a comment if I may about a motion I'll move staff recommendation there's a motion for staff recommendation I will second second by Ms. Brown Ms. Collin Tari Johnson on your motion sure thank you Mr. LaBerge providing us with a letter I looked at the letter I looked at staff recommendation I further inquired and one thing I was interested in and seeing is why CFSC did not accept the condition of de-restriction for affordable housing and perpetuity for these properties and so this is why I've sort of landed in the decision that I have landed to support the staff recommendation I understand what you're saying about this would be a one time and it would not set precedence but I was interested in seeing the acceptance of staff conditional approval of the affordable housing de-restriction affordable housing perpetuity I think that's a good question if I could answer that the definition of perpetuity speaks to endless time this house 223 Darwin the Perlman house I think the analogy would be if we're going to leave property to our children or grandchildren would we leave an assets crumbling and this 1947 house is crumbling we spent CFSC money to maintain it but if you imagine an endless time this house through termites plumbing and all the other issues of time will crumble would we leave to our children and grandchildren a crumbling asset with increasing debt and the terms of this loan the debt will double in 30 years so it's 150,000 now will be 300,000 and then 600,000 with a property that's built in 1977 and if I could remind the council at this moment we're applying for a four and a half million dollar home key grant to provide housing for transitional housing for 22 turned out foster care so we not only have we provided housing since 1981 we have commitment for the next 40 years to provide 22 units of housing for termed out foster care so we are a trusted companion with the city of Santa Cruz in providing affordable housing the issue that they raise is a hypothetical of some other nonprofit that may take these assets and run for the opposite our debt load for us to continue to provide affordable housing we can't have a high debt load this would add to our debt load and would keep us from doing more affordable housing in the future so I really would ask you to reconsider this vote we've proven to be a reliable ally we're providing four and a half million dollars of home key money to provide more housing for turned out foster care does the city council really have a concern about us staying in the business of providing affordable housing all we're asking is for the city council to support what the city council promised in 1993 which would put us in a better position to provide more affordable housing I think that's a pretty simple request and we're a pretty good long-term ally of this city and the city council I'll leave it at that if I might did you have for the comment for the comment Ms. Brunner thank you and thank you for sharing your comments as well and this is something that I know I gave a good read and looked through the information and the data and I think for me what the concern is in addition to your comments of affordable housing applying for grants for future affordable housing I see this as affordable housing funds now that have been invested in affordable housing that we're responsible for ensuring that our affordable housing remains affordable housing and to say that other affordable housing projects in the works is enough to replace something like this I I think it's very you know given that already the CBDG loan was forgiven over 100,000 and I just don't see that being very responsible if we were to forgive this loan I think from the city staff report the conditions that have been offered are reasonable and if I could just respond to that we do have $100,000 in ongoing loans that are part of a million dollar loan from Comerica that supports all our supportive housing so we carry debt on Darwin Street and we're going to continue to carry that debt on Darwin Street and so what we'd like to do is understand too that I understand the city's philosophy presently of not forgiving but this was a promise made to CFSC when we came to the city's assistance back in 1993 and it made sense then to have forgivability to trusted allies and we're a trusted, time-tested ally and we're asking you to provide that forgiveness to us so that we'll have less of a debt load so we can do more supportive housing and I think it's a pretty straightforward request at no cost to the city even though I do understand the council's concerns but having been here since 1981 providing probably more homeless housing than any other non-profit if you look to Van S to Broadway, to Mission to Water Street, to Darwin I don't think there's any other non-profit that's shown that commitment to supportive housing and we're just asking the city council to put us in a position so we could provide more affordable housing in this city. For the questions or comments Mr. LaBerge, I you were in on this at the ground floor at the start of all this and when the city and CFSE were negotiating the terms of the agreement the city was willing to put in I'm assuming willingly put in the forgiveness provision right was there any argument or debate about that at the time? Indeed when we took it over in 2012 SCAP program had financial problems so we had to come in and assist the city in SCAP. At that time there was no question when we undertook to help save this housing that forgivability was a key part of our acceptance. The minutes of January 2012 indicate that our board accepted this liability based on that forgivability but you didn't believe did you that it was automatically going to be forgiven since it was an option on the part of the city to do that or not do that? It was clearly in the promissory agreement that it was an option but in the discussions with us and the notes and the summary that I included in my letter to city attorney Kandadi it was clear the assumption was if we honored that agreement if we kept that as quality housing that that loan would be forgiven and if you look to the letter I sent to the city attorney Kandadi that was exactly the information contained in the summary and the minutes of 2012. Well it does seem to me that if the city didn't ever intend to forgive they shouldn't have put it in as an option. They had a resolution by the city council. It's my turn now. That the city didn't intend to ever forgive then they shouldn't have put it in seems to me that in a direct question to the city attorney the city attorney said that he did not believe this was presidential in nature if we were to go ahead and forgive the loan. We have a seems to me a very long standing very trustworthy partner here in you folks providing some of the most difficult housing to provide in this community. There's no question that you pick any category of housing in the city of Santa Cruz and what you'll find is that it is overpriced and only a small amount of it and so especially when we get into these challenging situations like the services that are provided inside the facility for which we provided a loan and enumerated a forgiveness provision. I think all of that makes good sense. I don't see how in any way the city is going to be disadvantaged materially by forgiving this loan and so unless there is a different motion I will be voting in opposition to this motion. Further questions or comments? Vice mayor is recognized. So my understanding I don't see Bonnie in here. She's available. And I'm wondering if she could speak to the terms because let's put this over until Ms. Lipscomb is here. There she is. Good afternoon, rather. Good afternoon, mayor. The terms that we have before you are similar to what we have with all of our nonprofits and they're actually a little more generous in that we agreed to defer all of the principal and interest payments for 30 years and to subordinate for any financing that he may have. I did want to go back to a comment that Mr. LaBerge made around the minutes and the city commitment. The letter and the accompanying documents with that letter were not city minutes. Those were between the two entities when they agreed to take over the loan. So there was not a commitment directly from the city for forgiveness and the minutes themselves that are referenced in that letter talk about the potential for forgiveness but it wasn't from the city that was not a city document or city minutes. I would say that I am supporting the staff recommendation because although it's in perpetuity, someone that's getting an ADU has to do deed restrictions on the property. There was a time period where we did that and so I'm sorry, you can get loans. You can remodel the property. You're still leaving a property but you're just agreeing to keep it in, you know, deed restriction and perpetuity and someone that be investing it in the future would hopefully, you know, keep that if you're taking a loan and if not within 30 years, in the 30 years you've had it, I don't think 75,000 is going to break the bank on a non-profit and so I'm inclined to support the staff recommendation and although I agree with the comments that Mayor Keely said in regards to your organization, I appreciate the good work that you do. For the question or comment, click or call the roll. Council member Nusum. Aye. Brown. Aye. Brunner. Aye. Calentary Johnson. Aye. Vice Mayor Goldert. Aye. Mayor Keely. No. Motion passes and so will. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. LaBerge. Members, we are on item number 20. This is a technology surcharge. This item is continued to the meeting of June the 13th, 2023. Anyone who came for that item, that item has been continued. We are now on item 21. This is an agenda item relative to West Cliff drive update including infrastructure transportation roadmap development. The this will be presented by Mitch Schmidt from the city manager's office, accompanied by planning director, excuse me, the public works director and others. Good afternoon, Mitch Schmidt. Thank you, Mayor, Vice Mayor and council members. Laura Schmidt, your assistant city manager. I'm here to introduce the topic we last visited you at the end of February regarding West Cliff and our tagline is an accessible, a resilient and accessible West Cliff for all. So we're continuing with all of our hearts and might to pursue that with an integrated citywide team as well as looping in a very educated and expert consulting firm in Farallon strategies and the team is here today to present you an update. So we will kick it off with public works and they'll give us some highlights on the infrastructure work they are doing as well as transportation. They will then hand it over to Michael and Jen from Farallon strategies and they will give you an update and begin the public comment and feedback on the partial roadmap that is in your agenda packet today and our eyes were a little bit big at the buffet and it is a partial draft of the roadmap and we'll be kicking off your feedback today and delivering the subsequent portions of the roadmap by the end of August. So just a heads up on that piece that I will hand it over to Nathan Nguyen, our Public Works Director. Thank you, Mr. Schmidt. Mr. Nguyen, good afternoon, sir. Good afternoon, Mayor, members of the Public Council. We have a presentation to share with you. I'm going to start up right now. Looks I'm able to see that Bonnie. Apologies for that. Fantastic. Okay, great. Thank you guys. So today I'm here with Matt Stark, our Transportation Manager Nathan Nguyen, Public Works Director. And we're here to give you guys an update with regards to the latest events on West Cliff. A few things that we'll talk about today is the current approach that we've embarked upon within Public Works. We'll touch on the infrastructure, the current status of the funding as well as the design ideas that are being played with. And then we'll close with a transportation update. So we'll talk about the traffic calming measures that are existing, some additional ones that are being proposed. And then we'll hand it off over to Fairline Strategies on the roadmap. Okay. So the first thing we'll kind of talk about is kind of restoring the bluffs and the damages. So as I mentioned earlier, Public Works has gone out. We've done additional assessments early after the January storms. And then our continuing to work with our partners in Caltrans, FEMA, FHWA and the Coastal Commission on different funding sources, and I'll go into that a little bit more detail on the next slide. Additionally, we're doing a lot of neighborhood outreach that Matt will go into in a minute, but it's discussing the challenges of the pilot one way, the evaluation efforts that are currently underway and that will continue to happen throughout the summer. So on the infrastructure updates, I just decided to include this plan view that you can see in front of you right there is the 16 West Cliff. And so this is where we sustained a significant amount of damage back in January where we ended up doing in our last update to you guys where we ended up placing the 250 tons to protect that particular site from sustaining some more damage. Okay. So on this next slide that I have here in front of you, you guys may also recall seeing the slide originally, but we've updated it with a few things. So over the last two to three months here, we've been meeting with FEMA as well as FHWA and Caltrans teams. We've submitted damage assessment forms to those different funding agencies and this map is to really give you guys an update where what you see in blue and in the highlighted bubbles, those are the locations that FHWA appears to will likely fund those repairs in those locations and that's because those locations actually touch the actual pathway and the roadway of West Cliff. While the bubbles that you see in there in white, that also shows riprap that has been displaced along the coast, but that's more for the coastal armoring portion and so those white locations are what we expect or hoping that FEMA will fund, reimburse us for and so if you're looking at those five different FHWA locations, you know, the estimated damages in those locations is roughly 17 million at this point while the riprap that was displaced, we're looking at about 1.8 million and that's based off the numbers we got from the riprap that we placed back on 1016 West Cliff in early January. Okay, so of those erosion repairs for those locations you can see we've identified 920, 932, 1016 and 1030 West Cliff. So those are the areas at which we were planning to do some type of erosion repair. Originally we were looking at doing a riprap design which is placing boulders and stacking them from the larger ones at the bottom with some smaller ones towards the top to help protect the coastline but as time went on we were able to work with our consultant team, structural and geotechnical firm, to propose a new idea which you see on the left there highlighted in yellow. That's what we're calling an info wall that's not necessarily a full sea wall it's really just those specific locations those four locations along West Cliff that stretch anywhere between 10 to maybe 30 or 40 feet but not necessarily a long stretch that's being looked at or being proposed in the West Cliff adaptation management plan. But what the info wall allows us to do is we can tie into a future sea wall should we pursue that avenue as our long range planning process continues. What else we also found was that it's actually based on again the estimates that we got from the riprap that was recently placed that the info wall actually might be less expensive potentially 10% in that range and so it actually could be a benefit in cost, in resiliency and then we also talk about the design, the aesthetic of it so with regards to a info wall there's an opportunity for us to try to sculpt that in a manner that is more nature based so the funding source I mentioned earlier in these locations that we're looking at is FHWA now we're under a tight timeline if we can essentially get all these repairs done by middle of October there's a potential that we can get a 100% reimbursement but now we're still waiting for FHWA to respond to our damage assessment forms so again we've had initial contact we've submitted those forms and now we're waiting for that process to continue to play out if we're not able to make that timeline and some repairs happen after middle of October we would be looking at about an 88% match so we'd have to provide a 10 or 12% local match for that grant program which is also still very enticing but we're all working to see if we can accelerate these projects getting them to come back out here giving us authorization approval of these grants so we can try to get construction going later this summer or fall so that's roughly the ideal situation and staff is continuing to again work with FHWA on those four locations now the big other location that FHWA is also going to potentially cover here is the Bethany Curve Colvert so this Colvert sustained significant damage during the January storms but it also had some existing damages as you can probably see here the structure is over 100 years old we feel it's well past its service life it's a combination of a Colvert and a Seawall now for us to evaluate or do additional assessment of that particular structure we'd have to do additional demolition and so forth and we're holding off right now and waiting to see again if FHWA will fund this project and potentially betterments here at this location as well so we're looking at potentially extending the actual Colvert Seawall approximately 20 maybe 50 feet on each side and raising the actual roadway in elevation so right now this actually ends up being a low point on Westcliffe and as you can see from all the years and storm events that we put our catch base in there and things water collects there but we may be looking at trying to again raise elevation maybe one to two feet but it still be the low point on Westcliffe but again with less likely this four wave action to come up onto the roadway timeline for this is a little more difficult though so we don't necessarily have engineered plans on Bethany Curve Colvert yet ideally we could potentially get into the construction this fall and try to meet that same timeline that I mentioned to you guys earlier this one is a bit more challenging without knowing the full extent of the damages we do know again that the wall is cracked it's rotated the storm drain system is disconnected there is silt and sloughing behind the wall itself and so we're still not opening it back opened for vehicle traffic for the public but ideally we could get into this later this fall and with that I'll pass it off to Matt Starchy great thank you Nathan alright so with all these infrastructure challenges we've also been trying to manage the traffic flow through Westcliffe and I'll give you guys an update on that so here is an image here showing our pilot area where we're working focus there in the middle in gray is our main study area between Almar, Delaware and Columbia but we're also zooming out a little bit to just see how this impact works in the whole neighborhood we've really heard a lot about that from the community. Shown on the screen with the dots and the lines is just an idea of all the different pieces of data that we're pulling together we're doing traffic counts and we're using historic data to really inform inform this work that we are pursuing we kind of have two situations out on Westcliffe I know we have a lot of conversation about two way one way and how we want to use the roadway but right now we're really constrained by this bridge being closed that's really leading to a lot of our challenges so at the bridge closure at Bethany curve we have no vehicle access and because of that we see cars going up Woodrow up Almar and Delaware and into the neighborhood to try to get around that closure at the same time also between Woodrow and Columbia we have one way traffic where we've provided an on-street separated bike lane and that's due to the different erosion sites so with this we kind of we have two different situations that are kind of going on out there and we're trying to see what we can learn from them to help inform changes to this pilot and also inform sort of the long-term road map thinking that we have going on as well so with this in place we're doing a couple levels of traffic analysis to see what we can learn from this pilot shown here on the screen is what we're doing right on the ground we're doing some traffic counts we collected counts back in February and we had counts out last week and then we'll be sounding on Memorial Day weekend to see what sort of peak traffic is like out there and then after that we're going to look at sort of a broader picture of travel patterns which I'll share on the next slide but from this level of traffic analysis we can really start to see patterns emerge in the real immediate area and the really interesting one here to me is on Almar and Woodrow shown on these graphs is we're seeing a real imbalance in the directional traffic where there's a lot of people leaving Westcliff which is actually a really different pattern from what we saw on Westcliff before the storm we saw a lot of more even eastbound westbound traffic so this is starting to tell us people are changing their travel patterns because of this I think that might be a really obvious statement but I think it's really interesting that people are adapting to this change in a new way the other piece of information that we're we're starting to look at is the area or location based service data this is going to help us look at sort of that bigger picture of how travel patterns are changing in the area so what we're seeing here on the screen is an example of that with showing where people came from to Westcliff in 2022 compared to 2023 I think one thing that really stuck out to me is we can see a bit of a change in how people maybe came from the UCSC area down to Westcliff there seems like there's less people doing that in 2023 and you know we continue to see a real big concentration of usage from people right in the neighborhood showing me that big blue dot there in the middle but we also see how many people come from different neighborhoods in Santa Cruz and the county to come enjoy this resource that we have these sort of patterns that we can find from big data something we're going to keep looking into to really try to understand more how people are using this area the other sort of element to the travel pattern analysis we continue to work on is traffic calming we've heard a lot from the impacted residents in the area about the changes that these travel patterns have had in their neighborhood and it's something we're looking to keep working on as we refine the pilot we've started to sort of test this process out here with some neighbors on Oxford and this is a sort of an evaluation process that we're going to refine more and bring back in August where we can really provide what we think are a menu of traffic calming options we can do in the area how we can have a neighborhood identify that they want them and then have us evaluate and prioritize them we do get a lot of requests but we have limited resources to install them and then we'll work with the neighbor to confirm they want these and then work on implementation this is really kind of a model from how we do our residential parking permit program but more to come on this process I think one of the major things we've been doing is outreach events we've had a lot of great garage meetings or backyard meetings with people to learn more about the challenges and then we'll have a lot more of these calming we want to hear from people out out on the street so you can come find us on Westcliffe or at the Wharf Summer Concert Series to talk more about what's going on on Westcliffe and so here's kind of what we're leaving with our next steps transportation element here we're going to continue our public engagement through July work on refining this traffic analysis from the data we've collected hopefully create some real findings from that in July as well refine that traffic calming approach that we talked about and identify which tools will need to mitigate these diversions that we're seeing and then compile all those three items into refine the pilot area and we'll submit those findings hopefully in August with that we're going to pass it over to the consulting group. Thank you. Good afternoon. Good afternoon Mayor, Council, pleasure to be here today to talk a little bit about the preliminary draft roadmap as Laura introduced this is a work in process so please view our presentation and the materials that you received earlier from that perspective are you going to end up? Okay. Cool. I will use the clicker here effectively so I'm Michael McCormick I'm the president of Feralon Strategies honored to be supporting the city and this work we operate in this gray space between nonprofits public agencies and the consulting space so we operate in a pretty unique way as a partner to communities and a lot of different structural aspects of how we operate I think this project is really unique in that there's a lot of that context that we're bringing together here and so we have a stellar team supporting this project including Beth Gibbons who's our national resilience lead connected deeply into our friends in Washington DC Jen McKenzie who's with us today we have detailed dives on the data and information that's out there and then our wonderful fellow from Middlebury Institute without further ado whoops that's the wrong clicker this is the clicker we will click you'll click for me how's that sound? That's great it'll be a partnership so we have three primary objectives in our support functions one is city engagement so these first two items we've really focused in on the first couple of months of working with the city we've been on board since February to help connect resources and submit proposals that you'll hear about in a little bit but there's also a regulatory funder and interagency support role that we're providing as well relationship building connecting folks and building collaborative constructs for the recovery process and the longer term resilience discussion and the third piece which you're hearing about in a little bit more detail today is the west cliff alignment road map and this is a core part of this because it's rolling up a lot of these conversations that we've had over the past few months into a more formal discussion of how the city can move forward more effectively in the future and more efficiently when things do affect west cliff and other parts of the community so purpose of the road map very briefly we've got the story of the west cliff as a resource for the community as a public amenity accessible to all this is framed directly in the document as it is now so we'll ask some questions about this afterwards as well through the document the work's going to align priorities and timelines from existing plans including the city of Santa Cruz Mark Park's master plan the west cliff adaptation and management plan the active transportation plan the local coastal program and other plans and documents and the road map is really going to allow the city to streamline the focus the city's limited resources on things projects and implementation efforts that are highest priority in that moment but also with that longer term vision in mind and maintaining consistency with the greater goals and that vision for a resilient west cliff so rather than a static document this is being built as a document that can help guide decision making by the city longer term and is intended to be updated by the city and the city as the dynamic coast changes so we'll talk about that in a second too so if we go to the next next slide here so this is the starting point right table contents this is where we have to start our work and there's some critical pieces of this that we'll talk about structurally as we move forward so the next slide please one of the things that we've done across the various different documents that apply to west cliff there's about 38 that we've pulled out we've dove deeply into 30 of them to identify the various different projects policies and programs that apply to west cliff acknowledging the city is unable to implement all of them concurrently at the same time with the same priority with the limited funding and resources you have and acknowledging the post disaster dynamic has changed the calculus on which of those projects will be more important than others so we're looking at the policies that connect to those projects and then the potential triggers and thresholds that we can use now to help prioritize particular policies and projects and in the future when something like this happens again and acknowledging in a dynamic coast these types of instances will happen and they'll continue to happen as climate change continues and the objective is to be as prepared as possible for when they do occur in the future so next slide so there's a couple of important relays to the stool as we like to say and the sustainability space looking at prioritizing west cliff policies and projects while also concurrently engaging the public and aligning the longer term vision of west cliff and then helping to coordinate across the city of Santa Cruz departments various different programs and plans that are going through the update cycle that are going through the regulatory process going through funding consideration discussions and making sure that there's a shared understanding of what some of the priorities are longer term this is all being done if you go to the next slide in the context of the dynamic coast acknowledging we have a lot of different priorities to balance along the coast including the recovery dynamic but also the resources that come from coastal management economic resilience transportation and mobility park space as a community asset and then a planning process as well as the next slide and one of the longer term a dynamic coast considerations and you've heard plenty about triggers and thresholds as part of the west cliff adaptation and management plan is a longer term we need to have clear signals about when policies and programs might need to be implemented or changed or funded so reassessing these triggers and thresholds in context to the current dynamic that we're in a disaster recovery effort and also in consideration of the coastal commission's desire to see these as part of the local coastal program update next slide so I won't go through all of these but there are a lot of projects that are applying in this current period of the post disaster recovery both things that have been long longer running aspects and then others that have are clear opportunities related to the post disaster recovery dynamic Nathan and Matt talked a little bit about some of the projects very near term recovery projects that should hopefully provide functionality and access back to west cliff but there's also longer term considerations that need to start now in order for those projects to be approved in the coming couple of years next slide so in this consideration process we also have methods for prioritizing projects we're following in the roadmap process including after three years how these projects should be prioritized including regulatory funding and adopted policy dynamics the city council's made decisions around specific policies on west cliff we need to acknowledge that moving forward but also acknowledge that there's opportunities for funding and resources to come from our federal and state partners if we reorient or reprioritize certain projects and programs to get funded now and so that's certainly part of the dynamic where their policies and projects contribute to the long-term vision of west cliff and this is a big part of this there are all of these really significant documents that apply to this long-term vision of west cliff and this is one of the times captured in a silo so one of the things we're looking at doing is really weaving these visions together into a cohesive vision of west cliff that staff can support the council can support the community can support and it makes a very clear priority around what the community is working towards we have the emergency dynamic and then the timeframes that have been outlined in prior documents that related to west cliff including the 15 up to 15 the 15 to 30 these are these are timeframes that the reality of the city council right you're looking at financing financials the capital improvement program and how you're going to deploy your own resources in connection to the resources that are available coming from external entities so really looking at those timeframes in context of the funding that's available both inside the city and long-term in the city too and outside the city as well so long-term projects they may require prioritization now you know for example there's organizations and communities around the state that have chosen to move right of way not saying that's going to be the case here but that's not a one-year process that's a 10 to 20 year