 Good morning, everybody. I'd like to call to order the January 31st, 2023 meeting of the Board of Supervisors. We could begin with a roll call, please. Supervisor Cummings, Hernandez, McPherson. Here. Koenig. Here. And Chair Friend. Here. Thank you, Chair. You have quorum. Thank you, Madam Clerk. If we're gonna begin with a moment of silence, I believe Supervisor McPherson, if you'd like to lead this. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'd like to acknowledge the tragic shooting at the 18-year-old Rowan Parnheim Buller Creek on Saturday night. We're keeping his family and students in our hearts today. And I'd like to remember him in our moment of silence this morning. Thank you, Supervisor McPherson. Anybody else have any comments? So a moment of silence, please. Please join us in the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, and ever this old, with a free and justice for all. Mr. Palacios, are there any changes to today's agenda? Yes, we have two changes on the consent agenda, item number 44. There's a revised memo replaces packet page 443. And then on item 72, staff request that this item be deleted, remove package pages 882 to 909. Thank you, that's all. Thank you, Mr. Palacios. Are there any board members that would like to remove an item from consent to the regular agenda before we open it up for public comment? Yeah, Mr. Chair, I'd like to pull item number 38, the four-leaf contract, and place it on the regular agenda for discussion, for a broader discussion by the board on this. Okay, item 38 will become item 11.1, is that okay? Madam Clerk? Yes, thank you, Chair. Okay, we'll now open it up for public comment. This is an opportunity for members of the community to address us on items that are either not on today's agenda or on our consent agenda, or if you cannot stay items on our regular agenda. Is there anybody that would like to address us from Chambers please? Feel free to step forward. Good morning. Good morning, Chairman, Supervisors. By the way, there's no places for people to park out there to attend. You show your hatred for the public time after time, both by making it very difficult and censoring people here at the very podium. The fact that you do not report your secret meetings of a cog, of a Soviet, of ambag to the public, the fact that it's not even taught in our schools is outrageous. The people have no idea the degree of distraction and input from the World Bank and the United Nations through the phony regionalization organizations in which you're taking away the people's right to govern. You no longer represent us, you represent those you're taking the money from, including the California League of Cities, which is not only racist, but figurative. The person that founded it, was a Governor Filane, and his brochure reads, Let's Eat California White. The California League of Cities is a surge and a slap in the face to the American citizens. Also, wearing a mask is absolutely outrageous. There has been a suppressed report. You'll have more than 86 different references to this, the fact that the mask is dangerous even to surgeons who perform surgery for more than a half hour. They've shown it's detrimental because of the increase of carbon dioxide and lack of oxygen. The also, the very fact that you had a secret donor fund the person that said which businesses were important and which ones were not vital. There is certainly, I think, grounds for lawsuits against those people, including Palacios, who was part of the Community Foundation and is also part of Bruce McPherson's green energy. Thank you. Is there anybody else in chambers I'd like to address us? Good morning. Good morning. Not my first time to come to the board, but new players, welcome to both of you. My name is Richard Lewis. Three years ago I came, if you don't remember me, when Susan had that letter to me and I spoke about Grupo Amistad. Today I'm asking to see what we can do at the next election at Cabril College. Check out that nobody raised their hand. This is leadership 101 if people were here. Check it out. We got a trustee now moving on up. My friend, I hope, I have the domain name for a different kind of union. And I hope there's leadership from the board and other people from having the domain names for a homie's union, one that moves forward, what is possible? He, I've done my homework. I can't speak for three minutes and transfer, but I can't in person. Back in those days, we mentioned that in 75, there was a county of Santa Cruz Youth Commission. I asked you to research through staff that there's a whole lot of possibility. The former youth commissions in Watsonville and in Santa Cruz were high school. Now there's a county law that creates the California Youth Empowerment Commission. Who can do it? Not me. Maybe not even that, the chancellor at Cabril. But boy, you have a hub of a diamond with Dr. King's statue from Georgia overlooking our county. So my name unimportant. I'm not gonna give up. I believe that you can have it used. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Okay, sir. Sir, thank you. I do. Good to see you. Is there anybody else from the chambers I'd like to address us? Good morning, sir. Hi, how are you all? My name is Garth McDonald. I'm a public information officer for SBA's Office of Disaster Assistance. I just wanted to stop by real quick and address you all in person. I've met a couple of you so far and I've exchanged emails with a couple more. But I'm here in Santa Cruz County representing SBA's Office of Disaster Recovery and Resilience. We're here to help individuals, not only businesses of all sizes, of course, private nonprofit organizations, but homeowners and renters. In fact, a majority of our low interest loan funds that go to federal major disasters actually does go to homeowners and renters to rebuild their house, to replace personal property. And we also assist them with various other resources as far as getting them funds before the insurance companies might settle. We can cover funds for rebuilding and recovery, sort of the long-term recovery arm of the federal government. And we do it with low interest loans for most homeowners, 2.3% fixed rate, no payment for the first 12 months, no interest now in the crews for the first 12 months, which is a new offering by our administrator. So they're very favorable, but most people don't want loans because they're hit by a disaster, of course, but it's usually the best source of federal funding that's available to get people as close to pre-disaster condition. I do know, I grew up in Santa Cruz County went to high school in Cabrillo College. And so I know the area, well, I was here in 82, but there's a lot of issues that up in the San Lorenzo Valley, a lot of problems that we can't fix. Some of the federal government can fix over the long-term, hopefully we can work with the county. I have this one flyer, I'm gonna leave for you folks. It's really the most important thing that a borrower should look at because it has pretty much all the details of what they need to do, steps to apply. So I'll leave these in my cards for you all and I appreciate your time. Thank you, Mr. McDonald. Thank you for your communication with us. I'd like to thank Mr. McDonald. He was, we had a town hall meeting in Ziony about a week ago and there was probably 250 to 300 people there and you were there along with everybody else, Congressman Kanetta and Sheriff Hart and others and Steve Wiesner from our County Public Works Department to explain some of the road damages and so forth. It was very well received and I thank you for being there. Thank you for really, I'm gonna say to the state and federal government for this tension they've put on our County to get it rebuilt. Thank you. Supervisor Hernandez. Chair Friend, I didn't really want to necessarily pull an item but on 39 now I wanna see if I can add some additional information to it. Yeah, Supervisor Hernandez, we're still doing public comment when we bring it back to the board. Absolutely, thank you for bringing that up. I'll take a note though to make sure that we have that. Is there anybody else who'd like to address us during the public comment time from the chambers? Please step forward. Thank you. Good morning. Sorry, traffic from South County is a lot of fun. My name is Jennifer Fontez and I'm here representing our community that was hit by this past disaster. We lost our whole bridge to our community of 31 people in homes and we are now using a very emergency easement through our neighbor's front yard to be able to even get out. We have reached out multiple times to a lot of the people in the County government and haven't really received any kind of responses which has been kind of difficult and disheartening. And we've taken it upon ourselves as our community to go out and we've applied for FEMA. We're in that process right now and FEMA's been really responsive and the federal government's actually been really responsive and helpful. We are now stuck with the bridge in a river that we're not technically allowed to touch and nobody's been helping us figure out who to talk to, what permit process to go through and we've reached out to multiple agencies with no help other than finger pointing and all we're seeking is not even funding just maybe an expedition on expediting, permitting or removing a bridge that's damaging and eroding the river further and just waiting for another storm. That's all I'm looking for. Guidance, assistance, through the permitting process. We're already sourcing our own funding and it's a private bridge but it's just a regular community of 31 people and it's also a major fire access road and escape route. Are you Ricky Canyon and Browns Valley and Coralitas? Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Fontez. I do believe our public works director would like to connect with you there on the right. Is there anybody else here in chambers that would like to address us before we go online? Okay, seeing none, Madam Clerk, is there anybody online that would like to address us? Yes, we do have speakers online. Thank you. Maria Elena, your microphone is now available. Good morning. This is Maria Elena de la Garza. I am the executive director to the Community Action Board of Santa Cruz County and let me start off by saying happy new year, board of supervisors and welcome to supervisor Justin and supervisor Felipe. It's great to have you there. I just wanted to address, I believe it's comment or agenda item number eight but I have to leave a little bit early today. I just want to say thank you for our partnership with our county partners. We have a program together where CAB provides and serves as a trusted messenger to ensure that information is getting out to the immigrant community, specifically folks who speak Spanish, specifically folks who speak indigenous languages. This partnership has served and has done amazing work in connecting the folks who are furthest away from the county systems to get a little bit closer, to feel a little bit more trusted because as we know, the anti-immigrant rhetoric that we are just at the tail end of because of a federal administration a few years back really pushed our immigrant community into further away and into invisibility. And so this partnerships with the county like this one between the county and the community action board has really set the foundation to understand that trust is earned and that trust can be built. And so I want to thank you on behalf of the community action board. I want to thank our county partners, Edma Marquez and Randy Morris and Kimberly Peterson for acknowledging that there is a space that is best filled by a community-based organization. And that's how we move forward. And so thank you for that. And more to come, have a good year, happy new year to all. Thank you. Colin, user one, your microphone is now available. And Garrett, I ask you to stop the slaughter of the trees along highway one, that out of Soquel area, it's a horrific clear cut. I am referring you to a couple of years ago I asked the board to sign on to the international appeal to stop 5G on earth and in space and gave you the documentation. I ask you to do that again as no action was taken to protect the public. An update on this from Arthur Verstenberg, author of the invisible rainbow, a history of electricity and life. And he is the administrator of the international appeal to stop 5G on earth and space. You can read the whole document at Arthur at cellphonechatsforce.org. This is from December 14th last month, titled The Ecoside from Space. Number of operating satellites, paths of 7,000. On the evening of Thursday, December 8th, 2022, one web launched 40 satellites from Cape Canaveral, Florida, bringing the total number of active satellites in orbit around the earth to more than 7,000. These cell towers in space are altering the electromagnetic environment of the entire planet and are debilitating and exterminating all life on it. Ethan, the first lead of 28- Thank you, Ms. Garry. Chair, we have no further speakers online. However, I've been made available, aware that there's one additional speaker in chambers. Perfect, thank you. Please come forward. Morning, sir. Morning. Good morning, supervisors. My name is Jose Barajas and I'm here representing Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Cruz County. I just want to thank you all so much for your support. We've really been able to partner up with you all during these last couple of weeks with the floods. We've appreciated the support that the county has lend us with your help and your support with the county. We were able to feed almost 8,000 meals throughout the county for those that were evacuated. We were supporting those at the fairgrounds and we were supporting those up in the valley. With that continued support, we've also been able to reach out to many folks for CalFresh with the support of Randy Morrison, Irma Marquez, who is going to be speaking as well. And we'd really just appreciate your support that you've done. The food bank continues to support the county when it needs it the most and we're going to continue to find strategic ways to continue to reach those that haven't been able to access the food bank over the past couple of weeks. We've seen an increase in people that have needed our support. A true testimony has been somebody out last week at Ramsey Park. We were handing out food and emergency boxes. Single dad, two kids lost his home out by the levee, came in, was shattered in tears, had just lost his work as well. We were able to give him a box of food and we were able to give him that support that he needed to register for CalFresh. So again, thank you so much for your continued support. We appreciate all the things at the county and that you all continue to do. