 Welcome to the 10 30 instructions on your screen. Please mute your television or streaming device once you call in and listen through your phone. Please note there's a delay in streaming. So if you continue to listen on your television or streaming device, you may miss your opportunity to speak. When it's time for public comment, please press start. Thank you, Mayor, Council Member Byers. Here. Matthew. Holder. Vice Mayor Meyers. Here. And Mayor Cummings. Which we gather is the unceded territory of the Owasa Speaking UP Tread, hard to restore traditional stewardship practices on these lands, instructions throughout the meeting whenever we move into an opportunity for members of the public. Thank you, Mayor Cummings, members of the City Council. The Council met remotely this morning at 9 a.m. to discuss the following items. First was pending litigation. The Council received a report from and gave direction to legal counsel in regard to the four following matters. One, save our big trees versus the City of Santa Cruz currently pending in the Santa Cruz County Superior Court. Second, regions of the University of California versus the City of Santa Cruz also pending in the Santa Cruz Superior Court entitled City of Arcada at All versus Specific Gas and Electric Company. That's currently pending in the San Francisco Superior Court. And item four is the case of Donald J. Trump at All versus the State of New York. And on that item, the Council voted unanimously to join the County of Santa Clara and the public rights project in an amicus-cure-eye brief currently being prepared in a case before the United States Supreme Court that challenges President Trump's memorandum directing that undocumented immigrants be excluded from the population count to a portion congressional seats. A three-judge lower court in New York concluded that this memorandum was unlawful. In a related case, a three-judge court in California found that the memorandum violated both statutes governing the Census and the U.S. Constitution. So that was an action taken by the City Council on that item. Item two was an item of significant exposure to the litigation in which the Council received a report from the city attorney's office and gave direction. There was no reportable action on that item. Item three was a conference with labor negotiators in which the Council received a report from its negotiator concerning the SEIU Local 521. There was no reportable action. And in particular winter storms and winter flows, an increase as a result of the recent fires up in the north of us in the San Lorenzo Valley in particular. And so to do that, we will have our fire chief and our water director give a presentation on the impacts, particularly to the city and to our water system. So with that, I'll turn it over first to Chief Hyde. And then after that, our water director will also do a presentation. So thank you. Mayor Cummings, City Council. Jason Hyde, your fire chief. And Bonnie's going to pull up a very brief presentation on the post-fire debris flow. And what you're looking at right here, this is a map that is generated by the county. And the area that's outlined in black is actually the fire perimeter of the CZU fire that occurred 85,000 plus acres. And inside of that footprint, you see a shaded area that's blue. And there's light blue and dark blue. And the light blue is at an elevated risk of fire, post-fire debris flow. And the darker shaded areas are at an even more elevated risk. What's important to note about this is that the debris flow footprint is greater than the footprint of the CZU fire. And that's just based on the topography and the terrain that we have up in that area. And so this is a county-led effort. This information later on I'll share the link that you can go to. But really, this is a big deal and people need to pay attention to this. They need to take this seriously. The post-debris flow is going to have the potential to have a greater impact in the fire itself and also outside of the footprint of where the fire was. What we don't want are for people who are in an area that didn't suffer any consequence from the fire to not take this seriously. They're downhill from where the fire occurred. They're at an elevated risk. And so this map just kind of shows the area that is of greater concern. The majority of the area is located in the San Lorenzo Valley along the Highway 9 corridor. And then there are some other areas on the western edge of Empire grade out toward the coast that because of the fire impacts that they are in increased risk. Nothing inside the city itself is at risk right now, even though we do have the potential of having some impacts from that. If you can go to the next slide, Monty. How can the debris flows impact the city of Santa Cruz? Debris flows, they can be called different things. So just want to make sure that we're on the same page when it comes to the nomenclature. Mudslides, mudflows, debris flows. And they're a little bit different than some mudslides that we've had just from rain because of the impacts of the fire. So they can move large objects, not just mud, but rocks, boulders, trees, and they flow over a large area. And what happens when we have a fire of this magnitude in the scope is it's so damaging to the ecosystem and the vegetation that would normally absorb a lot of that water. If you think about a redwood forest and the dust that's underneath that, that material was really damaged by this fire that occurred. And ash that is left is very mobile and it's also hydrophobic. It does not absorb water. And so when we get rain that would normally be absorbed by that biomass, by that ecosystem that lives within the redwood forest, that's been changed. And so we're at a much higher risk of having a debris flow, and that's why a lot of planning has gone into this. So that excess material, what the impact for the city can be, besides just the people that may be impacted by this, is an increased risk of debris coming into the San Lorenzo River. Increased risk of material that can potentially damage one of our biggest areas of concern is the Highway 1 bridge as you come into the city. That has a center pillar. And so if we get a large amount of material that gets flushed out of the San Lorenzo Valley and built a dam, it can actually erode and take that bridge out. So that's something that we've made some plans for. We'll be keeping an eye on it. And the other consequence, and I think Rosemary will talk about this, is that the water quality and the water quantity may be impacted. Next slide, Bonnie. So what are we doing as a city to prepare? We'll be monitoring all rain events. We do this anyway. And we'll be pushing out early notification to our employees and community for the potential flooding when we're notified by the National Weather Service. The city, through the EOC, through the fire department and the city as a whole, we've been working with all of our allied agencies for both the response component as well as the planning and the communication and the coordination. 9-1-1 has developed our polygon to our areas where people will be at increased risk, how they're going to communicate with them, working with the California Office of Emergency Services. And really importantly, the National Weather Service and developing a flow response plan and monitoring the weather and those trigger points for how much rain that we get, when we get that rain, and when we need to notify people. Two weeks ago, we went through a disaster preparation tabletop exercise with all of these partners, the county, the city agencies, Cal OES, the weather service, public works in the county, and went through a tabletop exercise for how we would respond to this so that we can make sure that we're as prepared as we can be. And I also want to highlight that this is a county-led effort. None of the impacts from the CZU fire occurred within the city itself. And so the county is really the lead for this. And you can go to the county of Santa Cruz website, and they have two main tabs on there. One is for COVID, which is still going on. And then they also have the Santa Cruz County fire recovery. And if you click on that link, it will take you to where you can access these maps where it talks about debris removal, debris mud flows, and it has the maps that you can really drill down to your specific address so that you can have a plan for how you're going to evacuate, if notified, as well as whether or not you're at an elevated risk. And I would urge everyone to do so so that you're not caught unaware. During the Thomas fire in Ventura, there was some pretty catastrophic consequences when they had debris flows in Bonacito. And our goal is to prevent that loss of life. We're not going to be able to prevent the mud flows themselves. There's nothing we can do about that other than having an increased awareness of the potential and having an increased awareness for what would trigger those potential debris flows. So that's what I have for you today. I'm more than happy to answer any questions. Again, I would urge everyone to take this seriously, be prepared, go to the county website and see if you're in the area that could potentially be impacted by this. Thanks, Chief, for that update. My question, I guess, is for you and maybe also Mr. Devil, our public works director, I'm just curious how these conditions relate to the FEMA sort of the FEMA certified flood, you know, flood project we have. And now I think we're now the we now own that that facility in a sense and that, you know, mark what. So I guess if we get rained, you end up with, you know, this event kind of basically moving downstream through the city. Are we where are how does the flood control project perform in terms of, you know, any damages or if there is localized or even major funding flooding. I'm just kind of curious about how we prepare specifically to, you know, our flood prone area in the downtown. You could just speak a little bit about that just because of materials in the. Sure, that's a great question. You know, we've done our standard vegetation management and we've actually gone in and ripped section of the bed of the river between the highway one bridge and the water street bridge and extra two feet to hopefully mobilize any material that if we get some high flows will push that area through. Since that area of the river like control project is the area with the most potential for flooding. So we want to keep movement of material through that area to keep our highest capacity. The area Jason mentioned is debris against the highway one bridge that's really the the unknown issue for us and that's one that we're very carefully paying attention to because if that does dam up the water. Potentially put the bridge at risk but it also potentially break could break the river out and go around the channel in that area and so we're going to be monitoring any debris that gets up on that bridge. And we have been working with Caltrans to alert them so that they can mobilize equipment and take that material out. So that's our biggest issue. We are we do have now control the flood control channel and we have maintenance on our manual which you are completing and participating that the actual maintenance. If any damage and we get any flooding due to this debris flow it's a new FEMA event and we would go back and get reimbursement secret reimbursement for that. Just like we're doing for the fire so it would be a separate event. And then we would have to pursue it like another disaster. And just one follow up on that mark well to I guess two questions one is I know that some of the insurance pieces along you know for people who live along the channel. Are we now that we are sort of you know the owner of the channel. Where are we at with people flood flood insurance types of concerns etc. That's also a good question. We're currently working on the FEMA certification of the channel. The Corps of Engineers build the flood control projects but they do not certify the flood control projects. You have to go to a different federal agency FEMA to do that. We're currently in a discounted flood insurance zone because the project was technically under construction. It has been turned over so we have three years to get that certification to then either keep our discount or even reduce flood insurance rate even more because the project will be certified. By FEMA and and then that will reduce people flood insurance rates. If it's not certified that after three years that discount could go away. And that's our biggest concern that could be almost a million and a half dollars sitting wide on impacts on flood insurance increases. So we're definitely this is a priority for us. Thank you. And do you get the impression in your conversations with Caltrans that for example they would you know put a crane on the bridge or you know I know that we've had to do that on the Water Street bridge before with taking material off and actually physically taking things out as they're actually coming down the river. I mean is that the kind of response that you're hoping for from them in that they will actually be there to kind of protect the structure and actually move material away from the structure. Yeah that's the best access for that removing material from that bridge they've done that actually in 2017 they did that. But yeah we put them on alert they're not able to stage equipment nearby but we have been in communications and they will activate and react because that's their structure they want to maintain it. So the issue is if they wait too long and the structure the material builds up too high then they put their employees at risk to get that material off of there. So they have to stay on it as it starts to accumulate. Okay thank you. Yep. Kind of from Rhodes Mary and it's regarding the improvements made to the the infrastructure for the the intake right there up at Graham Hill around Sycamore Grove and I was wondering if any of that project has been delayed as a result of these fires and like potential you know flooding or or debris flow coming down the river. And so we are hoping to get the pipe in place and then start refilling and having them be finished by the time by the end of the year basically. I mean we're still getting into good potential to get the pipe in place and then start refilling and having them be finished by the time by the end of the year basically. I mean we're still getting into good potential to be some rainy season period but fundamentally that that that plan is moving forward and we're we're finished with the tunneling and should be in the you know demobilization here in the next few weeks. Okay. Are you ready for me? Yeah just about I was just going to say thanks to Jason for that. Oh thank you. Yeah I did remember. I emailed Justin to you and to Bonnie Bush. We just received newsletters from the Bicycle community that half the county is having some debris flow town hall and I just sent you three shots. So maybe that's something we want to help publicize as well. Coming up I think in a couple of days so. Yeah. Jason I'm sure you know about that. So it's just one more thing to make available to people for more detailed information. Patients and that. Just give you an update on the on the status of the work that we've been doing for post fire recovery planning. So basically review talking about what our goal is the challenges and the actions we're taking to make sure that we can continuously achieve the goal. So the goal is not a very surprising thing. It's basically safe reliable supply of drinking water 24 7365 and with the pandemic issues we've had over the last you know in eight or nine months we know for sure that it's you know that's more important now than ever. So that is really an important goal for us and in the circumstances that we find ourselves. It's not without its challenges and Jason started to talk some about some of the what some of those challenges are again just a little bit of an orientation. So the source of the major part of our water supply both stored water in Lachlan Reservoir and flowing sources and then we do get water from the north coast sources. The hatched area that you see over here is karst geology which is and these areas some of these areas particularly in the upper area were burned and so we do have some concerns about potential long term impacts from burn situations on that karst geology and how that might eventually show itself in in some of the water quality issues up in that area. It may be quantity two and you just saw this sort of fire perimeter map. A lot of the most significant problems were further up into the northern watersheds. Wydell Creek is one. Scott Creek here had quite a bit of more severe burned areas hotter areas. And I do think that if you overlay those those three flow maps you would see a number of places where there's more concerns up in these areas as well as you know moving in into the San Lorenzo which is everything kind of on this side of the divide and clearly this is our key area for us. So one of our key concerns is polluted runoff from fire damaged areas. It's the source of the source of major water supply for us and with less impact than other parts of the burn area but the potential from polluted runoff or the area is real and not insignificant. I'm going to try to make this go smaller. And I want to show you some of the things we're concerned about the these kind of situations where you get burned out vehicles and you can see that literally you know you've got melted. And if you looked at your car what's in your car recently you'll see all kinds of plastics and various kinds of man made materials that are made up of all kinds of chemicals you see areas where you know homes of burn with the materials that are inside homes. And you see these you know base you know big collections of ash that have come down maybe from the burn itself or from some of the deposition of ash that occurred during various parts of the fire based on wind. And these things have made us identify circles or these are properties where we know that there are debris that needs to be taken away it's potentially toxic and we have identified those areas particularly in our watershed. And in some of our other you know important sort of areas like over here is again this car theology where these are priority areas that we have identified and communicated to the county and to the Cal OES people who are working in the next phase of the debris removal. So when they talk about debris removal and Jason did mention this in his brief presentation. They're talking about moving these vehicles out of the way actually removing that build up a accumulated ash so that that ash doesn't flow you know get mobilized during a rainstorm and blow into a receiving stream and end up in somebody's water supply like those of us who live in Santa Cruz. So this is a huge priority for us and we've been working very actively with the county during the phase one investigations as well as in preparation for the phase two work that's starting shortly. I did want to provide a couple of additional links as Jason mentioned. There are quite a bit of work going on at the county level. There's a back sheet here and there's information about how to get signed up for debris removal off of a burned out property. So these are really