process and if that were to be part of the dynamic you'd want to start that now if you wanted to see something significant occur right away utility right away any type of organization organizational change that requires a very high jurisdictional partnerships and decision-making takes a very long time and then leveraging triggers to make sure that the policy dynamic that's in place in the moment is responsive to the actual environmental conditions on the ground and that is a very challenging component of living on a dynamic coast right the coast changes weather systems impact our coast and our policies also need to keep up with some of those changes to make sure we're making the reality on the ground next slide and of course right now is a really interesting point in Santa Cruz history you all have multiple policy and program documents taking place right now including the capital improvement program an update to the local hazard mitigation plan the emergency coastal development permit responding to the storms of December and January and February now and a local coastal program amendment and these are all being done currently with the roadmap process so when we talk about the need to bring a unifying vision together across multiple documents this is one of the things we're talking about is making sure that these documents talk to each other through the vision that the roadmap is helping to establish next slide so how does the city coordinate right this isn't a small issue and I think that sometimes there's a lot of things happening behind the scenes and it's important to recognize that there are prior slide and Nathan presentation there are a lot of projects happening concurrently out there right now and there needed to be strong coordination internally at the city so in addition to the ongoing community conversations there's also a 16 person working group at the city led out of the city manager's office to make sure the different departments are working together and not against each other and that's a really powerful vehicle to move initiatives forward and each of them have particular roles to play in coordinating with external agencies at the state and federal level there's a pending grant application to the Silver Jackets which is a state and federal interagency task force basically designated to do emergency response and tackle vexing issues at the community level so we've worked with the Army Corps of Engineers we being the Royal way of city staff and the consultant team have worked with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers DWR and the other state and federal partners to put in an application to have their assistance in helping us think through what are these next steps what are the state and federal resources that are going to be available now available in the future that we can bring into the community to think through what these next steps are and that's tied to but somewhat independent they might write independent of each other is a technical assistance through the federal resource marketplace and the state and federal making process where the state and federal friends that are involved in Silver Jackets would be helping us to connect directly to resources that are available now and so the decisions on those two projects won't take place until the next fiscal year in the federal government so that will be in August likely that we'll hear July or August we're really excited about it the indications are pretty positive but with any application it may not be approved so as a backup to that we've been building direct relationships with each of those state and federal agencies that may be involved in that organization through Silver Jackets and hopefully being able to leverage those relationships independently and then concurrently with that we're exploring possible interagency partnerships across both the land and ocean side acknowledging the jurisdiction of the city only goes so far and some of the solutions to the long-term risks faced on West Cliff also will need to address our federal and state partners that operate in the bay and the ocean yeah so next steps so May and June we're looking at incorporating feedback from this council meeting but also continuing assessing those policy prioritization and funding options which you have not seen yet so there is a pretty significant amount of work that you haven't seen yet that's in process ongoing federal and state interagency coordination to build that pathway to the resources and funding that we know is available and then a few more outreach meetings and then incorporating feedback from those meetings into the process and bringing it back in August so that is an accelerated pace of change in this roadmap document I'd like to hand it over to maybe Matt Huffaker if you wanted to add anything else to that okay he was leaning forward let's assume but thank you I can take any questions thank you very much I suspect that we can now ask questions to all of the presenters let me ask if there are questions, comments vice mayors thank you for the super comprehensive presentation I really appreciate that my question you said something and I do appreciate how quickly you went through but I don't know what this is you said move right away like moving bowls right it's just an example of a policy that would require a number of years of coordination it wasn't meant to be specific to any particular physical asset on west cliff but yes it would be right away on sidewalks, utilities sewer anything that would require moving where physical infrastructure is placed that the city or some other entity manages on behalf of the community thank you other questions thank you for that presentation this is a question for you Nathan let's see you were talking about the erosion repairs and a milestone timeline of mid-october but if we don't meet that timeline something happens with the match and I wasn't able to track what you were saying yes sure thanks for the question so I believe it's 270 days after the initial disaster was declared if you're able to reconstruct the damages make the repairs within that date that FEMA or FHWA would reimburse those repairs up to 100% and so we're under this funding timeline based off of when the disaster actually occurred and then we've already submitted all of our forms we're trying to get in line with both the FHWA and if we don't meet that 270 day mark it doesn't mean we're not eligible for the funding it's just that the local match would then be required for about 12-12.5% in order to still get those disaster grant funds so I have a follow up to that so you were saying we were waiting for damage assessment waiting in response to our damage assessment forms are we looking forward with the repairs who is responding to our damage assessment forms is it FHWA? that's correct we have damage assessment forms submitted both with FHWA as well as FEMA but we are really pushing more on FHWA as those really more are for the roadway and pathway repairs so it's in their hands for us to meet the 270 days because we're waiting for them to respond it's a typical process where we go out and do the assessment we do this initial damage assessment IDE forms that kind of sees if the site is kind of initially qualified and then we have the subsequent follow up meetings where then we actually kind of have a project manager a damage assessment form is then done with someone on site it's submitted which is the current step that we're at but then we still need to wait from FHWA to actually say yes these sites do qualify which is kind of the current holding pattern that we're in right now two more quick follow ups once we get the okay and move forward how long do we anticipate those erosion repairs will take that's a great question the design right now the concept design we have for the infill wall project which is what we're proposing to do is just that level as a concept design we would likely take the project out to bid we would come back to council for authorization to receive with the bidding of those projects but as far as the construction timeline itself I think it would be dependent on the procurement and the materials as well but construction actually on site I would hope would I don't maybe four weeks as an estimation at this point but I'd have to come back to you guys to give you a better update on that okay so you're doing everything that needs to be done to encourage FHWA to respond to the assessment but if there's anything more we can do as a council I don't believe so at this time we've been working with Caltrans our partners at the local assistance level who helped program the funding through FHWA and so we were instructed to fill out those forms as quickly as we could and we did and we got in line and so now we're waiting for that initial response but I'm happy to try to follow up and we do continue to try to follow up with both those agencies, FEMA and FHWA to keep us in line to make sure that we're hopefully next Vice Mayor I have a follow up to her question is there a way to pre-authorize going out to bid given that we're hearing this any way for us to expedite things given the there's been some discussions I've been talking with the city manager about potentially trying to allocate funds. We are as part of a budget process identifying funds you'll see that in our hearings tomorrow and then in the budget adoption in June 13th but we are proposing to put funds into the West Coast stabilization project as well as create a new project for the Bethany Curve Colvert because that project itself is just so much different than the other infill walls that are being proposed at those other four locations I guess just my concern is the July recess and so I wouldn't want it to be held up on that is that a possibility or no I appreciate the question Council Member Goldner and as Nathan's describing we are exploring leveraging every opportunity to expedite these projects outside of our traditional somewhat cumbersome at times procurement process for these public works projects if that did necessitate us scheduling a special meeting we would of course work to do so that we wouldn't lose the opportunity to do so Council Member Brunner thank you for the presentation the information and I think I have a question for whoever can answer regarding the outreach and community input I'm also thinking in terms of visitors to the area and how we're reaching and communicating with visitors and I know there's also earlier we had the presentation regarding beach safety and there was mention of a tower out at Lighthouse and really making sure that visitors are safe but I'm wondering how that's incorporated into this work with Westclaw Westclaw yeah right now we've heard a lot from people most directly impacted I think by this so that's why our goal in the next few weeks Claire and I will be out on Westclaw actually talking to people who are using it so I'm assuming that would kind of capture that visitor group we're going to be out there in an afternoon and on a weekend to try to capture that group and then also go out on the warf during an event just to kind of capture the broader community I think there I think those are right now our ideas for how to grab those sort of broader community but if there's more ideas we definitely like to hear them yeah I guess and that's great I know I was speaking to a couple who was visiting and they come every year to Santa Cruz and one of their favorite spots is Westcliff Drive I mean it's really as mentioned it's one of our parks in a sense it's such an iconic area that people visit and use in different ways and there's been a huge shift and change in the area and how people are able to use it and thinking also how we're reaching visitors in letting them know about this so they're also able to be prepared for alternative ways of transportation as you spoke earlier and also to have opportunity for input I'll add to what Matt Starkey was talking about on the transportation side of it and also to note that the data that our transportation captures and the consulting partner that we're working with captures it doesn't care where you're from so if you're walking on Westcliff or we're capturing you it could be from anywhere so we're getting usage and access through that means as well which is really a great mechanism the other thing is we are working with community partners to reach into different parts of our community whether that's the high schools and the different generations as well as a survey that will be coming out shortly and I believe Save Westcliff could talk to that when they come up during their public comment portion we're going to be leveraging outreach programs that we have in the climate action and sustainability and health and all policies where we're going to go out in the summertime, in the August and the fall time frame and we'll leverage those outreach conversations as well and include Westcliff as part of those Thank you I wonder also organizations like Visit Santa Cruz could be helpful in that and I know council member Watkins and I sit on that board and thank you for mentioning the data points and incorporating for example peak weekend Memorial Day weekend this weekend and I think that's really important thank you Thank you council member other questions or comments this would be the opportunity for members of the public to come forward and make comments on this agenda item by prior arrangement in a timely manner Mr. Ramadan has been granted eight minutes to make a presentation on behalf of Save Westcliff Mr. Ramadan good afternoon sir Good afternoon mayor and council members and I wanted to just say thank you to Matt Hafege Laura and the team at Farrell and they have been doing some young men's work here so thank you so much I wanted to start out by just saying that Hillary's not going to be able to join us today which is really Obama her mum's really sick all of a sudden so I'm going to be carrying this solo so you'll have to just imagine Hillary standing on my shoulder or next to me okay but we want to say we kind of hear the concerns about traffic like honestly and we're probably going to hear more about it today we all live with those traffic issues too my wife Christine's worried whenever she walks our daughter along the pedestrian path she's terrified that she's going to get hit by a one wheel on your bike which will knock our daughter the wheel chair down these concerns are real these are deeply personal and they impact the way that we all access West Cliff but they're not the problem they're a ramification of a different we all want access to our beloved and iconic West Cliff cars, bikes, pedestrians scooters, e-bikes, dogs you name it we just don't have sufficient space for our collective needs and on January 5th it all became very real right we lost our pedestrian and bike path we lost half our road the damage was caused by the real problem that we need to focus on and it's not a problem on land over which the city has jurisdiction that's not the problem in fact it comes from the other side the ocean side and to help us all understand this ocean threat that we're facing we save West Cliff and a whole bunch of people put together a coffee table resource book called West Cliff Beloved and Iconic a visual record this is the book some of you have seen earlier versions of this when we shared it at the community meeting recently Bonnie I'm going to hand this to you as part of the record and we're submitting it as part of our testimony today we expect this book to be broadly available in local bookstores and on our website at savewestcliff.com and in this book we use historical aerial photographs to help us come to terms with the loss that we have suffered on West Cliff over the last 100 years it's been substantial we've got to internalize this it has been substantial in the book we also explain this ocean threat in more detail back by some of the greatest scientists of our time this threat is not sea level rise although it has a role to play the threat comes from bomb cyclones or so called west coast hurricanes powered by atmospheric rivers when these hurricanes come from the west or the southwest we're in big trouble these west storms caused 76% of the damage to west cliff and January 5th was one of those storms so with the storms during the super El Nino years of 1983-84 and 1997-98 Dr. Gary Griggs from UCSC and Dr. Kurt Stolazi from US Geological Survey have been writing about this threat for decades unfortunately we haven't been listening to him and if you're paying attention to NOAA and our scientific community right now you will know that many are expecting a super El Nino for this winter see temperatures in the Pacific right now are the hottest on record ever which means more atmospheric rivers more bomb cyclones more of the dreaded west cells we have to get real about this ocean threat we absolutely have to get real about it and we're kind of done with the decades of indecision about who owns what we've got to go past that quick so today we are demanding some action and my notes say here to read our request is former Mayor Hillary Bryant to do that so I'm going to do my very best for Hillary and this is all council speak so please stay with me we are asking council to issue the following directives to staff today number one instruct staff to move expeditiously to restore access to Westcliff the three year plan as circulated as part of today's agenda should be immediately prioritized and activated with external funding we need a completed plan until August 2023 to reduce the risk of losing access entirely we are less concerned about the one way two way debate than we are about the no way situation no access is a disaster for the whole community if you think the traffic in the neighbourhood is bad now wait until there's no access please get these emergency repairs green lighted as soon as possible to allow the city to demonstrate that they can execute on these repairs provide the city manager Matt Huffaker and his very capable Laura Schmidt and the entire city staff the direction and permission to work with the community to develop a 50 year roadmap we've got to get our eyes above the horizon here we are encouraged by the initial start from the dynamic co-section of the draft that Michael presented we must have the courage and conviction to collectively reimagine how we access our beloved and iconic Westcliff locations to come please give staff and Farrell on the confidence to take a long term view to use nature based solutions to mitigate the west swell threat and expand access and recreation in the westcliff recreational area it's also said an aggressive deadline a final draft for review by fall of 23 so we don't drift into another decade of indecision and the final point number three perhaps the most important the city of Santa Cruz cannot do this alone no matter what you say and do you can't solve this problem people so we need to build a holistic solution that covers not only the land side of the equation but also the ocean side which is where the threats coming from we must have a strong coalition of agencies non-profits and funders to solve this multi-durastrictional challenge please direct staff and Farrell on team to actively engage with state and federal interagency to determine a partner to lead on the ocean side and enable us to work collectively and simultaneously on this effort from both sides the ocean and the land let's have the framework for a coalition plan in front of everybody here by August of this year please issue these directives today time is running out since then it's way too late thank you Mr. Ramadan thank you and the other members of SAVE West Cliff we do miss Ms. Bryant here today on either side of the dais this would be the opportunity for others who wish to comment to do so and while you're signing up there let me ask if let me ask if do we have anyone online what we're going to do we're going to alternate we'll listen to this gentleman then someone online then someone with us then someone online good afternoon my name is Andrea really resonate a lot of the urgency about reimagining West Cliff I liked a lot of the things I heard one thing that I heard is that we just don't have space and yet we're arguing about one way or two way and in my mind to have access for pedestrians for cyclists for dogs for e-bikes and of course for cars the one way is the obvious solution because the cars are the least space efficient but we can have access for them if we run it one way as a resident of the west side I think that that's really what's going to benefit the community as a whole the most basically my two cents I just wanted to jump in with thank you so much for coming here this afternoon we'll now take someone online person online good afternoon hi I think that's me my name is Tammy I also live on the west side on a tiny street called Clark Avenue between Woodrow and Columbus kind of between West Cliffs and Pelton so I am right in the impact zone of the traffic I'm wondering about getting more signage for people letting them know where it's closed because it seems to me that they're not if somebody's visiting they're not realizing where exactly west cliff is closed so there's a lot of people making illegal U-turns which is very very unsafe for pedestrians bikes people in cars it's like all of a sudden people are driving and then they just come up on this and they have nowhere to go and they just make all these crazy U-turns in the middle of the street so I think that's my main thing right now is just it feels very unsafe in addition cars are parking on these roads now where they weren't before again adding to the the scariness of when people make the U-turns so it would just be earlier more signage heavier signage so it stays so people can't move them anyway I very much appreciate your time take care well thank you very much for your time we appreciate it afternoon Mayor Kaley Council there's two points that I would like to just suggest to the city council one is I would like to continue advocating for a roundabout somewhere before maybe after its beach it will both enhance a the place bring attention to the health field area allow cars to return on West Cliff rather than find their way through Clark Street or the neighborhood streets it will definitely in the words of consultants in the past create a sense of place so it could be very attractive and small and really would enhance both the area plus the traffic flow allow people to return especially tourists they don't have to drive all the way down West Cliff to find their way back the second point is really advocacy for building on what El Ramadan spoke about and that is to engage the state and federal government in this and I'm sort of wondering whether a delegation has met with John Laird our state senator who previously was in charge of natural resources under the Brown administration I'm sure he has something to deliver helpful at least and also Congressman Jimmy Panetta I think they should be drawn into this at this point while it's definitely on everyone's radar thank you very much thank you Mr. Myberg Miss Bush someone else online yes good afternoon person online this is Garrett while there certainly has been a horrific rate of erosion over long periods of time near Woodrow West Cliff the narrative surrounding this still seems to me perhaps it doesn't reflect the basic erosion facts as known still prioritizes trigger reactions not proactive actions values recreation and nature over protecting assets wants to actively discourage the freedom even if it diverts traffic to side streets still seems like a mandatory philosophy all under the catch-all mantra of climate change I simply state my opinion opinion once again is the very last ditch action when no other actions are left that have any benefit we are not there yet the vast bulk of erosion at the last 100 years occurred before armoring most certainly has worked well to slow it down over decades and the most recent latter studies agree on some basic facts over short time spans like a decade measurement show more than half of all California cliffs show no erosion at all the other half of cliffs and in Santa Cruz in particular also usually show a minor erosion in the range of one to two inches a year most of the really serious erosion occurs in very infrequent random ultra powerful storms the storms are getting more powerful or frequent that's not a fact yet but climate change hysteria all erosion should be seen as a matter of exceeding breakage thresholds if sufficiently hardened or if the natural hardness of cliffs is greater than the force of water there is no erosion none erosion occurs in difficult predict cycles if these man-made structures don't last forever if that was a reason not to build nothing would ever get built save west cliff seems to make a convincing case that all the area around Woodrow is far more particularly and therefore it merits a much better protection you know more so than planned even maybe not all cliffs are equal that way or expensive that way and identification and proactive management of the most vulnerable cliff portions is needed this is the city mostly consisting of private and public assets and it's not a nature preserve no matter how much some people would like it to be I value people their needs and properties above sand I agree damage can be put back better than before and Mitchell's Cove seems to demand it or it will disappear if the city beyond some other entity paying for it doesn't seem to want to accept protecting assets as part of its mission I predict this will become a nastier but far too late political conversation if any more assets fall into the sea I strongly disagree with the draft that includes any design of thresholds that automatically invoke so-called manager treat actually a cut and run philosophy when what I call holding the line is still a viable option the line for now is the seaward side of West Cliff path we have no more inches to give away what kind of traffic and use is another lesser matter but I would point out bikes already have access now thanks thank you sir good afternoon good afternoon Mayor Keely and council members Gillian Greenside I'd like to express very strong support and a shout out to the public works engineers and staff who are working to fix the damage frankly I think all of your resources and support should be in that direction the rest the consultants the long vision for West Cliff I find to be a distraction and I think the message should be fix the damage and I was very impressed with the senior engineer who was quoted in the press right at the outset of this disaster saying that the armoring the riprap that had been more recently put in stood up to this storm where the damage occurred was riprap from the 90s that had not been maintained now to me the conclusion there is quite clear we need to it can be maintained and it should be and I think that should be your energy going forward and the infill wall etc I would say as fast as possible when we get into this more through through area of a long term vision I think that there's some problems with that approach because it is some people feel very strongly about one way others feel very strongly about two way and that is just going to come clashing in a public process if you don't focus on the main issue which is fix the damage open the roadway if you then want to have that debate okay but I think everybody should be aware that if you make the traffic one way you can talk you know till the cows come home but the impact on certain areas of the lower west side will be dramatic and there will be pushback and you basically it's a safety issue there are three schools that are on the other side of Delaware and children go to those three schools and have to cross Delaware if traffic gets diverted down Delaware because you've made it one way you're going to have a real serious safety problem to figure out so I just I'm very impressed with our public works I think they do sort of a bit of a hidden job and the comment that when something like this happens again which seems to be driving a lot of energy I think that is debatable I think our public works with funding with the agencies can repair this in a manner that it won't happen again so that's what I'd like to see you concentrate on thank you thank you Ms. Greensight Ms. Bush someone else online good afternoon person online good afternoon my name is Nancy and I was asked to speak today regarding traffic calming efforts on the streets adjacent to the hard closure of West Cliff Drive at Bethany Creek Greenbelt I live on Oxford Way and a large group of my neighbors came together in late January about measures that could be undertaken to mitigate and calm the huge increase in number of vehicles noise, speeding and other traffic violations on our quiet residential street the impact of the closure of West Cliff Drive has essentially been a life changing experience for those of us who live on the streets that are close to the closure and one way pilot between Columbia and Woodrow West Cliff Drive is an arterial road with a high traffic and we are feeling this throughout the lower west side having said that I want to say that working with the city's transportation manager Mark Starchy and transportation planner Claire Galagely has been great I've worked with them directly on mitigation efforts for Oxford but I've also worked with them and had the opportunity to observe their work with neighboring groups they've been responsive to neighbors concerns and appear committed to coming up with solutions to traffic and traffic issues we're all experiencing it's been a pleasure to work with them both installation of the traffic barriers and accompanying signs on Oxford way as plans for this week we are very appreciative and we look forward to an improvement in the traffic situation on our street and eventually the other streets in our neighborhood some neighbors have expressed concerns that the barriers as designed will not be robust enough however the project if necessary we look forward to continuing our work with the city staff to monitor the pilot program and make adjustments if they are called for and again we're very appreciative and grateful for the efforts that have been undertaken so far finally I want to thank the council members particularly Vice Mayor Golder and Council Member Calantari Johnson who have supported this work and focused staff resources towards traffic and the neighborhood directly impacted by the west cliff drive closure there have been significant steps forward but there's a long way to go to ensure the quality of life for residents on the lower west side we look forward to your support moving forward as well thank you so much for your time thank you very much good afternoon my name is John Edmonds I live on west cliff in the so-called single lane proposed area I just have two quick suggestions I'm really directed at Nathan I appreciate the work you guys are doing one is that I think you're going to display if you go to a single lane you're actually displacing a fair amount of parking and there's parking spaces and then also the people could park before or next to the houses so if you count all of that up my only suggestion to you is you ask yourself where's that parking where should it go at the end of natural bridges some other parking lots that are over on the other side near the lighthouse I don't know what the solution for that is but that's something we're thinking about because it's going to make the given area there more congested when people tons of people flood into the area and want to park somewhere the other thing I would suggest to you in terms of lead time and trying to get to this 270 day it's very tight I would think you'd have to begin construction first if you're going to be done by mid-October and that just gives you like a two week buffer if your timeline is correct so if you're going to have the materials by then if you're going to have the equipment lined up you may need to make deposits there may be some things the city could decide to do to go ahead and procure those things or put the money down for them before you've actually let the contracts oh no you definitely could explore that that's one way to try to keep yourself on a schedule on a timeline that might work but I think there are people who are very interested and you'll get a lot of applause from a lot of the comments of being made today if you can make progress on those four locations by that time frame and it'll demonstrate to people that you're you're actively taking action as opposed to we want to study for this for the next 270 days which is what we've all thought we heard so that would be great those are my two suggestions thank you thank you sir very much Ms. Bush anyone else online nobody else this would be the last call for anyone who wishes to present testimony or make comments on this item seeing here none the matter is back before the council may we're glad to entertain a motion Ms. Calantari Johnson thank you mayor and I sent the motion to you Bonnie and I'll read it so this is slightly amended from recommendations the motion to receive an update on citywide west cliff work including infrastructure