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for your work. Okay. We'll close public comment and we'll bring it back to the board to discuss consent items. Mr. Bars and McPherson. Yeah, Mr. Chair, there's a couple. The number 31, the broadband grant, we've been pushing for greater connectivity for years for more rural areas in our county. And this is an opportunity to identify how we might get there. And after facing our fourth disaster in six years, the rural areas are disproportionately affected by the flood and debris and the flow and even makes it more critical than ever that we improve connections, especially in the isolated areas. And we all know where there are. A lot of them are up in my district in the center runs of valley. But this broadband grant, I know that the national NACO, which you represent our county and Mr. Chair and myself at CSAC, the California State Association of Counties, broadband connectivity is a high priority for both state and federal agencies throughout, certainly this county, this state and this nation. On the number 48, the storm recovery update. We can go a long time about talking about this. And I wanna just thank our Office of Response Recovery and Resilience for this update. And we look forward to some town hall meetings that are going to be coming on February 2nd and 7th to talk about the rebuilding process and the Zoom link to that can be found on the County Storm Recovery website under public meetings. They're gonna be at 6.30 on February 2nd and it's February 7th and it's gonna be a county-wide town hall. I wanna thank the county personnel who were a part of the immediate response to the recovery. I know we all do. We all had severe impacts on our districts. And I wanna also thank our state and federal office holders who have been very engaged in conversations with the county on funding and other resources to help our residents. Congressman Panetta was designing a town hall that we had, as I mentioned earlier, an issue who represented the North County prior to the recent redistricting was always on top of it. She's still engaged very much with what we're doing. We've seen US Senator Alex Padilla here a couple of times in the flood recovery grant that we got and then some of the issues that are facing us now in Capitola, in the second district and elsewhere as well. So we really have some great response from our state and federal office holders and I wanna thank them profoundly. We know that past disasters that given that the amount of damage county-wide, this promises to be a long recovery. And I know all of us are on board with the staff to work things out as quickly as we can. And I'm glad to see the disaster recovery centers in Felton and Watsonville. And it's my hope that the number and those agencies and nonprofits engaged will result in problem-solving at a very quick pace as quickly as possible. I visited the one at the Felton Library in the Santa Rosa Valley. A lot of people were there. Every agency you can think of for disaster recovery was represented there. And we heard from a speaker from the Small Business Administration here this morning as well. So I thank you to the community members for your patience and for your kindness that you've given to others in our county. It's very much appreciated. And we'll get through this one too. I think we've had enough of it, but that's not for us to say, I guess, which one's gonna come next. But we are getting to be experts at disaster recovery and I just wanna thank the people in the communities that really were hardest hit for getting together and helping one another. Thank you, Survisor McPherson. Survisor Koenig. Thank you, Chair. I wanna echo the commendation for our county staff who worked many tireless hours throughout the disaster, particular to our county roads crews who I know have put in many, many long days. And I think as you heard from the earlier speaker during public comment, our road infrastructure is incredibly vital. I mean, it is the lifeline to the rest of our community. And so I really, again, I wanna thank our road crews for making sure that people are connected whenever possible and can go back to life as normal. Also, don't think we should gloss over the, relatively, seemingly small actions that I know made a really big impact for people during this crisis. So the 1 million pounds of sand that were distributed, that was really appreciated in the middle of all these continuous floods for people to feel like the county was providing something concrete, something literally heavy that they could use to protect their homes. That made a big difference for people. And also the dumpsters. I appreciate the CAO's quick action to make sure we were able to get dumpsters out to communities where people could begin to clean up and let go of the things that were damaged to the storm. And that was really helpful, especially as we mobilized a lot of volunteers through the Volunteer Center and other folks who flew in from all parts of the country to help over the last couple of weeks and helping people to clean up their homes. Of course, there's, as Supervisor McPherson said, we're becoming experts in disaster services and we can always do better. And so to that end, I look forward to speaking about item 38, which we've moved to our regular agenda and wanna thank Supervisor Friend also for item 39, the contract for emergency public safety notifications. I think we all did our best to get information out during this crisis, but we could definitely do better in terms of cohesive messaging and making sure we're all on the same page. So thank you, Chair Friend for that. Thank you, Supervisor Koenig, Supervisor Hernandez. Well, first, I'd also like to thank all the public works crews that worked tirelessly out in South County to stabilize the boils that we had over there and to stop the seepage on the Pajaro River. There were several hours that it was really critical and they worked tirelessly overnight, long hours, probably over time. So I wanna thank them for really being heroes out there. Working hard. And second, I wanna thank my new commissioners, Yesenia Jimenez, Olivia Madrigal and Karina Moreno and thank them now for their future service to our county. And I also wanna thank Zach Friend on item number 39. One of the things that this weekend I went to was I attended the City of Baltimore's legislative conference and legislative breakfast. And afterwards we had a little bit of discussion, sideline discussion about some of the issues with the city manager over there. And one of the things that we talked about was the emergency notifications. And I think one of the things was that we wanted a more user friendly, a user text friendly sign-in process for the notification systems and also a more user friendly map system without codes. But I think the most important thing is that the city was, we were talking about was making sure that we all align. And so if we could take those three things into account, if we can align our systems, probably all the cities would probably be beneficial in the future if we align our emergency notification systems. And that's pretty much it. Thank you, Supervisor Hernandez. Excellent suggestions. Supervisor Cummings, good morning. Chair. Do you hear me? Okay. Good morning, Chair Cummings. Morning, community members and staff. I have a couple of comments. The first is on item number 55, which is transfer from Fish and Wildlife. I'd just like to thank the commission for making these recommendations to the Board. I'm especially appreciative of the inclusion of the Environmental Stewardship Pilot Project that will partner with the Downtown Streets Team at the Coastal Watershed Council to help and remove invasive species from the river. So just wanted to express my appreciation of staff's work on securing that funding. The second was item number 57. This is CalWorks funding that would go towards Community Action Board to help with eviction protections. And as a renter, as we know with the affordability crisis we face here in Santa Cruz that many low-income people can sometimes find themselves at the point where they're facing eviction and just in need of additional funds to help keep themselves in their homes. And so just wanted to thank the Human Services Department staff for working with Community Action Board to provide additional funding for eviction protections. I mean, it's really critical that we continue to support these programs, especially when people are faced with disasters and out of work and really need this kind of assistance just to stay afloat. The last item I was gonna comment on, and before I do, I do continue on expressing my appreciation of staff and how they're helping with the disaster response. I think my colleagues have really done a good job of expressing how hard folks have worked, but I just wanna also add my appreciation for their work as well during this difficult time. But the last comment I want, the last item I wanted to comment on was item number 63, which is related to private youth transport companies involved in child custody reunification proceedings. I really wanna thank the staff for bringing this item back to the board. There was a lot of community interest in the event that precipitated the board actions by the previous supervisor. And it's serious enough that I believe the county should take the lead to try to address this issue. And so I'd like to add additional direction to this item. The first additional direction would be to direct staff to send the attached resolution to our state legislative representatives. And then the second action would be to direct staff to prepare an ordinance for the board's consideration within two months that would prevent private transport companies from physical contact with minors in the same manner that our county policies prevent child protective service workers from touching minors. This ordinance would apply, and that's the end of the direction, but this ordinance would apply in the unincorporated parts of the county. And we understand we wanna have alignment with the cities and I think that should this ordinance be something that we can implement, we would wanna encourage the cities as well to take similar approaches. Our county has policies that prevent workers from physically touching minors. And I think that private businesses that do that same kind of work with children should be held to the same standards. So I'm hoping we can add that direction that we get support for that direction as well. Thank you, Zuba, your comments. I'll mention a couple of quick items on 25, the digital wallet project, appreciation from Ms. Benson and the team that's been working on it. Obviously it hasn't been quite as quick as I think the county was hoping for, but it does appear as though we're getting it right. And I think that that's more important than expediting. On item 31, also appreciation for ISD on the broadband master plan. This is an item that I brought forward sometime forward to use funding for a number of things and to have the CPUC provide funding for this broadband master plan, which really one of the key components is this qualifies this for a significant amount of state and federal funding for broadband expansion throughout our county. I look forward to working with ISD and I encourage my colleagues to do the same to ensure that we get the word out about the surveys and the work that they're doing so we can find where those holes are so that when we're doing this master plan, it allows us to get funding for those specific targeted locations. On item 39, which is the emergency communications, I appreciate the support of my colleagues. The idea here was just to have something that had a lower barrier to entry than the reverse 911 system that we've been using. There's a lot of things we need to communicate with the world on and even just some of the most recent traffic related issues that we've had are road closures. I mean, the barrier to entry can be very low. You can geolocate on some of these emergency communications devices. So I think that Supervisor Hernandez's suggestions are very good and as part of the process that I'm sure the CEO's office will look at they'll look at what other people are using within the county to see if there could be the option of alignment. It's very cost effective. People expect to be able to passively receive information from their local government and this provides us an opportunity for people to self-select into that opportunity. The last item is just on the storms. I'll also add that appreciation and also make sure that people recognize in the community that if you suffer damage either in your home or business to be sure to reach out to us or to your state or federal representatives to ensure that you are actually getting access to all the resources that you need. There's a lot of things that actually go unclaimed during a process like this. A lot of people don't know that they qualify for a lot of loans or other opportunities. We've had a number of conversations with constituents in our district that people didn't realize something had the possibility of being reimbursable. So make sure that we want to use these services. And also we don't have a whole lot of time. I mean, ultimately these applications need to get into the next couple of months to our state or federal partners. So make sure that you do reach out and avail yourself of that. All right, so we do have a request for additional direction. If there are no other comments it would now would be appropriate time for board member to make a motion on consent with the additional direction. Second, so we have a motion for consent with the additional direction on item 63 from Supervisor Cummings. You may need to provide that specifically to the clerk with the exact language as we have a second from Supervisor Koenig if we could have a roll call please. Supervisor Koenig. Hi. Cummings. Hi. Hernandez. Hi. McPherson. Consented and passes unanimously as amended with additional direction. Thank you, Madam Clerk. All right, we're gonna move on to the first item of our regular agenda, which is item number seven, which is to consider authorizing the issuance of a proclamation honoring agricultural commissioner, Juan Hidalgo on the occasion of his departure from the County of Santa Cruz to be signed by all members of the board and outlined in a memo of the chair. Good morning, Mr. Commissioner. We are very sad to see you go. I must say I will make some brief introductory comments as I believe the supervisor that's worked most closely with you because of more agricultural land in my district than anyone else. And let me just say a few things about Juan that I don't, that this is one of those members that maybe a lot of members of the community may not know but you in my opinion epitomize the best about what an agricultural commissioner across the state would be. And you have been recognized as a leader throughout the state in your association, which at the good fortune of being able to speak to you a few years ago. But you've been able to find this balance between the regulation side, the education side and being a really progressive leader within your field. Santa Cruz County can be a challenging place. The interface between agriculture and schools, between agriculture and business, between agriculture and just the general sense of life. The ever-changing state and federal regulations and as far as growers' needs and also the challenges with regulations and you've been able to find this balance where everybody feels like they've been heard. We've been able to move policies forward in a very progressive and positive way. You're a member of our community. It shows when I heard of your departure, although you're not leaving very far down to Monterey County, it was a tough one because I just have seen the amazing work that you've done throughout the South County and I appreciate everything you've done. Are there any other supervisors that would like to make comments before we open it up to Mr. Hidalgo and also I'll open it up for Mr. Palacios. So, divisor, commentator. Mr. Hidalgo, I just wanna acknowledge one specific example of the kind of work that Chair Friend mentioned, which is helping get our counties part of a pilot pesticide notification program. That means a lot to people, particularly who live close to those fields. Of course, agriculture is one of the two main engines of our economy here in Santa Cruz County. I always appreciate your thorough reports. I think I first encountered one as part of the Focus Ag program, which two of my fellow supervisors, if you haven't done yet, I highly recommend you take that program. But I mean, $657 million worth of crops in our county in 2021, the last complete report. That's incredible. And of course, it's steadily risen under your leadership as our Ag Commissioner. I'll also point out to people, I think one's name appears more times in our county than anyone else's. If you look at every scale, at every supermarket or every gas pump, he's there making sure that you're getting a square deal on all those products that need to be weighed. So thank you for your work. We're really gonna miss you. Surveys and I appreciate it. We are very fortunate Santa Cruz County, I think to have the best of the best of 58 counties in California, to have you as our Ag Commissioner and all the plot at school, you could go on and on with what you've done and with what you've engaged the youth to to realize the value of nutritional foods and so forth and what they can do and to start young. And that's what's gonna make the difference in the long run, literally. So there's so many aspects of what you've done for the agricultural community, for this county that have been mentioned and you could go on and on, but you are the best of the best and Santa Cruz County is very, very fortunate to have you as their Ag Commissioner in the near future. We've really appreciated having you here for as many years as you've been here. Thank you. Thank you, Surveys or Cummings. Just wanted to say, sadly, I haven't had an opportunity to work with you just now getting on the board and with your departure, but I just wanna thank you for your service to Santa Cruz County. Obviously you've done a great job as has been expressed by many of our board members as reflected in our community. And just wanna thank you for all your hard work and wish you the best in your next endeavor. Thank you, Surveys or Cummings. So we haven't had the opportunity to work with you as a Santa Cruz County supervisor, but we've worked a lot on as a city council member. And I wanna thank you for helping me guide me and navigating through a lot of issues that we've had. I really appreciate all your advice, suggestions and really leading us in the right direction in South County. I think that like Zach Friend said, I think that you're this awesome balance of progressive vision and making sure that we have prosperity in South County as well. So I think, you know, keep up that bold vision of being progressive and making sure that we're prosperous in our communities. And I'm still gonna give you a call once in a while to ask for that advice. Thank you. Thank you, Surveys or Cummings. And by the way, before I turn it over to Mr. Plosio. So Supervisor Caput, we're here. He would thank you for making sure the peanut butter has the right weight in it. Every year he