important for properties that have been affected by the fire to you know get engaged in making sure that the debris that they that might have accumulated on their property is properly removed and remediated so that it doesn't result in pollution. Into local water supplies. Another area for us is basically the debris flow and we've talked a little bit about this already so I'm not going to go into great detail here but these are the same kind of similar maps that you saw a little bit more gradation of some of the you know the probabilities that there would be a debris flow with a quarter of an inch in 15 minutes. That's a pretty good rainstorm but not certainly not especially in the higher elevations of our area not without precedent. So I think there are some pretty strong possibilities that we will be seeing debris flows that will affect certainly the San Lorenzo River and certainly some of these other areas and the receiving streams over here as well as any population areas that exist. So this is a big concern for the reasons that we've been talking about. So now when I sort of shift over to talking about fire response action planning and there are three key elements to ensuring safe water supply and our focus has been on those elements. And one of them is understanding what's going on with water quality and how that water quality data might change. Another one looks at treatment processes and trying to really look at what we might be facing in terms of change water quality and then taking steps to get ready for whatever might be coming. And the last one is really about infrastructure reliability which of course is always the case but if you've got a great treatment process but you can't get water to it or you can't get water away from it because you have an infrastructure problem then you don't have a reliable water supply. So in terms of water quality the key treatment process parameters can change as a result of runoff or debris flows from the burned areas. And depending on the degree of change treatment processes can be adjusted or a potentially impaired source can be taken out of service and alternate sources or supplies can be brought online. So this is the kind of the data really has to help us to understand can we treat this water and if we can't then we need to be prepared to turn that sourcing health online to make sure we have an adequate supply. So in terms of water quality data collection what we've done is we've added sampling locations make sure we have relevant data from fire impacted areas. We've added water quality parameters to sample for including some of the really more troubling things that are some of the pollutants that come from you know some of these burned man made items, dioxins, furans, purans. And one that's, I love this word, I had to put it in here because it's like a really big word. Dibenzodioxin, if that doesn't sound bad to you then I don't know what would. But that's bad to me. And then we've increased sampling frequency including event sampling to ensure that water quality changes aren't missed. So that's the strategy with respect to water quality data collection. We've also implemented, I don't have it written here, but implemented some sediment sampling, some soil sampling to try to really understand what's accumulating in soils that we might see coming into the system. From a treatment process perspective, water with higher sediment nutrients or organic carbon loading is more challenging to treat. The water treatment process we have at Graham Hill is adaptable to changing water quality, but really only up to a point. And beyond that, the only choice is to let the more impaired water bypass the facility and switch to Lachloman as a source of supply. So that's a, I mean it's great that Lachloman wasn't impacted by the fire and it's good to know that we have a good source of supply there. But we also have a major construction project going on at the dam and in Lachloman right now. Dredging is going on. I think you've seen some pictures in the weekly report. And so, you know, it's a little bit of a juggling act to make sure that Lachloman assuring that it's going to be available when we need it. And it certainly is high on our priority to manage that construction project to ensure that it would be available. Additional actions on related to water treatment have focused on improving our ability to deal with significantly greater production of solids when treating higher turbidity water, working to minimize the potential of forming higher levels of disinfection byproducts and water with higher loads of organic carbon, and optimizing every aspect of the treatment process we can to make sure that it's working as best we can. Additional actions related to critical infrastructure, switching, you know, I mean the reality of our situation is to switch sources from the San Lorenza River to Lachloman. No creek pipeline has to be available and functional. We've had a lot of historic history of breaks on that line, and that's a concern that we wouldn't have access because the pipeline would be out of service. And in addition, because pump station, Tate Wells, Belts Groundwater Resources also must be available and functional. And we know that we have an issue going on at Belts Water Treatment Plant right now that we're working on, but it's a major, you know, again a juggling act to keep everything in operation. The steps we've been taking and we're planning, inspecting and addressing all the culverts and drainage ditches that could impact system facilities, organizing ongoing inspections once rain begins. This is a drainage ditches that, you know, a lot of debris comes in, for example, can do the exact same thing to a pipeline that we're talking about, having concerns about the Highway 1 bridge that material can build up. It gets a lot of momentum behind it and it takes a pipeline out. So managing the drainage ditches and culverts in our system and some of our remote area pipelines is really an important activity. We've worked with the SoCal Creek Water District to make sure that O'Neill Ranch interties in place so that we can get water from them if we need to. We've ensured that the Tate Wells, which are across the river from the coast pump station, can be operated when the San Lorenzo River intake is offline. We did that in 2017. It was a godsend and it was really an effective thing to be able to get some water into the system there, even though we couldn't get the river. Organized issues to address the Belts Water Treatment Plant issue. So we've got a team out there working on taking care of one of the filters. It's not been working well. Ordered and received a good inventory of spare parts for use in transmission pipeline repairs for Null Creek and North Coast Pipeline. So having the right stuff on hand or most of the right stuff on hand is really important. And then finally, we've located and opened a purchase order with a backup welder in case our usual magic man welder isn't available when we need him. So making sure that we have that capability is really important. The financial impacts of what we've been doing, the source water quality and sediment sampling is $150,000. It could be that if we don't have an issue that we can scale that back down the road, but we've funded it up front to make sure that we do have the capability of keeping going if we're seeing impacts on water quality that we need to continue monitoring. We've established a working to get an aeration system in the washwater tank. This helps us to volatilize organic carbon disinfection byproduct issues. And it's about $100,000. And so we're trying to get that in place to help us minimize the effects of any higher organic carbon levels in our system from creating disinfection byproducts that get distributed out to our customers. And then we're looking at the additional soil solid handling capacity. And we don't know the financial impact of that, but we're still evaluating that. And the bad news that FEMA reimbursement for these costs is unlikely at this point. So we're looking at at least a quarter of a million, probably, you know, more like $350,000 or so that would be absorbed into probably emergency fund costs at this point. And with that, I can take your questions. Thank you Rosemary for that report. I'm pretty sobering. I was just curious to sort of reminding people to have their sort of, you know, emergency kit ready with, you know, some water, you know, especially water. I mean, do you see any need for just kind of that general kind of winter preparedness kind of thing or feel like the system's going to be functional to to serve? To say two things. One is, you know, preparation is always a good idea. So I think that that's a wise thing to do is we go into any kind of winter situation. I guess what I would say with respect to the system operation, you know, the water treatment operators and the people who work in production and the maintenance staff, they do a fabulous job. They pull the rabbit out of the hat every single time. And I know that they will, you know, give it their all to make sure that we're in the best position we can be to produce and deliver water. One of the things that we do when we get into these kinds of situations is we keep our distribution storage full so that we have a little bit of a cushion there to go down on distribution storage. It gives us usually a day or maybe two days of, you know, a little bit of grace if we're not producing the full production. Like we have a pipeline break, you know, we can we can get emergency contractors in or our staff in depending on what it is and can get it repaired often in a, you know, 24, 36, 72 hour kind of timeframe. So the distribution storage is a little bit of a buffer and the staff are really keeping that topped up. So, you know, if it gets bad, we will definitely be letting people know and giving people heads up and we'll have to write it out when it happens. Thank you. We'll be posting up on the website probably by the end of the week information about the water quality issues in particular, the additional monitoring we're doing, the, you know, the steps we're taking. So we're trying to get that information out in the event that people have questions, but if people do have questions, they should definitely call us. It is really reassuring to know the amount of anticipation, trying to envision everything that doesn't go long and prepare for it. And I think it's reassuring to us and certainly to the public. So to the extent that you can share some amount of this, it increases the comfort level about what line I'm in. Thank you. I just have one final thank you and comment to both the public works, the fire department and water department and all of the terrible preparations they did during fire when we were like vastly understaffed and they were out there. Protecting all of these assets that we have. You know, and that was just, it was so amazing to see where we got to go toward the damage and I just can't thank everybody that participated in that enough and thank you for your leadership on that. Thank you. No, no, that's that's all we have prepared for you today. Thank you very much. Thank you. Very quick one. The metro transit, as I'm sure you all know, has seen a real drop in ridership and they have been working. We've reported on this previously really diligent effort to improve, to protect safe people as the drivers and the customers. They did some polling to see what does it take to get people back on the public transit. Obviously the cut in student riders is the big thing, but their regular riders said the main thing they wanted was to be reassured of the safety. So that's been a big push in terms of the marketing. You may be seeing the posters on the sides of the buses. So it's not just marketing. It's real. But that scene and the process in helping to rebuild the ridership. And also they I think probably we got noticed that the bus passes for downtown workers that has been really negotiated successfully with Metro. So that's that's a good path progress and continuing that with the downtown management corporation, the property assessment group that funds the hospitality program. Zach Davis turned down on the board, so Ian McRae who was added to the board as one of the business representatives. And they are in the process, the hospitality process is in the process of transitioning to a national company that runs similar programs called Block by Block. And so that transition is happening right now and that's going well. And then finally we visit Santa Cruz. I think I hope you all get to visit Santa Cruz newsletter that comes out. I'm trying to work very conscientiously with the county health department, the state health directive to send the message of travel safely. And they're engaging the industry very actively in that. And of course that's part of the challenge between opening up and being safe. And I think our local visit to the county can be extremely conscientious as is the state organization in trying to appear to our timeline. I'm just reporting that we met as a public safety committee and we went over the independent police auditor report. I'm not exactly sure what is available or allowed to report out from specifics. So maybe somebody else can help me that's on the call. But we talked about more team, maybe you can. Yes, so the committee will prepare a written report that then will be presented to the city council. So that's forthcoming. Thank you. Yes, so it was a closed session. So thank you. Typically, as I recall, and I think maybe Laura's on, she can help me with this. We just do a written report that's distributed to the city council. It's not an agenda item. It's just been a kind of a report of the committee of the cases are reviewed in an overview. So it's more information on nature. Thank you. Sorry about that. Just confirming what Martin said, that is usually what we do on the public safety committee. And I appreciate Council member what she can and we can in regards to our thing. And as was mentioned, there will be more information forthcoming to the full council. They have just sort of two additional reports. One is that the farmer's market is open. It's got limited hours. And, you know, if you can and you do regularly go to the farmer's market, please do wear your mask. And they're experiencing a small group of individuals who don't want to wear their mask. So please practice public safety protocol while getting your fresh produce and other local items. And then the other is that we met as a city and city schools committee and just really want to share our appreciation for the council and the committee and the ongoing collaboration we have with our city schools to support one another and share and leverage resources. And one exciting development was that 50,000 in the children's fund. And right now those dollars are actually being used to help some of our city employees with scholarships for childcare. And just really want to applaud our parks and rent department and those who are really just mobilizing right now to support youth. They're trying to navigate virtual learning and what that means to our city employees and really a great model to look at expense as needed for those who are working and needing childcare and really exciting that we have this resource to support. That was something I'd also like to share. And that's it. Thank you. So I'll just report on one of the commissions I'm on. The RTC is right now has put up online ongoing public open house on for milestone three of the transit corridor alternatives analysis. And this is for uses of the future uses of the rail line. And so they are inviting public comment through November 27. And there will be a couple of opportunities to hear from and talk with the transit corridor analysis alternatives analysis team which are made up of members of the commission. And those will there will be live chapters on Thursday this Thursday the 12th from 12 to 130. And when next Wednesday November teams from 6 to 7 30 p.m. You can find out more about how to access through the SC C RTC dot org website. And please weigh in on the analysis that's being done about how to best use our our rail corridor rail trail corridor. I think I'll just add a little bit on that. And I can't remember walking covered the school school meetings about the grade. The other I guess the other thing just for the public is that the county will be presenting the three year strategic plan that's developed. I think it's 5 p.m. Now today and in front of the council we hope it'll be a short presentation. There was a full presentation today at the board of supervisors which of course I'm sure will be on tape. This is the county's effort to sort of restructure and revamp the homeless sort of service approach for the county. It's a lot of work in progress they've been working on over the last two years. The staff despite all the fires and COVID and all the other things that they had to deal with this summer diligently work to get this report out. They are doing a broad presentation of the materials they're going to be visiting each city council in the next two weeks to present the materials. As I said they presented the materials this morning at the board of supervisors meeting. They'll also be doing some public outreach and I believe some sort of town hall type of things and the information will be available on the county website. And I would just encourage any anyone in the public who wants to understand and see the changes and the directions that some of the homeless services will be taking in the next couple of years. This would be a great way to check in and understand where things are moving. The county has also hired a new homeless director and that individual will be starting here in Santa Cruz County. I believe in I think it's December 1st. So a lot of really interesting things going on with the county with regards to some of their focus on revamping and looking at best management practices for designing homeless services for Santa Cruz County. And so please take a look and also council members please take a look in those at their materials on the county website. I think it's an important issue as we all know and glad to see their work has concluded in this report that we'll hear about later today. 