transportation and the development of a road map for resilient and accessible west cliff and kickoff community review of the in process road map to collect additional input and provide an updated draft of the resilient west cliff accessible to all road map to city council by end of August 2023 that includes activation of projects listed in the post disaster project zero to three years the third part through a multi agency approach utilize the policy concepts named to the dynamic cost section of the draft road map including nature based solutions to develop the beyond the three years section to include a 50 year plan by end of 2023 second by the vice mayor you may open on your motion great thank you I want to first acknowledge public work staff and all the departments that have put a tremendous amount of effort and work into getting us to where we are now and we heard from the public comments so it has not gone unnoticed and we've seen we've seen the differences in the neighborhoods we've seen the differences on west cliff if you're not there every day maybe you don't notice it but we've noticed it that what you presented to us was really thorough and my slightly extended motion really integrates what you've put before us in terms of what you're committed to what you've already started and the path that you know is best to get us to where we need to go Vice Mayor Golder and I of course have talked to community members and wanted to really explicitly call out the urgency and timeline that again you named in your presentation but we wanted as part of the motion and the collaboration that this will take and the multi jurisdiction agencies this will take to help us accomplish our goals see what else do I want to say I just want to recognize that this is a respond to the immediate which we've been doing and we have to continue to do and a the holistic picture of what we see before us in the next 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years so I'm really happy to support the direction that staff has put before us I want to thank you again for the work you've done and I want to thank the community members who are here today whether you spoke or not or online who came to the garage backyard meetings we went to a few of them your voice has helped us shape what you see before you I mean we have amazing experts but it's also important to listen to the experience of those who are living and experiencing it every day bringing those together is how we have a good product in front of us so I think with that I'll just I'll say thank you to everyone again and I'm looking forward to hearing back from you all at the end of August to see where we should go next Thank you the vice mayor is recognized Thank you Council Member Kalatari Johnson and I have been out at four different backyard meetings and had hundreds of emails, phone calls, conversations and I think the interesting thing about this issue is I think it's one issue in town where I think literally everybody's on the same page from Gillian to Garrett to everybody with opposite political local signs normally wants to fix Westcliffe because everybody loves it and I think at this point in time there's no need to even discuss one way, two way I think that is something for further debate and discussion and I'm sure there will be some day but right now those sense of consistency in the community is real and I think I really want to appreciate everybody that put together that community meeting at London Nelson when was that a couple weeks ago I think it was the most well attended community meeting it was so efficiently run that it allowed for maximum engagement and exchange of information and I heard a lot of super positive feedback from everybody that attended and so I also want to really thank and Matt Starkey for the direct outreach you've done in neighborhoods and super responsive solutions you've come up with to really unique problems that are happening in specific neighborhoods and locations and so I have nothing like Nancy said nothing but confidence in that you guys moving forward through this process I really love that you added the long term piece in there although I know you've thought about it I know it's something that we don't need to think about today but thinking 50 years into the future and really I was looking at the vision statement for the Army Corps of Engineers and it says engineering solutions to our nation's toughest challenges and so I feel like this is one of those things and so this is maybe not our nation's toughest challenge but it is a local tough challenge right now that I think aside from homelessness and housing is one that we have a sense of urgency to unite and address and I really I just really want to thank everyone at Save West Cliff every single member of the public that's reached out to us or done something to support this and I'm super excited to see what you guys start to do moving forward so thank you thank you Madam Vice Mayor further Councilmember Brown I'll just quickly say that I too support will support the motion I appreciate the attention to this longer term vision I also am I just I do want to say I'm cognizant of the concerns that as Greensight mentioned and I do worry about the workload for you all so I did want to just ask if the end of this year feels realistic to come back with this number three not because I don't think it's I think this is all of its urgent but I do want to make sure that the immediate needs are really the priority I'm not suggesting that you're not already clear about that but I wanted to just see if this timeline seems doable at your end. Appreciate the sensitivity to that Councilmember Brown and I'll jump in and Laura may have something to add but we're comfortable with that timeframe this is a all hands on deck full speed ahead both in terms of the immediate actions that are needed but as well as really flushing out a long-term vision for Westcliffe and we're comfortable with that timetable it does really reflect worth that's already underway and the timeframe that we had in mind and if it may just I'll just make one last comment cause us to have to start diving into those thornier questions on an accelerated timeline as well and so let's do it Councilmember Watkins has recognized thank you and I appreciate the questions I appreciate the motion naturally the work as well as the community input I guess as we move forward with number three on the on the proposed motion is if we could look at that as a template for future planning and consideration I think that area naturally is an area we want to have a targeted and we know that this existential threat of climate change warming oceans are going to impact other areas and so as we look at what we're learning through this process is that something that we can create as a framework that could be applied potentially to other issues that may arise or will likely arise moving forward so it doesn't need to be an answer but it just maybe a consideration as we're thinking holistically as a city with our planning Councilmember Brunner has recognized thank you my question has been asked and regarding the 50 year plan by August 2023 my eyes and December 2023 still to come up with a 50 year plan by the end of this year seems like a a goal that would require a lot of capacity and I just also I'm glad to hear that it seems doable and realistic and I want to think Farrell and strategies you also referenced West Cliff being a public amenity accessible for all and that in your work you are pulling from the parks master plan and all the other plans that already has a lot of community input public input so thank you for pulling from that to create the roadmap and I think that's a great starting point so really we're not starting from scratch ground zero so I see you shaking your head yes great great and also just thank you for laying out your methods for prioritization I think there's a lot of balancing act and thank you council member Watkins for bringing up I do there have been a couple of comments to me about equity and a lot of I think there is a kind of perception that West Cliff is where all the six million dollar homes are and therefore that's why it's a city priority and and to really think about what we've learned with this area and how it can apply citywide with any other areas that can be affected in ways that we are addressing this so I think that's really important to just mention and keep in mind and the there was I want to just quickly ask there were a couple public comments made so one was about signage and hopefully we can address more signage better signage heavier signage was mentioned so that again visitors that come to the area not familiar with street closures and where it's closed aren't making unsafe illegal U-turns as mentioned so hopefully that can be directed to staff to figure out and I know that Farrell and also in the state and federal supports and resources in that whole plan so there was a comment about you know engaging those legislatures Jimmy Panetta congressman Jimmy Panetta Senator John Laird and I'm sure that's all part of the work that's already underway but just wanted to make sure that was included so thank you so much for all of your work on this and I really appreciate appreciate the updates especially since I haven't been to the meetings and thank you for bringing this book I hope there's a coffee table version coming soon maybe funds can help repair there's some amazing historical photographs and aerial shots over the years from the 1800s on so this is pretty amazing thank you thank you further on this a couple of thoughts one is I think I'll need a bigger coffee table on point the vice mayor and I as the mayor and the city as vice mayor and senior administration we meet on an annual basis federal and state legislative delegation and when we had that meeting with our federal delegation congressmember Panetta this was one of the top three items that we discussed at some length with them and in a subsequent meeting with senator Laird and assembly member Gail Pellerin we likewise went over because of course they are state and federally funded as we move along in this made this one of our top three asks as well and they were quite receptive and responsive to this this is a completely minor issue I am wondering if the maker of the motion on the second point that you raised this is a completely minor issue if you would strike the words kickoff and insert the word initiate kickoff is just a slightly informal term for the serious nature of what we are doing here thank you very much I appreciate that further questions or comments seen here none the clerk will call the roll councilmember nason Brown Watkins Brunner Johnson Golder Swater thank all of you who are here on this item we appreciate it my guess is we're going to get you know you a lot better over the next few months we are going to do the following we are going to take a very brief ten minute recess very brief ten minute recess when we come back those of you who are here on this city serve item we will take you up immediately ten minute recess council is back in session for its May 23rd 2023 regular meeting in order to go forward we will move backwards at this time and we are going to return to item two this is a an opportunity to recognize the outstanding work of city serve and national volunteer week we are very blessed in this community to not only have many many folks who volunteer their time talent and money to the good works of volunteer organizations and nonprofits throughout our community which make it a stronger healthier safer and better community in which to live we want to acknowledge the city serve volunteers who give their time and commitment to those in the community in the city of Santa Cruz and I would like to acknowledge Mr. Shaman city serve program coordinator welcome you to the microphone thank you so much for being here and thank you for all the good work and I want to say hello to everybody's friend Karen Delaney for all of your work for so very many years and it's great to have you in chambers good afternoon sir thank you good afternoon mayor council members my name is John Shmone and I am the city serve program coordinator with the volunteer center of Santa Cruz for the city of Santa Cruz this program places volunteers within the city including city hall the mayor's office and parks and recreation along with many other departments in the city these placements are both short term meaning special events also long term volunteers that we have here at the city currently we have placed over 250 volunteers in several departments giving over 1300 hours of their time and this is just from January of this year to our current time so an amazing job that they do the individuals we are honoring today are committed to the improvement and beautification of our community here in Santa Cruz we thank them for their dedication and willingness to serve the city of Santa Cruz despite the many challenges that we all have faced recently thank you volunteers I want to say personally thank you very much and you are very much appreciated at this time I would like to introduce Miss Karen Delaney the executive executive director of the volunteer center of Santa Cruz county who will assist mayor Keely as they highlight each of the volunteer honorees that are here today thank you everyone Miss Delaney good afternoon good afternoon mayor how long you have been doing this me personally 37 years I thought it was a minute I thought it was a minute we have had this partnership with the city for 30 years and you know Johnny was just saying we had to close down the volunteer programs during COVID so in the nine months since we have reopened city serve we have had over 300 volunteers in regular placements and parks and rec has had over a thousand volunteers connected to come do outdoor projects so it is a smart no city has to invest in making sure that volunteers are engaged in their community but boy is it a smart move for you because not only is every penny you invest returned five times over in the value of labor but these folks are passionate about their cities their ambassadors for the good work your staff does with my geek here is what we know about regular volunteering people who volunteer are healthier happier and they live two years longer than people who don't volunteer and there is particular mental health benefits volunteering and getting out and connecting with your community is one of the best ways to overcome isolation and coming out of COVID that is an epidemic right now businesses who volunteer and encourage their employees to volunteer have lower absentee rates higher retention rates and better engagement for their employees communities with high volunteer rates and we are proud to say Santa Cruz has a higher than average volunteer rate for the state of California communities with higher volunteer rates more donations to nonprofits they have higher property values and it is one of those things that nits the community together and in a time when we are not only trying to deal with really important weighty issues but we have had some it is a time where there is a great pulling a part of people in public space where people do feel disconnected coming out of COVID where people social media and some of the impacts of the way people talk to each other we feel like we are more at odds when people meet each other and actually work together for the common goal that restores democracy that restores civic pride that restores our ability to work on the same team and like you were saying in the last item agree sometimes we disagree but these folks in city serve more than 1,300 of them so far this year love their city and so we are really pleased that you have partnered with us for all these years and we hope it was on for another another 50 we are going to be honoring three people today one of them is perhaps not here because he is out volunteering right now as talking to his partner but I believe that the way we are going to do this is the mayor and council members are going to read and I will hand people their certificates well first of all thank you so much Karen you are an absolute gift in our community and thank you for the fine work of helping place folks in city government I think we are stronger and better when that happens thank you so much I believe our first recipient that you are going to acknowledge is Paul Martin and if we can have the gentleman come on up now listen now listen to this Paul Martin Paul Martin Mr. Martin you are not going to escape that hang on just a second let me tell people a little bit about you so Paul is engaged in the graffiti vandalization removal project in other words that if you can get graffiti removed within about a day of when it goes up the incidents go down and the gentleman has been doing this for well on your hats 25 years 20 hours a week 20,000 volunteer hours in our community God love you that is great work and it is something we don't see every day is because of your fine work you would make some remarks well I'll try to keep it all positive here I would love to see some consequences for the people that are doing all this but I wouldn't appreciate the town near as much if it was just like it could get if it didn't get removed I would like I say I'm going to try to keep it all positive here on YouTube there's several good videos called graffiti downtown Oakland if you look at these YouTube videos you'll see what it could be here and it is depressing up there thank you yes I do it because I don't like graffiti I work with Karen in the county program back when they had a county program and Norm did too thank you for the recognition it is an ongoing I just saw four tags on the way here I'm trying to get in the way back thank you thank you sir very very much Norm Nelson is also one of the folks we want to we want to acknowledge he works alongside Paul he gives an hour every Sunday and has accumulated 500 hours of volunteer service also helping us be as graffiti free as possible and that has a wide-ride range of beneficial effects in our community and we thank the gentlemen greatly is he here with us today not today Norm is not here but can I hand it off to him if it would help him feel welcome we could all scribble something on it if you would like but seriously thank you so much and thanks to your buddy for helping out so dug on much it's just great yeah well we certainly appreciate that thank you Suzette McMillan I hope is here there we go there she is volunteering every week with collection management services and Santa Cruz and at the public library she participates in ongoing projects such as diagnosing and mending library damaged media items in addition she works independently with library vendors compiling lists of needed media order and replacements she saved the library a tremendous amount of money by giving damaged materials a second life instead of immediately discarding them this is so wonderful of you just can't thank you enough this is terribly kind of you to generate your generous excuse me kind of generous of you to donate your time for such a positive cause congratulations and I would invite you Miss McMillan we'll never have a we'll never forget a word you had to say we certainly do thank you and encourage you to continue your commitment Mr. Laney we want to say we're looking forward to seeing you added volunteer projects and I want to have a special thanks to Johnny and Christina Thurston our volunteer engagement team this year's been hoppin besides restarting these volunteer programs they have been our point people for community cleanups so they were the folks who were out with the muck out crews in Paradise Park and down in Pajaro and still managed to engage volunteers here so we are just really pleased to be able to continue to find a way to connect the community and my one request since everybody's having a love fest here is I really appreciate taking the time to thank volunteers and one of the things we can do all of you can do all of us can do is when we're out in the community speaking just take a moment wherever you are and have a shout out to the people who are out there not just talking about problems but actually taking action to solve problems because there's a lot 1300 folks are out there every year working putting sweat equity into our beloved community and it's lovely that they have this one day but I think in terms of repairing that social space and getting a new generation to value that and join just simply calling them out and having them raise their hands because they're not the folks who are going to come up and say a lot during public they're probably never going to come and say anything to you during their two three minutes because instead they're out there making life better for folks so for those of us who do have a mic it's a simple thing that we can do at every minute at every meeting hey who here is a volunteer for whatever raise your hand thank you because there are so many solutions already happening it's just that the folks who are doing them don't necessarily get the mics so thank you Karen Delaney thank you and thank all of the volunteers thank you to your staff as well we are a better community because of it thank you all so very very much we are now going to move to our 2024 proposed excuse me oral communication I knew that look I find it took five months but I know the look now thank you Ms. Bowers this would be the opportunity we're under oral communication this is the opportunity for anyone to address us on a matter under our jurisdiction but not on today's agenda we have a couple of minutes to do so would you like to do so come on up good afternoon good afternoon Mayor Keely and council members well Karen is a hard act to follow but it's nice to speak to you when we're all on a high note my name is Kate Hinenkamp I am the operations manager at the community action board immigration project and I'm here today to invite you all to celebrate with us community action month which is in May every year but first I want to take a moment just to thank you I want to thank the council and the county for including CABS immigration project in the core funding cycle this past year thanks to your support we have been able to launch a new office in the city of Santa Cruz where we are now providing our full spectrum of free and very low cost immigration legal services which include docker renewals, green card renewals citizenship applications legal consultations and family and humanitarian based applications for legal permanent residency and we're all we're providing all those things now in the city of Santa Cruz which we've never been able to do before and no other nonprofit has offered that before and our site is at 501 Soquel avenue just down the hill from restaurant Italiano and we're sharing the space with two other long-time CAB programs you may be familiar with the rental assistance program and also the day worker center which moved from Live Oak and is now in the city so we're really excited it's a new hub in North County for CAB and we're serving residents of the city of Santa Cruz as well as surrounding neighborhoods look out later this year for invitation we'll do an open house at that site and we would love to have you join us so now I want to step back to talk about community action month as I mentioned all over the country may is community action month and you may not be aware that CAB is actually a part of a nationwide network of community action programs we're in all 50 states and US territories there's over a thousand programs in almost every county in the nation and we're working together dedicated to eliminating poverty and creating social change and I'd like to invite you to join us in assisting low-income families to achieve economic security and well-being and we have a couple of specific asks of you the first is continuing to partner with CAB on initiatives and programs that make a positive impact on those we serve including low-income farm workers day workers youth seniors and families I'd also like to ask you to be a champion for efforts that support greater equity in our community which I know many of you are and I just have to do a little shout out to councilmember Watkins so thank you for speaking at my child's graduation from OSS high school today we did it I know that's one way that she supports equity in our community and it means a lot I also invite you to learn more about CAB's programs and to schedule a visit with us especially at the 501 Soquel site to see our programs in action and finally I'd like to ask you to consider personally donating volunteering and spreading the word with your family and friends about the problems of poverty and how CAB is addressing and how all of us are addressing solutions through direct services and social change and if you'd like to learn more about CAB our website is CABinc.org and just want to thank you for your time your attention and your partnership thank you very much thank you and we have someone online we do not have someone online good afternoon sir hey Brad Snyder I have to ask is this public comment on the volunteer item or just general this is normally more at five sorry okay so yeah okay I have something to say let's see the thing I touched on at a former prior meeting about the point when you're going past the river from main beach between Seabright and that adjustment of land that people love to walk on but there's just no safety type railing and it's been that way for maybe a decade I can't remember the exact year that for one reason or another was taken out I think a lot of people in the community if it was discussed you know real directly should be done there I think a lot of people would agree that having a safety railing and letting people go down there I just remember this one instance a gentleman he had crutches because he'd recently broken a bone in his leg or something and he was just sitting there and just looking out over it and this is back when you could walk out and you know his friend asked him what do you think you're going to do I think I'm going to go out to the point I just thought about it like it's a very healing thing walking out there and it was you know like you know what exactly 29.3% of our you know entire economy is based on tourism but like when people come here you know going out there is a really neat interesting cool thing so that's my opinion today thank you so much anyone online miss printer under royal communications yes there was someone who was unable to speak at oral communications so I just wanted to convey their message on if that's okay but please proceed okay so let's see this is regarding and maybe I think other everybody else might have been contacted as well but there was a concern from a community member regarding a letter to the editor in the good times that she wanted to bring up and speak to the concern of the anonymous hateful speech is what was written and the effect it has in the community in harm it creates especially the queer and trans community right now where nationwide there's huge public safety concerns and so they wanted to bring that concern to our community and they were really upset about that here in the community and the choice that it was published in this way without a dialogue or context and so I wanted to just suggest that the health and all policy committee could discuss that further perhaps or get back to the community member through that ones and so yeah. Thank you. Anyone else under oral communication we do have someone online can you recognize? This is Garrett. I've never thought national problems like homelessness, income inequality or inflation by the city's mission or its business to solve especially using methods of full on socialism. It doesn't take a genius to understand if the city offers outside subsidies compared to neighboring cities or certain kinds of excess nonprofit presences the city will import subsidized poverty into the city with lower city revenues. Housing bonds are outrageously expensive to start with because at today's rates half the cost is interest money going to the banks and not to purchase whatever the bonds were intended for. Also if either the city or well for exclusion property tax deadbeat nonprofits by the property or in a partnership that reduces the property tax role forcing governments to seek more taxes in every way possible to fund the existing services if the county wants to turn sanctuaries into the designated permanent county dump for homelessness section 8 welfare all while Jesse street methods that can be a little too much love support depending on how much and where these people come from the latest housing bond idea of the government to help assist the public and bringing a household bond measure is a mockery of the differences in law regarding initiatives of the public versus the other legislators to raise taxes for special purposes. I will say that this is not a requirement and a rush front running evasion of a proposition requirement government reason list of taxes and fees. If the massively failed socialist measure M and vacant home tax initiatives qualified so will this. I will save my basic thoughts on the details of a ballot measure for another opportunity to speak but basically the public needs to get their max monies worth and there are ways to do it if you are willing to do your part anyone else online. We have completed with oral communication we will move to consideration and a presentation of the 2023-24 fiscal year budget. Mr. Hoffaker good evening mayor city council members of the community it's my pleasure to briefly kick off the start of our 2024 fiscal year budget briefings over this afternoon and throughout your day tomorrow. So thank you for the time and attention to this important topic. I did want to share that over the past two budget cycles we have really made a concerted effort to demystify what is now a half billion with a B annual operating budget across all of our funds and departments and as you all have in front of you an over 544 page budget document to be exact through a process of really creating opportunities for all employees to have an opportunity to understand our budget to be part of the budget decision making process and have more regular communications both with our employees and members of the community to take a really informed approach to building out what we believe to be a very thoughtful set of recommendations before you this afternoon. So with that, I did want to start by thanking our finance team, our department heads all of our department budget leads. There were many team members in our organization that were part of building out this comprehensive budget that you have in front of you this evening. You have a slide deck, sorry. It is the CM budget presentation. One moment please. It'll be more interesting if there's slides. What would we do without Bonnie and Laura? Thank you. Good news is we don't have to find out. All right, next slide please. So as we all know the budget was developed with a backdrop of tremendous uncertainty and challenges throughout this past year. We spent quite a bit of time this afternoon talking about the significant damage and toll that the accelerating climate change and storm impacts have had on our community just as one example. Oh, can you go back one slide? We also continue to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic and move towards a path of recovery. We've been navigating nearly half a century high inflation and the toll that that's had on our economy, along with ongoing economic uncertainty as we look at the horizon. And yet throughout the process I'm incredibly proud of the way in which our city team, our city council have been able to really step up in the moment and continue to provide critical services to our community throughout these challenges. Next slide. So we don't have time this afternoon to really run through all the great work that's happened over this past fiscal year but I did want to take just a moment to highlight some of the major efforts that have been underway over the course of this past year. That includes really concerted effort towards modernizing and building out our organizational capacity across all of our departments and moving through our all in shaping our future review of a number of service programs with support from our city employees. As I mentioned earlier, moving through storm response and recovery efforts, really having an all hands on deck full speed ahead work on our west cliff recreational area, as well as the tremendous amount of work that happened across all of our city departments through the storm events from having our water staff repairing water mains to clearing storm drains to continuing to keep our community safe through what was a very challenging month and a half of storms. As we've also celebrated over this past eight year rena cycle, Santa Cruz is amongst a very small group of jurisdictions across California. In fact, only 6% of jurisdictions in the state of California that has reached all of our regional housing need allocation targets in every income category and exceeded many of those as well. So we're excited for this cycle ahead but certainly worth