was fascinated about his peanut butter jar and whether somebody was actually making sure that Juan assured him he's there for you on the peanut butter. C.A.O. Plosios. Yes, thank you very much, Chair Friend. Juan, I wanna thank you for your years of service. You command a lot of respect in the industry and the community and among the advocates as well. And that's hard to do to get everyone on all sides to have a lot of respect for you. And you command the respect because of your integrity. No one ever questions your integrity. You're fair to all sides. And as has been mentioned, at the same time, you've been very progressive. So you've moved us forward as well. So I really do thank you for your years of service. We're gonna miss you. And I also want to wish you the very best as you drive to King City to your office over there. I miss you a lot, please. Good morning, Chair, members of the Board of Supervisors, Juan Hidalgo, Agricultural Commissioner. I'm truly humbled by the very kind words here today. I really have enjoyed working with the county so many years. I've been here 18 years and I've had the privilege to serve as Agricultural Commissioner for the last several years. And it truly has been an honor to be able to serve our community. During challenging times as well as good times and to be able to provide for support for our growers, make sure that they have the tools that succeed for agriculture and also working with our communities and working with my staff to make sure that our services are there to support our communities. It's certainly a fine balance between the needs of agriculture and our communities here. And I'm grateful to all the folks, all the growers, all the community members that have come to me and have been willing to work with my office, with my staff and be able to collaborate and find some middle ground on some of the difficult issues that have come up over the last few years. I wanna be, I'm truly grateful to your board and the CAO's office for all the opportunities to allow me to excel to become the leader I am today. I couldn't be here if it wasn't for how progressive our county is in focusing on developing leadership within the county. And I'm truly grateful for that. And I'm just so glad to have had the opportunity to work with so many fine individuals here in the county over the years to be able to, at the end of the day, to be able to support our communities in the county and be able to become better at what we do. So I'm truly grateful for that. And I wouldn't be here in my success. I wouldn't be as successful as I am if it wasn't for my staff. Truly grateful to my staff for their support. They have always been there for me. They believe in what we do. They believe in our services. They believe in what we do to better our community. It's essential work. And we were essential workers when the pandemic started. And it was a challenging time, but I'm truly grateful for my staff that they were there to lead the way, to recognize that we needed to provide services to our community. And there was no hesitation there. And I'm truly grateful for that. And to my family, I'm grateful for their understanding, understanding their flexibility, always being there for me, because as you know, similar to your jobs, this is not an eight to five job. And there's a lot of things that you have to miss out on and make some small sacrifices. But at the end of the day, I'm grateful to my family for being flexible and recognizing that at the end of the year, at day, what we do is for a much bigger cost, right? And to me, supporting our community is right there at the top of those things. What it means to be a public servant is not just doing the job that we do to provide services to the community, but stepping out of those requirements to support our community doing challenging times, such as some of the disasters we have hit. And certainly my staff has been incredible in providing and serving as disaster service workers, either during the floods or the fires and even during the pandemic the county was setting up some of the shelters. And lastly, I just wanna thank former Santa Cruz County Agricultural Commissioners for living the way, setting the example, believing in me and being the mentors that I had in the past that have allowed me to be where I am at this point in my career. And certainly truly grateful to Growers in our community for giving me the opportunity to serve as Agricultural Commissioner all these years. And I am gonna miss working with my county family here with my staff, with my colleagues. It's been wonderful working here. I learned a lot and I hope I can carry what I've learned here in Santa Cruz County to my new job in Monterey County. And I'm truly grateful for all the opportunities. Thank you so much. Thank you, Juan. Is there any, this is an action item. So is there anybody from the community that would like to address us on this item? Very quickly, Elisa Benson, Assistant CAO, and I've had the incredible honor of working very closely with Juan over the last year and a half. And just from the administrator side of the house, Juan demonstrates, he models exceptional public sector leadership and then set an example for his staff and all of his colleagues to learn and emulate not only does Juan have extensive technical knowledge and experience that crosses all the dimensions of his department, he brings administrative management skills, budget, personnel, state relations, that is exceptional. But beyond all that, and I think everyone has touched on it is that openness, that integrity and that fairness in everything he does. He actively engages with internal and external stakeholders. And I can tell you whether he has to take a hard stand as a regulator or as a boss. I've heard from many, many people that he comes to those decisions from a place of respect, fairness, thoughtfulness and transparency. And this was for folks, even if they didn't like the decision, they appreciated what he brought to it and how he shared. Monterey County is getting an outstanding leader and public servant. We're gonna miss you. But your investment in your team and your department leaves them well-prepared to continue your ethic of service. And the model you've made for all of us, brother Juan, we wish you well. Madam clerk, is there anybody on Zoom? Yes, we do have a speaker online. Call in user one, your microphone is now available. I remember when Juan came to the county, definitely a nice person, however, working in a system of pesticide poisoning. I taught many years in Watsonville, next to the health of pesticides, my health provider says that's why I have an essential tremor. We formed a group that needs to be the model, farm without harm, farm without harm that supports ecological and organic agriculture without the use of pesticides. Regulation, oh, doesn't that sound good? Regulation, what does that mean? Regulation is the system of permitting and perpetuating corporate harm, in this case from pesticide corporations. Prohibition prevents poisoning. Many times I had to take my classroom children at a messy school in Watsonville, inside the classroom as they were coughing from spring, from the adjacent fields. You talk about nutritious food. Nutritious food is food without poisons on them. We need to prohibit this poisoning of the agriculture. And it's horrific that babies, the umbilical cords of babies have something like 200 chemicals in them that weren't there before World War II. Anyway, is there anybody else online? Yes, Carolyn, your microphone is now available. Thank you. This is Carolyn Farrell. And I addressed the meeting a few months ago regarding the transport companies in Santa Cruz. And I wanna thank you and specifically Supervisor Cummings for... Ma'am, we've already voted on that item, but we appreciate that you... Can you just say thank you very much for voting on that? Thank you. Thank you for calling in on that. Is there anybody else on for Mr. Hidalgo? Pass, your microphone's now available. Thank you. Good morning. This is Pasadilla, Impact and Program Director for Community Action Board. Juan, we just wanna say thank you for your collaboration with Community Action Board. I was able to be part of your team when COVID-19 hit. I was amazed on how you just brought nonprofits together and helped those individuals in the farm fields when they were working and nobody was reaching out to them. I was really impressed the way you just got us all together. We're really gonna miss you. Monterey is very lucky to have you. And I wish you all the best and good luck, Juan. Thank you very much. Thank you. Anybody else, Madam Clerk? We have no further speakers, Chair. Was there anybody else in chambers? I wanna make sure that... Good morning. My name is James Hewing Whitman. I think that what Ms. Marilyn Garrett, the speaker on Zoom spoke about was her actual experience having a career in this county with how pesticides actually affected the children around her. So I wanna thank her for doing what she did. Obviously I would have liked to have been here on time, but that's the way it is. So there is a big difference between live soil and live food. And a lot of times many pesticides don't create live food and live soil. And there's a big difference between the two. So I know nothing about this gentleman, except he's been, I think, from what I read in charge of public weights and measures for the past eight years. So there's just a criteria that could also be looked at. And that really has to do with whether we're producing something that creates health or other things that create poor health. So thank you. Thank you. Anybody else? All right, seeing none, we'll close the public comment component of it. This is an action item. We would need a motion for the proclamation. Chair, I move that we issue a proclamation honoring agricultural commissioner Juan Hidalga. Second. We have a motion from Supervisor Koenig. A second from Supervisor Hernandez. If we could have a roll call, please. Supervisor Koenig. Aye. Cummings. Aye. Hernandez. Aye. My first and chair friend. Aye. Congratulations. Thank you. We'll move on to item eight, which is to consider an update on county strategic initiatives, including the third biannual progress support in the 21 to 23 operational plan. The status of the 23 to 25 operational plan and budget, the development of a countywide equity framework and targeted performance improvements for spring of 2023 and direct the CAO, the county administrative office, excuse me, to return on or before August 22nd, 2023 with the next update as outlined in the memo of the CAO. For this, we have Elisa Benson, the assistant CAO. We have Nicole Coburn, the assistant CAO. We have Sven Stafford, the principal administrative analyst and CAO's office and our member Marquez, the HSD social services division director. All right. Good morning. Ms. Coburn, please. I'll kick us off this morning. Chair friend and members of the board, it's a pleasure to be back with you to talk about our strategic initiatives. I'm joined today by Elisa Benson, the other assistant CAO. Sven Stafford, our principal analyst in the CAO's office and deputy director Irma Marquez from the human services employment and benefit services division. And I'm Nicole Coburn, assistant CAO. So let's turn to our agenda for the presentation this morning. For the rest of this morning, we're going to provide brief updates on the current operational plan. We're in the third progress report for that plan. We're also going to be talking about developing the new operational plan for the years 2023 through 2025. And then we'll turn to the creation of our countywide equity framework. While these efforts are today's focus, I did want to just mention that our work continues on performance measurement and continuous process improvement, which we're integrating into a comprehensive performance management initiative. And we'll come back at a future board meeting to talk more about that. So to give you a little bit of an overview of our strategic initiatives, particularly for our new board members, the county strategic plan was adopted in June of 2018. It covers a six year period for 2018 through 2024. A continuous improvement was a pillar of that plan. And the county developed three strategic initiatives to embed a plan due study adjust learning cycle across the county. The plan in due phases, which you can see in this diagram are represented through the county strategic plan, our operational plan, and our county budget. They articulate the county focus areas and goals, create specific measurable objectives and align county resources and staff to achieve results. The study and adjust phases are represented through our performance management program and they create data, spark curiosity and provide tools to target and improve our work to get the best results for our community. Since the adoption of our strategic plan in 2018, the county has moved to embed equity principles across the entire cycle. And that's why you see it at the center of this diagram. Elisa Benson is going to be talking a little bit later about that in more detail. These initiatives are a way of framing real work that's being done in the community and improving and accelerating that work that departments are doing to make an even bigger impact. So now I'm going to invite Director Marquez to share a story about a human services objective related to immigrant food security. This is one of 180 objectives in the current plan and she'll talk about the impact that that objective is making. Good morning, Chairman Friend, members of the board, Mr. Palacios, members of the community. My name is Irma Marquez, Division Director over Employment and Benefit Services of the Human Services Department. Today I want to talk to you about the positive effect of CalFresh benefits on participants and community. What is, what are CalFresh benefits? At the federal level, this is known as SNAP, supplemental nutrition assistance program. In the state of California, we know it is CalFresh, formerly known as food stamps. It is a federal mandated program for California. It is state supervised and county operated. CalFresh improves the nutrition of low income households by increasing their food buying power. And this food buying power has a cascading effect throughout the economy. When recipients spend their CalFresh money, that spending generates income for the people who produce, transport, market and sell the food that those dollars purchase. I want to share with you a snippet of the life story of the Garcia family. The Garcia family is made up of Aurora, a non-citizen single mom with two U.S. born children. This household composition is known as a mixed status household in public assistance language. Due to Aurora's non-citizen status, this is, she is not eligible to CalFresh benefits, but her two U.S. born children are. Aurora and her family were impacted by the recent storms and she was not able to work for two weeks. If it weren't for the CalFresh benefits, we would not have food, said Aurora. The former president and his administration proposed policies, changes to immigration policies, which generated fear in immigrant families and forced families like the Garcia's to make an impossible choice between meeting their basic needs for healthcare, food and shelter or face future possible deportation. In Santa Cruz County, many immigrant families disenrolled from CalFresh benefits, believing that benefits issued to their U.S. born children could prevent them from attaining their own legal residency status, which is not true. Our partnership with Second Harvest Food Bank and the Community Action Board Thriving Immigrants Collaborative helps educate, engage and assist our community with completing CalFresh applications that our eligibility staff then process and issue benefits for. The collective impact that our partnership has on the community we serve helps make sure that families are getting the nutrition benefits they are entitled to while helping increase trust in government. In Santa Cruz County between January 2020 and December 2022, there were 2088 CalFresh cases or households with an undocumented parent and a U.S. born child. We set a goal to increase enrollments of U.S. born children to immigrant households. And in July 2021, the number of CalFresh children in mixed immigration household status was 2,624. And by November 2022, we had 3,710 children enrolled in CalFresh benefits. This is a difference of 1,076 children. One in every six children in California have an immigrant parent. And when 38,000 Santa Cruz County residents receive CalFresh and only 10% of, 10% of our children are non-citizen parents, you know there is more work to be done. Continued partnerships like the ones we have with Second Harvest Food Bank and CABS Thriving Immigrant Collaborative is essential to securing the family's access to nutrition benefits. There are many studies that touch on food insecurity across America. And one thing that everyone can agree on is that consistent access to nutritious food is fundamental to health and well-being. And