16 and I just have questions on item 18 on some of the budget overruns. But I don't feel the need to pull the pull the item. I just have questions for staff. Okay. Thank you. Yes. As I communicated with you, I do have minor edits for the action. The minutes of number 12 number 12 are studies fashion special meetings on October 29. And they're they're really kind of minor just flushing out some of the concluding council comments. I sent them to the mayor. I'm happy to present them. I don't think it needs to be pulled. It was really trying to just fill out the thoughtful comments that people made at the very end. So how do you want to handle that? Maybe. Yeah. So this is the very end of the minute for that meeting. And you can just see, I just amplified the bullet points a little bit. Being honest about the challenges, confidence in the future, rebuilding together, engaging business groups and sectors, labor contractors, workforce development, reaching out to civic organizations, community groups and nonprofit partners, outreach to youth, stress and commitment to economic recovery and job creation, celebrating successes and sharing examples of survival and recovery, emphasizing the holistic collaborative approach. I decided to just capture the sense of the group comments there. So I would just suggest those as an attitude. Action on the consent calendar with these incorporated into the minutes. I just I do want to make a comment on item 16 and also on item 17 just really briefly. And it sounds like 18. Some of the, there are questions. So I'll just wait to hear what those are. Thanks. My comment is just excited to see the application, the grant application. This item is a grant application to the Ocean Production Council to support our resilient coast program that has been under development for the last two years through our climate manager, Tiffany Weiss-Weft. I'm excited to see that we're working with point conservation, excellent organization here in the state of California that does really innovative climate resiliency and adaptation restoration work. And so just wanted to just point kind of point out this great work. I think it's super important work that we do as a community in recognizing, especially with the year that we've had with both COVID and the fires that climate type issues are here to stay. And just excited to see Miss Weiss-Weft moving moving this project forward. I've been lucky to be on the technical advisory committee and just really pleased to see that she's continuing just work on getting these kinds of projects and programs up and running for the city of Santa Cruz. Thank you. Yeah, I would just echo those comments and want to thank Dr. Weiss-Weft for all of your tireless efforts. And I think, you know, I just want to highlight that I feel like this is not only, you know, an opportunity to bolster our efforts around the resilient coast program and our climate action, broader climate action efforts, but also really a stride towards using an environmental justice lens, really, in how we look at and address issues facing our coastal neighborhoods and really looking at focusing on engaging the beach flats and lower ocean communities that are likely to be hit hardest by sea level rise. So I'm really glad to see this happening. And I thank you for all of you. Yeah, thank you. Again, this is I just want to highlight this item is regarding sending a letter to the FAA, the Federal Aviation Administration, related to their proposal to change the flight path into San Francisco International Airport. And we have been involved in this roundtable for a long time. And Councilmember Matthews has been hanging in there with that effort. And I've been outspoken as well on my concerns and opposition to the change. So I'm just really glad to see this element also being highlighted here and acknowledged. And I just think that I want to appreciate the mayor coming for maintaining that communication and, you know, collaboration with the Amamutian Tribal Band and Val and Keen Lopez. I think this is just a really great example of how kind of keeping those channels of communication open with our community partners. It really, really is important and, you know, just, you know, an ability to respond to those concerns to the best of our ability from, you know, the powers that we have. So thank you for moving that ahead. Mentioning briefly, we are no longer paying into the roundtable effort. That's part of our budget cut, but, nor is the county, but we are still collaborating actively with the county's tracking of this. And this action also includes writing letter, not only to the FAA, but also to a federal representative making sure that he's picking up work as well. Yeah, I just wanted to also recognize that actually, Supervisor Ryan Coonerne's office did reach out to the city regarding this. And so I just want to recognize his leadership. He contacted council members Matthews and I and the mayor. And so I do want to recognize that actually his action really was important in letting us know about this necessary communication. To recognize and thank their office for reaching out to us. I had a question for staff regarding the overruns. And I'm not sure maybe Mr. Pindotti would, would, would have specifics regarding the attorney overrun. And then I had a question for the, for Chief Hydrick, whether or not the overtime that was noted in the 200, I can't remember offhand over 200,000. Are any of those costs, Chief Hydrick, are they available for reimbursement from any of the FEMA funds? Or is this, you know, I know there's some payback type of situation where our staff are responding to other fires. So I'm just wondering if that's the situation. Yeah, it's actually a two-fold thing. One, we've reduced the number of bodies that we have on staff as far as part of the budget reductions. And we still have, excuse me, a minimum staffing requirement. And we've had some injuries and illnesses. So part of it is that the other part has been the statewide OES response similar to what we saw here with the CZU fires where we had people from New Jersey. We've been heavily involved in the state. And there's a lag time from when we extend that money, submit for reimbursement, capture the reimbursement. And then also on the financial end, reconcile the coding that was done so that they can transfer those funds from the operations into the OES reimbursement. So it's a two-fold thing. But significant chunk of that, if not all of it, for that amount will be reimbursed through the state plus an administrative fee. Okay, great. Thank you. And Mr. Kintagadi, I just, I would imagine COVID probably is related to some of the overrun. But with just the budget cuts that we've been doing, I just curious to be good comment on the overrun and a little detail regarding them. So for the public, there's an overrun of about 400,000 in the attorney's office, city attorney's office. Yeah, I'm happy to comment on that. Yes. As you know, the truck is about to go by and you probably won't be able to hear me, but bear with me a second. Yeah, back in 2017, we worked with the finance department to start breaking down our accounting for time by department. And the purpose was to provide information on this very topic. And unlike some of the other departments, we were not able to, say, assign a certain cost to the city on a given month, because we have to respond to the legal services that the city asks for. And so it's hard for us to gauge what, to what extent the budget is going to be accurate in terms of the actual legal services that you receive. This year, the highest single category of legal services was assigned to the city council. The other big expenses were COVID-19, absolutely. Work with the city manager's office and the city clerk. Interestingly, the water department, because the water department has been in the process of implementing a very aggressive capital improvements program. And our office has devoted unusual, you know, in terms of what's typical in a year, an unusual level of legal resources have been devoted to the water department. And we have that all broken down by cost that I could share. Thank you, Tony. I was just curious, maybe for our finance director or city manager, with regards to the COVID-19 costs, and I would imagine all the resolutions, I mean, is there any cost recovery that's available at all for any of those kinds of activities? Oh, just quickly starting, and then Kim can add to this. But we are keeping track of all of our COVID-related expenses. We have specific forms for that so that we can attempt to get reimbursed for as much as we can. So I think we will attempt to do that. I don't know if you want to have more. Yes, we have been working on a FEMA claim for COVID. So it's been a massive project, copying all the invoices and getting all the time sheets and the 214 forms that track what people did. So, but we are working on it. Thank you. Yeah, I just think it's important for the public with the recent budget cuts that we've had to do to understand sort of some of the recovery capabilities we have with some of the funds. And those are all my questions. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Staff. Yeah, hi, this is Garrett. So by number 17, the FAA balances literally hundreds of complaints concerning hundreds of thousands of people about flight path noise to arrive at a compromised plan to maximize the general good of all. Jets flying at 10,000 or 20,000 feet, as they now are over Capitola, have far less fluidities than ones from cities near the airport, that fly much lower altitudes with noisier aircraft maneuvers. From the west side, I can't hear the jets that fly over Capitola at all. And compared to leaf blowers, gas-powered landscape tools with chippers, emergency response sirens at the bottom of the noise list, they're for public recreational use by all people. The Amemurtson seem to think the outside world should not be allowed to exist or be evidenced in even the faintest way so they can have occasional secret, totally quiet ceremonies on this federal land, which was already dedicated to public mutual recreational enjoyment. May I suggest ear plugs? The FAA can accept inputs from anyone in the flight plan evaluation process. Why the mayor has apparently been appointed secretary for the Amemurtson as the go-to letter writer and perpetual cheerleader multi-centuries ago historical reminder in chief that we live on the unceded land, blah, blah, is unclear. Don't they have email? I also see no need for the FAA to consult them if they made their own views known by their own correspondence, just like everybody else does. You must realize that when the mayor writes a letter, it is coming from him and should represent all the citizens of Santa Cruz. I'd guess that 65,000 citizens on balance would choose to have the flight path over Davenport on the coast areas rather than Santa Cruz if that were the choice, rather than protect occasional secret quiet meetings of the Amemurtson instead. The FAA's goal is to reduce the hundreds of complaints and all those complaints are then balanced by them. The Amemurtson are free to personally communicate without the mayor's apparent single-minded special interest endorsement. I could guess council opposition to this might be negligible because it would take consent and cost them nothing to go along. And generally, don't watch the FAA but it leads to a special interest of a small number of people where actually a more even, I'd say, honest, representational one should exist. Thanks. Bye. Thank you. Are there any other members of the public who would like to comment on our consent agenda? The consent agenda items 10-24 incorporating the minor edits submitted to the city clerk for number 12. I'll go ahead and second the consent. Are there any further questions or comments from council members? Council member Byers? Aye. Matthews? Aye. Aye. Boulder? Watkins? Vice Mayor Meyers? And Mayor Cummings? Aye. That motion passes unanimously. So we have a time... Could be a problem. Okay. Could you just go over it again and I assume somewhere in there we could take a quick lunch break? Yeah, so we could take a break right now maybe and... Okay, thank you. So Mayor Cummings, Vice Mayor Meyers, members of the council, I'm joined here today by our fire chief, Jaypen Hydeek, Parks and Recreation Director, Tony Elliott, and Division Chief and Fire Marshal, Rob Odie, and our urban forester, Leslie Keady, that would be available for questions at the end of this item. So our whole team has worked together to develop a new update to the urban forest and wild month urban interface policy. And with that, I'd like to turn it over to our fire staff to begin the presentation. And Bonnie, if you can queue that up for us, that would be wonderful. Thank you, Bonnie. Mayor Cummings, City Council, Jayson Hydeek, Fire Chief, and today we're going to talk about our urban forest and wildland urban interface policy updates. This has been something that we've been working on for a number of years now, and I think the events of this summer really just highlighted the importance of doing proactive vegetation management versus just reactive suppression response, which we will continue to do, to do this in a holistic manner and give our entire community the best chance possible of suffering a catastrophic wildland event. Bonnie, if you can advance to the next slide. Similar to what I showed you before, as far as the footprint of the CZU fire, the area shaded in red, is that footprint. And this is taken from the Cal Fire Damage Assessment Map, and each one of those houses represents a home that was damaged or a structure that was damaged. And as you can see that this is pretty widespread. It's crossed two counties. Luckily, it did not come into the city proper. However, it came very close to it. And the goal of our vegetation management and updating the heritage tree ordinance is really to try and prevent this type of a catastrophic consequence. We obviously can't prevent every fire from starting. This was a naturally occurring fire due to a fairly impressive lightning storm that came through. But our goal with this is not to clear cut. We're not trying to, you know, remove all vegetation. But later on in this presentation, we'll show you what some of the consequences are of doing some proactive vegetation management and what the impacts can be. Next slide. So these are just some definitions and you're going to hear really your wildland urban interface and urban forest. And so urban forest is the sum of the woody and associated vegetation that comprises houses, streets, roads, commercial areas such as malls. It includes the street trees and residential trees and vacant properties within the zone. And really what this is, this could be considered our downtown area. This would be along Pacific Avenue. This would be in the Seabright neighborhood. This would be the urban forest where we have shaded canopy along our sidewalks. But really they're not connected to what we consider to be our wildland urban interface. And that's that area where you start seeing a clear delineation between where neighborhoods are, structures are, and then a large interconnected, continuous wildland, whether it's a forest or brush or grass. And it's generally not maintained to the same criteria or specification. It is by definition a wildland area. And so what we want to do is talk about some of the steps that we can take within these areas to give the best chance of the wildland surviving a fire, as well as preventing those impacts so that we don't lose a thousand structures where people live and all the memories that are associated with that. Excellent. So this is a map of the city of Santa Cruz and what you're looking at, the shaded gray areas are, if you look down toward the wharf, that would be our urban forest. The areas that are highlighted inside of green, the outer edge if you go to the north and to the east and west, those are our boundaries outside of city limits. But this is really where we have a large, continuous fuel source or a wildland area that it butts up against our neighborhoods, like in De La Viega in Pogonep, Moore Creek. And so for the city of Santa Cruz, this is what we consider to be our wildland urban interface. And this is where we have a large fuel source of wildland space that butts right up against neighborhoods or commercial buildings. The blue squares are individual tiles that have greater detail, but this is the overview map. And so when we're talking about our wildland urban interface, this is the specific area that we're talking about for the changes in the heritage tree and also the vegetation management that we need to do in response to catastrophic wildfires, as well as changes to the adopted fire code. Next slide. So I'm going to turn this over to Rob Odie and also to Travis Beck, unfortunately with the time change for this presentation, Leslie Keady, who is our urban forester, is not available right now. However, she is available for any questions that you may have following this up. So I'm going to turn this section over to Rob Odie to talk about the Santa Cruz fire code changes and then the next two slides Travis will speak to from a Parks and Rec perspective. Well, council, thank you for your time. Yes, just some views, whether it's new construction or remodel. And with that adoption in 2019, it obviously had a trickle down into our municipal code, chapter 1905.100. And what it specifically includes branches or trees, overhanging dead homes within the... An important aspect of our urban tree policy is the heritage tree protection, which is in the Santa Cruz municipal code, chapter 9.56, which basically protects trees that are 14 inches in diameter or larger or have special status from alteration or removal unless specific criteria have been met. And those criteria are spelled out in a separate city council resolution. And it includes a number of factors. Most relevant today is that trees may be removed when they meet the findings of the urban forest and wildland interface policy statement. So that's the statement that we're here to discuss today. So this statement really deals with the areas of the urban forest that are also within this wooey, the wildland urban interface. And it's intended to help us have good coordination among our policy goal in that overlapping area. And this statement that we are working on was last updated in 1992. So with the changes in the California fire code and those becoming part of the Santa Cruz municipal code, it's high time for us to reconsider the wildland and urban interface policy statement. Some of the first things that you'll notice as you review the red-lined copy is we changed some of the terminology. The old document referred to wildland interface, whereas in the... as well as adding specific references to the fire piece to the distance that we want to maintain a defensible space around the home. As you can see, a fire break shall be made by removing or clearing away of a distance not less than 30 feet on every side of the building, whichever is near. And what we want to do is remove all defiable vegetation, whether it's shrubbery, dead or diseased growth, that become combustible. In addition, fire protection zone or fire break may be made by removing all brush, defiable vegetation or combustible growth that is located within 100 feet. So for those that have property lines to be on that 30 feet, the code and the spacing ladder fuels controlling the combustible growth on the ground. It's important to note that this does not apply to single specimens of trees or other vegetation that is well pruned, maintained to effectively manage fuels and not form a means of rapidly transmitting fire from other nearby vegetation to any building or structure. So again, we're not trying to target anything specifically, any species. We're just trying to make sure that we take out a link in that chain so that it speaks, so that fire does not progress from the ground to a shrub, to a tree, and then to a structure. Next slide. Here's the sort of that. So again, living trees up. And then beyond that, you have dome two, which is at 30 to 100 feet. So if you actually happen to have property that extends beyond, again, you want to be mindful of what you plant, how close you plant them as it pertains to, again, proximity to the home, the slope of your property and so forth. Again, this