pausing to celebrate that great work that's underway. And we are entering into a phase of a number of very exciting downtown projects that are underway, including long range planning efforts with the downtown expansion plan, ground breaking of the La Jolla project approval of the downtown and affordable housing library project approvals and the list goes on and on. So excited to see really our downtown moving into the future with some very exciting projects. Our homelessness response team continues to do tremendous work really focusing on upstream solutions to homelessness in ways that we've not been able to achieve in the past implementing our homeless action plan and continuing to connect unhoused individuals in our community with services. We also, as part of a hearing just recently with the California Coastal Commission, received approval of the oversized vehicle ordinance and in tandem with that there's been really important work around standing up safe parking programs. In fact, a model that we hope can be scaled to other parts of the state great work underway on that front and we continue to move forward with implementation with the council's recent approval of the 2030 climate action plan. This year's budget was developed with three lenses, inform, invest, and innovate. The first acknowledges our commitment to transparency and wanting to ensure that our staff, community, local businesses and council understand the budget how decisions are being made and have opportunities to weigh in throughout the process. We plan to continue to prioritize and invest in our people, modernize our services and develop intentional long range strategies to invest in our infrastructure needs. And lastly, as we approach all of this work, we have a commitment to innovation in the delivery of our services and strategic investments as well as exploring additional sustainable revenue streams. And I know the council and many of our staff have been engaged in those efforts. So with that, I'm going to go ahead and hand over to Elizabeth Cabell who's going to take the next portion of our budget hearings and appreciate the council's time. Mr. Cabell, good afternoon. Good afternoon, mayor and council. Elizabeth Cabell, the finance director. Today, I'd like to start by looking at our fiscal year 2024 budget and as you have the 544 page document, I'll try and condense that into 10 minutes. And we'll start by reviewing the budget process, the focus and themes that guided development of the budget and then dive into an examination of the general fund. We'll take a high level look at what we'll look, dive in and look in detail at the general fund. Then take a high level look at the proposed capital investment program as well as the citywide operating budget and conclude with looking at what happens, what we're projecting for after fiscal year 24 and then take, bring it back to you for comments and any questions. Ms. Cabell, if I might for purposes of us administering our business here we are, if I understand it, we are going to go through essentially six items here. The overview, the public comment, economic development and housing, planning, community development, city attorney's office and homelessness response. Is that correct? That's correct. My guess is that doesn't get done in 20 minutes. We are at just about five o'clock and for purposes of a nutrition augmentation meeting so I suspect council members are going to want to have a bite to eat and so that the departments can also plan on when will their presentation be here. I'm going to guess that not counting the dinner break we're going to be here for three or three and a half or so hours. Is that a fair estimate? Anybody have an estimate on that? Laura Schmidt has an estimate. Well, there we go. Ms. Schmidt, good evening. Thank you, Mayor. Before you factor in public comment, we had estimated about 2.5 hours so you deduct amounts 10 minutes so we have about two hours and 20 minutes along with a nutritional supplemental conversation meeting should that take place. Nutrition augmentation. Government speak. We will do that. How about we do this? Would this work for folks? I don't think there's any way we're going to power through this without a break at all. Let's do this. Let's take your overview, take a break, come back here with four departments. Anybody okay with that? Anybody have an objection to that? Ms. Cavill, good evening. Thank you. So the budget process began in October and has been a team effort. Representatives from each department met with the finance budget team bi-weekly. The culmination of those meetings is the presentation of the budget book containing not just proposed budgets for each fund and department but about the city, the budget process, goals, accomplishments, performance metrics and the city-wide staffing plan. The final step in the process is budget adoption, which is on the calendar for the first council meeting in June. The focus continues to be on the re-envision Santa Cruz recovery plan introduced in February of 2021. The strategy has three primary elements, fiscal sustainability, downtown and business revitalization infrastructure. In fiscal year 23, our budget themes were recovery, rebuilding, refocusing. In fiscal year 24, we look to the next steps to inform, invest and innovate. These themes, along with the focus areas previously mentioned, serve to guide the budget process. Innovation has been especially important this year as we maintain status quo discretionary budgets despite inflationary increases in many supplies and services. Departments were asked to absorb many of these increases to examine their budgets and determine how to do more without additional funding. We are beginning the second phase of our long-range financial planning project which culminates in the development of our fiscal sustainability plan. A key part of that project is focused on the long-term investment in people and infrastructure to ensure a sustainable future for our community. We've implemented several new elements in the budget this year and these were presented to the budget team early in the process so that departments had time to review and be involved in the implementation. So specifically, what's new in the fiscal year 24 budget, we've implemented a new cost allocation plan that replaces the one developed in 2012. The new plan uses various distribution bases, things like agenda items, to allocate the costs of central service departments such as HR, finance, IT, out-to-the-operating departments such as public works, economic development and water. We've also budgeted vacancy savings across all activities based on a seven-year average. Prior to fiscal year 24, we only included vacancy savings in the general fund budget and it was not broken out by department or activity. Our new methodology includes all activities and provides departments with a more accurate representation of personnel costs. We've seen significant increases in liability and property insurance costs. In fiscal year 23, the general fund absorbed 2.3 million of this increase. In fiscal year 24, our risk division worked with the actuary to allocate these cost increases over all departments and all funds. Finally, we've made a change to the annual $5 million transfer from the general fund to the capital investment program fund for new projects. Because we are in the middle of the development of our long-range financial plan, much of which is focused on addressing the over $350 million in unfunded CIP projects, we decided to pause this transfer for fiscal year 24. This gives us the opportunity to finish our long-range financial plan to focus on the progress of current projects, formally close out fiscal year 23 and come back to council at mid-year to request general fund dollars for CIP projects. Now, looking specifically at the general fund, revenue is represented in this chart by the blue bars and the expenses are the gold shading in the background there. After a deficit in fiscal year 20, you can see that our revenues exceeded expenses in both 21 and 22. This was due to the receipt of one-time ARPA revenues and a surge in tourism and visitor-related taxes such as sales tax, transient occupancy tax and admissions tax. The high expenses projected for fiscal year 23 are due to $11.2 million of carry forwards from fiscal year 22. This $11.2 million represents resources that are committed through purchase orders or projects and are held in a committed fund balance. Any deficit at the end of fiscal year 23 will be covered by this committed fund balance. We will not have to dip into our reserves. For fiscal year 24, we are proposing a revenue budget of $132.1 million and an expenditure budget of $133.6 million with a $1.5 million budget deficit to be covered by fund balance. This chart shows revenue from our top tax sources as well as the category of fees for fiscal year 19 through 2000 what we are proposing for 2024. After dips in fiscal year 20 as expected, everything has returned to pre-pandemic levels all of our major revenue sources. For expenditures, this table there's a couple of ways of representing the expenditure side of things. This table compares how we expect to end fiscal year 23 with what we are proposing in the fiscal year 24 budget. This table shows that the revenue of the services shows an 11% increase year over year which is a result of more accurate budgeting of vacancies as I mentioned earlier and increase health benefit and pension costs as well as new contracts with five bargaining units. The large increase in the supplies and services category is due to an accounting change in the recording of cost allocation charges between general fund departments because it all netted to zero. We are changing that practice in fiscal year 24 to more accurately reflect the true cost of service for each department. The fiscal year 24 budget reflects $10 million in service revenue to central service departments like finance, HR, IT, and $10 million in service expenses to the operations department. This table shows that the cost allocation charges are $10 million in service expenses to the operating department. This all nets out to zero but it looks like there is an increase on both sides. If you exclude that $10 million that is in there for cost allocation charges you can see that the department services and supplies are a status quo budget of about $33 million. This chart is another way of looking at the actually I should talk some more about these numbers but the capital outlay another number that is different from 23 and 24, the capital outlay represents the carry forward of multi year projects and many of those commitments or any of them that are not spent in 23 will be carried forward into 24. The most notable difference between fiscal year 23 and the 24 budget is the transfers to the CIP and streets funds. I talked a little bit about the $5 million that is in fiscal year expected for fiscal year 23 includes $6 million transferred to the CIP fund $1.1 million to the CIP streets fund and another $3.3 million in project carry forwards. In fiscal year 24 we only budgeted $2 million. $1 million is going to the CIP fund and $1 million to the CIP streets fund. That is why there is such a significant difference between fiscal year 23 and the CIP fund. Another way of representing or showing the $133.6 million in expenditures proposed expenditures for 24. This chart shows it by department. An important part of our fiscal sustainability plan is building up our reserves. The government finance officers association or GFOA recommends having two months operating expenditures or just two months. They are two separate things. Our fund balance in the operating general fund primarily consists of those committed resources I spoke about earlier that 11 million of projects and POs that are committed that have been committed for specific purposes. And most and any of those that are not spent will be carried forward into the next year. Our current policy requires that any fund balance above and basically an operating reserve. Our goal is for this to be 5% of general fund budgeted operating expenditures. Fiscal year 22 was the first year that we ended the year with enough of a surplus to have an operating reserve. And right now that reserve is about 5.26 million. Our stabilization fund holds two reserves. Our pension reserve and our emergency stabilization reserve. Both reserves have specific resources. The emergency reserve can be used to sustain general operations in case of a declared emergency. And the pension reserve is an IRS section 115 trust that can only be used to cover costs associated with employee pension benefits. The purple line represents our reserve goal which based on the proposed 24 budget is close to 19 million. While the chart seems to indicate that we are over that goal in 2022 and 23. The pension reserve that burgundy bar there at the top is restricted for a specific purpose so we are still short of having two months expenditures and unrestricted reserves. Our stabilization reserve policy was established in 2013. So as part of the development of our long range financial plan we plan to do a comprehensive review of our reserves and we'll be bringing updated policies to you as well. Our capital investment program for fiscal year 24 we're proposing 132.2 million in projects. At close to 65 million the enterprise funds which is the biggest blue bar there. And the smaller the smaller pie over there is all the enterprise funds broken out. So that represents about 65 million almost half of that 132 million. And then we have two special revenue funds gas tax and the clean beaches special revenue funds and our IT and street CIP funds which are a little bit smaller slices there. The funding sources for these projects are varied and consists of federal and state federal state and local grants but also includes measure D successor agency FEMA, ADBG lots of other things. Citywide our operating budget is 100 and 3 million and as Matt mentioned all of this put together we're getting close to that half a billion dollar mark. The largest operating budget is the general fund followed by all of our 500 price funds. So looking ahead to 2024 and beyond we expect expenses to continue to exceed revenues and are continuing to look for innovative opportunities and sound investment approaches to ensure the city's vibrancy and the local ad hoc budget and revenue committee continues to meet and focus on new revenue opportunities including ballot measures for 2024. We've engaged a consultant to work on a cost recovery fee study and we continue to pursue and leverage state and federal funding opportunities. Given our increasing expenses what does the future look like as far as reserves. Fiscal years 22, 23 and even 24 are pretty stable based on the large influx that we received from ARPA money in 22 and are committed fund balance. Our reserves we don't project having to dip into them in 23 and even into 24 but as you look at 25, 26 and moving forward you can see 25 we start to dip into our operating reserve and then 26 we start to draw down our pension reserve. So by 28 both of those reserves as we continue to go would be depleted. On that not so happy note. Thank you for your time and let me know I've got the budget team is here as well if there are any questions or anything else that I can clarify. Thank you very much for that presentation. Thanks to the city manager and your team as well as yours Ms. Cavill for putting this budget document together. I think it is very readable, very accessible even for budget folks and I think that's for public agencies that's terribly important to you. Not everyone does that, not nearly everyone does that so thank you Mr. City Manager thank you. Questions or comments? Okay I will excuse me. I just have one. Madam Vice Mayor. This isn't meant to sound rhetorical but I'm actually asking this. If there's 13 million we're getting that. What we'll use if we go all electric for vehicles to augment that? Is it something the finance committee can think about? It's a challenge. This is actually something you may know more about this but this is actually something that the state government is wrestling with quite a bit right now is how to essentially I suspect the City Manager has more information. The Mayor is correct and I appreciate the question because it has been a roading revenue base for quite some time now as vehicles become more efficient and obviously the shift now to all electric and the state mandates that are coming along with it so there's quite a bit of discussion in Sacramento around what that model could look like in the future as well. Thank you for your attention to it for sure. If you would I suspect that anything is fair game before we get into departments. This is the general topic of the introduction to the budget. Let me ask you a couple of questions. Take a look at what for me anyway is page 45. This would be the property tax trend and the sales tax are very good. Thank you. We know a couple of things are true on property taxes at an absolute minimum. The revenue we receive should go up 2% every year simply on the Prop 13 principle of going up with the market but no greater than 2% a year. Second contributing factor to any projection on property tax as I understand it would be reassessments upon resale or new construction. I'm wondering this looks as if you are projecting property taxes to come in slightly lower and that as the former county treasurer I wonder about that and how we would project that. The property tax includes property tax but also RPTTF funds that come through as well as secured supplemental and the fees are all encompassed in there. We did have a decrease in RPTTF of about 200,000 so that's one reason it went down there was also projected in 23 a decrease in the secured as well and an increase in fees. So not the big property tax but yes there was projected to be a decrease in not significant I think was about 100,000 so in other words our property tax includes more than just the actual property it's got the secured, the unsecured and the RPTTF and the fees are all in there. The county's proposed budget with regard to property tax forecasting looks different than this so I know they get a different share I understand that. Let me move to sales tax for a second again you're showing sales tax declining very marginally certainly very marginally and I'm wondering about that in so far as we're having increased economic activity during the upcoming budget year quite a bit actually will come online I believe I'm interested in understanding then how we would project sales tax to come in lower. So part of this we did have actually have a meeting with HDLR consultants this morning and part of that is the way that especially with Amazon and some of the larger companies how the sales tax is coming in there's been some differences in the way of reporting I think also the other reason we're projecting it to stay pretty stable at least for the next year or so is there was that huge spike in 22 as everybody started shopping again and we definitely don't expect that to continue that was an anomaly so I think that what we're really seeing is it to sort of level out so I don't think that we are projecting a small decrease there but overall I think what we're really consistent we're not I mean there'll be little bumps in the next probably 25 and 26 but not as much as we saw in 22. That's interesting to me in the following regard unlike some communities even some cities our size we don't have for example a lot of auto dealers where you get a sale and boy that sales tax is a chunk you know we have to sell like 5000 trinkets downtown to get even close so my point is not to disparage that it's to say that we are different every community is different but we don't have what I would call large sales tax generators where somebody goes in and makes a purchase and the sales tax is several thousand dollars on it much more likely that a high in purchase in our community might have a few hundred dollars in sales tax on it so the reason I raised that is that this notion that people came out of the gate and spent a lot of money I think that's undeniably true the facts support that but for us which is not a high volume in terms of individual purchases we have a different reliance we have a very large denominator across which sales tax is spread as opposed to a narrower one but higher numerator so I'm wondering if that holds up so it looks like I'm looking at the projections that we have going out for 24, 25 and 26 and this is by category so as you mentioned auto is the one that's going up construction is going to be going down overall what we're projecting from fiscal year especially 26 forward is about a half percent increase overall so I think that again there's some ups and downs in the categories but I do think that overall it's going to we're projecting that kind of 2% it's going to be that range of increase moving forward I do think by the way on your answer to these first two questions I very much support the idea being it's the only conservative bone but conservative on your revenue estimates and not being conservative on your expenditure estimates will serve us all well over time the utility users tax trend that does raise the issue of what could possibly result this year or the budget year what could possibly be the result of a or the cause rather of a reduction in utility users tax and off the top of my head I don't know before the end of hearings tomorrow with that thank you the transient occupancy tax trend is also of interest I know we're bringing on I believe for new ish or remodeled and reopened hotels in the fiscal in the budget year we'll start on July 1st and this is a fairly small looks looks to be like maybe there's a less than a million dollar maybe 750,000 I'm not sure what it is 750,000 or so and increase revenue there on TOT what assumptions are you making about those new hotels we have big hotels crews in Lava here coming online from 28 and then here I think the assumptions are based on the information that we economic development has a consultant that we work with with our long range financial plan based on room rates and the occupancy and I think a lot of it too is again that sort of leveling out from 22 so we had a large increase we don't expect that or 20 going into 23 so we have a large leap to continue so I don't know again exactly what the number of new rooms is but that is all figured in there and based on what the projections are for travel, average daily roommate and things like that I'm not going to argue with our experts certainly because I'm not one but I will say again I think this is a conservative TOT estimate given the nature of two of the hotels that came online this year and will be in next years and they contributed very very little this fiscal year that we're in right now but adding them in for next year they're in our town they would be considered somewhat upscale and so I'm interested in that number and part of this too is the projections are including the possibility of a recession so I think that part of what we're looking at is that things may not and this looking at all the trends that have happened in the past what we expect to happen in the future that's sort of some of where those numbers are coming from as well let me ask you a couple of questions on the fee side of life you showed a slide of the various enterprise funds that we have in the city and those have fees associated with largely covering the expenses within those enterprise funds is that correct exactly do we collect 100% of the cost or do we subsidize any of those enterprise funds with general fund none of those are subsidized 100% covered by fees thank you thank you you'll bear with me for just one second thank you what excuse me what assumptions are you making on our workers compensation fund I have to check with Ross and HR on that get back to me on that one or not to me get back to the council on that thank you during midyear budget discussions you were kind enough to agree to provide the council with a statement or a report is overstating you provided a document on May the 10th on sales tax the context was we were discussing street vendors and they were required to have a business license and sales tax remittance document my recollection is that we require street vendors to display their business license we do not necessarily require that they display their sales tax document we'll visit that later on in these hearings I suspect but the issue of how much you might be captured if every street vendor was required to actually have and remit sales tax that it would get us about $17,500 it's really a rather de minimis amount and you think that that holds up based on as you can see we've had five that have reported so based on those numbers and also it's they're required to display their sellers permit in order to get a sellers permit you have to have a business license and required to display their sidewalk vending permit in order to get that you have to have a business license and a CDTFA sellers permit I don't know if $17,500 for every single vendor is an accurate estimate but I feel if anything it's on the high side and so I think that if we were to guesstimate that that's I'm sorry it's $15,200 I'd be quite happy if it was $17,000 per vendor that would make me very very happy but that's based on saying that each vendor brings in approximately $15,000 so that's kind of the which I felt was a little bit anything kind of high so if we're saying that that would be $17,500 total in sales tax revenue versus the $3,000 that we've received so far okay thank you for that I have a question on the city manager city manager at one of our council meetings probably month to month and a half ago the council was doing some work to improve safety improvements on Laurel Street heading up towards California as I recall and I pegged on a request which Mr. Condati was kind enough to say thought it was relevant enough we could we could go with it and that was for the public works department to report back during budget hearings on the 10 most on the 10 busiest intersections to make sure those are as safe as possible currently oftentimes at those we have folks who are sitting on those and seeking contributions from folks or whatever it might be it seems wholly unsafe to do that both for the people on the median as well as people who are other pedestrians as well and folks who are riding bikes, motorcycles, cars anything else I have not as yet received that will we receive that prior to the public works budget being undertaken here? Appreciate the question Mayor Keely and we do remember the original direction and the intent behind it when it comes to the safety of our medians and intersections it is something that our transportation team within public works would be tasked with much of their attention as we were discussing earlier today has been on West Cliff so I'll have to circle back to them to see whether or not they have that proposal ready as part of this discussion I don't know that offhand what would be irrespective of how ready they are we need to report back even if it's I understand they're very busy we'll get a report back if we need more we can work on that yes there will be a report back thank you very much those conclude my initial comments generally speaking on the budget council member Brown thank you I just have some of my questions about projections on next year's revenues for different tax sources were answered so I just have one question and it's on it's page 62 I'm just trying to understand the interfund and interagency charges item which is a significant increase I just notice really big changes and I'm wondering if we could just get a sense of what that is about because we're going from 5 million to 18 million in interagency and interfund charges it's the cost allocation so you're changing the cost allocation to I'll say anyway it's just that it was never recorded before so what we have is there's an increase on the expense side but there's a corresponding increase on the revenue side so you're seeing this large increase here but there's also a corresponding I notice that and so it's just about the allocation nothing new for the initial questions no seeing here none Mr. City Manager we microphone so what we can do is are we prepared to take a break at this point would we be ready would we be ready to take a break at this point we could are you finished with your initial comments and presentation Ms. Cavill okay let me ask if there are folks we're going to take public comment and then we will take a brief recess for a dinner break let me ask if there is anyone with us in chambers this evening who would like to make a comment on the proposed 2023-24 fiscal year city budget Ms. Bush do we have someone online certainly good evening yeah hi this is Garrett hey my stomach is crumbling too anyway I question your 64 thousand 75 city population data figure the 22 census data says it's 61,800 as of July 22 with a two year decline but hey as with a lot of government numbers who's double check and account I mentioned because the ratio of the city's head count growth versus a declining public population growth rate has been going up for a long time the population peak here in 2020 and is now in actual decline as long-term growth rates have been declining for decades despite the media propaganda as the students returning to in-room learning is some real growth the real negative population growth rate compares unfavorably and unsustainably to the plus 1.1 percent head count rise for the city next year there is a portion of what the city does that does represent actual work for example CIP that creates asset wealth but the number of people buying that is going down as well as the portion that doesn't produce wealth is going up I did not see the total city residents public debt also yearly payment obligations with a year of history and I think you should start including all the public debt in your report all the city bonds and all the city public utility debt everything in a chart you do know what current and total future bond utility debt costs are I'll bet very soon the public debt will have increased over an extra billion dollars or so in just the last few in the next few years I see even with rising property and sales tax revenue higher to a tax and would seem an onslaught of fee increases the general fund will decline once again the part where you budgeted starting to fund an effective reserve fund target with months of operating reserve wasn't all that clear to me but I do congratulate you and not spending every single cent you could have running the general fund dry I'm not an accountant but the massive discrepancy between the much lower bottom line of the summary of other projected revenues compared to other projected expenses doesn't seem like a favorable trend that could continue every year and more so for the general fund however you should take this as a compliment is better than I expected and that's a different than where the city was projected to be now last year since annually the other revenue and expenses now dwarf the general fund I comment here in principle about citizen loyalty the city should provide what the citizens need want and are willing to pay for but when you take the big outside money who pays you're really doing what they need want and willing to pay for those desires might not be the same and things like I don't know I think the real trail example comes to mind some people mistakenly think the government is the embodiment of the people but it is not instead it is more like a huge monopoly of force with its own agendas its own problems its own desires and wants its own self-interest its own narratives and beliefs and the only check on that beside the courts is the elected representatives who supposedly act as proxy for the people we know that the model is a disaster at the immoral and corrupt federal level with its warhawk neocons what we worry debt inflation idiots by the change covid brothers the toiletarians etc my possible foolish hope is that it could possibly work at the local level thank you mr. Phillip anyone else online what we will do at this excuse me what we will do at this point is take a break for 30 minutes let's call that we will be back at 6 o'clock stand and recess until 6 p.m. the Santa Cruz City Council is back in session for its May 23 2023 meeting we are entertaining a discussion of the 23-24 fiscal year budget at this point we are at the departmental budget for the economic development housing department and you can find that at page 105 on the proposed budget Ms. Lipsum good evening good evening mayor welcome to chambers again thank you it's my pleasure to present the fiscal year 24 economic development and housing budget so I'm going to first start off by just briefly going through our core services organizational chart some of our achievements and then I'll get into the budget okay so our core services are business services which you typically expect for economic development but we also have our housing development division which includes housing development creation preservation we also do infrastructure development and asset