as my late grandmother would say, pancita llena, corazón contento. Full tummy, happy heart. Thank you. I would like to turn it over to Mr. Stafford. Thank you, Director Marquez. Back to the panel. And good morning, board. The food security objective is a good reminder that when we mark these objectives complete, it's not the end of the story. It's really a completed objective means, hopefully that a system or program is better than it was and plays some part in achieving the county vision of a healthy, safe, more affordable community. Ensuring children get the food they're entitled to is one of those contributions. As you can see, we've completed 42% or about 75 small contributions that are building towards that county vision. As another example, the board took another small step in December towards becoming a more affordable community by adopting the sustainability update to the general plan. Currently, we expect another 52% of the current batch of objectives to be complete by June of this year. And so I'd like to take a brief tour of the operational plan website, which does reflect the current status of the operational plan. As you can see here, you get our general statistics that we have 180 total objectives, 75 of which are completed, and the rest are either amended and or in progress. And I just like to bring attention that we can sort these objectives in various ways by their completion status. So you can see all the completed objectives in one place or in progress. You can see all the objectives by the timeline that they're supposed to be completed. You can sort them by departments and you can even sort them by collaborating department if you wanna see, for example, how some of our internal service departments help, you know, help align and collaborate on the work of all of our client facing departments. Finally, you can also group them by our different focus areas for the 21-23 plan, including objectives that have an equity lens, our COVID-19 recovery and fire recovery objectives. This morning, I'd just like to take a little time to focus on an OR-3 objective, our Office of Response Recovery and Resilience. As the board is aware, the OR-3 did a really big amount of work to bring the climate action and adaptation strategy to the board. For all completed objectives, we do provide a verification link and our documentation. For this one, we've linked to the really neat story map that OR-3 put together. I'd just like to take one second to scroll through this because I think one that it's pretty cool, that it tells all the story, it does some education about how we got to where we are that's worth scrolling through. We also have over here on our emissions inventory, data on emissions and what we need to target to be successfully contributing locally to reducing our greenhouse emissions. So here you can see it by sector. And as was noted in the presentation in December, transportation is the overwhelming contributor to our emissions. And finally, it provides a set of strategies that are cross-sectoral and hold us accountable, but are really focused on creating the behavior change that will hopefully allow us to thrive long into the future. You can go back to the presentation. Thank you, Clark. For the 2023 to 25 plan, climate action objectives will be a major theme. And so taking those strategies and turning them into targeted, measurable steps towards resilience. The other focus of the plan will be on housing and the interrelation of the two as we try to become more resilient and more affordable. When we last came to the board in September, we talked about improving the process to be more inclusive, measured and targeted. To achieve this since September, we've activated five teams within our community development and infrastructure, both on the planning and public work side, within health services, the personnel department and general services. All five departments were ones that we felt were critical to meeting our goals for this process. Those teams have turned around and reached out and included over 600 county staff in the process. Additionally, CAO staff have done over 20 presentations to county commissions and advisory bodies. And we've also worked with every department to provide training so that over 25% of county staff will have been involved some way in developing objectives for this plan. All that work we hope will result in 90% of our objectives meeting standard. And that is to be a smartie, which is specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-bound, inclusive and equitable. And to hear more about how we're thinking of equity, not just at an objective level, but at a county-wide level, I'll turn it over to assistant county administrative officer, Elisa Benson. Thank you, Sven. Good morning, board members. Elisa Benson, assistant CAO. And I want to thank Nicole and Intermeffer for putting forward the front part of the conversation. In my section talking about our county equity framework, I'm going to talk about what's been going on, what's the ongoing and the old work and what is new and how what we're going to be introducing to you today is new, different and critical. I'll also do the wrap up of the briefing today and then we'll, we are excited to have conversation with you and hear your questions and input. So with that, I want to talk about what's going on today. And so I want to go back to that opening slide where we have that equity in the center. So what does this mean? We have definitely been doing equity oriented work over the last five years. As you heard from Sven and Irma, we have integrated that. You see words and focus on it in our strategic plan language. You see it in our 80 of 180 operational objectives for the last period, two year period. 80 of those are equity oriented objectives. And then I want to talk a little bit about some of the other pieces that have been out there over the last five years. We have the resolution that you all adopted in, I'm going to gotta get this right, August of 2018 on August eight, August of 2020 on August 18th, remember that day where you adopted a resolution declaring racism as a public health crisis and put a number of actions into motion. You also established an ad hoc advisory committee to provide perspective from Brown, Black and Indigenous community people around their experience around the county and the county's work. And we have been, that is now a group that reinvented and renamed themselves as the circle on anti-racism and economic justice. We call it CARES Justice. And we have been in conversation with them for the last two years, learning about how to just even talk about issues of equity. We also, as I mentioned, have those 80 equity objectives that span all our departments. And some are heavy leans into deep equity issues and some are like, so we really have a lot going on. We have what you just adopted with the cap in December, your equity guardrails about recognizing as we come up with our actionable steps around adaptation and mitigation, we have to consider equity lenses. So we have a lot going on. We have probation who has been a national leader working with Annie Casey Foundation and their results count framework, looking very deeply at questions of equity and racial equity in particular and in their part of the system. So a lot of work is underway, but what isn't there is a county-wide unifying framework. And we've heard from our partners, our operating partners in departments saying, we need help plugging this all together. So that's what brings us to our objective 196, creating an equity framework. And that is something that sits within the county administrative office, but it is absolutely in partnership with you, with our operating departments and with community. So I'd like to go to the next slide. And what we have here is what we are sort of starting as our opening framework around how do we actually create something that we can unify all those diverse activities across departments and quite frankly with our community partners. First thing we need to come back to an actual definition of equity. We use the word a lot and I think people all have different meanings and we can utilize the work of many other organizations across the state, across the country who have been leaning into this work. But that definition has to be locally grounded. So we want to have that definition. We want to have a vision of equity. What are we striving for to really drive that hard effort? And this will be a hard effort. And we need to have tools and be accountable. And so what you see at the bottom of this page is sort of buckets of how we work organizationally and how are we bringing equity lenses into each of those buckets that we have and we have to do that very explicitly. So here's just, this is what you get from us a lot an analytical framework how we're going to start talking about things. We also recognize that as the second largest employer in the county and a major institution with a long legacy we bring just walking into the room we bring a certain presence and that we have to have these conversations with a lot of other people who have a different perspective. And to do that, we're highly aware of that those power differentials and those dynamics. We want to work closely to create environments where people can have comfortable and meaningful or maybe not comfortable, not comfortable hard conversations about their experiences so we all can be better informed. So to do that, we have an internal group because we need to do this with our staff and employees because we all need to be part of this. And we, Sven and myself are sort of at the core of that within our office and we've invited Megan Riley who is our new deputy director from general services and Metsuno Baumeister who is with the personnel department both have experience outside of our county looking at issues of equity. Megan in LA County Unified Schools and Metsuno and I'm gonna get the name of the transit agency wrong in Santa Clara, the transit agency in Santa Clara that I don't know. So she looking at, look at again at an internal and external focused equity so we want to bring more voices and experiences as we craft our internal process for this. And then on the community side of it we are really leaning on the work of the last two years with our Cares Justice Group to help construct a working group with community voices to help us work on those definitions and visions of equity. And the third part as I think we've referenced in the letter is meeting with all of you before we launched this process in the spring to get your perspective on this work what we're doing well, where we have gaps, voices that maybe we're not thinking through. So you can absolutely, we are relying on your participation moving forward as we jump in to this next part of the work. With that, I'm gonna move actually to closing unless we wanna talk about this. I'm gonna move to the closing and then we'll be open for questions. So with that, we will be finalizing the 23-25 operational objectives for present in February and March, working with those adaptive assistant teams and all our departments. On the equity framework side we'll be finalizing the design for the rollout of what we know will be a flexible and adaptive conversation. And we'll be meeting with you all in February and then roll out that work in March and April. The budget and the operational plan objectives will be coming forward to you. It'll be rolled out to the public in late April, early May, and then we will have quite a bunch of time with you all for your consideration of those. And then we will be bringing back the countywide equity framework to you in June for your consideration to drive the work moving forward. With that, we are excited about moving forward and a little nervous, but it's been, and we look forward to hearing your feedback and your questions. Thank you, Ms. Benson. Are there any questions or comments from board members on this item? Surveys or Koenig? Thank you, Chair. First, just want to commend the entire team for your work on this. I mean, having these very incremental and measurable objectives through every county department is really helpful. Of course, we don't have to do this, right? I mean, it's so much extra commitment, I think, by every member of this organization to really be the best that we can be. And I guess, you know, I feel like the integration with the county budget last year and of course, going forward. And I think also one of my favorite pieces of this is the permit center dashboard. I mean, these dashboards is of course, also go across probation, treatment, intervention, substance use disorder services and really provide real-time data for us and for the public, as far as how effective we are at delivering county services. My question is, in the development of the 2325 operational goals, are we put out like a survey to employees? So often, I mean, this whole theory of operational improvement, Kaizen, as it's called, the theory that we can always striving for excellence, which originally came out of Japan. I mean, it's all about the people who are closest to the work, suggesting ways that we can improve things, maybe they're doing that are wasting time or things they see that could be done better. Have we put out an employee surveys within departments asking for suggestions for these specific operational improvements? Supervisor Koenig, we haven't done a survey, but what's unique in the development of the new to your plan has been the adaptive assistance teams that Sven Stafford mentioned. They're bringing together staff at various levels of the organization, particularly staff who are close to the work to identify data to develop measures and objectives that are much more specific and, you know, aggressive. So I, Sven would be happy to speak more to those teams, but I think it's been very effective at drilling into the work and getting close to what you're speaking to. Yeah, I mean, I just add that I think, you know, we can certainly do a general survey. And I think when we reach out in a targeted fashion that's related to staff's work and engage them in that way that it's more effective in terms of producing hopefully organizational change. And I think some of the changes that we're thinking about for taking what we've learned over the last six months with these teams and trying to apply it to the process improvement side of this plan to study a just cycle will hopefully, you know, drive that inclusion. Great, great. Thanks, looking forward to seeing some of those recommended objectives. Sir Rosenberg-Pherson. Yeah, when I look at how much progress this county has made since setting and meeting the strategic goals since 2018, I really see a lot of increase in efficiencies and transparencies and transparencies and really overall government services that continue to be improved year after year. And I wanna thank our CEO, Carlos Palacio, for getting us on track and let's move forward in all the current county departments and employees who've been engaging this and making the public inclusive of it too. That's been a key factor, I think. I hope the community pays special attention now to this work because we're making the real commitments to make our county services more measurable and the outcomes more transparent. If you want a roadmap of what the county wants to do and where it's going in these next two, 23, 25 years, 2023, 25, take a look at this. This is what our target is and this is where we wanna go. And it's really good to see that we've accomplished some of our tasks. We don't wanna get too comfortable with all that. There's a lot more to do and we know that. And I think the focus for the 2023, 25 on climate change and resiliency is especially revelant and timely given that we appear to be dealing with one climate related disaster after another. And I think the approval of our climate action and adaptability plan or CAP and our sustainability plan at the end of last year puts us in a framework of where we wanna go and what we wanna do in the future. So by linking the new objectives of the next two years with department budget proposals, we're hoping ourselves to really plan better to be more efficient with our resources and increase our productivity to meet the goals and be transparent with the public of what our targets are and where we wanna go in the future. This is the place to look for the basis of our overall plan for the next two years. And I think you've done a phenomenal job of inclusiveness and transparency. And I think this is way ahead of the game from the other counties in this state, I think. And you're to be commended for the work you've done. And I look forward to implementing as many plans as we can in the near future. And congratulations on the success for the accomplishments that we've made to this point. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor McPherson, Supervisor Cummings. I just wanna appreciate all the work that's been going into this planning process and being new to the county's plan. I'm looking forward to learning more and working with you all moving forward. And just wanna let you know that I'm one, I know you mentioned you're gonna be reaching out to us and community members and having some experience working with diversity, equity, inclusion programs, look forward to working with you all as this plan continues to be developed. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Hernandez. I really appreciate the presentation. And I think it's really timely that we can apply a lot of this for the South County centers, both the health center and the West Marine. It's gonna be really applicable for the expanded services and equity. And so I really appreciate all your guys' work on this. Thank you. All right, thank you. I just wanna open it up for the community. Is there any member of the community that would like to address this on this item? Please. Good morning. My name is James Ewing Whitman. I'm glad that I was present to be a witness here. It took some interesting notes. I wanna say a mistake does not become an error unless you refuse to correct it. It's not my fault that I have a geology degree in cultural and physical anthropology degrees more than 30 years ago. But there's perspectives here that just don't seem to be talked about. And since several people, individuals have mentioned actual community involvement, why don't we start with education? So don't believe a word I say, but there are people that have taken the time. For example, and I'm referring to ransom Godwin in an interview with David DeBine, where they added up all the CO2 of all the nations on the world, and that's 196 nations. I believe they came up with 60 million metric tons of CO2. Well, the comparison was made that natural volcanology on this planet produces 15 times that amount. So if we use that degree of scale to all of the measures that are going on to reduce carbon, it does nothing compared to what the planet is already producing every year. But it's my understanding that human beings are 17% carbon. If we go back in time, let's just go 65 million years ago. I think right now it's 0.1% CO2 makes up our atmosphere. And I don't know how they did the test 65 million years ago, but it was 2% CO2. And that plant flourished. And if you date the coal on the planet, one of the times is 65 million years ago. So I know that I'm probably disagreeing with everybody in this room. It's not my fault that professionally the past 38 years I've been an auto mechanic or a contractor. I don't normally talk to human beings as much, but obviously I've been here a lot the last four years. So I am actually hoping that these conversations are more open to public participation. Thank you. Thank you. Anybody else from Chambers? Welcome back, thank you. Hello. Sorry, welcome back. Hello again, Sosobaraz here, Second Harvest Food Bank. Again, thank you so much for what a great presentation that was speaking to that testimony of the Garcia family. Those are the families that we work with every day. And that is really what we're here to do and serve the community. We are working as a food bank to figure out what other innovative and efficient ways we can do to get our outreach efforts out to the community. We know that there's still a gap. We know that there's still people out there that are mixed families and folks that qualify. But there is a lot of myths. And there's a lot of opportunities for education to be brought up so that people who need the service are utilizing the service and are not going hungry in our community. We thank, again, the community. And we thank you, the county, for helping us and supporting us in our efforts to meet the needs and make sure that nobody goes hungry. Thank you so much. Thank you. Anybody else in chambers? Madam Clerk online. Yes. Marielena, your microphone is available. Good morning again. This is Marielena de la Garza, the executive director to the Community Action Board of Santa Cruz County. I'm also a member of the CARES Justice Circle. And so I just wanted to speak with that hat on. And first of all, thank our county partners, Alisa, Randy, Sven, our public health partners who have been part of the CARES Justice Circle, who was created over two years ago. And it's a group of consultants and activists that support the county by providing expertise on these plans and these projects with an equity lens. We have come together for over two years to learn and try to understand what is our role and what is the best way we can move forward. I want to invite each one of you as our Board of Supervisors to come in and to meet us. It's been a bit, as some of you we've met before, our new Board of Supervisors, we have not met in that space. And so I'd like to invite each one of you to come in and to meet this CARES Justice Circle, to learn about who we are and what we do and why we do it. It is the essence of community engagement. And so I want to just share, Gloria Nieto, who has left us last year, was part of this circle. We have our Black activist voices, Latino voices, Asian voices, LGBTQ voices, senior voices, Native American voices. And this kind of group of expertise is really the best example of community engagement in partnership with the county. Sven has worked incredibly hard to pull us together, to be prepared for us when they pull us together so that we have information and we're giving our expertise on the county work. But we need you there too, Board of Supervisors, we need your input and we want to build stronger relationship with you. Muchas gracias. Thank you. Colin, user two, your microphone is now available. Garrett, and thank you for that moving account of the Garcia family. Everyone has a right to food and a healthy environment and nutritious food. And I have a document here that I gave to former Supervisor Tony Campos from Watsonville, stated 2009. And the food supply, a lot of problems with food health access, et cetera. It's titled Bees, Birds and Mankind, Destroying Nature by Electrosmog, by Ulrich Warnke. Effects of wireless communication technologies, which you are pushing massively and it's destroying the environment. Here's the summary, for many decades, research results shows showing that the natural, electrical and magnetic fields and their variation are a vital precondition for the orientation and a navigation of a whole range of animals has been freely available. What has also been known to science for many decades is that we humans depend upon this natural environment for many of our vital functions. And by the way, so do the bees, the beekeepers you talk to are very worried about the decline of the bee population back to this document. Today, however, this natural information and functional system of humans, animals and plants has been superimposed by an unprecedented dense and energetic. Thank you Ms. Garrett. Sorry about the y'all, some Madam Cork online. Yes, we have one more speaker. Pause, your microphone is now available. Thank you. Again, Buenos dias, good morning supervisors. Mr. Carlos Balacios, happy new year to all of you. Welcome, Mr. Hernandez and Mr. Connie. So my name is Pasta Diya, again, community action board. I just wanna give kudos and thank you for the collaboration with the county. It's because of this collaboration that we were able to do 28 food distributions reaching out to 988 people. We did 11 events or tablings for reaching out to 598 individuals. We did 29 canvassing areas reaching out to 4,840 individuals in our county. We did eight canvases reaching out to 653 individuals in one presentation via Zoom out to 40 people. We will continue advocating for the needs. We will keep on looking for those gaps. Our hopes is that we continue collaborating with the county as we see more and more needs throughout the year. But it's because of this collaboration that I do work that I feel that we're doing a really good job within the whole entire county. So I'm really looking forward to continue our collaboration advocating for the needs of our community in the entire Santa Cruz County. And I'm looking forward for 2023 year and more to come. So muchas gracias y seguimos en la lucha. Thank you. We have no further speakers here. I think you're gonna bring it back to the board fractional. Let's make a very brief comment that this is obviously goes well beyond, I think what any of us would have envisioned we would have had on this a few years ago when we first brought this forward. We do need to ensure that we do an even better job in trying that the community is aware of it and engage in it. Because I mean, it doesn't do any good to have Sven spending this much time on it and not have the world engaging in the work that the county is doing. So we really do have to, I think, ramp up the efforts to make sure that people know that they have access to this information. It makes it a much more accessible and transparent government. Do we have a motion for the recommended actions? I'll move the recommended actions. Second. A motion from Supervisor Koenig and a second from Supervisor McPherson. A roll call please. Supervisor Koenig. Aye. Cummings. Aye. Hernandez. Aye. McPherson. Aye. And Chair Friend. Aye. Item passes. Thank you. We do have a 1045 item, but it's sweet. I think we can get this item in Ms. Hanson, which is item number nine, which is to consider a presentation on the sixth cycle housing element update. It was outlined in the memo of the Deputy CAO. We have the memo and an update to the program. And we do have two people here with us today. We have Ms. Stephanie Hanson who's our Assistant Director of CDI and Matthew Sun, who is one of our planners. Welcome to you both. Good to see you back. Morning board. Thank you. We're happy to return to the board today to present an overview of our housing element update. With me today is Matthew Sun, Senior Planner. He's managing this project for us. He didn't have a chance to meet you last time we were here. And so with that, I will, we're gonna try to make this brief and I'll turn it over to Matthew to get us started. And we're both here to answer any questions you may have. Thank you. Morning Chair and Supervisors. Today we're going to update you on the sixth cycle housing that is ended on this. Over to you guys with the business. In your staff report is the staff memo with attached housing element update program and schedule and staff recommendations. This presentation, this agenda item is for information purposes only. And so no action will be taken. I wanna point out that all those staff calls this the sixth cycle housing element. It can also be called the 2023 housing element, general plan elements. And as you can see, these are the various general plan elements of the County of Santa Cruz. The housing element is one of seven elements in the amended general plan and one of seven state mandated elements. The housing element is updated every eight years. The 2015 or the fifth cycle housing element was approved by the Board of Supervisors and certified by the California Department of Housing and Community Development 2016. Several of the elements shown on this slide were updated in the sustainability update which the Board approved in December. The noise element was updated in recent amendments and the public safety element is undergoing separate update. And so updates of these and all other elements are not part of the housing element that we're currently going to go through. Goals for the housing element update. The goals include providing a range of housing choices, removing barriers to providing housing, preserving housing stock and providing opportunities for special needs and supportive housing. Goal number two is to assist in the development of adequate housing to meet the needs of extremely low, very low, low and moderate income households. A new goal for the housing element is to focus future housing in areas with high resources. The sixth goal is of paramount importance to the sixth cycle update and is meant to address inequities in zoning and access to resources and services that may not be available where lower income households have historically been located. High resources areas are those sites with access to transit, schools, jobs, parks and other services. Also that do not require environmental mitigation and where permit streamlining or development incentives are available. Housing can still be built in low resource areas but only if the county will incorporate policies and programs that are designed to remedy existing poverty conditions in low resource areas. Housing element update requirements. Presented here are the required actions associated with the housing element updates. First, the county must review the existing fifth cycle housing inventory. This will require that staff conduct a thorough analysis of the existing approximately 1,000 plus properties included in the fifth cycle housing element. Properties that remain vacant may then be included in the sixth cycle housing element. Properties that were developed under, excuse me, during the fifth cycle will also be evaluated to determine if they are underdeveloped or underutilized and therefore a potential candidate for inclusion in the sixth cycle housing element. Staff will also identify properties that were overlooked or subsequently subdivided and therefore not included in the fifth cycle but could be developed and therefore a potential candidate for the sixth cycle inventory. Housing and community development, HCD requires that only sites with realistic demonstrated potential for development during the planning period be included. The inventory must identify current utility infrastructure and must specify number of units and income level of units that can be accommodated on the property. As to site eligibility to accommodate affordable housing, county staff must review density of projects on similarly zoned sites at similar affordability levels as indicators of affordable housing potential. With some exception, vacant sites that were identified in two or more previous planning periods and non-vacant sites identified in the previous planning period cannot be carried forward to the sixth cycle unless the sites will be rezoned to allow 20% low income affordable housing or existing zoning allows by right development for 20% low income affordable housing. This potentially could constraints on how much capacity can be attributed to the existing inventory and may force the county to engage in rezoning to accommodate higher densities after the housing element is adopted. Our next slide here shows the fifth cycle rena numbers as well as sixth cycle and the percent increase that were subjected to 353% increase. In the next slide, affirmatively furthering fair housing. Affirmatively furthering fair housing or AFFH means taking meaningful actions in addition to combating discrimination that overcome patterns of segregation and fosters inclusive communities free from barriers that restrict access to opportunity. Note that the AFFH terminology is new to the sixth cycle or the 2023 housing element. The assessment of fair housing, state mandates an assessment of fair housing which requires an analysis of the relationship between available sites and areas of high or low resources and concrete policies and programs to affirmatively further fair housing. The purpose of this assessment is to replace segregated living patterns with integrated and balanced living patterns and to transform racially and ethnically concentrated areas of poverty into areas of opportunity. The assessment of fair housing includes a summary of fair housing issues in the jurisdiction and an assessment of the jurisdiction's fair housing enforcement and outreach capacity and an analysis and summary of fair housing issues using available federal state and local data and local knowledge. The assessment of fair housing analysis must address integration and segregation that must address racially or ethnically concentrated areas of property, of poverty, disparities in accessed opportunity including for persons with disabilities and the assessment of fair housing analysis must also address disproportionate housing needs including displacement risk. Disproportionate housing may include overpayment, overcrowding and housing conditions disproportionately affecting protected classes. Sustainability update and the climate action and adoption plan, adaptation plan. The sustainability update and climate action plan adopted in 2022 provided basis for a lot of the work associated with the housing element update. These documents contain policies and strategies that support infill housing and various housing options in the context of a changing environment. Public involvement, as noted, public involvement has to be robust and begin to occur early in the process. It is important to note that at the October meeting the Board of Supervisors expressed an interest in a deliberative and representative public engagement process where a panel of community members that represent the demographic diversity of the county is created and their recommendations incorporated in the housing element update, the policy group is aware of this word preference and is committed to working towards creating