is a visual representation of what that is. Vegetation management, sometimes just looking at a picture doesn't give you a good example. And that with groups when they hear vegetation management that we want to clear cut everything. So I want to show with you some of the examples of what we've done within the city and then also talk about some of the impacts that we experienced with the CGU fire. So the picture that you're looking at right now is part of our vegetation management work that we've been doing in Pogeneff, and this is along the spring trail. And this is the before picture. And if you go to the next slide, this is a little bit further back on the road, but it's looking at that same set of trees and they're still there. The difference being is that we've limbed them up. So any fire on the ground won't readily transmit up into the crown. And hopefully that fire will burn at less intensity. And so it's less damaging to the trees themselves and to the environment as a whole. So we're talking about vegetation management. We're not looking at removing trees unless we absolutely have to. What we really want to do is maintain those trees in a way that they're still there. They're still present. We like living here, but we also want to provide a greater degree of fire safety for everyone. And if you come to the next slide here, this is a picture on Empire Grade. And this is a shaded fuel break project that was done by Cal Fire over the last few years. And this is directly across from the Christmas tree farm up on Empire Grade. And this has taken about three weeks after the CCU fire. And if you look at this, you saw the forest. But the difference being is that they've limbed up and lollipop those trees. So you have solid trunks. You have a canopy that doesn't extend all the way down to the ground. And if you look at this picture, you can make out some of the burn marks on the bottom. But if you notice that the upper canopy is still green, and that's because when the fire came through here, because they've removed the amount of fuel that was actually available to burn, and just as importantly, the arrangement of that fuel, there was much less of an impact. And that's important for the trees and the environment. And also decreases the potential for debris flows and runoff because it wasn't just that intensity of the fire that destroyed everything. So we go to the next slide. And again, this is same area, a little bit different perspective. And really what's important to note here is that fire burned through here. This was well within the footprint of the CCU fire. And if you look at the canopy, you can see the bottom edge has some browning of the leaves. But the majority of that canopy and that tree is still intact. And so it's living, and it's not going to take as long to recover. We'll go to the next slide. This is also taken on the Empire grade. And this was in an area where there was no vegetation management. There was no shaded fuel break. And if you look at the trees, there is no canopy. You have trees that were almost completely consumed, both from the ground all the way to the top. And this is an area that's going to take much longer to recover and it's at a higher risk for debris flow. But the other thing that this picture doesn't show completely is the intensity of the fire here was much greater, which poses a greater risk to houses in the area and poses a greater risk for people trying to evacuate this area and poses a much greater risk to firefighters for suppression efforts. And so shaded fuel breaks, they mitigate a lot of the concerns that we have. And so that's why we want to address that within our city ordinance. And I believe a number of the city council members, we took a tour of this and as if you're driving up past UCSC, you can see areas where we have shaded fuel breaks where no fire reached. And then you get into areas like this where no vegetation management happened and you can really see the difference and the fire intensity and the impact. And so within our wildland urban interface areas here within the city, our goal is to do vegetation management so that we still have vegetation and that we're also really minimizing the risk for a fire event occurring. And so if we go to the last slide here, we took this to the parks and rec commission and they voted six to zero to approve this recommendation. And there was a number of people on there that had questions initially about what vegetation management meant and what protections were in place for the environment. And we took tours to La Viega, the urban of our La Vie system, vegetation management shaded fuel breaks that we've done. And I believe that they supported both for the impacts for fire but also for the impacts that happened for those areas when we do vegetation management. Again, we're not looking to remove wholesale all trees, all brush, but we are looking at being able to, you know, react in a prudent manner for protecting our community and protecting our wildland as a whole. It's one of the reasons why we live in Santa Cruz. And that concludes our presentation. I just got a text message from Leslie Keady. She is available as well as everyone else on this call to answer any questions that you may have regarding this. Yeah, I'm just wondering what, I mean, obviously you have limited resources to devote to this. So how are you prioritizing? Is it neighborhood interest in being part of it? Is it species like eucalyptus or comforts that are very flammable as opposed to others? Just a quick answer on this. Yeah, so we obviously don't have the staffing, you know, within the city. We've got 24,000 structures or so within the city of Santa Cruz and we have our identified wildland urban interface areas. And so really this is a set of standards that people can maintain on their private property. We can provide that technical expertise. We obviously are complaint driven, incident driven, and within our open spaces we've engaged in doing proactive vegetation management. You know, what I said at the parks and rec commission is that we didn't arrive here overnight as far as where we are for our fire danger. And we're not going to exit this overnight. This is going to be a slow, steady process of telling people how to build houses, how to maintain the houses and then obviously responding as needed with the resources we have within those areas. But this is the beginning of setting our community up for success going forward versus not doing anything. Yeah, just a quick follow up if I could. It was really interesting. This has been definitely an evolution of this policy for sure and I noticed the language in the third paragraph changes from human intrusion with vegetation to human intermingling. That's a conceptual change. And then just the typo on the second page. I think you changed wild land intertate to WUI consistently. I just see one place where it wasn't changed and that's probably just this step. So it's right before we go one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. It's just okay. Yeah, I just wanted to thank you all for working on this policy update. Very important. And Rob, I know when I took my tour with you up into the burn areas, you commented a lot on, you know, the work that you had done to get, to really do this readiness work with homeowners. And I appreciate your work and the fire council, fire state council's work with getting our neighborhoods ready. I was just curious whether or not there was any, if it's typical or atypical for any focus policy on certain non-natives, especially like French brooms. So when I, the way I'm reading the policy is that people could take that out under the policy. Is there any need to kind of sort of point towards people towards certain types of vegetation that actually, you know, can help by taking out can help kind of alleviate the spread of some of the fires? Or is that just too complicated for us to kind of, you know, put into a policy? So in other words, I guess my question is, you know, we used to do these big French room poles up in the valley. You know, we, you know, worked for days and days, I'm getting rid of French room. So I'm just curious, I see that species here and there. It is not a lot of it in our, in our urban forest areas, but I'm just curious if there's any need in the policy to point people towards certain kinds of, you know, vegetation that has a propensity to, you know, burn hotter or cause issues with regards to fire. I think Councilman reminds I can answer that a little bit and then maybe Odie or Katie can jump in. So one thing that's really important to remember is that the reason why we don't want to focus on a single species is, and I'll take eucalyptus as an example, even if we removed every eucalyptus tree from the city of Santa Cruz completely, which would be a, you know, daunting undertaking. We would still have a wildland risk. It wouldn't remove that risk. And so the CZU fire really kind of highlights that, you know, redwoods are fire adapted. They generally don't support fire. And so it's more about the weather conditions that are driving that event, the amount of fuel that's actually present, and then the arrangement of it. And so, you know, obviously for a lot of reasons other than fire, looking at non-native species would be something that we could do. But the purpose of this was really to put, you know, our foot in the door to how we're going to change going forward. And I'd be more than happy to work on looking at single species that I would really defer to people who are, you know, like Leslie Keady, who have a wealth of knowledge about, you know, what that would entail. But I really want to highlight the fact that a single species in and of itself is not just the single answer. It is how they're arranged and how much is present. And then weather conditions are the major driver for most of these events. Thanks for those comments. I think, yeah. I think sometimes some neighborhoods can get really fixated. The De La Viega neighborhood obviously fixated on the eucalyptus, the Arayaseco Canyon, you know, neighbors, folks like that. So it's, I think it's just helpful for people to understand it's a system sort of based approach and not getting too fixated on treating one species over the other. I think, and then I just wanted to compliment the work you guys have done. I've seen pretty much all of it in our open space areas, just through hiking in our parks. I just think the work was really well done and very respectful of the environmental conditions. And so thanks for doing all that work. Very noticeable. Thanks. Thank you. Public who would like to speak to the public who would like to speak. Happy to move the item and especially appreciate all the work that might be needed. Mayor, council member Byers. Matthews. Hi. Brown. Hi. Boulder. And mayor Cummings. Thank you. To introduce the item. I know everybody has read it. It's come before us previously. And I wanted to thank the saving lives effort for bringing this to us. And I believe we had some communication from their members in support of this. The ordinance is the same ordinance that was presented back in early October. And I'm happy to discuss with members of the council any additional outstanding concerns or refinements that you are interested in making. My understanding is that the folks from the saving lives campaign have also reached out to the rest of the council and offered to be available to answer questions. And so hopefully that has helped resolve that have been expressed. You know, I just see this as a largely symbolic, you know, one more way of affirming the, you know, the safety of Santa Cruz support for, you know, engaging more deeply and directly with Cuba and its medical professionals who have shown demonstrated in many parts of the world over the years to have played a really positive and productive role in, you know, in public health and healthcare issues. So I'll just leave it there. And I know that there were folks who were wanting to call in. I don't know if the, I did alert them, but I don't know if the time changed if they are able to do so. But I'll just leave it there and see what other folks have to say. Thanks. Once you've called into the meeting, please. Hi, this is Gerrit again. While there is an echo evidence of Cuba's interferon alpha 2B drug showing some effectiveness against several viruses, I was unable to find any peer-reviewed studies of this drug against COVID-19. Or see any such citations in your resolution calling for a great many changes in foreign policy with a communist country because of the existence of this drug. I'm afraid Newsweek doesn't count. Their drug is regarded as neither a cure nor a vaccine, but one of a number of treatments by existing drugs out there. The fact that a communist country, China, is using it for treatment recently means little because our healthcare system in the USA hopefully does not take directives from communist countries and neither should you. Verges that the U.S. and the President to suspend U.S. economic and travel sanctions against Cuba is so far outside your pay grade. Well, actual purpose as a city council member I can hardly describe. Maybe a balanced budget is our priority. Since the announcement yesterday of a potential 90% effectiveness of two American-made fast-track vaccines by Moderna and Pfizer, this resolution couldn't be more ill-timed. They may be approved for mass production in as little as a month. Noblevax is close behind. I see no evidence. Citations are much of anything here. And the fact in a pandemic other countries are searching for answers is not convincing. Well, I suspect the FDA CDC as well as BuddyBuddy who types like Fauci don't always seem to serve the interests of the American people as well as I'd like. There is a monster worldwide effort to invent both vaccines and cures for COVID. Not again Cuba's old drug is neither. Which will be available soon without a change in national foreign policy. I always wonder why a resolution you might send to Congress instead explaining that they're corrupt and immoral deficit spending, special interest, credit bubble, money printing, is bankrupting the country, destroying our monetary system, jet-fueling, continually higher wealth inequality, and basically devaluing life itself might be on the agenda someday. But then I reaffirm the odds of that are like pigs flying, and this is what we get instead by the council comrades on a regular basis. Mick Jagger had it wrong to say the U.S. is A, everywhere else is B. Some places are C, D, and F, and Cuba's one of those. Thanks. Bye. The public who'd like to speak to us on this item now is the time. That extra time to kind of get to kind of get into this, and I appreciate those two reached out with further information. I was able to review some of that. I also, one of the things that I wanted to do is to sort of understand our, what we would be asking of our county health partners, and I, although I didn't have a chance to speak to them directly, I did speak to a couple folks at the county, and I don't know if they felt comfortable being able to explore directly with Cuba, but I think if we want to shift some of the language in the resolution that we maybe share potential for them to also reach out to our federal representatives, offering interest of support, that might be the more appropriate act, as opposed to direct exploration of a collaboration with Cuba, which is asked in the resolution specifically. I don't know other thoughts on that. I, yeah, I was just going to make the motion, but I, you know, in terms of response to that, yeah, I understand the concern there, and, you know, that is something that we talked about and did think through in crafting this ordinance, you know, the intention here is not to tell the county they need to do something, it is to provide encouragement to explore collaboration, you know, perhaps to the extent, adding into the extent feasible, or something like that would try to get at some of your concern Councilmember Watkins, and that's fine with me. I mean, you know, clearly we're not going to, the city of Santa Cruz is not going to direct, you know, other jurisdictions, you know, actions, but I do think that just, you know, including the idea that we encourage our health partners, and that one of the big ones is the county of Santa Cruz to, you know, be open to these kinds of collaborations. That's really what the intention is, so I'm okay with some revisions to the language, you know, to the extent feasible is kind of the simplest way to get there, but if you have other suggestions, I'm happy to hear those as well. A couple of quick things. Councilmember Brown has several times the prison ordinance. This is a bit of a clarification. And I understand the sympathies behind this. I know there are close relationships with Cuba in several sectors in our community and a lot of affinity across sectors, but my own feeling is that this resolution is a serious overreach and makes assumptions about medical preferences that I don't feel equipped to make. So, having said that, if there's a motion and a second for the resolution as proposed, I won't be supporting it, although I'm definitely sympathetic with the broader interest in lifting harmful restrictions on Cuba. I'll go ahead and make a motion here to adopt. Thank you for, I just have ordinance in my head because we're looking at other ordinances. I adopt a resolution promoting medical and scientific collaboration between the City of Santa Cruz, excuse me, sorry. So, I'm going to amend the number one language. So, adopt a resolution, one encouraging the Santa Cruz County Health Services Agency to explore collaborations with Cuba to jointly face the COVID-19 pandemic to the extent possible the other parts of the recommendation in place as written in the resolution. The motion, I just want to have some clarification. So, in number one, I encourage the Santa Cruz County Health Services Agency to explore collaborations with Cuba. Yeah, that's fine. You know, the resolution language stays the same. So, yeah, that's fine. I just feel like it, you know, the caveat of, you know, including to the extent possible, sort of gets at the concern that Council Member Watkins raised and in terms of the other concerns that Council Member Matthews has raised, you know, I don't feel comfortable, you know, just stripping this down. You know, a lot of thought has gone into this. It's been, you know, promoted by national and local groups in a variety of communities. It's been adopted in some, and so I don't see this as heavy-handed so much as, you know, kind of educational and illustrative of the kind of innovation that is possible. So I would just leave it there and then it leaves the other components in place. For one, and I'm wondering if the interest is, but I think this, and I apologize if it, I don't mean to sound not like supportive of the interest behind it, but it seems unlikely that they could collaborate even to the extent possible with Cuba. But I wonder if behind that is essentially saying, you know, we hope that they could look at the jurisdiction at potentially wanting to move a similar type of resolution in support of expanded relations between our country and Cuba for medical treatment into what I think is, I am hearing this behind this, but I don't, I don't realize even to the