management manage all the city's leases and we also have arts and culture there's a few things that are a little hard to categorize within these graffiti removal you can put that into business services also asset management and then our housing successor which is the successor agency to the redevelopment basic business services of course is the botanic and lux opening which is such a great event permitting a technical assistance promotional small local businesses collaboration citywide regional economic development initiatives during the pandemic certainly some really good regional collaboration connecting businesses with local talent we like to really promote local local businesses and really connecting among different local entrepreneurs groups like Santa Cruz works etc promoting business growth and retention financing and incentives beautification and site selection are some of the things that we provide as some of our core business services on the affordable housing side creation and assistance partnering on the actual creation of and development of new affordable housing projects providing key funding for projects in the community and of course developing the agreements and the regulatory agreements for housing projects in the community as well we also focus on affordable housing preservation which includes monitoring administering of affordable housing units throughout the city and connecting residents with housing resources and other organizations within the community and then finally on the housing and community development side we administer the CDBG and home funds around the city infrastructure development project planning for city sponsored projects this is the full sort of scale of things from the beginning of project management through completion and construction and occupancy of projects we do quite a bit of grant seeking and funding support I'll get a little more into that later and then we do project review and concept consulting for a lot of private projects along the way as well on the asset management side master planning for city properties promoting vitality of economic engines maintaining city assets as I mentioned we do and manage over 80 leases and license agreements across the city we also work on acquisitions and dispositions within the city purchase of opportunity sites Sky Park currently we're working on that Caltrans a few others I'll talk about in just a little bit leasing and assets we have both the former redevelopment agency assets some of the eastside parking lot some of the assets that are a little unusual as well as all of our commercial spaces in our parking garages around the city and then we also have some former redevelopment housing assets as well clicker is not wanting to move forward there we go okay arts and culture last one public arts program we have a mural matching grant program we also have some sponsorships of murals this of course is one of the sea walls we have the graphic traffic signal boxes that's one of my former favorites and then the scrap program Santa Cruz Recycled Art we also do sponsorships and projects with supportive community groups in public places and promoting the art of business both with the ED side and the business side and work a lot with arts council and other arts organizations in the community this is hard to read at this distance this is our organizational chart and I'm just so pleased this year that we are fully staffed this is like the first time and I think maybe a decade that we've been fully staffed and really just in time because we have so many projects underway and so many initiatives from our affordable housing projects that we're working on in the downtown to a number of major sort of business initiatives and you know support as we're moving forward with an expansion hopefully which will come before you next month of the downtown district assessment we just have a lot of work underway and still doing the pandemic recovery and assisting businesses so it's a really critical time to have a full team and it's such a great team I feel like we have and I've said this so many times before but it's so true you know a small but mighty team and the whole city team across across the city is just exceptional and I feel that you know doubly so of course about our ED and housing team and I'll just take this time to acknowledge actually the folks that worked on preparing this year I have Kathy Mence who's online to help answer any questions and Jennifer Shelton who really pulled together a lot of the PowerPoint and a lot of the backup this year as well as Tiffany Lake who is also very familiar with our budget and so just a great team all around but it really was a whole department effort for all the contributions and accomplishments into this year's budget. We also have and I should just mention that our new folks are across both our housing division and our business support division so some of you know Josie Buchanan formally with the business council and then went to grad school and now she's back in our department we're so happy that she's here Katie Ferrara is also part of our business support team Emily Watkins on our on our housing side and Jennifer Shelton on as a management analyst and then Lindsay Nelson as well as our admin so that's our full sort of compliment that we've had being able to get full to staff this year which is pretty exciting and now I want to talk a little bit about our 2023 accomplishments on our business services side we developed and implemented the parklet ordinance and that came before you recently was like a fairly involved process and I really appreciate the council support in the subcommittee as we went through that and recently you also approved our parklet incentive program so we're really excited to have that application out and to have that program to really offset the cost of getting those public parklets going forward Midtown Fridays we've expanded the weekly summer block party we've made some permanent improvements on the east side parking lot so we're really excited for that this year and looking forward to that going forward on our downtown pops program our vacant storefront activation we've supported four businesses through short-term leases we've graduated two businesses into permanent long-term leases and another two graduated from the program so we really have had some success in that program on the housing development and preservation side we've completed just recently our HUD annual action plan we've submitted a pro-housing designation application so we're waiting to hear about on that but we do feel like we've scored really well and we really did that also with the support of the planning department and then we are just busy both administering and coordinating the grants applying for more grants we've received in the last sort of 18 months 65.5 million in grants largely to go towards our affordable housing projects in the downtown and secured particularly with Congressman Panetta's support the four million in earmarks between Pact Station North and the library projects so we're really grateful and appreciative of all the grant support we've had for our housing development which of course is Emily and Jessica at our housing kickoff event that was at Cabrillo as part of affordable housing month talking about our projects and then we also recently submitted applications for infill infrastructure grant and another affordable housing sustainable community funding for the downtown library affordable mixed use projects so we're pretty excited almost like another 45 million outstanding that we're waiting to hear back on on infrastructure development and asset management side we have secured entitlements for the downtown library affordable housing project thank you for really helping us move that project forward and sort of getting to a place where we have a lot of the really great sustainable features in that project as well as the daycare and the library so that 35,000 does not include some of the elements of the roof tech and some of those in that square footage. Our theater we finished a renovation it was that historic building it was quite an effort it was more so than we realized initially with some of the wiring once we got into into the building but that is often the case with historic buildings but we now have Childish in there is one of our popups and they're just doing so great so we're extending that downtown it's such a great store and then on the wharf we just recently launched our first popup with Humble Sea which is doing really well with the revised and recirculated EIR for the wharf on the arts and culture side accomplishments we approve 15 applications to our card this is a city arts and recovery design program completed three projects and executed nine sponsorship agreements we also with the arts commission support launched three initiatives to activate public spaces to promote the creative economy and that's including that's including the wharf master plan building partnerships there's a number of really important partnerships on the in the arts areas and arts organizations such groups as UCSC performers and nonprofit service providers Andrew Pershing's project that some of you were involved in you know really working with housed and unhoused residents with artists through projects to promote communication I mean all of these are so important and the arts commission is really committed and dedicated to working with us and making sure that we are looking throughout with that equity lens throughout the city and it's a really great partnership okay now moving into the budget budget overview you can see before you a couple just notables that are just a little bit different this year if you look at the affordable housing trust fund that 21% that's largely our permanent local housing allocation that's a relatively new state program you actually look at the corresponding line item affordable housing trust fund you'll see that's 587,000 so that's actually fairly small and some years it's more like 140-ish that we received from the state so it's not a sustainable source of long-term affordable housing funding and so even though it looks like a big part of our operating revenues here when you put it in context it's really not very much for all the programs that we administer and we used to have resource redevelopment we had 2.5 million a year in the year that it was terminated that we've been really effective in leveraging grant funds but those aren't sustainable ongoing funding sources so there is a real need there budget overview operating expenses okay this is a little bit it looks a little different this year as well and I want to explain that if you look on the right hand side you'll see that top line affordable housing community development 15 million that's because that's actually showing us the expenditures as loans for the grants that we received and we're loaning them into the affordable housing projects even those that were part of our partners and we're doing the residual receipt loans because those are typically what you've leveraged for being able to secure state and federal funding so we have those in our project it then becomes a big part of our budget as we move forward so we have a lot of funding that we've reflected in this that's roughly 230,000 and we don't have the tenant improvement contributions for the wharf that we take a small percentage of wharf leases to be able to reinvest that in related tenant improvements on the wharf is not reflected in this budget. Housing projects this is just to put this in context of some of the projects on non-CIP that we've secured the local housing trust fund or grant applications that we applied for through the state affordable housing trust fund is our funding source and that is for housing and Luffy's that you know that we collect over time it's not a reliable funding source and then home and home ARP funds that you can see and how they're allocated to each of those projects and then our nine non-housing portfolio I wanted to show this because these we only have 380,000 in our CIP budget this year so most of our funding is funding that's carried over and a good portion of it are bond funds related back to redevelopment for the projects that you see in front of you we are actually moving forward now that we're fully staffed up and some of the other projects are moving forward we can move forward on some of the supporting infrastructure so downtown beautification infrastructure we have a number of those things moving forward we have the ocean street beautification we have that survey underway and the banners just went up asking the public to take the survey so we'll have that up through the end of this month and we've already had five received 550 survey responses with some really great things about beautification and safety at that intersection so we're really excited to move some of these forward this year funding efforts I mentioned this earlier grants in the pipeline we just submitted last week the state library grant for 10 million the affordable housing sustainable communities grant for 33 million and a coastal conservancy grant for the war for 5 million we on the right hand side those are grants that we've received but aren't yet budgeted because we're finalizing those grant agreements that's another 54 million impact on services this is a good problem to have we have so much under way planning has it the whole city has it with all of these housing projects we're really busy highlighting just the map to show the housing projects there's over 31 housing projects in various stages of development in the city with that comes a pretty considerable workload across the city across all the departments so that's something that in effect it's a good problem to have but it does mean that we're very busy and as we do receive these grant funds to be able to administer the funds and move those projects forward in terms of term positions related specifically to those grant funds for those projects in a way to make sure that we stay on track on budget with these projects going forward okay now briefly core services and context business services some of the things that we're doing particularly in the downtown and the next year I already mentioned the CRM the downtown management corporation expansion you can see in the lower right hand of expanding east and west to be able to absorb some of the new infrastructure that the city ambassadors provide and both the beautification outreach and just really supporting the downtown and the downtown businesses also we have the proposed hotel coming up we have our outdoor dining there's just a lot of projects that we're doing some of them still sort of recovering from the pandemic as we transition into permanent parklets going next year development these are just some of the projects that we're doing some of the projects and then we're providing support to the other projects in the list and I just would mention that for riverfront apartments Anton Pacific for the Paseo and for 530 Front Street some of the grant funds we have for infrastructure and the IIG grant will help pay for some of the public improvements that are around and be supporting those projects there's just a different view of just the amount of different projects some of the projects we're working on through the card program you can see Kathleen Crocetti's Dancing Waters you can see a number of projects on Anthony's flight on the stairs the awakening nourishing fires and of course through the arts master plan we have one of the one of my favorites when you see those sort of umbrellas that on the right hand side which is the feast of flowers by Jenny Ward so these are all arts projects that we're moving forward in the next year and with that I'm available to answer any questions that you have let me see if there are questions by excuse me I thought I heard some questions by council members council member Brunner thank you for that quick summary overview I think you briefly touched on it on the art projects and the the budget what did you say about the budget didn't reflect I missed that part when you were speaking about art the arts and culture maybe I misunderstood trying to think back what I said there are a few things in the budget oh the percent for art projects and the way they're funded which are to the enterprise funds but they reflect don't show up on specific budget pages and so 1% on those projects for other departments projects that go forward are those enterprise funds so you see the water fund and you'll see the wastewater so those in parking has one as well so those projects are part of their budget enterprise fund but we administer those going forward I also had a question on the kiosk maintenance and the proposed increase there are you able I'm looking at page 111 and if you don't know now you can come back to that I'm just wondering if there are any projects in the pipeline for those I know there has been we periodically do I know that we have a health and safety sort of state requirement for the triple sink and so as they become vacant if they don't already have them we do that so they often need roof repair so as they come up and we are transitioning now we do budget what we need to to bring the kiosks so that they're leasable going forward I think also you may have been speaking about the revenues into the kiosk fund and during COVID we suspended the parklet and so we're going to see more revenue coming back as we begin to implement them later in the fall thanks Kathy and yeah just to point that out when you look at the year end estimate for fiscal year 23 so we had a number of vacancies in two of the kiosks and I know Councilmember Bruner you know this well and so we have moved forward now in putting forward basically a new solicitation RFP to refill those kiosks but during the pandemic just in trying to support and keep our businesses particularly our kiosk businesses which are typically start-up businesses and new restaurants to really help support them we did not collect rent on a lot of those so this is reflective of the revenue and our projections for what we in a typical year have which is what we're proposing for next year that's good to know thank you thanks Kathy and I have to comment on the art again and those visuals and you know they say your budget should reflect your priorities and you know we have some very serious priorities a lot of them are invisible to people for example our water pipes and infrastructure but for art it is amazing and I'm so happy that part of our budget and our priorities as a city because it really supports artists who are often some of the lowest paid and struggling professions and it just activates our city in such wonderful ways so thank you for having that in your department and Kathy Mintz thank you for overseeing all of those programs as they come over the next year I'm just really happy to see that we are a city that really finds ways innovative ways to integrate art into everything so thank you thank you for the questions Ms. Cullentary Johnson thank you for that presentation Bonnie I have a question and a comment on page 109 with the performance measures are listed I'm trying to understand how to read the percentage change in downtown retail commercial vacancies minus one percent can you just explain what that's actually saying that we will have one percent less vacancies is that what that's saying? I believe that is what that is saying okay I just wanted to make sure I was reading as it could look like it's going in a different direction than what we want we will have one percent less vacancies in 2020 and I will say our actual downfall vacancies are really low so they were less than three percent so this is actually a big goal to modify that but I think we're there with there's so much activity now and interest in the downtown even though there are one really notable vacancy downtown there are there's a lot of activity and even those that are vacant now have leases sign leases on them and they're working on them many of them so it's pretty exciting time okay great and then so to that point the comment request I have is that I know there's a lot of work already happening around downtown revitalization and business district revitalization and glad to see and hear about the budget allocations for downtown and alley improvements and lower pacific and pacific avenue we could add that in the FY 2024 goals however is the best way to articulate that but business district downtown revitalization to sort of capture that because I know the great work is already happening and will be happening into the new fiscal year happy to thank you thank you Ms. Brown so council member Calentary Johnson asked my question related to the vacancy rate so thank you for clarifying that I'll just while I have the floor say it's amazing every year I kind of have this wonderful warm feeling when we get your your overviews and hear from you and this year there's no exception and in particular I want to call out the amazing work that you all have done to get affordable units built you know in the pipeline and getting built it's just it's incredible with the limited resources that we have the small team that you have to be able to leverage all of these funds to bring it together and make these projects happen is just incredible work so thank you and everything else as well thank you and I just want to acknowledge to our housing program manager Jessica DeWitt her background some of you know she worked for a non-profit affordable housing numerous ones before coming to the city and she's a real asset to have someone who has that experience and it just makes our whole team very cohesive and really be able to move these projects forward in a way so we and it's interesting because it's not just our housing team you know so we have you know on some of our projects side we're moving housing projects forward and mixed use housing projects forward across our development managers as well but we work across all the disciplines and projects forward so thank you Miss Watkins Thank you mayor and yes thank you Bonnie always and your team for all the great work that you do I think my question is in regards to I don't know how this would be reflected in the budget but in regards to the warriors and all that they bring in terms of their economic vitality to our downtown is that something that you can kind of be able to explain in some of the charts or not necessarily probably not in these budget pages but I can't share with you and one thing that's not reflected here and this goes into our public trust fund is we receive approximately 350,000 from the warriors on the payoff of their loan every year additionally we do receive the admissions tax we have a $1 per ticket facility use fee that goes as well into our funds so just from those original 2012 agreements we have I will say at this point we pretty much they've more than paid off the loan the $4 million loan that we gave to them originally and obviously the community benefits far exceed the monetary benefits that we've received but that was a question early on was oh we're giving this fund this loan and we're using public funds and we'll never get that back and in fact we have more than made up for the original loan that we provided and the businesses that have been able to really support the warriors and benefit from the warriors you know the specials that they have on game night you know the activity of people parking in the downtown you know walking to the warriors and hopefully you know shopping and dining in our downtown has just been real true community benefits. Yeah agreed and I appreciate you speaking to that the other thing that was brought up with Elizabeth's presentation was the just sort of fear of recession and I'm wondering how that might be factored into your budget as well. Yeah I mean our budget you know we're so much of our budget is non-general fund you know it's going with grants and many of the projects and some of it is the CDBG funding and some of the home funding so we're trying to offset as much as we can through other non-general fund sources I think as far as you know recession I mean that's more of our focus with the business support side right and that goes into some of our programs that we have with national development council for financial technical assistance with small business development center to provide free business consulting into you know the community for Santa Cruz businesses and our growth Santa Cruz loan program offering below market loans so we're really focusing on some of those opportunities as well as like for our parklets for our restaurants being able to offset you know a large portion of those cost of making those so those are the types of things we focus on on that side okay thanks I think that great thank you Ms. Lipscomb on my page 111 top item homelessness response fund 6105 is zeroed out for the upcoming year and that is a function of what that was specific funding we had provided in our budget as part of the American rescue plan funding that we had and so we provided a cab rental assistance through the pandemic so that was some specific funding we had for that that we provided as part of the homelessness response okay thank you ocean street beautification you elaborate on timing and what those elements might be yeah so we have a survey out right now and we're you know it's early or third week of May and I think we'll keep it open to the end of May early June as I mentioned earlier we've received over 557 responses as of today and now that the banners are up we expect to get even more and we're asking for feedback on the primarily the intersection but it's really our gateway this is funding we put in the budget actually when redevelopment was terminated as one of our bond funds and at that time the ocean street beautification plan sort of the ocean street corridor study was underway and we knew we really do want to do an investment on ocean street we're focused in working with a lot of the surrounding hotels right at that entryway on some safety and security measures but also beautification including some public art elements we're working with public works and looking at the median and working with the hotels and getting feedback as well as some of the residential areas surrounding that so the survey is up we can make sure I believe we have a link on our city website but we can make sure the survey is up we're getting some great feedback from members of the community on what they would like to see there even the sort of style of some of the improvements and the beautification the let's jump a couple of steps forward that's completed you've analyzed it would it be fair to think that sometime during the 23 24 fiscal year there's actual work on the ground I believe so I believe we will be able to move some elements of that plan forward in this next year I will also say that this next year is the 100 year anniversary of the giant Dipper and so we've also been talking about as this is our major gateway to the ocean and the water walk we are talking about how to work with them we have and it's been a little dormant during the pandemic but a very active banner program and so we're looking at also sort of kicking off some new banners we're looking at sort of ocean themed and we have some amazing photographs of both of West Cliff but of surfers and you know as we have the classic coming up again the beautification at least along the banners we completed the banner infrastructure a few years ago that does support these very large banners so we're excited to put that underway this year as well but we're hoping we can really get some of the intersection say the median near the intersection addressed this year very good does anybody suggest putting a big yellow sign sorry we'll move on are there other quick questions or comments members of the council certainly the ocean street beautification project that's when you come off the highway 17 onto ocean street I just noticed that it's listed under district 2 and it's marked on the map at ocean and Broadway or like ocean near Broadway in this report so it sounds like it's the funding when we created it is actually all of ocean street the idea certainly the commercial areas up to the highway was the intent I think where we're focusing at least initially is the gateway right the highway what you experience when you first come into Santa Cruz just dovetail on the exciting project around the beautification is that we are also you'll hear from Nathan a public works related to a plan pavement project for ocean as well so we're trying to coordinate this opportunity to just really enhance the experience that our community members and visitors have as they're coming in really our main gateway to Santa Cruz so I guess I want clarification on page 243 project number C512001 department economic development ocean street beautification what is that referring to the gateway or something else my CIP pages and you're looking at CIP now right do not have page numbers on them so I'm flipping through it is the same thing that I just mentioned though it was originally budgeted with our 2012 on the screen thank you it says map number nine ocean street beautification yeah and I'm not as familiar with the exact district map to see where that is but the intent of the ocean street beautification and the funding where it started is all of ocean street I would just say the commercial it's not where it connects all the way down to the river it's the more upper ocean where you have the majority of the commercial but all the way to the gateway can we have that reflected in the correct district please before the final budget thank you we can certainly have that updated thank you thank you for the questions and comments any further questions or comments thank you so much your department does a great job you're absolutely right small and mighty but it is a constant joy the work that your department does for our city across so many dimensions under such excellent conditions you know across so many dimensions under such extraordinary challenges with other levels of government your ability to leverage funds into our city which is essentially bringing our tax dollars back home from Sacramento and Washington DC it's not like it's somebody else's tax dollars those are our tax dollars and you bring them back in so we can spend them in our community and it's very much appreciated thank you Ms. Lipscomb they're a pleasure to work with and I will say actually the entire city team is a pleasure to work with because we are such a small team we really do rely on the partnerships and collaboration across all the city departments so they make everything we do better and much easier and much more fun so thank you thank you Ms. Lipscomb we were on the fourth item here this will be planning and community development Mr. Butler how are you sir doing great thank you Mayor Keely and good evening Council Bonnie thank you for pulling up the presentation and I have with me this evening Vivian Pearson and she'll be filling in for part of the presentation on the budget and also our assistant director Eric Marlatt is here with us as well alright I want to tell you about our core services our people our achievements, our goals and our budget and Vivian will cover the budget section for us and I want to start with our mission which is enhancing the quality of life safety and civic pride for our community by providing land use and development guidance through responsive respectful and efficient public service our core services include land use development and community engagement those are primarily handled in our advanced planning, our current planning and our building division we also focus on public health and safety particularly in building plan check and inspection where we're looking at structural integrity and escape and rescue and emergency lighting and a whole range of other safety measures we're looking at our rental housing stock and our existing building stock as part of both rental inspection and our code compliance functions we work with Tiffany Wise West on our climate action plan implementation as well as we implement green building functions all falling under that public health and safety component and then of course we are always striving to improve our customer service particularly as we move to online and digital services also recognizing that it's important to provide that face to face at times as well. Here are a few pictures on the left and right of our team in action at our public information counter on the left and out in the field on the right and then our code compliance team with some of the new safety gear that they just received and some of the projects in various stages of construction including the groundbreaking for the Jesse Street Apartments 50 affordable units in the bottom left there but we'll show a sampling of the other projects today in just a few moments. All right, we have 35 full-time staff members in the upcoming budget between our five divisions administration, advanced planning, current planning building and safety and code and rental and here are our team members that really make all the work happen and