a panel. The policy section circulated a request for proposal in December to various consultants to assist the county in developing the deliberative and representational public engagement process that accommodates a community panel and a stakeholder group. Staff is putting together a list of potential stakeholders that will be used for the, that will be used by the consultant and the county to move forward with the robust public engagement. Our most colorful slide so far, the updated schedule. It's set in quarters, one, two, three, quarter four and the beginning of 2024. Basically, staff has the next six months to prepare a housing element and get it vetted by internal staff and get it ready for a review by the Housing Commission and the Planning Commission in July and the Board of Supervisors in August immediately goes to Housing and Community Development for their review and the Housing and Community Development has two bites out of the apple and we'll go from our administrative draft to our HCD, we'll get their comments and questions and respond to those and we'll come back to the Board of Supervisors for your adoption of the document and then we send it back to HCD for another second review. So at this point, that concludes my presentations. Stephanie and I are available for any questions that you may have. Thank you for that excellent presentation. This is a non-action item but other questions from board members. Supervisor Koenig here. Thank you, Chair. I just wanted to clarify that when it comes to these 4,634 units that we essentially need to add to our planning process. I understand correctly, there's really two ways we could do it, right? I mean, we could rezone specific parcels to a higher density to allow those additional units to be built or we can change rules that apply across the board. And if I remember correctly from the sustainability update, one of the most significant changes that we actually made was calculating the number of units that you could build based on what net develop area instead of rows or vice versa, thanks, which just meant that more units could be built overall. So I mean, as public considering options and this board's considering options for essentially meeting our next cycle's housing goals, I mean, we can really look at both of those levers, right? That's right. Most of the board will be remembering not too long ago with the sustainability update, we made a lot of regulatory changes to our policies and codes in our general plan that would build more capacity. And in fact, the analysis for the sustainability update that we did for the EIR indicated a capacity of 4,500 additional units with those changes over 20 years. So we'll definitely be building on those tools and that capacity that we already have and look to increase it a little bit more as we look at the housing inventory in this program. And then one of the things I think that's really going to make us look carefully at rezoning properties is the AFFH components and making sure that we have enough opportunities in our higher resource areas. So that's not so much a numbers game, right? Of just units, but where those opportunities exist. So it'll definitely, we'll be calling on all the tools we have in the toolbox to kind of meet that inventory need. Got it. So do you have an estimate yet of basically how much the changes that we made from the sustainability update, like how many units we could count from that towards our 4,534 goal? Thank you. We did forecast 4,500 units. The question really is a matter of timing. That's a 20 year plan versus our requirements for the housing element and the arena, which is to accommodate that work in eight years. So we'll be looking at the programs that are in the housing element to really assess whether we are facilitating and streamlining housing as much as we possibly can to kind of move that timeline into an eight year program. As you know, there's only so much that the county can do, but we need to make sure we're doing everything that we can to help those opportunities actually develop. Okay, and I imagine that's something that HCD would give us feedback on as well. So if we say, hey, we did the sustainability update, it produces, we estimate 4,500 units over 20 years as an eight year plan, so it's 40% of that. We're gonna count that as 1,800 units in our plan. I mean, we could submit that to HCD and then they'll either say, yeah, that's realistic or no, you've gotta build more room into this plan. Sure, they'll be giving us feedback, but the housing inventory that we provide as part of this housing element is a series of tables that show the calculations and the capacity, the former development, and the future opportunities. So they'll be able to see in the numbers. Great, thank you. Thank you. It's a reasonable person. Thank you, Mr. Chair. And thank you for this presentation. I really do appreciate it. I look forward to the public input, the process of going forward. And as been mentioned in previous board meetings, this is a huge, huge challenge for us. We all know that to me, these revised reading numbers and the timeframe, they may not be exactly eight years because we've had a tough time getting halfway there with the past eight years in the county. And to no fall of anybody, it's just the way it is. And so this is just something that is gonna really be something we're gonna have to work on to preserve. I know one of the things is neighborhood integrity. And we have some limitations with previous measures that were passed by county voters that really inhibit our ability to really expand very much. And I'm so glad that we passed the sustainability plan and the zoning changes that laid the groundwork for supporting more housing, but there's some real geographic transportation environmental challenges, not the least of which is water and how with this growing population, how we're going to meet the needs, the water needs of our people here. I mean, we are known as the best conservation county related to water in the state of California and have been, I think our population has grown by 10 or 20% when our water needs have gone down by 30 or 40%. We've really reached some limits, I think, on what we can ask our citizens to do on conservation. They're doing a fantastic job and they need to keep doing it. How much more we can do with the growing population, I'm not sure. And I think the state should be more of a partner with these, with local governments to make sure we're building housing, not just give us unfunded mandates and requirements that are difficult to meet without such help. That said, we'll be working on this issue. I know you're doing everything you can and this is what the state has put forward. But as we know, that lack of housing is a real problem for our labor force and our working families and our businesses and agencies here. But to meet these goals is gonna be one of the biggest challenges we have, certainly for the next eight years, but I hope we can get there. It's needed. There's no question about that, but it's gonna be a tough, tough road to go. Thank you, Surveyser Cummings. Thank you for the presentation. I mostly have just comments to make. I appreciate calling out the need for affordable housing production and just wanna emphasize how we need to be explicitly and proactively focusing on affordable housing production as we're moving forward with this element, given that this is where we see the most critical need for housing in our community. In addition to that, I think it's really important that we see increased affordable housing programs, policies in the element. And one thing that would be good to help understand is what types of units will be counted and how they will be counted. So in particular, with respect to ADUs, SB9 units, density bonus units, how those units will be counted within the element. I know at the city levels, ADUs, given that they were affordable by design, will be counted in some of the moderate or lower income categories. But the reality is that a lot of those units are actually rented out for what's, what would not be considered sometimes those groupings. And so I think it's just really important that we have a clear understanding of how units are classified and that we're really emphasizing the production of affordable housing units. Thank you, Surveyor. Are coming Surveyor Handlers? You know, I also wanted to check in about the public involvement. Are we gonna do that in-house or are we gonna get consultants? I wanted to find out if we're gonna do targeted outreach for the Latino community and if we're gonna go out, you know, do that in-house. Yeah, thank you. As we were returning in the presentation, public outreach is a very important part of this year's update. The state requirements have changed on how you do it and how often you do it and when you do it. So our program includes kind of a two-pronged approach. One of them is to create the stakeholders group, which are those folks and organizations that have different interests in housing development throughout the county, all kinds of housing development. And then the second approach is to create that representative panel of community members and citizens who kind of represent the breadth of people that we have here in the county. So between those two efforts, we'll be looking at all the organizations that we need to reach out to and seeing how we can kind of both make sure we get the organizations input, but also those members of the community that they represent. As Matthew mentioned in the presentation, we did release an RFP. We will be using consultant help for that. We think there's good reason to have the county staff step back a little bit from that process so that people can feel comfortable and in a safe environment that they are giving input that will be considered against all of the other input that we receive. So we'll be, we're in the process of selecting the consultant now and we're going to rush into a contract with them to get them started right away. And my second comment or suggestion would be is because we wanna put or the state outlines that we put affordable housing in places where there's high level of services, I think we should really probably involve Metro in our discussions because we also wanna make sure that we have high level of public transit access as well. So whether it's circulator buses or just more public access to buses, a bus line in the area. Before I left council, we approved two projects. One was a commercial project. One was a affordable housing project, but we made sure that we did more bike and pedestrian infrastructure, but also a bus line, a new bus line with the bus burnout in those projects. And I think our public works too, discussing it with our public works that we include these projects that include more walkability and more bike and pedestrian infrastructure as well. Because if we have more people there and more housing without the bike and pedestrian infrastructure, it's gonna lead to more traffic violence. And so if we make it safe for everyone, for drivers and pedestrians and bicyclists alike, it makes it better for everyone. Thank you. All right, this is a non-action item. I'll just briefly say before I open over the community, it is interesting across the state to see these rena numbers. I mean, they're completely unrealistic. I mean, what is being asked of communities to do. And I think it'll be coming up on, because the goals are the same. I mean, we wanna see this amount of housing built. We wanna see affordable housing built. The timelines, the lack of funding and the expectations from the state are totally unreasonable and are gonna lead to a lot of conflicts. And unfortunately, I think, unfortunately a lot of conflict directly with the state, but I think that we'll do what we can to get through this process together. Is there anybody from the community that'd like to address this again? This is a non-action item before we move on to our 1045 scheduled item. Yeah, hello, my name is James Ewing Whitman. I appreciate being here for the comments here, particularly about public involvement. What does actually public involvement mean? I'm not gonna read what I wrote, but it is interesting that the public is being invited to make comments and maybe some things that weren't included in this with this is agenda item nine, a six cycle housing element update program. It's my understanding that 20% of the actual residences in this county are vacant. They are vacation homes. And if one looks around the county and they look at all of the commercial real estate that's actually vacant, it's actually really large. So in all these ways to find more housing and to be inclusive and keep the tax revenue growing, it seems like there's a lot of empty homes that could be utilized. So, you know, I miss public comments at the beginning, so I'll just be direct towards whatever I'm talking about. Thanks guys for this presentation. And hopefully there will be a lot of community involvement because there needs to be. Thank you. Anybody else from chambers on the side? Madam clerk, anybody online? Yes. Call in user two, your microphone is now available. Completely unrealistic expectations. And it's like trying to put a band-aid on a gushing wound of the poverty and homelessness that has only increased in the last couple of years. There's something in the manner of the structure of this capitalist system where we always have people who are poor and unhoused and it's growing while the wealthy get wealthier. And I say this, I said it before, I was so struck when I went to the former Soviet Union in 1966 to visit relatives and there were no homeless people on the street. They had a housing they built up after World War II. I visited my relatives. It was small, but very adequate. There were parks outside. There, my relative paid about 5% of her income for rent. It can be done, but it takes a different system. There's something very, very wrong and egregious when people are hungry, unhoused, unemployed and the money keeps moving upward. That's my comment. Thank you, anybody else online? We have no further speakers here. All right, thank you. There's no action on the side and I appreciate the presentation on this item. Thank you. Okay, we're gonna move on to our 1045 scheduled item, which is to consider a presentation by the Friends of Santa Cruz State Parks regarding the Castro Adobe is outlined in the memo of the chair. And we will have the executive director of the Friends of Santa Cruz State Parks, which is Bonnie Holley. And I'll just kick this item off by saying that I'd requested this presentation. This is a cultural and historic treasure in South County. And although while it's in my district, it really has a lot of cultural significance for Supervisor Hernandez and those in South County. There's been some amazing changes to this location and the community, I don't believe is very aware of it. I wanted to ensure that everybody had an opportunity to hear and see this treasure in the South County. Ms. Holley, thank you so much for being here. Thank you also for all the work that you've been doing with the storm rebuild. You and your entire team have been remarkable with Seacliffe and other communities across the county that have been impacted. You've been a community leader here for many years and I just appreciate the work that you do. So Ms. Holley, thank you for being here. Good morning, Supervisor Friend. Thank you very much. Thank you, board members. Mr. Palacios, Mr. Heath County clerk. We really appreciate this opportunity to talk to you a little bit today about the Castro Adobe Project. This is a little bit like coming home for me. I worked in this building for 21 and a half years. I served some of the most honorable elected officials in this county, Joe Cuchara, Fred Keely, John Laird. And then I specifically worked as staff and the board of supervisors for nine and a half years. So it's really great to be here. I've never actually been at this exact spot as a public commentator. So thanks for the opportunity. So you might wonder what is Friends of Santa Cruz State Parks? We are the nonprofit cooperating leader and nonprofit partner with California State Parks. We support 34 state parks and beaches in Santa Cruz County and Coastal San Mateo County. Our dedicated team of staff and volunteers work on a very diverse portfolio of projects. Recently, we worked on the Kids to Parks field trip equity program. We created the Big Basin Day Use Reservation System that allowed that park to reopen to the public after the CZU fire. And as Supervisor Friend mentioned most recently, the C. Cliff State Beach Recovery Fund. So we have a really dedicated team that works together. And for the past 20 years, we've been working with state parks on a project to create California's newest state historic park. It will be Santa Cruz County's second state historic park and the first non-beach park in the Pajaro Valley. We've worked to preserve and restore the Castro Adobe as the heart and soul of this new state historic park. So the Castro Adobe was constructed in 1849 