extent possible would be collaborating with Cuba, even if it's just a symbolic resolution. Sorry, I didn't raise my hand. No one else is going to jump in here. So yeah, in response to that, I, you know, I'm, I understand the concern. I understand the appearance of heavy-handedness. That's not the intention with which this was written. And if making that change, so it would be revision, more of a revision of item number one in the recommendation. So adopting a resolution, encouraging the county of Santa Cruz, I guess it would, I would prefer if we're going to do it that way to move that down to number four and move two and three and four up. So putting the communication with the county as number four instead of number one and, you know, encouraging the Santa Cruz County and its health services agencies, or I guess it would be the Board of Supervisors. So encouraging the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors to explore a similar resolution. Yeah, I just was trying to keep it simple, but I totally understand the concern. Okay. So the corresponding change in the resolution would be on, let's see, towards the bottom of page two, the first, now therefore be it resolved. And that would just, that part would be eliminated. That first paragraph start with now therefore be it resolved. That's the Santa Cruz City Council. And the second paragraph would be about the support soliciting restrictions on the Cuban COVID-19 treatment, et cetera, et cetera. And the final be it further resolved would include that same language regarding the City Council for bridging the County Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors to pursue or explore a similar resolution. No. Aye. Boulder. Watkins. Vice Mayor Meyers. No. Mayor Cummings. Aye. I would like to note for the record, I support the listing of economic and travel sanctions against Cuba. I think in terms of dealing with COVID, we need our full attention devoted to rebuilding the CDC, the NIH and rejoining the World Health Organization. We have one Council member at the moment. To be here with you this afternoon, I thought I'd start by just giving a little bit of background. It's presented as part of the Hans Christian Anderson's Day-Bel-Fe competition held in our beautiful sister city of Sestri, Lavante. Hans Christian Anderson lived for a short time there and is considered a favorite son. This is the 53rd year of the Sestri competition and childhood and youth. The competition is open to writers in four age categories, three to five years, six to ten years, 11 to 16 years and over 17 years. The essays can be about any subject, must be an original folk or fairy tale. A committee of readers determines first place winners in each age group and those winning entries are submitted to the Sestri competition. And so without further ado, I would like to invite Mayor Cummings to join me in presenting the award. All right. So it gives me great pleasure today to acknowledge the creative and talented writers and winners. Today we'll be showing the pictures of the participants who also received downtown dollars as their prize. So if you could just please hold your applause until we announce all the winners at the end. So let's start with ages six, Tiffany Robertson for Darkness and Light. We have her photo. We have California Contreras for the spell that changed her life. And in first place, Joelle Gerbrandt for the Soccer Fable. And I'm just going to pause for a moment because I think there might be a delay on my end. I'm going to wait for the screen to catch up. And for ages 11 to 16, the winners are and then the division for adult ages 17 and up. There'll be a patient for Princess Prue and the Dragon for five sacred stones. Nancy Lenz for a single wish. So real quick. Yes. One of the things I'm supposed to talk about is how all this got going. We had a person who was involved at the university and was doing a project. And he thought he came up with the idea of having a sister city relationship, something you call twin cities there with where so many of the fishing families here in Santa Cruz came from originally, Riva Tegosso. And from that, we began having tried to make connections with them. But no one really researched things very well. And we tried to make connect talking to Riva Tegosso. Well, there is no such entity as Riva Tegosso. Because we find out later that you have a different governmental system than we do. We have something called a county which takes in a general area then within those county certain cities. But very nearly, and a lot of because of Napoleon, you have where one city ends and the next one starts. And so therefore, Riva Tegosso ends up being part of the history of Lante. And we didn't discover that till much later. And so ultimately, we have talked to them. And the problem was we didn't get any response even from Sistri Lante. And there was no understanding why that had occurred. And the thing was to send the mayor, I was actually just done being mayor, El Sindico, to Sistri to see what's going on. And that's how I ended up going there. And it was sort of interesting what the trip meant to be because while I'm waiting to get on the plane in San Francisco, I hear there's a young lady and a couple older people talking Italian. And so I said, well, I'm going to practice to see if I can talk and they understand me. They did. And then we talked a little bit more. We talked to this young lady and they were concerned that she wouldn't be able to get through the airport in New York to continue the flight to Milan. And they said, well, if you can get her through the airport, we'd appreciate that. And then we talked to them about where is she going but to Sistri Lante, which is a coincidence beyond any imaginable. And if it wasn't for that, I wouldn't be able to get through their IP because all I had was a ticket to fly into Milan and then nine days later to fly out of Rome. And what was going to happen in between there was very fluid. And when I, a lot of things that she did I would never have understood. I would have been stuck at the airport doing those what. And for example, we get there and she tells me that it's way out in the booties somewhere. And we get, oh, that's our train over there. It's a movie. It's a movie. And she says, that's fine. I said, we don't have any tickets. Don't worry about it. Just follow me. And we went out to the train that's going down the railroad track, throw our luggage on and jump on. No tickets. No problem. She's very relaxed about it. And I would never know that you have done that. Because then somebody will come around later and you can buy a ticket from that person. That happened all the way along. And it was quite an experience that and then we get to, we get on the train and we get to I guess we're running out of time here. Anyway, it goes on and on. And there is police waiting for me. And I had no idea. They only knew I would be how they knew I was on that particular flight or anything else. I had no idea. And they said, come with us. That's Indigo. And they say, yes. And the police, I don't know where I'm going or who really are police or what. And so for any rate, they bring me to the mayor. And they have said it up and it was from there on everything got straightened out and we were able to get things going again. So that's a quick summary of how I got involved in this. Thank you. Thank you. And Luca Ciappoli online. I would like to thank you for your inviting to the meeting of the city council to thank the mayor and all the city council members. And I'm very happy. I'm honoured to be the 14th anniversary of our twinning. I still remember again our meeting four years ago in Sastro Levante and the beautiful experience you made me leave when I came in Santa Cruz in my vision. A way to projects go to the future meeting. A couple of great projects have been started also with the help of Luca Ciappoli a young councilor in the municipality of Sastro Levante hope that the COVID pandemic will end. We hope soon. In particular I'm very happy about the project that involves our students from high school. I think that it is a way to discover our past our common past in the memory alive a great way from our young people to live a real a real life experience in another country living the everyday life and a cultural a historic and a human enrichment. We are we are facing all very difficult moments now in which all our beliefs we feel like we don't have any to put trust on. So I think it's very important to remember we are and all the things that really count for us individual and for the community and I can say that our training is so much more than a simple read-up deed. It talks about roots it talks about a common past to bring us that bring us together it talks about courage and about hope and I really think that the hope is a feeling we don't have to lose. We have to keep strong and hopeful for us and for who is not able to be start strong and hopeful and so with this meeting but every day we are all one close to one and I hope that we want to keep this business alive stay safe and happy, happy anniversary to us. Thank you so much Mayor Valentino we really appreciate and we hope to see you soon in person, in Santa Cruz or in Sestri but we really hope to see you soon same for you Luca you're always welcome here and I think Justine you have a proclamation invite all of you to come and see the exhibit it's going to be here until the end of December so feel free to come it will be great for you to a view of the two cities as they were 1900s I just want to say thank you to everybody who organized this as a former member of the Sestri La Vante some committee on the sister cities I really appreciate all the work that you did to keep this relationship alive and keep the writing contest going and thank you to the members in Italy who kept the writing contest going even though you had to move to a virtual format due to COVID and I also want to say go check out the exhibit at Cafe Vida I went when it opened and those are really really cool so thank you to everybody and thank you to the whole sister cities program I've been a great fan for many many years and thanks for putting this program together for the anniversary Joe is still online it was great to hear of the genesis of this relationship and I'm sure Valentina and you guys are related somehow and Valentina I remember meeting you when you were here for the city's 150th anniversary and that was it was wonderful to make the connection at that time I was glad to hear that the exhibit is still up I'm assuming it's during the regular hours at Cafe Vida I was going to go and then everything closed down so we'll definitely be fine to see that and the confirmation was wonderful thank you to the mayor and this just seems particularly well timed the discussion about our roots when we're considering the work plan this evening thank you very much I just wanted to say thank you and really nice to meet Luca and Valentina and just really amazing to be able to connect with you across the world and via Zoom it's a really important relationship we have with Siesta Lavante and I hope we continue for many many decades to come and just want to say thank you and also to the mayor and the sister city committee and of course to all the locals who helped with the exhibit I've seen the exhibit as well it's wonderful and so congratulations and I'm thinking here we are online and not in person really reminded me of a wonderful presentation Hans Christian and so that might have been I don't know 20 years ago whatever I didn't get a time to do my homework to pin this date down but one of the 10 year olds read his story and there wasn't a dry eye at the council everybody it was just beautiful I still remember and I remember the kids it was a very special moment congratulations to all of you I'll keep my comments brief but I just wanted to express my appreciation I remember meeting you Luca when you came and presented at the fourth when David Charas was our mayor and just want to also thank you for your words of unity and really recognition of how much we have in common and these are the types of opportunities through these relationships internationally that we get to celebrate our common human existence and we are looking forward to many more years moving forward and thank you for taking the time to be here with us today even though it's virtually thank you I will just very quickly echo the appreciation and enthusiasm for this program for maintaining the connection for all of these years it was great to hear the story from Joe Gio and it's great to see your faces across the distance and I think now that more than ever it's just so important that we maintain these kinds of relationships and in an era where there's a lot of talk of looking inward and becoming you know withdrawing from the international community let's just say I believe that efforts like these are just so important and just appreciate you all and thank you for being here I want to just thank you everybody everyone said our bond is really important and even if we are so far far away I can our projects can feel as really close to everybody thank you this project to you today for the redevelopment of the east side of front street in the block between Soquel and Laurel streets and for decades the buildings under stretch have turned their back on the river and this project is the first hopefully many that will remedy that situation and have development that really celebrates the river this project proposes two new pedestrian that will have active uses that draw people towards the river and then it will back fill the levy that allows for new public space adjacent to the river where people will be able to enjoy outdoor dining or active uses and really put more eyes on that stretch of the river so that it's a more inviting place and so there's more opportunity for people to enjoy the great amenity that we have right here in our downtown but that is underutilized by the city of downtown and the city of downtown. Before I turn it over to Samantha for a detailed presentation I wanted to call the council's attention just over an hour ago we did get a letter from the coastal commission on this project that has been sent to you all. The coastal commission is expressing some concerns about views and so I just wanted to quickly and I will also say I don't know that they expressly indicated views but they express concerns about the height and presumably that is directly related to views and Samantha did have a chance to talk with them in the last hour she may have some more information but I wanted to quickly just share my screen here to point out some of the views that you can see there are a number of comparable height buildings in our downtown this is 1010 Pacific and I should say this is this is just under the Laurel street or next to the Laurel street bridge so this is the other side of the river the project would be located somewhere in this actually this is 1010 so it would actually be right over here and you can see comparable height buildings we've also got additional height down here with the Palomar building and you can see some similar views from this perspective here so it would be in this section through here and just some additional views here of that same stretch here's one from the same side of the river you can see one thing that I want to clearly point out is from a pedestrian perspective you do not experience additional height at those heights on the other side of the river you may be able to notice I believe they're asking for 7 feet and some change maybe 8 feet in additional height above what would be allowed by our downtown plant through the density bonus allowances which have been incorporated into the LCP deviations from numeric standards have been incorporated into the LCP and so as long as those do not deviate from as long as they do not adversely affect coastal resources all the coastal commission letter did not specify which coastal resources explicitly they're concerned with they have to presume the height that they've called out is talking about views this shows you that as a pedestrian you're really experiencing the first 20 feet of a building you're not experiencing the the uppermost stretches of that building and then these others really go to show that there are other buildings in the same vicinity of similar heights and so yes the building would be placed closer but there is not a view that's impacted by placing a building right here of the same height as this it's beyond this building there's essentially just barely a treetop that can be seen so I wanted to call out some of those things you know we again we just got this letter about an hour and a half ago and so it's late breaking news for the council consideration and with that I will turn it over to Sam for her presentation I'm just going to jump into this presentation so I can walk you through the project please let me know if you have any trouble seeing the screen can everyone see that yep looks good okay great so like we said this is the riverfront mixed deep project it's a seven story development consisting of three buildings with ground floor and river facing commercial and 175 upper floor residential units this project requires approval of all the permits listed here and it was heard by the historic preservation commission on August 5th this year and it was heard by the planning commission on September 3rd of this year and both of those bodies recommended approval of the project to the city council with some modifications to the conditions that I'll go over at the end the project site shown here we was describing it from the pedestrian view here's the aerial view it's between front street and the river and it currently consists of five parcels that they're planning to combine and create the project site this slide is intended to show you the additional height zones within the downtown area so this property is located within additional height zone B that additional height zone allows for buildings up to 70 feet subject to specific criteria across front street is an additional height zone that allows for buildings up to 85 feet subject to specific criteria and then further west of specific avenue another additional height zone allows for up to 75 feet this project is 175 residential condos according to the applicant they are likely to be rented they consist of 53 studios 89 one bedrooms and 33 two bedrooms they also have 11,500 square feet of commercial space both facing the river walk and front street and the project includes the creation of two publicly accessible landscape areas between front street and the river walk so these passageways will effectively create these outdoor gathering areas and courtyards and they'll bridge the gap between the public and private realms so these will also provide these long desired connections between the downtown core front street and the river walk the building is seven stories it's six stories above ground floor commercial at front street and then the river walk where the elevation is different it is five stories above commercial the total height is 77 feet 9 inches it's higher if you measure it to the top of the mechanical equipment but the ordinance allows for that to exceed the height so the total height is 77 feet 9 inches there's no disturbance on the river