help deliver those services to our customers and make sure that our building stock is safe. Moving on to the achievements. Matt mentioned this in his introduction and we are really happy to have achieved the regional housing needs allocation numbers for our fifth cycle which you can see here include 910 out of 1,715 units or 53% of those units in the fifth cycle really great achievement there and of course while we are happy to celebrate that we do have a lot of work ahead of us when we look at our sixth cycle those numbers are five times the numbers that we have for our current cycle and if you look at that middle row what we've done in the fifth cycle you can see in the low income category that's where we're actually closest to achieving if the same number of units were produced in the next eight and a half years were produced in the prior eight and a half years we're closest to achieving that low income category so we've been doing good there we're still short 461 versus 562 that we need but when you look at some of these other categories like very low income that has been the hardest to produce and you can see we've got to quadruple the rate of very low income category in order to accomplish our rena targets for the next cycle so I hope to be in front of you in eight years in saying that we have accomplished that but it is a big task ahead of us just over here good news for us alright some of the other things as far as accomplishments go we currently have over 2600 units in the development pipeline over 880 of those are affordable units and about 224 of those are permanent supportive housing units and these represent work at various stages of development from initial preliminary review application through construction some of these are falling in the current rena cycle some of them will be hitting in the next rena cycle and they represent work across multiple divisions and departments so an example of the work that one of those divisions has done this fiscal year is in current planning we're on track to approve about 800 residential units this year including 189 de-restricted affordable units numerous assisted living units and memory care units and all of those across 85 discretionary permits and here is a sample of some of the larger projects that we're working on this year all of these are going to continue on to next fiscal year but just this slide right here gives you an idea of both how busy we are in our department as well as it really highlights the changing face of our city and I want to acknowledge as Bonnie was mentioning before me the work that we're doing as a team is not occurring in a vacuum we have many departments that are working with us to help bring these projects forward public works, fire, water, economic development of course are all working on these projects and I want to highlight that six of these projects up here are 100% affordable and three of those are on city-owned property where our economic development and housing department is working hard to facilitate the production of those affordable housing units in conjunction with the rest of our development partners here at the city moving on to the statistics we're on track to approve over 1650 building permits this year we're on track to field over 11,500 phone calls and walk-in customers we're on track to have nearly 10,000 inspections that includes about 2,400 in our code and rental division and about 7,400 in our building and safety division and we have a we're on track to have a building permit valuation of about 120 of over 120 million for the year and I just want to point out that the actual valuation the actual investment in our community that's coming through our building division is underrepresented by that figure the actual figure is about two to three times what that 120 million is so quite a lot of construction investment coming into our community right now some of the key policy work that we've done this year we of course completed the objective standards late last year we've been working hard on the downtown expansion plan and we have our first draft of our housing element into the state HCD housing and community development department and we'll be bringing that back to the council later this calendar year for their approval we also finished our first season of sidewalk vending ordinance implementation last summer and have kicked it off this year as well quick sampling of some of the key goals that we have coming up for this year we've got a lot of them but some of our top priorities of course are the housing element certification and our downtown plan expansion work we also are working on a new land management system our land management system is pretty antiquated and is no longer being serviced by the vendor and so it's really critical that we're able to get this system updated we'll be bringing something before the council in the next month or so both with respect to a contract request with a new vendor and also with a fee request to fund that new implementation and then finally customer service improvements are something that we're always seeking to implement the land management system certainly falls into that it will provide a lot more capability and more opportunity for 24 seven service and access to our system as well as just getting our staffing up to filling the vacancies that we currently have so that we can provide that customer service handouts and brochures and web updates of course and then our increased digital presence in online processing capabilities and I will go over to Vivian who will present to you the details of our budget great good evening mayor and city council I'm pleased to share with you the planning department's budget of nine million dollars and of the nine million dollars we have about 66% allocated to personal services and 34% towards supplies and services with less than one percent towards capital outlay now taking a deeper look at our nine million dollars we have most of about 30% of it going towards our building and safety division followed by our planning administration of 28% and the rest of the divisions and programs comprised of the remaining 42% so you'll see the breakdown of our nine million here now taking a closer look at our revenues versus expenditures our main line here are focused on our revenues and the two expenditure lines are the ones in orange and then also personnel expenditures are in blue so for revenue the difference between this upcoming fiscal year 24 compared to last year we see approximately we're estimating a slight revenue decrease of about half a million dollars and that really one of the projects go through that really impact our bottom line revenue so it's a slight decrease and then we will look into the expenditures for services and supplies and so as Elizabeth has explained in the finance departments we are impacted by the allocations and so those are a lot of the increase that we're seeing about 900 million dollars sorry 900,000 dollars going to be impacting the planning department's budget and then for personnel compared to last year we had a limited one position and so you'll see that a slight decrease and Poli and I are here are available for your questions thank you let's see if there are questions a few on page 173 the numbers that I have I don't know if that's it but it would be your page accomplishments and goals or 23 accomplishments good thank you sir the only one that has X's all across is the initiating the downtown plan expansion project community outreach and hearings and then when you turn the page the same concept is the only one that has X's all across the various dimensions so my question is this when will those community meetings begin with regard to the downtown expansion plan sure thanks for that question Mayor Keely we've had some community meetings as part of the early parts of that process and the next outreach we have some community members that have been reaching out to our team individually and we're going out to meet with them so I would encourage any members of the community to reach out to our team if they've got questions in advance of those formal community meetings we're happy to meet with folks and talk with them we do anticipate a formal additional engagement effort this summer we also recognizing the vacation schedules that many folks have that they might not be able to participate in those in a large community meeting this summer so we do anticipate having that same opportunity for people to participate online if they're not able to make that meeting seeing as we want to keep the project moving forward and so this summer while we'll be going out we'll also be offering that as a virtual opportunity to engage in the next stages of the project so I would like to share with you what we're going to be doing this summer I would also note we will be back in front of the council in June related to this with a contract amendment the additional direction that council provided earlier this year we've been hard at work with the consultant to make sure that we can implement that project and have the funding for the rest of the project on track thank you Mr. Butler it does occur to me that what happens in the downtown expansion areas perhaps the most profound and significant change in our history in 100 years in terms of one particular concentrated area downtown I don't think it's I think I say this without fear of contradiction there is more than a little bit of public interest in what that's going to be people are concerned is this going to be something they like or don't like we know that we don't have frankly a lot of options to doing this concentrating much of our growth as required by the state of California to concentrate that south of Laurel so that we can have the lightest touch possible on the rest of the community specifically in what we would call neighborhoods as opposed to the downtown expansion area all of that leads me to say I would encourage you to look at a an additional perhaps hybrid meeting you have the first one in June I think you said or during the summer and then another one maybe online at a later date please consider that second one being a hybrid meeting so folks can show up in person and participate on electronically if they wish to but that's your call but I would encourage you to do that I think that the degree to which there's no surprises for the community on this that this as it's evolving they can see that happening can provide their input I think it's also very important for us to be clear with the public that this is not something that came to our mind and we're doing this completely of our own volition and that this is a response to that significantly increased rena number that you've pointed to in your presentation and also what the consequences are now of not doing that who would be in charge we know the answer to that but I think it will be helpful to continually educate the public on this this is a brand new world for us you can we can only imagine what a new world it is for folks in our community who aren't steeped in land use planning and that kind of thing or state law or shifts and who's in control of land use and all that business so I think it'll be helpful if you would consider that let me ask you to take a look at page 176 in our in the budget which is the budget summary expenditures and resources you tell me when you're there there now thank you sir on the I did notice that on planning administration that it goes up from roughly a million dollars to 2.5 million dollars the line for planning administration maybe you could share with us why that 2 plus fold increases there sure I think I would guess that that is related to some of the carryover expenses or the expenses that Elizabeth was speaking to with respect to services but I'll ask Vivian Vivian I bet that she knows the answer my former graduate student will have a good answer I suspect good evening a former student of Mayor Keeley actually so yes so that accounts for about the nine hundred thousand dollars that the increase that we had so specifically those line items would include the legal service these are all internal so legal services we have the informational the from the it team and then you see services so these are very internal charges that Elizabeth had mentioned that now are being charged for each department so it does seem alarming that there's a nine hundred thousand dollar increase but those are just simply internal charges where would those have been reflected prior to the new allocation cost allocation measure where would that be allocated because somebody absorbs it in their budget Ms. Cavill good afternoon again excuse me good evening so we did not those were not in there at all prior so what was right now so it was happening in say fiscal year twenty three is those charges like that's basically what planning is paying for the attorney for finance for HR and then those the revenues for those are going to those other general fund department so it just netted to zero understood so where were those previously when we didn't do cost allocation that way or did we always do cost allocation we always up until twenty four so any cost allocation that came into the general fund was from the enterprise funds anything within the general fund we did not do it by department at all so it was not reflected so I mean that's the same it's still zero but we did not have we did not charge planning nor did like HR finance receive revenue this is a good change then as far as I'm concerned oh it is definitely it shows exactly the cost of services which we didn't have before anybody was trying to but it's not transparent this is transparent thank you for that let me ask on Mr. Butler on current planning which appears to actually be a number that goes down which surprises me on the expenditure side the current planning number would go down given the rise in activity or the volume of activity that you were suggesting would be the case in the new budget year you tell me why that's the case so it does not involve any personnel changes I'll ask Vivian to see if she can outline the specific numbers I expect it's related to some of our services that we're providing there thank you so for current planning obviously it's a very busy division and so we made some adjustments to the services that we have for consultants and so we did make a slight reduction there I'm not sure I understand what you just said I'm sorry say it again explain it to me again there was a reduction in our consultant services and so we made modifications in that area is the thank you is current planning these are folks who come in and want a building permit and that kind of thing is that right no well it's before the building permit stage so the items that come before you are the entitlement stage and those are typically the current planners that are presenting the development proposals and current planning processes those design permits the use permits the coastal permits and so forth and then subsequently they go to our building division processes the actual building permits so building and safety is where the processing of building permits takes place is that correct that's correct also in coordination you know planning confirms that they're consistent with the rules and public works reviews those make sure that they're consistent same thing with fire and water and so forth is that a hundred percent fee recovery system that is not at this point we do believe that there is an opportunity to provide to receive additional revenue we have a request for proposals out right now to update our fee schedule and we've coordinated with our other development partners to include them as well so that we have a comprehensive analysis of water, fire, public works parks and our building division fees so that we can come closer to cost recovery what is the if you know or if you could provide us before we take final budget actions in June what the general fund contribution is that if it is not a full cost recovery system what the general fund subsidy is so roughly for the department I don't have that broken down by division but I can tell you for the department there are around seven actually I can pull up the specific number but around seven or eight hundred thousand dollars so if we look here ask you about that because that's stay on that same page when it's resources by fund it says three point six million dollar general fund contribution to your department I understand that's not broken down by individual activity but if you took that I'm assuming that three point six million dollars which was four million dollars this year and it's intriguing to me that it would be going down which I like but this we still have three point six million dollars some portion of that is underwriting the building operation which could be a hundred percent cost recovery am I right on that yes so we would I do not anticipate that we would get back to full cost recovery for our entire department and so I just looked it's about stood on that as we have we have a number of activities our code enforcement activities for example let me let me slow you down sir I understand all that I'm trying to focus in on the building where someone comes in asked for discretionary permit whether it's to replace a water heater or build a house or anything else that's a discretionary act here it is you get it you pay us a certain amount we hand you the piece of paper you're good to go we go out we follow up with an inspection everything's fine or not but assume everything's fine that particular activity is an activity which primarily benefits the applicant and the permit holder so my question becomes within that activity that series of activities that as I understand it is housed in your department inside the building department do we have or can we acquire a number that tells us today before you do your study before you come back what is the general fund under writing of the building side of your activity absolutely we can get that information we'll be doing that also as part of the fee study but we'll be doing that also as part of the fee study but we're happy to pull that information and get that for you thank you Mr. Butler I appreciate that sidewalk vending program the proposal here is to go from over the years it's been about $3,000 then nothing then $205,000 then almost $200,000 now $139,000 that's a lot of variation for this variation so we just implemented the sidewalk vending last year for the first time there was also a budget amendment some of the funds that we were anticipating to include in the current fiscal year did not get pulled over and so we we added those in at the mid-year and then we are also we've got a better understanding of how much additional staffing we need to support that so learning from last year we've identified here's when we need that coverage here's when we can stop it in the fall when the activity slows down and so all of that has informed where we're at also we're staffing up in our division so that we can cover some of that work as well instead of going to a consultant thank you take a look I'm on the same page and the very last item under your resources by fund is the child care impact fee fund which is going from $125,000 to $16,000 seems like a precipitous drop in the income and I'm channeling my inner council member Watkins when I answer this question I think just sitting next to you you can feel it I want to ask child care questions Mr. Butler I believe the biggest reason for that anticipated number versus what we're seeing is that the large majority of the projects that we have seen coming in have been 100% affordable and we have exempted 100% we've exempted affordable units from the child care impact fee we did just receive we just had a large market rate project come in I don't have the specifics in terms of what that child care fund was but the front river front project just pulled building permits and began construction and so we will have a bump in that number the council will recall that we're dedicating that to the facility that we have in the library as the first step and then we'll proceed back to the facilities study that would then inform where we invest those monies in the future thank you Mr. Butler I appreciate any other questions or comments I just wanted to build up that question thank you Mayor in terms of child care impact fee because I did have that question so if I might want to make sure I'm following you correctly in that I don't think I want to do any more questions or comments which I recall was what the front street project had identified as the child care impact fee that they would be contributing are you suggesting that that goes as part of the 125,000 for this year? we will have that accounted for in this fiscal year and you're not projecting any additional It'll just depend on when some of those larger projects, particularly the market rate projects hit. It's fairly small for the everyday projects that we see and a large part of our budget is dependent upon the, as is the case with the childcare impact fee as well, when large projects end up pulling building permits. And what would those projects be given the slide that you presented if you don't mind? Sure, yeah, I'm happy to take a look. That would be considered contributing projects to that fee. So I would anticipate that this coming year, we have, we'll have Coral Street, that's 120 units, but it's 100% affordable, so we won't get the... That's not it, right? We will have, I would anticipate this coming fiscal year, the Delaware edition, which is about 160 units. So I do anticipate getting that they are in for building permits right now and are indicating that they want to move forward expeditiously. The other one, well, the library is 100% affordable, so that wouldn't, that's the main big project that I see pulling building permits that is not 100% affordable. In the next fiscal year? Yep. Okay, I mean, that's interesting in terms of the narrative also within the community about what's being developed, right? I think it's important to specify that. Thank you for that. I just had one additional question in terms of the Green Building Educational Resource Fund. I see an increase with that, and I'm wondering if you can help us understand what that's for. Sure, the council may recall that we increased that Green Building Fund and, or the Green Building fee, I should say, and we actually did a broader cost allocation because there are more of us that are working on that than just the one individual. So it was originally allocated to that one individual's work and really as we've implemented that program, it's our inspectors, a portion of the inspectors' time that are out there doing those inspections. It's Tiffany Wise-West and myself and Eric Marlatter, assistant director and others, our advanced planning team working on building electrification and so forth. So there's a small percentage of a number of people that were not previously allocated and that's reflected in the increase here. That's great. I mean, I think that's appropriate, so I appreciate the context. I guess my last question is, and I know you mentioned the consultants fee, kind of being a reduction, and I'm wondering in terms of just like where we are in terms of like the, I don't know if it's seasonal or let's not the right word, but the continuum of having assessments and NEXA studies conducted, where are we on that spectrum? Is that, are we not involving consultants at this time because we are already kind of caught up on some of the information that we need or? So thank you for that question. It actually varies by division. So the current planning division, my recollection, is we did have a slight reduction in that, but if we have a current planning project that comes through and we need to, for example, consult with our outside council, Sabrina Teller with Remy Moos Manly, for example, who you all have seen, those costs are actually reimbursed by the developers. And so we charge the developers for those costs and therefore we've got that budget allocated, but if we need to increase that budget, it would be associated with a corresponding increase in revenues that are coming from that current planning. So we were comfortable reducing that consultant budget because particularly in current planning, those are gonna be directly reimbursed. Whereas in advanced planning, for example, we have a lot of consultant work that we've got going on and between the housing element and the downtown plan expansion. And same thing with our building division. We're expecting substantial amounts of additional consultant work. As we're getting these big projects in, we're often, for the big projects, almost universally sending those out to a third party plan checker because in order to meet the turnaround times that we've established, they have the resources, separate plumbing reviewer, mechanical, electrical, structural, versus our limited staff that can turn that around in the timelines that we wanna provide the responses. Okay, I appreciate the identification of which division that falls under. And then just going back, sorry really quickly to the childcare impact fee in that I remember as identifying a portion of the fee going to support the childcare within the library project, but that was prior to the $100,000 coming in from the Front Street project. So I'm just curious where that is reconciled. So right now, I think the direction that we have from the council is to focus on that library affordable housing project. What we can do is in coordination with economic development as that project moves forward, we can provide the council and we will provide the council with an accounting of that. And the council will then be given the discretion to say, let's dedicate this entire amount towards that or let's siphon off a portion of it and start on that facility study. So as we work with our economic development team to progress the library affordable housing project forward, we'll be returning to the council with updates and that'll be an opportunity for the council to weigh in at that time. Perfect. And no surprise, I'm supportive of that, so thank you. Thank you, council member Brown. Once again, waiting till the end means that my questions get answered. But I did have one question or a guess, a comment. I didn't see the housing element in our goal, in your department's goals. Maybe I missed it, but I'm just wondering if that was something that you, just because da, that's what we are, we have to do that. It's not here, but it seems like it's a major component of your work and it is gonna be a real accomplishment to get a certified housing element. So it felt like it could be in there. I'm just wondering about that. Thank you for pointing that out. As you noticed on the slides we prepared, that was the very first thing that I mentioned. And so we will certainly correct that before the final budget, with it not being in there. So thank you. For the questions or comments. Thank you. That was my question as well, thank you. Very good, thank you. Mr. Butler, thank you very much. I will leave it to your recollection, although. I jotted down a few follow-ups. We have down some notes about some items she'll bring back to us on her before the final adoption of the budget. That's correct. Thank you very much. That provides you that information. Thank you. Thank you, sir. And thanks to all of your team, everybody in planning is by far not the easiest activity to be engaged in. You meet folks who are on a wide range of emotions on the spectrum. They have their property, they want to do something with it or they've got some other problem, but you deal with people in all kinds of circumstances. And the service orientation that you and your staff provide is so important because you are the face that many people see and that's their interaction with government, our city government. So thanks to you, we please pass on from all of us, our thanks and appreciation to your staff. We'll do, thank you. Thank you, sir. Well, he has legs. I see three minutes here. I don't think I'll make it quite that fast. The city attorney is really nice to present his budget. Thank you, Mayor Keely, members of the city council. It's my pleasure to present the city attorney's budget to you. I will say at the outset though that the budget has been prepared by the finance department. Our role at the city is somewhat unique and therefore our budget is a little bit unique in that we are called upon to provide the legal services that the city needs in order to function. And that of necessity means that we have to be a little bit flexible. The demands on our time vary depending upon who's sitting up here and what issues are confronting the city. And so we look at the budget as a useful guide, but what we do is respond to the request for legal services that the city asks of us. For that reason, I haven't prepared a list of accomplishments to cite. I will say that as I listened to the very impressive accomplishments that have been brought forward by the planning department and by economic development and that will be coming forward over the course of the budget hearings. I'm proud to say that we've had a significant role in most, if not all of the significant projects and initiatives that have been undertaken by the city. So I am going to move, are you controlling the slides? Is this the button? The mission of the city attorney office is that we are committed to providing excellent legal services consistent with the highest professional and ethical standards with the goal of protecting and advancing the city's interests in serving the people of Santa Cruz. Our functions are one, we provide an advisory function in which our office provides advice to the council, boards, commissions and city staff. We work on ordinances, resolutions, contracts, leases and other legal documents and we review documents prepared by all of the other departments. We're charged by the city charter with reviewing and signing off on every single contract that the city enters into. I sign my name to contracts probably three or four times a day. We also work very closely with the city clerk and the police department in responding to the just inundation of Public Records Act requests that they get on a regular basis. As you know, the Public Records Act provides a broad, very challenging obligation on the part of cities to search for, provide records. We have to go through those and make sure both that we are responding adequately and that we are culling or omitting things that are privileged or not subject to disclosure under the Public Records Act. The litigation function of the office, we defend the city and state and federal court, either with attorneys in our office or through the supervision of outside council. Our case load is diverse and includes personal injury cases, property damages, contract disputes, land use, constitutional and other specialized litigation. We've developed a particular expertise in seeking workplace violence restraining orders on behalf of city staff when they are threatened by outside sources under fairly recent changes to state law that provide us with a mechanism to do that, as well as assist the police department in seeking gun violence restraining orders. At the request of the police department, we seek to protect the community by taking dangerous weapons from individuals who should not be in possession of them. We also represent the city and the people of the state of California in municipal code, misdemeanor criminal matters. Our prosecutors are dedicated to promoting and improving public safety and the quality of life in Santa Cruz through fair, compassionate and effective administration of justice. We work closely with the risk management department and city departments to eliminate or mitigate potential risk and preserve public property and resources and minimize potential city liability. We are staffed by 14 attorneys, roughly 11 full-time equivalent attorneys. I wanna say that at this time, we are in terms of the number of lawyers in our office, the largest law firm in Santa Cruz County. Private law firm that is. The public defender's office, county council have more attorneys in the DA's office, but in terms of private law firms. To be clear, we don't spend 11 full-time equivalents on providing legal services to the city alone. We represent a number of other public agencies in the area, including San Mateo County, Monterey County and here in Santa Cruz County. The ability to represent multiple agencies also provides us with efficiency in really learning from the work we do for other agencies and more efficiently providing that assistance to the city and vice versa. So just very briefly, our plan for the coming year is nothing really extraordinary. We hope to continue to provide timely, accurate and practical legal advice and perform legal support for negotiating and drafting all legal documents and supporting services required by the council and all city departments, including key council priorities like the March 2024 affordable housing bond or affordable housing measure, let me correct that, and the recently approved oversized vehicle ordinance. We seek to keep abreast of continually