and 1850 by native servants of Juan Jose Castro and Rita Pinto Castro. The Castro's were one of the leading founding families in Santa Cruz County and also in California. And maybe of interest to you in particular, Juan Jose Castro was elected as a County Supervisor in 1853. And he was the last Latino County Supervisor for 146 years until Tony Campos was elected in 1999. So to celebrate the restoration of the Castro Adobe, we did create a video to share with the community. I'd like to acknowledge some of our team members, our volunteers and our staff who are here in the audience today. I also want to particularly point out our very most rock star member who is a friend's board member. He's a park docent and he has a Castro family descendant and you'll see him in just a minute on screen, Charlie Kiefer. So without any further ado, can we show the video? Thank you. My name is Charlie Kiefer. I am retired. I am a docent here and I give tours to the Castro Adobe, which was my family's Adobe. I grew up in this area. My mother was born in this area. I was born in San Francisco and not one time did anybody ever mention that we had an Adobe or that we were Castro's. So it was a great joy later on in my life to find out that I am a Castro descendant. I did not think that's what ever happened. I actually thought this building's gonna die. It's gonna disappear. I was wrong. Today, we proudly celebrate the preservation of the Castro Adobe by recognizing all those who dedicated their time, resources and labor to create an experience that was almost lost to the past. Built between 1849 and 1850, the Castro Adobe symbolizes the deep roots of Mexican culture here in the Pajaro Valley and in California. The property passed through several owners over the decades until California State Parks took ownership in 2002, severely damaged by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. The Castro Adobe was left uninhabitable and covered in tarps, a relic of its former glory. Edna Kimbrough, who owned the Adobe when the earthquake hit, carved out a career advocating for the preservation and conservation of Adobe structures. The effort to preserve was always more of a calling than a job for Edna. People are drawn to the Castro Adobe. We are so grateful for the special community that has been created around this work and inspired by Edna. After Edna passed away in 2005 and driven by her passion, Friends of Santa Cruz State Parks led the restoration effort in collaboration with State Parks. Saving the Castro Adobe was no small feat, but Edna's legacy inspired so many people to join the cause and in 2007, the real work was just getting started. Friends of Santa Cruz State Parks teamed up with 150 volunteers in the California Conservation Corps. Together, they reconstructed 2,500 bricks, each one weighing about 85 pounds. The bricks were used to rebuild the damaged walls and launch a years-long true collaboration between Friends and State Parks. Over time, a new roof was installed, cracks were repaired in the walls, and seismic stabilization was installed to complete a massive retrofitting process that safeguards the Adobe from future earthquakes. Friends managed and led the restoration efforts. With a successful rehabilitation underway, the park started welcoming visitors for the first time, leading the way for a new generation of Californians to appreciate the Castro Adobe. Inviting local school children to experience the property was always Edna's vision for the future. This one would make a wonderful heritage park. I think this building has the potential to be a symbol of Hispanic pride and a place where school children could go for an entire day and participate in a program that would deal with raising cattle and Hispanic rancho life. Scores of classes have visited throughout different stages of the restoration, including students participating in the exciting program Kids to Parks. The experience that visitors have at this park is a real sensory connection to the rancho lifestyle, linking past and present. Here in the Castro Adobe's kitchen, or Cocina, visitors can now experience daily life at a Mexican rancho by preparing food in the casino. This is one of only five remaining rancho casinas in all of California. To provide universal access to the upstairs of the Adobe, it was necessary to strengthen the sagging second floor, led by the Friends Project Manager, a team of engineers, state parks historians, and preservation consultants agreed in 2016 on the best course of action after years of meetings, drawings, calculations, and designs. A steel beam was threaded through the Adobe brick walls, spanning the entire length of the building. This was completed in only two and a half hours. However, for everyone to appreciate the full history of the Castro Adobe, it was imperative to make the second floor accessible to all. The solution? Add a lift to the building. This innovation makes the Fandango Room available to all. It's a model for other state parks in providing access. Restoration of the Adobe continued in earnest despite the pandemic. Construction crews repaired and plastered all of the interior walls of the building, applying three to five coats of whitewash. The original painted chair rail and baseboard were meticulously conserved and restored. The exterior was also repaired and whitewashed as part of the finish work. Beyond the interior, the land itself was given a loving hand in the restoration process. The garden was fully restored in 2014, but the design plans were much older, in fact, and historic in their own right. In 1969, the Castro Adobe's owner, Elizabeth Potter, consulted with famed landscape architect, Thomas Church. Those original designs from over 50 years ago were used for today's Potter Church Garden. The revival of this garden created a central gathering place on the property and gave an incredible morale boost to the overall restoration of the Castro Adobe. Thousands of curious visitors have toured the Castro Adobe during various stages of the restoration, compelling so many people to get involved. Volunteers have put on events, raised money, maintained gardens, and taken a personal interest in the progress of the State Park. We invite you to share in the experience for yourself and relive a piece of our cultural heritage in the Pajaro Valley. One of the great stories about having this building is you can tell the history of California, and it is such a joy to know my family's wonderful, wonderful two-story Hacienda is alive and well, and people get to come to see it. So next year, we are going to be dancing upstairs in the Fandango Room. It's going to be an absolute joy to bring back that type of history to this area. Thanks to a community full of dreamers and doers, together we have restored the Castro Adobe. It took 20 years of hope and perseverance. We are so happy to celebrate this monumental accomplishment. We proudly celebrate the diverse community that came together to make this dream a reality. The Castro Adobe will continue to share its history for generations, no longer at risk of fading into a distant memory. Thank you, Bonnie. We love this story so much. I mean, it's such a treasure in South County. Board members are there, is there any comments or questions from board members who are from McPherson? Yeah, this is awesome, just absolutely awesome. I just want to thank you who are here who helped us. I mean, this is a years-long effort and just you're just to be commended. I mean, if you didn't do it, obviously it's nobody's thinking about having to get done. So this is a great tribute at a real honorable place for the County of Santa Cruz. And thank you for sticking with it. It's been a long haul, but it's awesome. It has, thank you, Supervisor McPherson. Supervisor Koenig. Just wanted to echo that thanks to all of you who put in so many hours of and so much sweat, equity and labor and love into this project. It's really a beautiful outcome. I look forward to visiting. Thank you. Supervisor Hernandez. Same, I just want to thank all the volunteers as well and all the Dawson's, everybody that, you know, took everybody that volunteered as well. You know, so many children from South County go visit the Adobe house from grade school to elementary school, middle school. And every time, you know, they go, they're awed by the house and the history that they took place there in South County. So thank you. It's a treasure in our community. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Hernandez. Supervisor Cummings. Thank you. Just want to thank you and everyone who's worked on this. This is the first time I've really heard about this and, you know, I feel like I learned more and more each time I'd sit through these meetings and we see these various presentations. And so I'm excited to share this with other folks that I know who might not be aware of this so that we can help contribute to keeping this part of our history alive in Santa Cruz County. So thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you, Ms. Holly. I do have a question because, I mean, to Supervisor Cummings' point, I think a lot of people aren't aware of this treasure in our community. So could you share how the community could get involved with the continued restoration of this project and also maybe how they could also visit? Absolutely. So we do have monthly open house events. The next one is on February 11th from 1030 to 330. And we are taking preregistrations at that'smypark.org. We also are always recruiting volunteers, Dosen volunteers, garden volunteers, people to help with maintenance of the property. We also, of course, as was mentioned, there are school field trips. We have the Kids to Parks program. There are virtual field trips, in-person field trips and hybrid field trips. We also, of course, accept donations and shopping. We have Castro Adobe merchandise that's available at our park store online and also at pop-up events at our events out there. So there are lots of ways to get involved and be happy to give any of you a tour of the Adobe. Anytime you and your staff would like to take us up on that. It is a treasure in our community and we're really proud to show it off. And then I also just say sort of what comes next now that the Adobe has been restored, we're gonna take the next steps to finish off this park project. So we'll be creating a visitor center, accessible pathways, restoring the habitat lands, putting in interpretation. We have a theme called If These Walls Could Talk. So the building actually tells you the story of the people who've lived and worked there over the years. So we're really looking forward to working with community on next steps. Thank you, Ms. Holly. And to all of you that have volunteered on this that are here today, I mean, you're what makes our community great. This is, you're leaving a legacy. This is a historic legacy, but we could have lost it and you're leaving it for the next generation. My son was, you know, he's just turned eight, but when he was three, he went to one of some of the early events that were there and helped cook. And just he loves it. It's an imprinted memory that he absolutely loves. And so just think about this legacy that you're all leaving. It's an amazing thing. Thank you. I remember that day and visitors can press tortillas and cook them on the Bercero and it's really a sensory experience. So invite you all to come out. I also have some educational materials for you. We did publish a book a number of years ago called the Castro Adobe from earthquake to earthquake. So I have a copy for each board member and also for Mr. Palacios. Should I give those to the clerk? Please. Thank you for the presentation. Thank you, Ms. Holly. Since you're used to sitting through these, you're welcome to stay for the continued items. And Supervisor McPherson said he'll be one of your garden volunteers. He's an expert. All right, so we'll move on to item 10, which is to consider approval and concept of the uncountified ordinance of the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors amending ordinance 5, 4, 2, 3 related to the effective date of amendments to the Santa Cruz County Code chapter 13.10 as part of the sustainability policy and regulatory update of 2022 and scheduled the uncountified ordinance for second reading and final adoption on February 14th, 2023, as outlined in the memo of the Deputy CAO. I know that this is just a cleanup language board item, but Ms. Hansen. Thank you, Chair Supervisors. In December of last year, the board adopted the sustainability policy. Ms. Hansen, I think that your microphone is not on. Thank you. The board adopted the sustainability policy and regulatory update, which was a major update of our general plan and county code and involved over 10 years of work to compile that program and get it before the board. Its major focus was to update our policies and regulations to really encourage more infill development and develop more sustainable communities within the county. There were nine ordinances that it took. The board will, I'm sure, remember to adopt those ordinances and the vast majority of those amendments are part of our local coastal program that has to be approved by the Coastal Commission before it can go into effect. Ordinance 5-4-2-3 was one of those nine ordinances and amended our zoning codes, it was a pretty important one. The ordinance contained an administrative effort, or excuse me, which bifurcated the ordinance, meaning it would go into effect outside the coastal zone immediately and then inside the coastal zone once it was approved by the Coastal Commission. While we sometimes do bifurcate our ordinances when we think there's real value to the people outside the coastal zone, in this case, all of this project was intended to be reviewed by the Coastal Commission. And because these codes are intricately tied to the general plan and those amendments, and in fact, some of the residential zones that are new, the residential flex zone needs to be established by the general plan before the code can go into effect, we can't have them going into effect separately. So this ordinance is just an administrative procedure to correct that error. And our recommended actions are to approve the ordinance and concept and then schedule it for second reading at the next meeting on February 14th. Happy to answer any questions you may have. Thank you, Ms. Hansen. Seems pretty straightforward. Are there any questions from Board Member Shoste? Supervisor Koenig. Just a brief question. Do we have any sense from Coastal Commission staff when this is gonna make it on their agenda? We don't yet, but we are about to schedule a meeting with them to start to talk about how they might divide up the project. We have a real interest in seeing some of the residential portions of the general plan and the county code in effect. And so if they're gonna, it's a huge package. So if they need time, we're gonna ask them to potentially divide those things up so we can have our housing regulations in effect in time for the housing element. Great, thank you. Any other questions? Ray, I'm just really happy that Santa Cruz County is, we've got a format for how we're gonna address climate change challenges with these two documents and the climate action plan as well. We're comparatively ahead of the game throughout the state of California. I'm glad we have this in place. We just gotta put it to work and make it work for this county. Thank you. Thank you. There's very many from the community that would like to address this on this item. Yeah, good morning, Stone, James Yeating Whitman. I'm not sure exactly what is involved with 5, 4, 2, 3, but it does make a reference to 310 where on December 6th in the afternoon, this board chose to link the agenda items 13, 14, 15, 16 and 17 into just instead of commenting for two minutes on each, whoever was here and I was the only one in the county to comment. Learning how to navigate, how to use the system unknown to me until a few days before, when you look at the major binder, it may have 1,800 pages, but in relation to agenda items 13, 14, 15, 16 and 17 on December 6th, which do relate to this agenda item 10, initially only about 270 pages were available, but when I learned how to look at it more carefully and we're always learning, there was an additional 2,104 pages that weren't initially included. So I guess I was the only one to make a legal request that this stuff could be looked at within 90 days or whatever you've changed it to. So I guess I'm glad that I'm here for the meeting today because I would have liked to have been here on time, but obviously I was delayed. So this will just be interesting to see if more members of the public will actually be in more action to work with you guys to do the best job for everything. How's that for being nice? Thank you. Thank you. Is there anybody else in chambers? Is there anybody online, Madam Clerk? We do not have any speakers online. Okay, I'll bring it back to the board for action. With the recommended actions. Second. A motion from Supervisor Koenig and a second from Supervisor