side of the levee or within the river channel the pedestrian passageways as you can see from this picture they break up the building mass so it looks like three separate buildings instead of one and the architect provided this unique but compatible architectural style between the three buildings all three of these buildings are connected by basement and ground level parking and this development complies with all of the standards of the downtown plan with the exception of some of the site standards that they're requesting as incentive concessions and waivers which I'll describe in a moment and then there's also one standard that they're requesting as a design variation which the downtown plan allows with a recommendation of approval from the planning director and approval by the city council that they're requesting as a design variation has to do with the location of the self pedestrian passageway the downtown plan requires that these publicly accessible connections are located within 50 feet of the front street intersection at the end of Cascart Maple and Elm streets so Maple Street is actually further south so that's not a part of this project but and the north pedestrian passageway is located at the end of Cascart so that's in line with the plan but the south pedestrian passageway it technically should be located within 50 feet of the future extension of Elm Street so Elm Street is shown here in red at this point it's unknown how or where Elm Street would be extended but if we assume that it's going to be extended straight through that property then the south pedestrian passageway would be located about 80 to 100 feet from the extension rather than the 50 feet required by the downtown plan and we did discuss relocation of the passageway with the applicant and if it was relocated south it would result in a much larger center building a much wider center building and the relocation of the driveway to the garage that would need to be relocated north and that would place it right in the middle of a row of commercial spaces so for these reasons and for the reason that the extension of Elm Street is not known at this time we are supporting the design variation it's been supported by the planning director and we're recommending that the city council also approve the variation that view that Lee was just showing you from at the Laurel Street bridge but with a rendering of the project this is in as I mentioned additional height zone B so it allows for buildings to exceed the base height of 55 feet up to 70 feet and 5 floors above ground floor commercial for these total and that's subject to specific design criteria in the downtown plan now this project is eligible for a density bonus and the way we figure that is that there's no range in the central business district or the regional visitor commercial districts but the development standards that are provided in the downtown plan they regulate the size of the building and the number of units that can be constructed within so the applicant develop plans that are consistent with these standards including the height permitted in the additional height zone and they establish the base number of units a base number of 133 units that could be constructed without any incentives, concessions or waivers to the standards this project was deemed complete prior to the adoption of the current ordinance so it falls under the prior requirement of 15% inclusionary housing so the applicant is providing 15% or 20 units at the low income level that's 80% AMI but like I said the project is eligible for a density bonus so they are providing 11% of those 133 units of 15 units at the very low income level 50% AMI and then they're also providing the remaining 5 units that are required to meet the inclusionary requirements at 80% AMI and then with that density bonus they're also requesting incentives and concessions and waivers so when we brought this project to the planning commission they raised the question of if the required inclusionary units can also be counted as the affordable units for the purposes of the density bonus and so we consulted with our legal counsel and they provided us with case law that I think we've discussed with other projects and that's also described in detail in the staff reports it's the Latino CUNY case against the county of Napa and it established that a developer is required to provide a certain percentage of affordable units within a project to increase the density and that the required inclusionary units count towards this percentage so we provided that information to the planning commission but the majority of the planning commission voted to recommend to the city council that we require both the 20 inclusionary units and additional affordable units for the density bonus on top of that and the basis for that was listed here on that additional affordable units is consistent with the coastal act policy requiring public access also that the city's inclusionary requirements were adopted by both of the people and have been in effect since 1980 and that the housing accountability act allows for the city to adopt an objective standard that would maximize the city's ability to meet its very low income housing needs I just want to quickly address each of these points that were made by the planning commission as support for stacking the units we reviewed the coastal act and the sections that address public access are primarily related to recreational opportunities providing recreational opportunities for all people and that development shall not interfere with the right of access so there's no mention in the code about public access for private housing development nor does the coastal act regulate affordable housing the second point is regarding measure O the project is consistent with measure O it includes the required inclusionary units and although measure O was approved by a vote of the people it's also required to comply with state law and the Latino Unidos decision applies to both measure O and our inclusionary ordinance the third point here is related to the housing accountability act the housing accountability act required local agencies to approve housing development that comply with objective quantifiable and written development standards so we can't adopt a development standard that's in conflict with state law whether or not it was adopted by the city council or a vote of the people so we have obtained additional legal counsel on the matter we're confident that the city must consider the inclusionary units the required number of affordable units for identity bonus project and so we would continue to support that the proposed number of affordable units the number that's proposed by the applicant does make the project eligible for identity bonus it goes through some of the incentive concessions and waivers that they're requesting one of the incentive concessions is to allow for a 20% reduction in a yard set back at the pedestrian passageway requirement that the 10 foot step back is provided above 35 feet in height so as you can see the elevators encroach slightly into that step back and that is a standard that is allowed with the identity bonus so that is allowed pursuant to identity bonus law and then the second request is for waivers the 10 foot step back requirements above 50 feet at the front street frontage and the river front frontages and also to allow for building height greater than 70 feet the height just to clarify the additional height zone B allows for building to be 70 feet and six stories within the additional height zone so it's subject to specific criteria which they meet the applicant is requesting the use to achieve the additional 7 feet 9 inches and the additional story and they have provided us with these diagrams that demonstrate that the effects of the step back on the development would preclude construction of the project the project includes the demolition of three buildings at the project site 504 seen at the left side of the screen that was evaluated by a historic consultant and it was determined to not have characteristics that were significant and so that one is not considered to be eligible for listing however 418 and 428 front street were evaluated and were determined to be historically significant and eligible for listing so demolition of these historic buildings is a significant impact pursuant to the California Environmental Quality after CEQA so with this proposal we prepared an environmental impact report for the project most of the impacts the project impact that we found were analyzed previously in the EIR that were adopted for the general plan and the downtown plan but the demolition of the historic buildings required further analysis we have evaluated three alternatives to reduce the impacts of less than significant the first is partial preservation of the structures reconstruction of the facade storage of the materials off site reconstruction and reconstruction on the new building facade they would have to be relocated because the current locations conflicted with other features on the building the historian had concerns about this alternative they indicated that the buildings would lose their representation as whole buildings if we only preserved their facade and the effect of a seven-story building constructed around the facade would not be consistent with the secretary of the interior standards for historic preservation the other alternative we looked at was the relocation of the buildings off site so that would entail deconstructing and reconstructing off site in a location of similar quality so a parcel that's adjacent to the river and located on front street the concerns that were braved associated with this alternative is that the structural engineer with entrance to buildings could physically be moved based on the size and the materials that they're made of and there was no off site parcel available for such relocation that had the same historic context between front street and the river and then the applicant indicated that for both of the two alternatives that I just described neither of those alternatives would be economically feasible to meet and also construct the project we also looked at the no project alternative that's an alternative that's required by CEQA obviously that one resulted in no impact to the building but it also wouldn't allow for construction of the project and the project meets several long standing goals and policies of the city the historic preservation commission agreed that while partial preservation would not be consistent with the secretary of the interior standards we were concerned with the loss of the buildings and they voted to recommend that the building facades of the historic buildings are portrayed on the front facade of the new building and they recommended this measure in addition to the recommended mitigation measure for photo documentation and interpretive display and the planning commission agreed with that the applicant had time during the historic preservation commission meeting and the planning commission meeting to revise to see what these buildings would look like on the front facade they pulled out elements of the building to replicate on these new buildings so for 418 they pulled out the steps cornice our deco design and some window and door designs and then on 428 they pulled out the horizontal lines the window designs and the curved awning at the side so this one is a little hard to see but at the top if you can see my arrow here but at the top you have this bottom floor used to be these round arch ways and then knee square arch ways on the side and then the bottom is the rendering of the new building 428 and then on the left side is 418 I don't know if you can see that with all the zoom information on there so both of the pedestrian passageways that are proposed stairs that would lead pedestrians to the river walk level to accommodate bikes they're proposing a bike rail along the stair rail and so these are two pictures that I could find that showed what these things would look like it allows for bikers to push their bikes up a set of stairs and then in the event that this is not feasible there's also elevator access proposed to the river walk in the south building and then there's also level access points to the river walk at the Laurel Street Bridge and the Soquel Avenue Bridge which are fairly close proximity there's also an existing bike ramp that would remain that on a property further south I think at the old Sherman Williams Building there will still be a bike ramp there as well the addition of stairs is supported by the downtown plan and that states that passageways shall be predominantly pedestrian in nature and it's also consistent with the San Lorenzo urban river plan that encourages pedestrian and bike and or bike connections to the river walk we support the design of the staircases in that we feel like it's a more inviting pedestrian feature than a sort of switch back bike ramp and we also support the stairs because of the two level access points at the bridges that are in close proximity to the project site I'm going to go through these one by one I just wanted to show you the number of policies that this project would directly implement these are a list of the policies from the San Lorenzo urban river plan and then from the general plan FDP and then from the downtown plan as well so you had two hearing bodies the Historic Preservation Commission and the Planning Commission they all voted to have the city council certify the EIR the mitigation monitoring reporting program and the statement of overriding considerations as well as approval of the project and they each included some conditions for you to consider the HPC recommends the partial preservation of the historic buildings the applicant has revised the plans to include this in their project so that is now part of the proposed design and the Planning Commission recommended conditions of approval to ensure that the murals are completed as a part of the project and then also conditions of approval to require the inclusionary unit in addition to the affordable density bonus units they had included two conditions of approval related to the mural to ensure that it was included as a part of the project and completed I wanted to propose a clarification to that condition as to who would be involved in that decision-making process so it would be a new condition that would modify condition number 32 and it reads prior to building permit issuance the applicant shall work with the city to select a mural artist and design concept for both the north and south ends of the development as shown on the plans a panel consisting of one member of the arts commission one member of the downtown association and the economic development director shall work in coordination with the applicant to select the artist and design a second mural a second condition that requires the mural to be completed prior to the issuance of occupancy permit this one clarifies that that would be the satisfaction of the economic development director I also have one other modification here this is a condition number 76 that previously required that the public pedestrian passageways remain open during the daytime and during business hours that was intended to just address the passageways being made physically open to the public so in order to address the possibility for them to maintain that area it is private property to maintain that area for any nuisance factors we would like to include the statement providing however that nothing herein shall be interpreted to preclude the property from ordering the removal of individuals engaging in illegal conduct or creating a nuisance an additional condition that I wanted to add that wasn't in my slide show that is to require that the applicant provide city fiber conduit they're going to be opening up the sidewalk to widen it and so the condition would read plan submitted for building permit issuance shall show the installation of two two inch schedule 40 conduits along the entire frontage of the property line to property line and two utility boxes at each end of the conduit in the public right of way sidewalk in parentheses as directed by the public works engineering department you have received all public correspondence associated with the project and you just now received comments from the coastal commission as we mentioned we were not we weren't given the opportunity to speak with them on these issues in advance but in skimming through them you might have noticed that there are many inaccuracies in the numbers that they provided and in speaking with coastal commission staff they were concerned that there were not enough public benefits provided as a part of the project that the public benefits that were being proposed are inherent in any project that is proposed in the downtown that those are required by the downtown plan we feel like the project is providing an area of public benefits including public access between downtown the river, expansion and enhancement providing housing in a transit priority area and so Lee and I are available to answer any questions, specific questions about the coastal comments that you might have but right now the staff recommendations of the city council is adoption of the resolution certifying the EIR adopting findings of facts mitigation monitoring and reporting program and the statement of overriding considerations and adoption of the resolution approving the project with the design amendments proposed by the applicant to meet the recommendations of the historic preservation commission and the planning commission based on the findings and corrected conditions of approval that I've just presented and that concludes the presentation sorry I meant to start my video there it is possible the coastal commission's letter could we have it in front of us it was sent to the clerk let me to the clerk confirm that that went to the council members yeah we it was sent to your email so unless you're checking your email during the council meeting you probably haven't seen it yet okay I'll check thanks a lot that I will have questions but right now I just want to concentrate on that mayor I was wondering since we just received this letter it looks like it's about four pages long is there any way we could just take five minutes to be able to read through the letter I can't I just feel like it's due diligence to read a four page letter from the coastal commission before getting into a lot of conversation about the project at this point could we either adjourn ten minutes and take a read through it and then come back on to do it I'm sure why don't we take a break Bonnie I did not get the letter would you send me another copy I'm just checking my email absolutely don't have it thank you I personally need some additional time I mean this is a really really it's a very complex letter I don't know if our planning director can walk us through this but I mean this to receive this you know just moments before this hearing is it's just difficult to take all this in I mean this is a letter very clearly negating some of the findings that we are meant to approve today and I just I need more time I mean I'm only on page three of a nine page letter so it's just a very very complex letter it's very disappointing that we received this letter