changing legal and regulatory landscapes and maintain systems, provide the council boards, commissions and departments with timely and practical information on changes in the law to facilitate compliance and implement best practices. We will work with the planning and economic development departments to provide legal support on all aspects of the legal issues that arise from major development projects, including the library affordable housing project. We hope a new Warriors Arena and of course the downtown expansion plan. We will continue to provide open government advice and training, including Brown Act, Public Records Act, conflicts of interest and ethics training for city staff and city officials. We will continue to work with the city clerk and the police department to provide legal support in reviewing and responding to a myriad of PRA requests we receive every year and to improve our efficiency and responsiveness in dealing with those matters. We created a special Public Records Act team a couple of years ago that is dedicated to receiving and distributing the work so that we have people who are regularly involved in handling those matters and achieve efficiency in so doing. We will continue to assist the police department to ensure our officers are properly trained to effectively enforce our laws while respecting the civil rights of our community members and continue to vigorously defend the city in litigation while working to resolve matters in the most efficient and cost effective manner possible. And we will continue to oversee the work of outside counsel to ensure that the city is being well represented in matters where specialized expertise is needed. So this is in your budget packet. This is a status quo budget. It's interesting to note that fiscal year 2022 the actual expenditures of city attorney's services were significantly higher than this past year as well as what's proposed for the upcoming year. I did note in preparing for this meeting that the 16 1.614 is almost the same amount that was budgeted for city attorney legal services in fiscal year 2021. And of that approximately 60% is general legal services, our day-to-day advisory work, our day-to-day contract, ordinance drafting, attendance at meetings, whatnot. And about the other third or approximately the other third is either litigation or code enforcement. And several years ago and sort of consistent with what the finance department has done with regard to breaking down costs according to department, we started tracking our time that was attributable to the different billing categories that we've created. You'll note that the largest use of our resources has been the city council. I think a couple of comments are noteworthy here. One is that unlike all of the other departments, we don't spend hours in regularly scheduled meetings with the planning department or public works or the police department. So that's a significant cost that the city incurs and it skews the city council categories to some extent. Secondly, a lot of the work that the other departments are doing are what we consider work on behalf of the city council. And so sometimes we'll be working on an item that might relate to homelessness. We'll charge it to the city council category because it's in response to a directive from the city council, even though we're working with city manager's office, police department or another department on those matters. You see that there is a significant expenditure of city resources on public records act issues. And that is simply a function of the state law and the burdens it places on the city, particularly the people who are doing the Lord's work in the city clerks department and people who submit sometimes requests that are either spite requests or unnecessarily overbroad and demanding. City manager's office as well, we work very closely with and therefore devote a significant amount of city resources to that. And then planning, economic development, water, public works, parks and rec, PD and fire gradually go down. We did have a category for work that we did in connection with the various emergencies that have confronted the city over the past couple of years. So this is a rough breakdown. It's not completely accurate, but I just want to give you a sense of how those resources are being expended. And this point I am happy. Oh, one more is this chart shows a comparison of similarly sized cities and their city attorney budgets. This is actually information that was put out by the city of Berkeley when they commissioned a study to look at their city attorney's department and figure out if they were getting cost-effective, legal services. And you can see based on these cities, they're mostly larger than the city of Santa Cruz, but on a per capita basis, city of Santa Cruz gets a pretty good bang for its buck, I would say. And with that, I am again pleased to be able to present our budget to you today. And I'm happy to answer any questions you may have. Well, thank you, Mr. Kandadi. Thank you so much. The, if you would take a look at your budget page, if you would bring that back up, there we go. The number that jumps off the page is the net general fund cost, which I think is a celebratory moment for us. But let me understand how this is going from one and a half million dollars over several years to $54,000 in the upcoming fiscal year. I think, but I will let the finance director speak to that. It's the same reason that you've seen other expenditures allocated to departments. We're allocating across departments. I don't doubt that, but I want to see this. I want to hear, thank you. Ms. Cabell, good afternoon. Good evening, rather, yes. Yes, so we had, as we mentioned before, we did not do any allocation within the departments before any general fund departments. And so now that we're doing that, you're going to see huge differences in the services. So yes, that is what's causing. So that is a happy moment here in city attorney land, but somewhere another $1.3 million is going to be spread across other departments. So given the chart that Mr. Condadi showed us in terms of who uses how much of their service, I'm assuming that you allocate based on use. Exactly. So well, then that makes me ask the question about the city, well, it does. It just makes me ask the question when we get to the city council's budget, we're going to have a question about that because I don't think it's reflected there. So we'll talk about that when we get to the city council budget. We're the largest single user as a department of the gentleman of the city attorney's resources, then it doesn't reflect that in the city council budget that's proposed. And just really quickly, I can answer that. We have an OMB compliant cost allocation plan and as part of being OMB compliant, we do that for grant purposes, city council elections, are those specific fees? We do not receive that cost allocation. So that's part of that, we had a choice when we were doing the cost allocation plan. Do we want to be OMB compliant so that which makes us a little more competitive when we're trying to do grants and things, or do we not? So this was the first year, again, we're kind of trying to figure out exactly what makes sense, but that's why. City council expenses in particular are exempt from, are not part of the OMB compliant plan. So that's why you're not gonna see that in city council, which means it's spread out over everybody else. We'll revisit this topic, but thank you very much for that answer. That's very elucidating, I do appreciate it. Thank you very much. Mr. city attorney, let me see if other council members have other questions. Council member Watkins is recognized. Thank you, mayor. I actually, I don't know if this would be for you, Elizabeth or Matt, but I'm just wondering if there's a way to quantify how much is also spent on outside council attorney fees in addition to what we spend on your legal fees as well. And I don't track that information. I assume so. But I'm sure that. The short answer is yes. We're happy to provide that information and we do track that by department related to what services are being provided by ABC versus outside council. Yeah, I think, I mean, I'd be personally interested in what we're spending on legal fees in general. So thank you. Other questions or comments? Ms. Brown. I'm very much interested in that information as well. So thank you for raising it. I just want to make a comment here because you showed us the compare comparisons across different jurisdictions, but there's also kind of a historical view here and having been on the council for a while, I want to say that I recognize that you, your office has been providing these services without a significant increase in the contract amount, right? So in-house, city employees get, according to our contracts, raises and that happens within your firm and you figure that out internally. And it just struck me when you said it a couple of years back that the way that you're managing this contract is really a huge benefit for us. So I wanted to, in addition to thanking for all the work you do and kind of the roller coaster that it can sometimes be that you're really doing us an incredible service. I appreciate that. You might recall from the meeting we had back, I think in January, that the council approved a contract amendment and a CPI adjustment. We've actually had a provision in our contract that allows CPI adjustments since 2017, but just given the financial circumstances that we're confronting the city, we did not make those adjustments on an annual basis. Now the legal climate is changing and it's getting very hard to attract really good lawyers. And so I suspect going forward, we will be asking for or implementing an annual CPI adjustment just so we can keep up with the market. For the questions, comments on the city attorney's budget. Mr. Gennady, thank you very much. We will see you in June. I think I speak for everyone here. We thank you for all of the work that you do and those members of your staff who you bring into closed session and provide us with good advice and counsel. I wanna thank you personally for your assistance in preparing for and undertaking conversations with the University of California at Santa Cruz and the office of the president of the University of California. We hope that that will bear fruit as we move along. If it doesn't, it sure isn't your fault, as for sure. I know who's it is. But thank you very, I'll get it aside. Thank you very much for your very good work. If I could make just one parting comment, I just wanna say that my firm has actually represented the city of Santa Cruz since 1964. And during that time, I am the third person from the law firm that was established by Rod Atchison to serve as your city attorney in over 60 years. It has been really the professional privilege of my life to work for and serve the community in which I moved with my wife in 1993 and we've raised our family here. And so to be part of this community and to be able to provide this public service has really just been a professional privilege of mine. And so I really do appreciate it. It shows sir, thank you very, very much. We will move on to the sixth and final item for this evening, which is the homelessness response. Ms. Murphy, good evening. Good evening mayor, good evening council members. I'll be presenting the homeless response budget and I have with me, Larry M. Wally to help present today. So let's see, I start with feel the power. Okay, a brief agenda of what we'll be going over this evening, we'll be reviewing the homeless response action plan, the California 14 state grant, ARPA funding as well, the city wide homeless response budget and expenditures or fiscal year 23 achievements. We'll talk about the grant fund carryover for FY 24 and our goals for the following year. I'd like, oh, that's gonna be tough to read well. I'd like to start off with just recognizing that just recently the city of Santa Cruz city council undertook strategic planning in April. And of one of the stated goals was homeless response. This is difficult to read. I will just read the goal statement. Working with the county move toward positive outcomes and homelessness response, safety and health, balancing the interest of persons who are unhoused in the business and the business community. I bring forward the strategic plan focus because it is tied to the budget and the budget goals. We believe that the proposed FY 24 budget will work towards achieving the goals as stated. In March of 22, the city adopted the homeless response action plan to guide the city's efforts on homelessness over the next three years. And in particular implemented two major council policies. The CSSO, which was adopted in June of 2021, which is the camping services standards ordinance, which required 150 emergency shelter beds. In addition, the council also adopted in November of 2021, the OVO, Oversized Vehicle Ordinance, which required as a portion of that program, the safe parking. This, the homeless response action plan incorporates those directives. The homeless response action plan was funded by one time funding, the California 14 million and 4.7 of ARPA funds. This is important to keep in mind as we work through the homeless response program. There were five key action areas identified in the plan. Basic support services, care and stewardship, community safety, building capacity and partnerships and permanent affordable and supportive services. The city received the 14 million of state funding one time and 4.7 of the ARPA funds to implement the homeless response action plan for a total of 18.7 million. To date, the city has spent 12.6 million, which leaves a carry forward of six million. I will go into further detail about the expenditures and the carryover later in the presentation. The reason for the carryovers, the unspent funds, is that not all the funds were able to be spent due to staffing capacity issues, our ability to undertake all of the projects, process, bid process, locating facilities, obtaining service providers. And again, it results in a six million carryover, which again I will discuss in detail. Ms. Murphy, could you pause for just a second? Are you showing us slides and documents that are not in our budget? I am because, as you will see, the homeless response in my next slide will spread out multiple departments. So this is compiling all of the expenditures across the departments. If you don't mind, I'll show you in the next slide and I'll hopefully answer your questions. Thank you. And as the mayor just pointed out, you won't see the entire program because the funding while the 18 million was budgeted in several departments and it crosses multiple fiscal years. So as you see in this slide, the different departments, the city manager's office, the public works department, the police department and economic development which you had pointed out earlier in doing Bonnie's presentation. Just to accolade you to this slide, there are several years of which that grant funding has been spent. And in FY22, started tracking these funds and 1.269 million was spent primarily on the Benchlands shink sanctioned camp and we started ramping up the HRT, the homeless response team. In FY23, you notice the large increase in funding. Again, those were the grant funds. Primarily were budgeted in the city manager's office. They were also budgeted in public works and police department and the economic development. Those funds primarily for the city manager's office had to do with implementing the homeless response action plan, specifically our safe sleeping programs including the armory, the safe parking programs, 1220, the staffing which is our outreach workers, a homeless response manager, a homeless response coordinator. It also entails encampment cleanup and support and what we call partnerships. The public works department is all primarily staffing for our homeless response team. And I have another slide which I will go over further for the staffing. The police department, again, that's primarily all staffing and those are our two CSOs. And economic development, that was for the rental assessment programs that was one time funding. I keep bringing up one time funding because it's very important as we move into FY24. But to round out FY23, the funds were also not only in the general fund which is what you see there. And if you refer to the pages in the public works department and police department and economic development department, you will see those line items. The CIP also received 8.5 million for projects. Those projects included the Coral Street Hygiene Bay Project, the purchase of the Coral Street property and pre-designed for the Navigation Center and the Benchlands closure. And again, as you can see in FY23 versus the actual, it's not all funds have been spent which results in the six million that I will be talking about later of carry forward. Of note for FY24 as we move forward, those one time funds are not here. What you see here is solely general fund. The six million that is, again, we will address later is what we call carry forward and it's not captured here. The funding in FY24 is primarily all staffing. It includes again the homeless response action team, the CSOs and the staffing for the outreach workers and the homeless response team, as well as our contribution to the COC, the continuum of care. I'd like to just detail a little bit more about the 12.6 million and categories I think are very important. If you look at this chart, you'll see of the 12.6, 4.6 million was used for permanent supportive housing activities. In five million, we utilize for temporary shelters. The combination of that is approximately 80% went to housing and support services for the homeless. 1.2 million was for the homeless response team. The 150,000 that was Bonnie, which again disclosed about the housing assistance programs. 1.4 went to encampment services and cleanup that includes the bench lands. And then just 100,000 for consultants and what that was for is the mobile crisis response consultant and then we just recently have a contract with a lobbyist which we'll just be getting started to help us work with our other coastal partners and cities just like us to help get us some much needed legislative support. I just want to add a note, not included in our numbers, but I think it's important to point out that's not captured in the homeless response budget, which I think you correctly identified as 6105. That's the magic number. So those programs, just to point out that do reach out into the homeless services world is our downtown streets team, the hopes team, which is the homeless outreach proactive engagement and services team, our downtown outreach workers and our mental health liaisons. I also wanted to note that these were not included, any of the core funding. I'd like to, again, it's a little difficult to see, highlight the accomplishments that have been achieved. I think they're very worthy of discussing. First of all, the dedicated homeless response team and I have them in three silos again because they're funded in three different departments. So you can see, I'll begin on the left with myself, the homeless response manager, the coordinator, our outreach specialist and our communication specialist Susie, which I failed to mention earlier. And then within the public works department, this is where the boots on the ground, well, I'm sorry, outreach workers, they're all boots on the ground, but this is where HRT field response team are the crews within public works department. We have the senior crew leader, we have a supervisor, we have three HR field crew workers. And in the police department, we have the two community service officers. And the reason I have the sergeant little box out there was just recently the police department has been able to assign a sergeant to oversee the community service officers and solely dedicate that person's time to homeless response. And we will capture that going forward, but it's not captured in this budget. Like to highlight some of the action plan accomplishments. Obviously we implemented the three year homeless response action plan. We've provided shelter to over 400 individuals. We've supported the rehousing of 62 formerly unhoused individuals. We've opened the city overlook, 135 capacity. We established the 1220 River Street transit transitional community camp with a capacity of 30 individuals. We've also established the city's safe parking program. We safely and humanely closed the bench lands. We also opened the severe weather shelter we had it open for 19 evenings. We purchased the property on coral street for the potential navigation center. We began the coral street visioning project. We recently retained a legislative advocate to form those partnerships. We provided 150,000 in tenant based rental assistance to low income families to prevent eviction. We recently issued the pre-development grants. This is to provide financial support for individuals to compete for state and federal funding. We also had the contract with the integrated health response team. It's a lot of accomplishments. Good job Larry. Now what we haven't been able to complete and this is where the six million comes into play. So what we haven't yet been able to implement is the shelter infrastructure which is the funding for the pallet shelters that housing matters. We have not been able to complete or start the RV dump station. The storage facility program which was part of the CSSO ordinance. There was also funding for additional transitional camp. The navigation center pre-design phase and establishing an additional indoor shelter facility. And the six million that is the carryover which is an administrative action that will happen at the end of the year and that's why you don't see that number populate in FY24 general fund. What we're recommending here this evening is to reallocate that six million from the projects in the previous slide. We're recommending reallocating to support several important programs and not fund the other planned initiatives. What are those recommendations? What you'll see in this slide here is on the left hand side are programs that have not been completed and then also in the yellow are the programs that we're asking you to reallocate the six million to fund. That's the middle column with the dollars, the reallocated of the current remaining funds and then the final column is what will not be funded if you accept my recommendation. We think it's very important to continue to fund the city overlook at the armory at 4.8 million. Continue funding the implementation of the storage program as it relates to the CSSO program. Continue the funding of the 1220 River Street. Continue funding of the staff, the safe parking all three tiers. Additional funding for the encampment response and cleanup and funding for the severe weather shelter. As you well know that again the 14 million and the ARPA fundings of 4.7 was one time funding. In order to continue these programs we are asking for the reallocation of the remaining funds. It's a difficult choice when you look to the what's not going to be funded which includes the shelter, the pallet shelters for housing matters, the RV dump station and additional transitional community camp, the navigation center phase two, additional alternative shelter, indoor shelter and a mobile crisis response. We will have the opportunity to look again at what funding opportunities might be available at mid-year. We are still waiting to hear about the encampment grants. We still have not heard of those funds if they were awarded six million for two years. So there will be an opportunity hopefully to revisit. Finding one of our goals in conclusion, reduce the impacts of encampments, continue to support temporary shelter programs in accordance with the CSSO and the OVO, continue to provide much needed outreach services to create a severe weather shelter program in coordination with the county, create the storage program, continue the safe parking program in accordance with the OVO in the future, potentially implementing the integrated health response team which is the mobile crisis response and finally obtain sustainable funding sources. And that concludes my presentation. Thank you, Ms. Murphy. We look to see if there are questions. Ms. Collin, Tari Johnson. Thank you for the presentation, putting it all in one place and for all of the incredible work. I have questions and comments. I wonder if we can see that slide with a pie chart that shows what percentage goes to what? Took a picture of it. I'm more than happy to provide email the PowerPoint as well. Great, thank you. Yeah, it's got the 12.6 in the middle. Yeah, do you want me to do it, Julia or do you? There it is, there it is. Yeah, just I think it's really worth noting that the majority of this is really going towards services and supports. And this is something that I would like us as a city to communicate. We often get folks who comment and criticize the work we are not doing or that we're investing our dollars in enforcement. And this chart shows the facts of what we are investing in our dollars and our efforts and our city workers to help us do as a city. So that's, I guess, just a comment that we really should be showing this chart everywhere because it's just so clear. There's no arguing with this. So thank you for that. I did have questions about the budget that you presented and some of the pieces that we'll have to pause on. The pallet shelters, I'm trying to like go back to a couple of years because it's been a couple of years since some of these specifics came up. My understanding was that there were resources with housing matters and with the county to kind of bring it all together and do the pallet shelters and that we wouldn't be doing that on our own. So if somebody could speak to the pallet shelters because I thought like we had space at housing matters and we had some of the pallet shelters and it was just a matter of getting the shelters and then putting them in place. So we do have a partnership with the county and housing matters. And there is where the former River Street shelter was was the plan. We would provide the pallet shelters and the county would provide the support services and housing matters would manage it. So it was a combination of all three and it's not that this project will be gone. We're hoping that we'll be able to qualify for the funding for the encampment grants and then we can use that for the armory and then pull that money out and use it for the infrastructure. Okay, and so in terms of our partners, I guess we would be the purchasers of the physical pallet shelters. So the rest of it can't happen. That's right. Okay, so our partners are, are they aware of what is being proposed before us and have they provided feedback? They, it's been proposed. We've had let them know, but without any outcome of not, not being able to say for sure whether what the council's decision was going to be. But yes, this will be, this is a hard choice. This would be a very difficult one not to fund. Okay, okay. And then the safe parking. So this is just saying that for the safe parking program, it's just the RV dump station component of it. Is that, that's my understanding that, right? Okay. And then what was the phase two of navigation center? That's the pre-design piece, pre-development piece, sorry. I'm not planning a good speaker, the planning piece of how that works. I'll let you do that part of it. Yes, good evening, mayor and council members. Thanks for the question. Council member Calatoran Johnson, within the allocation plan we had for the California 14 million, we set aside $600,000 to do the pre-design work around the navigation center concept. So $3 million was dedicated for the acquisition of one, two, three Coral Street for a potential navigation center, but then also setting aside funds that could support the pre-development to be able to be positioned to do the larger term capital project. Okay, got it, thank you. And then I have a question, maybe it's for you, Larry. I don't know. What is the distinction between the additional transitional community camp and the alternative additional shelter? I can't remember what's the difference between those two. Right. Yes, so in the original plan, we budgeted to have two transitional community camps, the first one being 1220 River that's been in operation since January of 2022. We've had plans to do a second one. So that's the first piece. The additional shelter is really a new opportunity that's been considered, how we can expand that shelter capacity. And so one was potentially the city could have a partnership around the former outdoor rule property that could be used, right? And so that's a budget concept that's been on the table, but given the priority projects that that didn't, that wasn't prioritized at this point. Okay, great. All right, just two more comments. I did see that the Board of Supervisors maybe last week approved additional funding for AFC to continue with their safe parking. I don't know the details of it, if it's just their sort of vehicle parking or RV parking, but if we haven't already, it would be great to coordinate with the county and see how AFC is going to be expanding their services. And it would be great if it was in alignment with the city's safe parking three-tier program and not just sort of on its own. I mean, I know we communicate and coordinate with AFC, but in this particular instance, I don't know if we have or not, so that if we haven't, I would like us to see us do that. Okay, and then I think just the last thing I'll say is, and I'll just, I'll keep saying this, I'm really pleased to see the shift and investment we've made as a city. I'm pleased to see that we are, there's a proposal for us to continue it and that we have reached a capacity in terms of not just our budget, but our people power and our ability to respond. Setting up infrastructure is absolutely within our role, but I would look to our partners at the county to do the service provision, and so I'll just keep hammering at that, and I know that we're working on it, but again, I'm committed and invested in continuing to do this, but we have to look at a sustainability plan, which includes the county picking up the services provision of what we're proposing here. Thank you. Me, that slide that's up there right now is quite helpful, I think. Let me make sure I understand. State grants the city of Santa Cruz together with ARPA $20 million. Is that right? About 18, yeah, 18. 