McPherson if we could have a roll call please. Supervisor Koenig. Aye. Cummings. Aye. Hernandez. Aye. McPherson and Friend. Aye. And passes. And we'll move on to the one item that was pulled from the consent agenda, which is now item 11.1, which was item 38 on the consent agenda, which is to authorize the community development and infrastructure department to return to the board on February 14th, 2023 with a proposed amendment of the current contract with four leaf incorporated to extend the term of the contract and add a new scope of services for consultant as recommended by Supervisor Koenig and myself, we're happy to discuss the item but Supervisor McPherson, you pulled the item so please introduce your concerns. Thank you. Thank you, Chair Friend and Supervisor Koenig for bringing this item to the board. I think it's imperative that we have a clear and expedited process to help folks rebuild after the storms, just as we have endeavored after the CZU fire, not just talk about COVID in 2016, 17 storms as well. I pulled this item for discussion because I wanted to clarify a few things about the scope of work and they asked for more data about the fire recovery process. And I have a couple of questions and I don't know if there's someone here that could answer them about, I know the amendment is gonna come back to us at the next meeting, but can we say whether or now, whether Orleaf will be adding other resources to handle the additional workload? That's one question and do we anticipate needing additional county personnel to provide the approvals and this problem solving that we're experiencing now and the residents that have run into the challenges that we have. Yeah, hi. My name's Carolyn Burke, assistant director with CDI and let's see. So the way the Forleaf contract model works, we will add, they're able to add as many staff as necessary to take care of the workload that's coming in the door and maintain our expedited review times. So that's kind of the benefit of using Forleaf is that they can flex their staffing levels to be able to meet demand and maintain that expedited times. And the board, the letter states that Forleaf will assist in constituent facing activities like community outreach and disseminating public information. Do we anticipate that the consultants are gonna take the lead on that outreach or the timing of it or how does the county specifically get into that? Well, let's see. So as far as outreach, we definitely, CDI coordinates very closely with Forleaf staff and developing the information such as the RPC website that they currently have, the county staff did a good portion of that work and then as well as Forleaf staff to get what we have up there today. And so we'd be doing the same to do that type of outreach. I'm closely connected with our CBO and the chief billing off official in the RPC and we come up with that together. As far as outreach, we also work with OR3, Office of Response Recovery and Resilience to support them in any events and activities that they've prepared similar to what we've done now attending town halls or different events up in the Valley for a CZU recovery. Okay, I'm supportive of this going in this direction with Forleaf and I just wanna ensure that we are going to achieve the objective that we have, which is to be as helpful as we can to those in the rebuilding process. And I wanna ensure that we're not unintentionally diluting our ability to continue the fire rebuilding process, but I think you've explained the process. And what I've seen is as of Monday on the CZU rebuilding dashboard for single family homes, we have 221 permits in process, 167 issued and ready to be picked up and another 197 that have all three clearances and could submit a permit, but have not done so. We get asked about these numbers all the time. I know in my office and I'm sure in some of your offices. And also that's about 600 units, which is about two thirds of the homes burned in the fire. But I'd like to get more information about why property owners with clearances have not come in for permits and why those issued permits have not been picking them up. And it's, you'd have to go to a one-by-one basis, but how we're going to work through this process. I'm just a little concerned of how it's gone. I just don't know the answers to those things and there won't be a single answer for any of them, but I'd like to see some analysis to help inform how we manage the storm rebuilding and what the success looks like and what we should realistically expect. What I would like for additional direction to the staff is to return the board on February 14th with both some contact, a contract amendment and a plan for how the county will collect and analyze both the data and the reasons behind the figures, permits issued, but not picked up, clearances approved, no permits submitted, permits in the process and strategies used to address the problem of delays. I'm not putting blame on anybody. I just want to get the answers because I've been asked these questions time and time again and I really don't have a good answer for it. And I think we can, I would like to see us, I'd like to add these directives to this and to come back to us on February 14th. Can I just ask a point of clarification possibly for council? You're asking for a contract amendment but isn't this just information coming back from CDI that answers these questions? I don't understand why we would add this to a contract is what I'm asking or maybe I'm missing the point but it sounds like he's trying to modify the contract authorization to have this language come back from Forleaf where it strikes me that this is just information that we can already obtain from Forleaf. We don't need a contract to do it and then they just receive direction to come back with a report. Yeah, I agree. I agree with what you're saying. The item before the board is for a contract amendment and the additional direction doesn't necessarily relate to the contract amendment. It's more of a request to get a report back from staff on a future agenda regarding these issues. Either way, I think it's a similar ask of the board. Yeah, I think it's an appropriate additional direction. I just didn't think it was, the language you'd use, supervisor McPherson would modify the actual contract amendment. I just didn't think that that's what we're directing somebody to do here. As long as we can direct the staff to come back with that information or have them know exactly what we are seeking because we just haven't been able to get it yet to my satisfaction anyway. And I think, well, I'm not gonna speak for the third district but I think for the third district feels much the same but supervisor Cummings, I don't wanna put you on the spot because you just got here in the aftermath of all this. But I think that's the case. Well, what we're hearing as staff is just there's two separate issues. There's the contract amendment with Forleaf and there's also an analysis regarding the efficacy of using Forleaf and issues related to whether folks are picking their permits up or doing rebuilding and the like. And I think staff can do both those things. Okay, that'd be satisfactory to me if under the circumstances, and I think, well, I'm not speaking for any other supervisor, but I think it'd be great to have that type of information. I think it still belongs as additional direction. I think it should be formalized. I was just trying to make sure that we didn't complicate a contract. I got it. I'm sorry, I'll get to you, Justin, with a supervisor, Koenig. Thank you, Chair or friend. Thank you, Supervisor McPherson for asking for that information. It's something that's consistently, I've had to scratch my head about a little bit when looking at our recovery dashboard. I mean, it seems like we're making great progress, but I wonder as well, why aren't people picking up their permits and what happened to the other? One third of homes that were destroyed that doesn't seem to be accounted for there. And I appreciate what you're getting at that you wouldn't want the additional work that we do for storm repair and rebuilds to further push back anything in the process for people who are still trying to recover from a disaster two years ago. So definitely sympathetic to that. I think that, as you said, Ms. Burke, the way this, the way for-leaf works, they can kind of add as many additional hands or help as needed to be able to process the sort of unanticipated number of applications that we're sure to get out of this. I'll also just add, I mean, every time I go to see someone's home that was destroyed by floodwaters where they had two feet of water and mud in some cases, brand new, newly renovated units trying to provide that housing for the community and then just having it ripped away. I'm always left wondering, how can we do more? It always feels like just, there's only so many things that we can do and it's never enough. This is something that we can do and it's something that we've been doing effectively for fire victims. And I think that we can do effectively for victims of these most recent storms. And of course, the one-stop model that for-leaf provides is something we're seeking to emulate with our own planning department and the Unified Permit Center. Of course, it's a process to stand that up. I think it'd be too much to try to labor and just our planning department with all these new permits we're sure to see and that this working with for-leaf in the short term will provide the best solution. Thank you, Supervisor Cummings. Thank you, Chair. And I just wanna express my appreciation of Supervisor McPherson's additional direction. It's something that's been a concern of mine and some of the residents in our district as well, just around timing of when people are rebuilding and the permits and how they're going through the process. But in addition to that, I have some other concerns given that we're having this discussion about for-leaf that I thought were important to bring up. One of the things that we've been hearing from fire survivors in the third district is that there's sometimes disputes between for-leaf and people who are trying to rebuild and it doesn't seem like there's any kind of intermediary at the county for when those disputes arise, where people should take those disputes. And so for example, there's been concerns that with some of the enhanced septic systems that for new buildings, that that's something that might be required by state but for people who are rebuilding, there should be opportunities for them to use these less expensive systems to help them or easily rebuild. And it sounds like there's disputes between staff at for-leaf and individuals who are trying to rebuild. And so it might be that there's some code or some reason why they can't, they have to go with the enhanced septic system but it's also not clear that they're getting any kind of real explanation. And then from there, they don't really know who to go to and we've had some conversations with other county staff who also feel like they weren't sure whether it's building materials or enhanced septic systems. Who they, if a resident has an issue and a dispute with for-leaf, it's not clear to them who they should go to as well. And so that's something I wanted to bring up and felt that I wanted to add a little bit of additional direction to that, which would be for when staff returns to the board that they come back with recommendations for a process to deal with disputes between for-leaf staff and disaster survivors, a point of county staff person to manage that process and keep survivors and keep our supervisor's office informed about that. And I think it's just gonna become even more complicated when you have now flood survivors and fire survivors who are coming with their concerns. And if there's any kind of dispute between for-leaf and the victims, there needs to be somebody in the county who we can direct these people to. Any other comments from board members? I'll just briefly say the rationale, sort of the top line so we don't lose track of this as to why we brought this item forward was the two of us brought this item forward is because people are hurting. And we need to expedite a process to try and do everything we can from a county perspective to not be in the way of their rebuild because it's not just physical and the buildings, it's emotional. And we're dealing with it on the fire side. Who if I was McPherson was hit again on the flood side and a number of us were doing it on the flood side this will help do that. There's no perfect process at all. I think that the information coming back is important. And I think that these recommendations are good but I don't wanna lose track of why we brought the item forward in the first place because and this is a very important item and the county is doing everything it can do to not be a regulatory barrier to people's lives being rebuilt, their livelihoods being rebuilt and their families being able to have a home or a business rebuilt. And so I think that this is good and I wanted to compliment the work of CDI and their openness for this outcome attractive amendment. Yeah, I wanna say congratulations too. I know it's hard for some of the youths that want to rebuild to believe but we're doing a better job than most other counties that have experienced fires or floods or whatever the case may be. So I don't wanna make this, I just wanna be complimentary but I wanna get just to see the facts and figures or clearly so we can pass it on to the public. Well, open it up for the community then on this item before we bring it back to the board for a motion and anybody from the community would like to address us. Yeah, that's James. I think it was Mr. McPherson who took this off the agenda, the consent agenda. I think that's fabulous. Any smiling or irony personally would have been because I'm trying to reuse my journals and this date stops at July 31st. So the tragedy of the CZU fires, what was that August 17th of 2020? I came in here and spoke quite a bit about that. Haven't said much about the flood stuff because that happened in between meetings. So what I've worked on some projects for the CZU fires and I'm aware of lots of issues that have come up and there's still a lot of physical evidence that I just won't go into detail about but I know that I only started showing up here, April of 2020 and it would be my guess that there's probably been at least 40,000 pages that were physically printed that have gone through. Who knows how many more have been printed? So it's entirely possible that there are some difficulties due to what seems like some tiny regulations like let's say septic systems that are becoming very expensive for people to actually do. I don't know, I was trying to pay attention but what are the 221 permits have been applied for 167 issued, 197 have all the clearances. It's my understanding that over 900 dwellings were destroyed during this fire. So I would just like to personally witness you guys walk in your talk about helping people and that's why I'm glad I'm here. Thanks. Anyone else from chambers like to address us? Is there anybody online, Madam Clerk? We have no speakers here. All right, so I'll bring it back to the board for action for if there's a motion for the recommended actions plus additional direction of supervisor Cummings, do you, would you like to make a motion? Yes, I'll move item number 38 with the recommended actions and also include the additional direction provided by Supervisor McPherson and Supervisor Cummings. Second. And is there understanding what the additional direction is, Madam Clerk? We're okay. The clerk would appreciate a brief recap of the additional directions. We can capture that accurately. Thank you, Supervisor Cummings. Do you mind stating from your end the additional direction and we'll try and capture Supervisor McPherson's as well? Sure. The additional direction that I provided was that when this item returns to the board, the staff come back with recommendation for a process to deal with disputes between four leaf staff and disaster survivors, appointed county staff to manage that process and keep the supervisor's office informed. And Supervisor McPherson, the data you would like as well in that report. Yeah, the permits issued but not picked up. The clearance is approved, but no permits submitted. The permits in process and strategies used to address the problems or delays. Council, we're clear. It's okay. Thanks, I appreciate that, Clerk. Absolutely. So we have a motion from Supervisor Cummings to second from Supervisor Koenig with additional direction. If we could have a roll call, please. Colleges, Supervisor Koenig. Aye. Cummings. Aye. Hernandez. Aye. McPherson. Aye. And Friend. Aye. Item passes unanimously as amended. Thank you. At this point, we're going to move into closed session. Is there anything anticipated to be reportable at a closed session? No. All right. Then our next meeting will be on February 14th. We appreciate everybody for being here. We appreciate Community TV for their work today as well.