so late after the publishing of the agenda on Thursday but this is a very complex letter I don't know what our attorney feels I don't know if Mr. Condati has even had a chance to look at it I'd be curious to hear from city attorney and maybe the planning director to understand a little more about the implications of this letter at this point and one thing maybe that I'll take into consideration more time to go over this and speak with other folks just received the letter myself and I have read it through as well as the December 2019 letter but I have not digested those comments and I know the planning director has had a little bit more time to look at it and might have some comments I think what you might be suggesting is continuing the item mayor that's an option for the council and so I guess I would ask the planning director to comment on that as well is that an option first thing I'd say is I've unreceived this I immediately sent a email back expressing our extreme disappointment in the timing of this letter as well we did receive the letter from 2019 and Samantha is on the line here and we also have Stephanie Striello with us as well as outside attorney Sabrina Teller who also worked on the environmental review documents and I believe and Sam can correct me if I'm wrong here that we address all of the comments from all of the environmental related comments from the team letter in the coastal draft environmental impact report and then we subsequently did not receive any comments on the draft environmental impact report from the coastal commission we also didn't receive any comments at the HPT the planning commission or at all until now and so it is quite disappointing to get these comments right now that said I think that we do have responses to those and frankly many of the items in there as I noted are just inaccurate and the citation to the 20% inclusionary for example in many of our reports we've specified that this project was being complete in advance of the 20% inclusionary requirement taking effect Sam that you don't happen to have the date off hand do you when it was deemed complete but I can find that for you it was before February of this year it was before yes it was in 2018 I believe quite some time ago SB 330 clearly states that retroactively apply standards once the project is deemed complete the standards that are in place at that time are the standards that apply to the project so you know there are a number of instances where that is identified Sam called out some others to me as we were evaluating this quickly right before this meeting for example you know it called out I believe an 85 foot height and there are some mechanical equipment and so forth that goes to that height except our code doesn't actually count those as part of the height those are additional allowances that are part of the LTP and so really the height is roughly 78 feet or so and not the 85 feet that's called out and so really I think there is a matter of disagreement on some of the items and some of those items are things like you know will this affect coastal resources frankly I didn't see any evidence in that letter that specifies anything about any coastal resource that's going to be affected as part of this they specified some things about views but did not elaborate on that in this latest letter I didn't get a chance to reread the December 2019 letter but that should have been addressed through that environmental impact report so anything you would like to add related to that Sam one and then two with respect to the continuance I think if it pleases the council we haven't had an opportunity even to hear from the applicants on this matter they got the email at the same time we thought at about one o'clock it came in at 12.30 we thought about one send it over at that point so I think if it pleases the council I would recommend at least hearing from the applicant and their thoughts on it as well because we haven't had a chance to coordinate on the contents of it and hear their perspective and then Sam or Stephanie or Serena if there's anything that either of you would like to add I think now would be a good time if it pleases the mayor I guess I would just add the clarification that the application was deemed complete in July of 2019 so prior to the adoption of the ordinance and also I see Sabrina popped up so I'll let her describe the way that we describe this in the response to our the council commission's comments regarding visual impacts so Sabrina I'll hand it over to you yes hi I can just speak to the process that was followed and of course I reviewed the EIR we knew based on the NOP comments that we received from the council commission that they had an interest in the visual analysis and the potential visual impacts and based on their letter commenting on the NOP for the EIR we paid careful attention to that in the draft EIR but as I was looking back through the finally IR I think I noted that I don't think that they commented on the draft EIR and so if they had concerns about the visual analysis that would have been a good time to share them and not an hour before your schedule to make a decision on the project that said I've only been able to sort of skim the letter at this point I don't have what I would say confident or fully formed opinions on the accuracy or the weight of those comments staff and I would probably feel better about being able to address specific points with a little bit more time to digest the letter in a more careful manner and come back to you with some specific responses to the letter rather than trying to respond on the fly and potentially miss something important Brown and then up. The planning director was being very restrained in saying that this was most of our adjectives he used in the setting this kind of a letter at this late date in the cost and I would just say in my opinion this is unprofessional it's offensive, it's obnoxious it's insulting and disrespectful and curious tone of these comments is simply unprofessional I feel badly for our staff not to say there's nothing to be a discussion I'm open for discussion but to have this thing delivered while the meetings in Congress think that letter I only got to page three myself in the allowable time if we do continue this I would like it at least to be noted that our staff believes that there are inactive statements as well as factual issues that need to be explored I think we all know that once a letter like this gets sent out it takes on the life of its own and the truth of its own so the factual misstatement then become part of the narrative so that's my one concern about just letting it stand so I'm a little bit divided I don't know if staff feels like they want to tackle some part of that but I do agree to do a decent job on this it probably will need to be continued but it's so unprofessional on the part of the Postal Commission to deliver it at this point thank you yeah so I I don't I'm a little bit torn myself as Council Member Matthews is about how to proceed but along with the comments made by Director Butler about perhaps wanting to take be able to take the time for the developer to respond for staff to respond I would add the public as well and I understand that there are concerns about perhaps some of the specific numbers and certainly the 20% inclusionary percentage being off but regardless of those the general concern still stands and I think we do need to take the time and and give an opportunity for everybody all the stakeholders to respond so I think I'm leaning towards my preference being that we continue this item in order to give time for staff the developer representatives and the public to weigh in and I don't know if there's a way to given that this is now in the record to produce just very quickly suggest there are some corrections that need to be made so that can be included for public consumption as well with Council Member Matthews and I think it's super insulting to send such a dense letter to us at this point in our meeting when we're trying to be focused on other agenda items and expect us to be able to digest and consider the points that are being brought forward and from my perspective I think they had plenty of opportunity to present this information and I do not want to delay but if other Council Members feel like they need more time I'll be respectful of that I think that we should continue with the process and listen to the public and have our discussion and move forward as planned and that's my perspective you know I guess I'm terribly disappointed we can be disappointed, we can be mad at them we can be everything but they have sent us a very detailed letter that needs really going over by our professional staff and Tony this is a huge project and one everyone's been working on forever so I don't think we can ignore this letter whatsoever along with that I guess it's a question for Tony Tony what's our obligation I mean obviously people are watching and they're one you know what I'm sorry Catherine you've gone on up there and I didn't know you were commenting okay I guess I was being a comment but I want to know we seem to, don't we have an obligation to share this letter now with the public so they have the whole picture it is a public record yes and how do we well maybe it's not appeal how do we I mean it's not required that members of the public have immediate access to documents that come in last minute I imagine that the city clerk will post the letter to the agenda item which is typical for you know late incoming correspondence but I thought your question was whether or not you need to hear from the public today no no my question really had to do with getting this document you know to the planning commission and the public who's weighing in on this that's all I think that's a great point it's unfortunate that the commission chose to hold up off on commenting even until after the planning commission I agree I couldn't disagree at all however it is before us and looking at it so I certainly this is such an important project so many benefits that I would hope we would just simply reschedule a meeting I would I just wanted to add a quick comment in response to council member Golder's point about moving through this now and I completely I understand that because I'm like ready to go and I've read it all it's right at the front of my mind at the moment but we do have to remember that the coastal commission is not just a stakeholder comment or they are an arbiter of whether or not these developments can be moved forward and if there is an appeal they will have a say and so I believe it's important that we take it seriously if we move ahead now it could end up delaying longer in the end that's just a clarification my main concern at this point is the legal risk if we ignore if we don't fully explore the issues right here even though they may be incorrect etc etc etc etc so maybe I would appreciate the recommendations from Tony and Sabrina on that I mean another thing close the public hearing and then how we come back with is just verification of the facts here and move forward rather than go through it all again that's probably less desirable but again as I say my main concern is just not rushing into an action where we have not fully considered any legitimate issues that may be raised here quite apart from any off-based issues just briefly you know this is one of the inherent risks in land use decision making is that someone could identify an issue that does not merit and bury it in a letter that is mostly empty rhetoric and we don't have sufficient time to analyze it and flag it for council consideration so that's frustrating yeah I guess I'm kind of reflecting on the risk calculation right now as well and also just on the long-term sort of kind of ramifications of the various things that are sort of in the wings with regards to this area in the downtown plan and with our budget issues that we have this seems like a risky thing to continue to work towards today I'm wondering if the applicant or the applicant's representatives are available or wanting to potentially speak I don't want to put them on the spot but I don't know if we could hear maybe from the applicant kind of get a sense from them as obviously I don't know if they received this letter any earlier than we did but I'm just curious if we could hear maybe from the applicant if that's appropriate mayor the comments that have already been made I think just sort of following up on what you were saying mayor I think having a clear understanding of our path forward some of the legal considerations will be helpful in determining the best choice in regards to the applicant I believe I heard you say that he is on the call and would want to address and if that's the case I'd be open to hearing from him as well we'll provide that I just saw Mr. Waller on our video feed I'll make sure that they have an opportunity to speak I just wondered by our opening and up to other than the council members we'll need to hear from the public on this and have a before the council takes any action you would not be required to hear from the public if we were going to be continued but if you were I guess that's what I was trying to understand if we just set a date and continue it but once we open up we need to hear from the public well I still think I guess I've got the floor for a minute that we just our time being a date ASAP to continue this item it may be also that I have no idea of the legal issues that may be contained in this but it might be useful to have for the session discussion with council if we're going to tell it as well it would be useful I know we've had outside council giving us additional background as expected in the past on major issues so that's another possibility that's a possibility what I think I would probably recommend first though is we could certainly analyze it and communicate the analysis to council but if we continue it to a date certain then we don't need to re-notice it so I don't know that's exactly what I was going to say given that we do a thousand foot noticing radius for this it's got quite a few notices as well as the newspaper publishing and so there's a fair amount of staff time as well as direct costs associated with the mailing and the publishing our preference would be to continue to a date certain that would give us an opportunity to attempt to coordinate with the council commission I will be blunt here and say that I expect based on the tone of this letter that there may be some issues in which we agree to disagree on and they may just then it may ultimately be the up to the California coastal commission themselves you know I for example do not see that there is a visual impact associated with this and we've talked about that as part of the environmental impact report and so if that's the case that the coastal commission is making we would put it to the council to say do you believe there is a visual impact and if you do not believe there is a visual impact and I would call it up and likely would call it up based on what I'm reading in this letter and the tone of that letter I would expect that they do but I would request a date certain I think it would be helpful to try and sit down with the coastal commission and if nothing else have them revise the letter to correct some of the inaccuracies and then really pinpoint the issues where we're not in agreement and if the coastal commission staff aren't in agreement with some of those things with the staff and then the council wants to approve the project that they believe is consistent with the LCP and the coastal commission doesn't believe that's the case then the coastal commission staff do not that would ultimately be presented to the coastal commission itself for their determination as to whether there is for example an impact of visual resources. I would just add one thing if you don't mind if we do continue it to date certain and we're not ready at that point we do have the ability to write a report that says hey we're going to continue it again obviously we don't like to do that with the public seeing that it's agendized and so forth cost conscious when it comes to this particularly given the large number of mailings. And then I guess you know I guess depending on how long would you expect the review that we could aim for that first meeting in December which I believe it's the 8th we could aim for that I certainly think it would be challenging very challenging to get it done before the meeting in two weeks and so if we continued it out for a month that it would feasibly give us enough time to do that whether or not we can address all the issues whether or not we would have to continue it again I can't say because there may be some things in the coastal commission's letter where after sitting down with them you know what if we make this change the coastal commission would be okay or there could be some negotiation where they say alright staff would support it if you do this but not that and then it goes to the applicant to say are you amenable to making that change and then would staff be making a recommendation that is inconsistent with what the applicant is proposing or inconsistent with what the coastal commission is proposing you know there are a number of different paths that it could go down but hopefully we could do that within a month and not have to continue maybe that we would have to continue again at that point really tight timing by the time we organize a meeting with the coastal commission and then if there's any negotiation with them I think you know if we were one week later that you know the 15th of December that would be more feasible I know that it's pushing later into the and that would actually have a different council so we don't know they're available lots of things to consider if you would like to do it on the first you know we will certainly do our best to get everything squared away in that amount of time I just I don't want to make promises that oh yeah we can do that because you know it will be a negotiation a three-party negotiation us the applicant and the coastal commission yeah I just asked that because I was really you know well this appears headed to continuous and I do favor doing it to date certain it sounds like staff would truly feel more comfortable with the December 8th date to have time to do a good job on it I have no idea what you have planned for December 8th what time you intend to start December 8th what might be moved from the agenda of the 8th to the first you know just gimme any things around and feel more comfortable continuing it to the 8th to be accommodated by other changes in vehicles we haven't just you know speaking for myself I'm happy to keep that December 1st open in case we need to move agenda items around but wrap this one up I would prefer either the 8th or the 15th the first is not a good day for me with other conflicts but this time I'd have to move some stuff around and it sounds like it's also a little bit later side so if we're trying to get a date certain might that would be for the later date just kind of go back to just wondering if maybe we could hear from the applicant if it's appropriate just because we're scheduling things and I'm sure they probably have a whole team of folks who probably have some date things that first also is a