18 million, and of that 18, we're going to, we've already spent some presumably, and more in a little bit, and the proposal for this coming fiscal year is to spend another six million of that, is that correct? That essentially that's correct. So we didn't spend all of the funds in what we thought we would do in 23, so we're going to push over what we call carry forward the six million into FY24, and this is how we're proposing to spend it. Okay. And this six million that we're carrying forward when we spend that, we will have spent all of the money. That's correct. Okay. So let's go through these. So for example, the city overlook, Armory $4.8 million number, I'm assuming, help me if I'm wrong on this, that that's all operations. Yes. Or virtually all operations. Okay. So if we find ourselves sitting here one year from now and we want to continue the overlook Armory, we have to find $4.8 million in the absence of the state or federal government sending us $4.8 million. That's correct. Okay. It's going to be true on the storage program, 1220 River Street, safe parking, encampment response, all those are the same answer. All the same answer. So we just got a ruling from the state coastal commission that in order to effectuate our oversized vehicle ordinance, we will need to have a three tier safe parking program in addition to some other activities. So whether we like it or don't like it as a condition to having that, which is a one year permit, we're going to have come up with half a million dollars of city money to keep a safe parking program if we want to have the oversized vehicle ordinance still in place. That's correct. Okay. And the severe winter shelter where it says new. So we did a little bit of that during this calendar year during the event of the disaster itself. Take a minute and describe what the severe winter shelter would be going forward because as I understood it, we had the Civic for a couple of nights and then in effect, the county said that'll be just enough of that on their part and they decided to go do other things and absent their presence there. We couldn't operate that ourselves, but we did operate the Depot Park and a couple of other places for folks to go. Is that right? You are correct. Okay. So then on the severe- You're doing my job for me. Well, no, I'm just making sure I understand. You're very clear in your presentation, so I don't doubt that. The severe weather shelter then $142,000, we would do co-op with that if we authorized that. So that would take care of costs for wherever we have the location. Let's say at one time we had at the vets, we have to pay for that. That would pay for the operator as well and all those services that go with it, not just the operator, we fed people. We didn't just house those individuals for the night. We had a lot of folks come and seek services, whether it was we provide them blankets, again, food and shelter. So that's what the cost would be for. And this is an actual physical place. Yes, well, determining where we would operate it, that's another story. Would it be the Civic? Would it be the Vets Hall? Would it be Depot? That operational portion? We need to work that out. This appears to be a bit, not a massive, but a bit of a change in maybe an unwritten policy here, which is that the city was willing to step up in the heat of the moment. But when that died down and other weather arrived, it was not nearly as severe. The city made a decision, for example, relative to the Civic to not open the Civic again, because we felt that at Depot Park and other places, for those folks who chose shelter, we could provide it for them. Is that right? Yes. We do that again, assuming that we're in this world of unpredictability, but when we have these atmospheric rivers, we are going to have serious problems. After the fiscal year that's upcoming, if we wanna continue that, we come up with this money. That's correct. So that's essentially everything in this $6 million column. Yes. It's gonna go away. Let me ask you about the city overlook and armory, which is now at full capacity. Who do we contract with on that? We contract with the Salvation Army. They're the operator of the program. And what are the terms and conditions of that operating agreement? Well, you'll be getting that contract in about one month, and we can review it in great detail together. We're just... Could you give me a general idea of what it is? The contract administrator. So the contract with Salvation Army for the present year is approximately $4 million. I forget the exact amount, but that's to serve 135 people at capacity. It provides for staffing. It includes two to three meals a day. I think they're actually doing three meals a day now, even though the contract is for two. It includes a transportation program that shuttles participants from up at the armory down to HBHB and to Central Santa Cruz to be able to access services. And those are the principal kind of elements of the scope of work. Do... That's true, there's, yeah. I mean, we have all the exact with the hygiene and sanitation infrastructure, shower trailer, port-a-potties, hand washing stations as well. Do people need some kind of referral to the overlooked campground or the armory before arriving? Or can people arrive there with their RV to park or seeking space inside the armory or seeking to camp at the overlooked campground? A referral's required for both the program to reference. So for the safe sleeping program, which is operated by the Salvation Armory, referral comes from our city outreach staff who engage people that are unsheltered in living in campments throughout the city on a regular basis. And so that's the referral mechanism into that program. The safe parking program tier three, the 24-7 extended with case management that's operated by the free guide also at the armory. Similarly, there is a process where the free guide staff is doing outreach to people that are living in their vehicles or connected. So people who are living in their vehicles can outreach to them as well. But there is a process to identify who participates in that program and there's participation agreements that are required. Thank you. So if someone was to walk up that rather steep road, but if they would walk there and didn't have such a referral from one of these entities and they said, I'm homeless, I'm cold, I'm hungry, do you have a space for me? They would be told turn around, go away, go get a referral. I think in practice, the way it would happen is that the staff at Salvation Army who work regularly with our outreach staff as well as our homeless services coordinator, they would make a referral to our team and connect them with that team to get them engaged in that process rather than simply turning them away and telling them to get a referral through another mechanism. They would make that connection to that referral. And could that person stay there until such time as a connection was made and a referral was approved and would they be asked to step aside and you'd get back to them when they had a space for them? So that's an interesting question. We haven't had that scenario through my conversations with Salvation Army in that process is something that we've developed a standard procedure for. So I can't comment on that specificity, but I can check with Salvation Army staff to see if that situation has ever arised. Are you satisfied that the contract is being appropriately administered? Yes, I think, first and foremost, just acknowledging the onset that this is difficult and challenging work to do. And I think that certainly there's difficulties in running a shelter in that process, but in terms of the work that the Salvation Army has done to be able to stand up that shelter and provide those services has been effective. And I think we reported at the last quarterly update about housing successes they've received. It can kind of demonstrate some efficacy. Thank you. Ms. Murphy, you indicated that a legislative advocate has been retained to do some work for us. I'm wondering if you can tell us who that is, what work they're supposed to be doing and what the results of that have been. There's precision advocacy. We just completed the contract process. We're going to do a kickoff meeting in a couple of weeks. The intent is to provide us with a coalition, to help build a coalition that will help us of like-minded organizations, agencies that have similar issues that we do, cities, basically cities, particularly in the coastal region, to help us form a group that can advocate for whether it's increased funding, funding that comes directly to the cities, behavioral health, more accountability for the counties, a number of different initiatives that we've outlined that we'd like for them to be working on. Is that, did that contract come to us, or was that below our necessary? It's below your threshold. Okay, can you provide that before the end of the budget hearings? Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Other questions or comments? Ms. Brown. Thank you. I just want to follow up on the overlook item because I'm sharing the concerns of the mayor and I imagine my other colleagues about the kind of endpoint for this, right? I mean, we've got a lot of things happening and I would say, yes, it's great and we kind of are maxed out and other agencies need to step up and do their part. With respect to the Armory contract in particular, I know we've talked about this and there's a challenge because finding an operator is very difficult and this is $35,000 a year per person. So, I just feel like if we're going to consider being in this business for the longer haul that we really should spend some, put our heads together to figure out how to provide these services at a lower price point. There are shelter programs and transitional camp programs out there all over the place that operate on a much leaner budget than this and provide those services and can be effective and I don't mean to disparage in any way the Salvation Army when I say this, but it's $35,000 a person. I mean, so it just feels like, I mean, no matter what we do, that's not sustainable. Have you talked at all about as you're trying to develop other potential operators, you found the free guide for the parking program, it's still pretty big ticket but much lower cost per vehicle, right? And so therefore per family or if the vehicle comes with more than one person, how many people are served? So just wondering, and we don't need to have a big conversation about this, but I wanna note it here and ask you if that's something you're thinking about. I know we're kind of in triage mode here, but this seems like if we don't do something, we're just not gonna be able to do anything. That's right. I think you point out a couple of different things that are completely accurate. I'm glad somebody else did the math. That is true in accounting, yeah. So looking to try to do an RFP in the future if we were continuing the future. We are in this triage emergencies type mode that is very reactive. The free guide is developing this program and hoping that we see his capacity grow and his capability to grow, which we're really encouraging. Safe parking program is still very, very expensive to operate that tier three is extremely expensive, but it's less hands-on than what we have the need for when you're at the armory. Where you need 24-hour staffing, you need multiple staff members there. We are providing a number of different services there. It's service, heavy service orientated, and I will tell you that the folks that work up there aren't making a killing. They're making $18 to $20 an hour and then we have high turnover. So we're looking at the potential of actually a higher contract coming toward you than what you see here, because we need to have, they need to pay, we're encouraging the pay their folks more and to hire more people. So I hear your concerns. It's a business that's just not operators, particularly this size and the amount of services we're providing that are willing to step forward. Council, the vice mayor is recognized. So I was doing the same math and then I broke it down a little more and then I looked and checked to confirm and we went to Fiji over Christmas and at an all-inclusive resort that includes booze, you could go there cheaper per month. So almost 2,900 a month per person. So I just am like a little blown away at the cost that I'm like, holy moly, like we're at the edge of a cliff if this is all we have for one year, that 35,000 for 135 people, I'd rather give it to high school kids for college scholarship. And I know that's not what we're talking about here, but I'm just kind of in sticker shock when I see this tonight before us. And so I don't have anything else to say that my colleagues haven't already said, but I'm extremely concerned about the cost of operating that facility. And I'm not offering to operate it for less personally, but I do think of what Council Member Brown said about putting our heads together and what you said about the bridging partnerships, but this is certainly not sustainable. And I guess I had hoped that whatever we spent this one-time funds on would be more infrastructure. And investments and things like that. And so it's, I'm more uncomfortable. I'm just gonna say that. May I make a quick comment? And to your point, that type of housing is very expensive with not huge outcomes that you see. And that is the very reason, one of the very reasons that there is nobody operating in that space of which the County is not operating in that space because one of the reasons is the intensive cost and not the getting directly into housing, this is a transitional step. That's why it's extremely expensive. And one of the reasons we had as a city needed to step into this space because there was nobody in this space anymore. And Mayor and Council, if I may just add to that very briefly. I know you have a comment, Mayor. I could see the wheels turning. Just to put a finer point on it, as Lisa's describing, the city of Santa Cruz is really the only jurisdiction in the County meeting temporary shelter needs, period. It's expensive. We've shown, and I think that the work that Lisa's presented tonight is a testament to what we can accomplish when we have the resources to do so. But the proposal you have in front of you is essentially a stopgap for one additional year. So we have a lot of problem solving to do when it comes to meeting a very real need that's not going away with regards to providing interim temporary shelter. And we would love to have more of a multi-jurisdictional approach to that work across the County. And yes, perhaps there are more efficient shelter models. We're certainly open to exploring those. But one of the constraints we often meet in this work is that many of those models require additional sites, significantly more additional sites than what we're able to achieve with the overlook. And the number when you roll it all up, part of the reason why it's so high is we're paying for transportation back and forth multiple times throughout the day. It's a large offsite facility that has checked many of the boxes when it comes to having a site that's not gonna be met with a lot of the community opposition that these sites are often met with. But with that come many other expenses that we would love to avoid if we had more convenient locations that the community was willing to support. So more work to be done there. It is raising the flag to say we're facing a fiscal cliff when it comes to maintaining these programs. And they're either at risk or the general fund's gonna have to absorb some large price tags here that you see on the screen. So I just wanted to put a final point on that and appreciate the questions. Council Member Watkins. Yes, I know that I mean I, I'll just recognize the complexity of the issue. And I think my, I don't know if it's necessarily a question or just a comment, but I think part of also what a temporary shelter site is for is for temporary shelter. And I'm wondering in terms of the 135 spots currently at full capacity, how many individuals are trans transitioning out of that into more stable independent living? And, and if we're getting into the business and you don't have to answer that question. Oh, it's on the slide. Yeah, we had it. We had it, okay. Somewhere in there, but. Go on, keep going. Six to seven? Yeah, I think seven. And then do they, do we account for who potentially comes back if not successful in terms of duplicated numbers? So we try for six months because it is temporary and there's plenty more folks who would like that space and the opportunity to stabilize and to receive services so that they can then make the next leap. But the next leap is into housing and there is not any housing available. So that's the other problem. There's a lot in the works and the county's working on it. We're working on, from a supportive housing, but there's nowhere else, the next move to go to, which means then that it's not really temporary because there's nowhere else for people to go. It's moving, it's hopefully connecting them to other resources, family. For stability. Something else to help them move along and help them stabilize, but it is an intent is to six months because that's about a good time than to exit them from the program. Right, and I mean, I don't, yeah, I don't question how challenging that can be for people who are struggling. So I totally understand that. I guess in terms of the advocacy, and then I'll, I know that my spare has a comment. No, no, no. In terms of the advocacy and that, if we're thinking about cities taking on direct services, then thinking about reimbursement and being able to draw down reimbursement dollars, particularly like the Cal AIM and the shifts there, I think should be part of that conversation and part of the advocacy component if that's the service we're providing. So I'll just leave it there. I agree with all the points that you made, Matt, in terms of needing our other jurisdictions to step up, too. I know you're jumping to do this, but Council Member Bruner is next. And I know you were very good about raising your hand and everything, Madam Vice Mayor, but nonetheless, Council Member Bruner is next. Thank you. And thank you for all of this information and the questions that have been asked. Let's see, I guess at this point, my first question is can you talk about the RV dump station maintenance? What is that? What is the maintenance? It's actually building an RV, a dump station. Think of it like when you go camping. Oh, so it's not maintenance of an RV dump station, it's creating, so. Creating and operating. So why is it not with new? It's not new, it was programmed when you all adopted the program in 2022, that was a line item. I see, so the new applies to after the program was adopted items that. Okay, that's correct. Thank you for clarifying that. And so then back to that creating an RV dump station, as it relates to the recent Coastal Commission conditions and action and the work that will happen over the next couple months and the pilot program over the year with this permit, it seems like that would be a priority as part of that. And I'm curious how, I mean, each of these are very important, but how that decision was made to prioritize the ones you did and specifically with that RV dump station. Yeah, while it would be great to have, it's not necessary to have for the OVO. That's the bottom line. It would be beneficial, but given the other needs, it was a trade-off, but it's not necessary to operate the OVO program. Okay. Madam Vice Mayor, oh, I'm sorry. I saw more questions. I'm very sorry. I'm sorry, I just want to add a little bit of context because that's exactly right. Sort of the provision of an RV dump station was not a requirement of the OVO and the conversations of Coastal, but related and part of the prioritization process is we've developed, working with Public Works, we've developed initial draft designs for an RV station and they've actually submitted a grant to try to get funding to develop that. And so waiting for the resolution of that. So there's potentially other funding sources to be able to make that happen. So that was part of the process in determining what to prioritize. That's great news. Fingers crossed on that grant. I've forgotten about the grant. Okay, and then the storage program, that was part of the initial direction, previous direction as well. So that's moving forward. It's not, oh wait, yes, we hope to. I'm sorry, I have to look at the right column. We hope to move forward. Originally, it was in the budget for 60,000. When we went out for bids, it's 230,000. So it was much more expensive than what we originally planned but in order to try to get the CSSO implemented, we needed to have a daytime storage. But the difficulty yet again is the location, staffing. Those are the high drivers because it's every day in and out twice a day in the location and having an operator. That's why it has not been implemented. How many bids did you get, you know, offhand? If not, that's okay. Yeah, two. It's been a while, but we thought that was quite high. There was a potential, try to look at other options, whether it was gonna maybe potentially at the outdoor world, but to continually operate that program we wanted to see if there was other options. Okay. And then let's see, my other question. I think some of the comments about our sustainability with this and the, you know, 35,000 something per person if you kind of divide, for example, the city overlook number, it's an investment into people that aren't capable of taking care of themselves for whatever reason is happening. And I mean, there are some people who make that in a year, but if you're not able to make that and you're not qualifying for assistance in other ways or not capable of getting to that point, this temporary investment in people I think is huge and investment in our community where they're not finding investment elsewhere. So the fact that it's temporary and rotating through, I think the fact that it says full capacity makes it sound stagnant, like it's 135 spots, it's full and nothing else, but it's a rotating. There are people moving in and out for various reasons. Yeah, back to capacity. And so I'm happy to see, and the previous slide I made a note about the 67 and when we start thinking of solutions going forward and sustainability, we have to think about the changes that are also happening simultaneously that didn't exist before. And a lot of that is supply, housing supply is coming. And that's where I feel a little hopeful that eventually it's going to be like this. If we're thinking longterm and investing in this way because state, county, other resources, I mean, it takes so much to assist people where they're at and what their needs are. And it's so varied and complex as we've learned. So the fact that we've been able to invest these dollars in this way, I hope that we can have more earmarked money coming in, more grants helping and assisting. I'm glad you mentioned a federal legislator to help. The lobbyist. The lobbyist to hone in specifically on this area, which I think is huge. And yeah, I think that's, those were all my questions and comments right now. Thank you, council member. Madam Vice Mayor. Okay. So I think where I'm a little frustrated is we sat in another meeting and I did a little other calculation. And what I calculated based on our point in time survey and what I did some quick searches was that in the United States, 0.1% of the population is homeless. If we look at California, it's 0.2%. Los Angeles, 1%. In Santa Cruz, the city, 2%. So I think we're, for whatever reason, and I don't think it's necessarily all because of the cost of housing unfairly burdened with solving some of society's toughest issues. I think the other thing is when we say housing isn't available after those six months, housing isn't available maybe that they can afford here because it's really expensive. If you move three hours east or somewhere else, you can afford it probably a little more. And you keep looking or Santa Cruz is great. It's not Mecca. Like there's lots of wonderful places around the world that are affordable. So I think when you're getting people stable and helping them try to find resources, I think we need to look beyond the city, beyond the state and help people find places that they can achieve like integration back into society in a meaningful way. And it doesn't have to be living in Santa Cruz. And I don't know, say I'm asking people to leave, maybe if you can't afford it here, you can't live here. And right now from what I see from the people living up that they're not exactly contributing to the quality of life for other people in a way that I appreciate. And I'm wondering if that number would be 135 if there wasn't drug use allowed. When I went up there, there was needle disposal and Narcan available. And so if you said no drugs up here, would it still be 135? I don't know. And so I'm really frustrated and that 35,000 is like a punch in the gut knowing that in public schools in this county, it's less than half that that our kids are being funded for. And I completely understand these people aren't capable of taking care of themselves. Having said that, and I'm not talking about children, but the adults. Adults. You have to take some responsibility for the situation that you're in. You can't, like the victim mindset is something that I have no empathy for. If you look at their situation compared to people worldwide, this is like extremely frustrating to me. And I wish I had seen this slide over the weekend so I could process and come down and not be cranky up here tonight. But I just had to throw that out there as my. Just one last question. I was wondering about the ability for individuals who may be using drugs or have other challenges in their life. Are they able to access or be eligible for some of the housing that could come online? Or are they not? It depends on the case worker. We really, every case is so individual. And so I wouldn't be able to. Like your assessment of the individuals we're serving do you think they would qualify or not? I mean, if we're saying that that's gonna be a potential solution. I wouldn't know. I don't have. I mean, I'm just curious because there is a requirement. Right. I mean, it's complex, you know, trying to make some generalized statements about that. But certainly with the process, everybody the overlook, we also have connections with our county partners with the housing pathways program, healing the streets that are working on or rate service issues, but also really working on housing navigation. And so a number of those folks are specifically connected to case workers, navigators, in addition to the work that Salvation Army staff is doing there. So that activity is happening, but trying to be able to deconstruct that down to particular cases is really difficult. Okay, then I guess I would just caution us for overgeneralizing that that housing coming online will be the solution for some of these individuals then. Essentially, yeah. Mr. Imwally, if I could ask you to stay there for a second. Let's remind me with the most recent point in time count is in the city of Santa Cruz for folks experiencing homelessness. I believe the 2022 point in time count, there was 1,469, or is it 1,439, apologies. Close enough. Budget work tonight. And of those, let's call it 1,500, easy to do arithmetic at 1,500. So those 1,500 folks experiencing homelessness, we don't count anybody who, am I right, we wouldn't count anybody who's actually now sheltered. It includes people that do not have a regular house who are in shelters. So the sheltered population is included in the point in time count. So it includes both unsheltered and sheltered in temporary emergency shelters. Okay, good. That's helpful. We're on the underway with regard to safety, public safety clearing of Sycamore Grove and the, excuse me, and Pogonip. And what is your, I've heard various estimates when we all took over, many people took a tour on the railroad tracks and then in subsequent discussions, something like 100 people in that area. What is your best estimate and how many people were in that area? I think before we started in Sycamore Grove, if you looked at the entire accounting Pogonip, both upper Sycamore and lower Sycamore, there was approximately 100 people. There's roughly our best estimate. Again, highly variable day to day, a lot of it is inference from number of tents rather than contacts with the individual. When the city engaged in the clearing of Ross Camp and the clearing of the Benchlands, my recollection, I wasn't here when the Ross Camp or Benchlands were cleared. I arrived here after that. My recollection was that somewhere around 30% of the folks that in each of those instances when offered assistance, about 30% said yes. Is that about right? Similarly, I was not here for the Ross Camp, so I don't have that data. Last year for the Benchlands through our process, it was actually 39% of individuals who worked with zone by zone through the entire process actually accepted shelter. And that is just at the overlook in 1220 so that does not include outside of that the work with community partners and a number of individuals were also housed at Housing Matters, so it's slightly over 40 at least. And do we have any data on how the clearing at Poganip and Sycamore Grove is going relative to people being willing to accept some sort of assistance whether it's shelter or any other assistance? Yes, I don't have that data available right now, but we do have numbers on individuals that we're able to connect to shelter at either overlook or 1220 with Sycamore Grove. The numbers at the time of closure were not considerable at that point, but we'll have that data aggregated and similarly through the Poganip process, we won't be collecting that information throughout. Will that information be available prior to the close of our budget actions in June? That's, you gotta come to Michael. We could probably give you, you receive weekly updates from our staff member, Suzy Oki. We can be sure to include the numbers of individuals that accept shelter. We don't start the Poganip until next week. We started noticing this week. Yeah, so it's not until next week, so I don't have numbers on Poganip. I think we're facing an extraordinary problem here. The county, the state government has said that all counties will need to stand up a cares court, which may be helpful with some portion of those experiencing homelessness. I must say that when the county was here and presenting, which admittedly in fairness to them, was this is a brand new concept to them, just like it is to us, except they have the obligation to stand it up, not us. But I was a bit taken back by the sense that perhaps the county was reluctant to go into this space that they are required to go into, and that there are rather significant costs, as it was explained by Ms. Colburn and her staff when they were here, that the county had not identified and the state was not providing subvention of any kind. So this comes out of presumably out of the county's general fund. A general fund, which looking at their budget is not a general fund that's going to have millions of dollars of surplus anytime soon, and they will have to undertake a multi-million dollar activity in order to stand up these care courts, if I understand it. Am I right in thinking that at this moment, the state is not providing an offset to the expenses that the counties are going to incur? It's a reshuffling, they're not, but one of the things we have been told from the county, it's basically a reshuffling of the decks. It's just taking the same population and prioritizing those that will get the services first, it's a reprioritization. It's basically what it is. Well, that's even worse than I thought. No, that's even worse than I thought, because they're really not going to be doing more, they're going to be doing different, and they hope that that different results in a different outcome, and I'm okay with them hoping that, doing the same thing over and over, expecting we know what the answer to that is. So they're going to try something new. So let's say they reshuffle the deck and they stop funding this and they go over here and they fund this, which I think is an optimistic expectation. I don't think they will stop doing everything in order to go over here and do the state program. And we're facing, at a minimum, if we approve this budget, a $6 million hole in funding homeless services in the next fiscal year. And if I look at, if I read this chart correctly, not a heck of a lot of that would fit into the homeless component of an affordable housing bond, because if I understand it, most of this is not capital outlay. Almost all of this is program. It's programs. So no capital outlay, program going away, no money from the state, a county that seems reluctant to want to engage in a cares court, they will do it because it's the law, but I didn't hear anything close to enthusiasm of getting on with it. And according to your characterization, which I totally trust, we may not see a net gain in county expenditures. So this is not so much a question as an observation, and you've probably heard me say this before, cities are not small versions of the county. We don't, we are not very good. We, you do it quite well, but cities are not designed to be health and human service providers. We're not. There's nothing in our mandate that requires that. We do it out of the kindness of our hearts, is how we spend this general fund money. But we're gonna face a tremendous challenge on the operations side. I'm willing to think that within the next couple of weeks we can fashion an affordable housing bond that covers a lot of ground and provides some capital outlay for the shelter needs or some transitional housing or permanent support, whatever it may be. We'll make, try to make a capital contribution to that in the right way. But I see us facing a tremendous challenge sitting here one year from now with no apparent change in the state. The state's budget this year, the governor seems to have forgotten all about and the legislature seems to have forgotten all about anything that they used to claim as their highest priority and they seem to have forgotten that. I mean, am I right? There's no funding coming our way to a city for any of this or any of the other things we talk about in the area of homeless services. Is that right? That's right. There's a market difference between the May revise and the earlier projections of what the funding was available for homelessness. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Any other questions or comments? We'll see you at budget, we'll see you in June. Thank you very much. I wanna say, before we leave, this is a very good presentation. I think what you're hearing from the council is probably what you experienced, a high level of frustration about this. We have no doubt that there are people in tremendous need out there. I think it varies, I will tell you that. I don't think every person who's experiencing homelessness is someone who we need to spend $35,000 on. I really believe that. I don't know what portion we should or shouldn't but your work on this is very good every year. We have given you a very difficult task. You do it very well. That's different than whether we are very frustrated about what's going on here. Thank you for your very fine work. Is there further business to come before us? Am I right in understanding? We'll be back here at nine o'clock tomorrow morning. Further business to come before the council. The vice mayor moves adjournment. Ms. Brown seconds. Mr. Newsom would have, but he didn't. I was going to move. It's not available. Those in favor, speak the file if they send a aye. Opposed, motion carries. We are adjourned.