conflict for me you have to press star 6 or something I don't think so is microphones unmuted as a if these always sound sometimes you have to press star 6 oh try pressing maybe star 6 if you're calling in from your phone I also don't know if there might be a mute button on your headset that's the case I'm not sure no there are other applicants here are there other folks here who might be representing the applicant that oh and maybe you can see if they want to speak maybe he could go out and come back in I was going to actually mention that you might be able to log out log back in and try that I would mention while we've got a little bit of downtime here is actually under SB 330 there's a limitation to the maximum number of hearings that we can have so it is a maximum of five hearings I think I'd like to get the applicant's concurrence that if we set this for a hearing and it's determined that we need to continue it for purposes of completing that negotiation with the Coastal Commission that the applicant would be amenable to having that additional hearing and so I would like to get the applicant's take on that if they aren't okay with that then I think we would have to say the approach that the mayor suggested of having a a re-noticed hearing once we've determined that we're ready could be better but that five hearing limitation just came to mind and we've had the Historic Preservation Commission, the Planning Commission this City Council meeting we also had a community meeting that was completed after it was after the project was deemed complete so that's four, this is the fourth meeting so the next one would be the fifth which the new SB 330 Regulations say is the last meeting if the applicant is amenable to that then it's a non-issue I see Steve Atkinson is on the line there he may want to weigh in on that on the applicants Mayor Cummings and Council, Steve Atkinson for the applicant that if we can schedule this for the 8th and that if that has to be continued that that that continuance shall not count toward the maximum meetings do I have correctly Lee that that's what you were asking that is exactly what I was asking so thank you for that concurrence an opportunity for you to jump up so again Council there was just a little echo of my past remarks so I'm not quite sure what happened there a creature of zoom I guess I see that Owen Waller is on and Owen would you like to say anything at this point can you hear me now now we can hear you Aaron Fox I don't think there's much more to add at this point I think like you said we'll open this up through hearing I don't want to give you the point at this point I think we need to review this letter carefully I concur with Lee Butler's analysis there's been a lot of work done here and we need to bring that along with the discussion of the commission I'm getting an echo so I can't tell whether you can hear me or not anything more to add at this time Mayor Cummings I'll belabor the point but I just want to express my extreme frustration with who whoever organized and sent this letter because I feel like it's so disrespectful for everybody that's here today whether they're members of the council members of city staff members of the applicants members of the public that came to listen and everybody's rearranged their schedule to be here today for this and having known that this project has been coming forward for months or years they have plenty of opportunity to put their comments in advance of this meeting and I just want to say that I'm always disappointed when I feel like people didn't do their homework and didn't get it in on time and I feel like it's just a deliberate attempt to stop the project and it's disappointing Do you need a motion to postpone this item until I'll go ahead and make that motion to continue the item until December 8th Thank you Mayor Council Member Byers Hi Brown Hi Golder and Mayor Cummings I can clarify that They're ready to start as soon as 4 because we weren't sure what time you would be able to start so I think they're available to start at 4 if you'd like but we did tell them that the latest that they would start would be 5 so that they would have an hour so it's really up to you Mayor and Council we anticipated that it could be as soon as 4 or it could be at 5 so they're prepared at 4 if you wanted to do it at 4 if you want to wait till 5 that's fine too How long did they want? I mean I want a full report I have not been on the 2-by-2 committee and I am interested in hearing this I know it's been a big deal so how long do they take for a good presentation? They're prepared to do they can actually do a comprehensive presentation that they did with the Board that was 45 minutes or what we had actually planned for was a 30 minute presentation and a 30 minute question and answer period so we had allocated an hour based on what we expected the Council to be able to accommodate essentially comprehensive presentation that they've prepared I'll just put out my defense it seems to make more sense to have them start at around 4 so to 5 or start at 4.30 somewhere in that 4 o'clock and then have oral communications that's at 5.30, 5.30 to 6 take an hour break and then come back at 7 for the presentation well I think thank you Mayor I'm not available from but you can go ahead I think I could just I don't want to interrupt that schedule that sounds good but I do have even at the University from 4 to 5 that I'm committed to I'm here can you hear me? I can't get my video to work can you guys hear me okay? Assistant County Administrative Officer here at the county and I've worked with many of you on issue of homelessness in the past few years I'm here today with Randy Morris our new Human Services Department Director I've done a lot of Zoom and team meetings but I actually have not done that many formal presentations in this in homelessness in Santa Cruz County so this is really the final deliverable in an 18 month engaged process we've had with focus strategy to perform an assessment with a broad set of partners including the city staff and city leaders and with really the intention of designing an action oriented focus improvement plan so my next step is going to be to try to share my screen so we can actually you can see this slide can you guys see that okay? No okay let's see I'll try a different one Randy here who will be co-presenting with me we have Kate Bristol who is one of our principal consultants from Focus Strategies who's really here to answer any technical questions so I'm hoping Randy's available as well but we do have our lifeline calls and I aren't able to answer all your questions today so with that I'm going to I mean I can actually make this move there we go overview of what we're going to cover today we're going to provide a little bit of background and context on how did we get here to this moment Randy and I will then tag team in terms of the summary of the framework we'll give a brief overview of our next step work plan then we'll be open to questions and discussion why an updated framework I think everyone is very aware that homelessness is a critical issue in our country and our state and especially here locally you visit nearly any west coast community and the impact of unaffordable housing, poverty addiction mental health challenges just to name a few of the root causes of homelessness really we see it all and in the city of Santa Cruz there's really a disproportionate share of homeless relative to many other communities and this graph actually indicates that where what we did some comparison with a variety of counties here in California and in terms of number of persons per 10,000 residents experiencing homelessness we're nearly 80 and that's double the state average we're not absolute highest but we have a much higher number and I think all of you are aware and when you look at large cities here in California who have numbers as high as ours or lower you don't get the same amount of funding that many of our major cities just across the state get to address this crisis moments just to ground ourselves in the the reality the faces of homelessness in our community so what we have is a little bit of a snapshot I'm sure many of you know this well from our last 2019 point in time count and though we are we're trending down just over 21,267 individuals as you know 78% of those folks are in sheltered those folks reported this count of homelessness as their first chance with homelessness and that's going to be important when we talk about the framework again what we see here is about about 403 individuals identified as chronically homeless we had 151 who were veterans we had 419 folks who were families 102 families comprising 419 people we had 51 children unaccompanied children that were counted and then this is one that I think often gets a lot of attention we had almost you know 569 transition age youth so nearly a quarter of our homeless population were in that 18 to 25 range so there are very different experiences of homelessness in our community we have folks that have lived on the street for a very long time and then as I mentioned this is a very new and tragic experience for them we have folks that are working we have folks that are disabled so it's a broad there's a broad experience of homelessness in our community but it's really that disproportionality and the fact that we look around and we're just not seeing a change in the county forward in engaging focus strategies in doing this work talk a little bit about the technical assistance that we started so really was when I first started working for the county in the middle of 2018 when the CAO asked me to do an internal review of county departments and their work on homelessness and that is sort of what I identified sort of led us to the recommendation that we needed outside technical expertise to really understand what was working and what was not working here so in February of 2019 the board allowed us to move forward to higher focus strategies a nationally recognized firm that worked solely on issues of homelessness and the charge of that engagement was really to carry out an inclusive and a collaborative approach and then really come up with recommendations on system level performance measures and targets how to improve our governance and decision making and a detailed action plan to get there and I'm going to talk a little bit about the parts here the timeline that has brought us to today that first phase of work was really where we started our qualitative assessment and engagement there were many many all key informant interviews they collected a bunch of information and data about how we were approaching this critical issue and they came forward with our baseline assessment in September of 2019 and in there that was for key early recommendations and those things really informed where we went in our subsequent phase and the second phase that was really through gosh march of this year focus really took our qualitative data our HMIS our homeless management information system data to do a deep dive into our system and by provider provider by provider projects to really look at what was working and what was not that report was finished up late in 2019 and then presented to the board in early March concurrent with that we had four different workgroups going around those interim recommendations one of those workgroups was on outreach one was on housing focused shelter and what was going on or not going on in our shelters one was focused on diversion and prevention and one was focused on governance and so there were teams that came together cross sector teams city reps provider reps, community reps that worked on those issues and so when we were just sort of wrapping up that initial work and coming forward in March to do what was going to be the kickoff for the actual action planning what happened the pandemic and it changed everything we did so you'll see in this slide you know we really we put a pause on that work literally we had sent out invitations for a two day community convening around system design and action planning for the end of March and obviously that was put on pause in that experience in that in sort of the aftermath of shelter in place home orders going into effect we actually did a lot together and I want to highlight that because it our experience working together on COVID response as it relates to homelessness actually influenced our framework quite significantly and I think everyone's well aware we work very actively with our city partners on standing up our COVID sheltering system the six hotels that we have in operation currently and as well as five different shelter in place programs so we have never had more shelter than we have right now but meanwhile it's still an incredible problem we just look around the community and we've got to do more that has influenced the plan so then also as you guys can imagine we had a little bit of a delay again in August when the county was basically dealing with the cdu lightning fire and that was an all hands on back moment for our team and so again we were still moving forward so one of the things we worked with our project advisory team to put together the proposed framework and that's what we have before the board today and really we are starting with a community engagement conversation and this is our first one after the board to get some feedback and understanding about where we go from here so we're really in this phase three we did the framework and action planning we have a proposed plan and we're moving forward and we're in that community conversation the intention is to go through a series of conversations and Randy will speak to that at the end of our presentation and then come back to the board in January with the month work plan to guide the plan's implementation and really just that final tease on this proposed plan happy to pause to see if there's any questions I'm talking about before we get to the action plan where we go from here what is the assessment identify about how we were doing things quick review of the findings they started with our strength coordinated entry our smart path system we had outreach teams we had shelters providing basic safety and service but not really focused on getting folks to housing and so we had these things we also identified some considerable gaps that we did not have a really robust good housing before they even entered a shelter system and that diversion is usually at the term for problem solving just working to understand what are the barriers what are holding people back from getting back to permanent housing it also identified that again our shelter was really addressing basic safety but not supportive service to get people on a path to housing case management housing navigation that that was not offered consistently across all shelters and really the result of that was a low success rate in terms of actual permanent housing placement we don't have really great outcomes another identified gap was our governance and decision making was not transparent or results focused our staffing capacity was pretty inadequate given the scale of the problem and we really have limited use of data to drive decisions or improvements it was this really honest assessment we had to have a systematic integrated connected approach from the first experiencing homelessness to hopefully a successful exit to housing that we had a loose coordination of activities that worked for some people but not for all people and we focus strategies our consultants really put it out there for us that we needed to move to a systematic approach where we had a shared vision and shared objectives at all levels that our resources and funding were aligned with those measurable outcomes that programs were designed and focused on meeting those outcomes and evaluated on a regular basis and that we used data so we needed a clear structure and process for governance and decision making so we would be accountable to results and that really if we could get there each person would receive timely and consistent we just want to say in doing this work all city jurisdictions people were very very honest and open about what was working and what was not it was a pretty hard look in the mirror and everyone has just been along this process said we know we need to do better we have to do more so that really brings us to the framework okay am I coming through okay can people hear me thumbs up okay so Alisa introduced me as the new I think new I guess it's at last for a year I'm still new Randy Morris the director of the human services department I started in February which is about four weeks before everything changed but I want to as a way of introduction but you know I worked for 25 years in Alameda County and to the topic that I'm presenting on here probably around five years ago I watched what I'm sure is Resonate to view all as city profound tensions just grow as the visibility of homelessness really blew up in the cities of Oakland and Berkeley and Hayward and just watched tremendous tension play out at Hayward and Alameda County where cities and counties are struggling with what's our role what do we do so I'm no stranger to these challenges when you have an issue that's bigger than you know a city or a county can handle I also just want to make sure the city knows it's in case you're not as aware because we've been discussing county world over and over I want to thank Alisa who on the backs of her and two other people handled a problem that's being transferred which is going to be on the shoulders of about seven or eight people and we still don't have enough people so I don't know how Alisa and her team did this but I understand way before Alisa the county didn't do very much at all so at least we started to step up and we're stepping up more of the county to be better partners to city if you don't know human service departments we basically have three big shops and that's the foster care division the kind of public welfare division like CalFresh and MediCal trying to work programs and employment programs and then aging programs like people protective services like is that but throughout California counties are struggling with who should be the administrative hub of this new vaccine public policy dilemma that no one can solve and that's a growing homeless crisis and it is happening throughout California that often planning departments or CAO offices are transferring them to direct service offices like health or human services so it's just happening next week if it's official Alisa happens to be this very big baton and that's why she and I are doing these co-presentations and Alisa will still be very involved in a policy role in our CAO's office but I have a new director who's going to be reporting to me starting on Monday that's why the transition happened I see Mark team not on video but we invited him to be part of the interview panel we wanted to have city hi Mark team city and community representatives to help us pick a good director to help kind of coordinate this work I want to say one thing about say just a touch more about what Alisa said about what happened when COVID hit which you know is literally five weeks after I got here if you don't know in California state statute human service agency in county in California are required to provide mass care and shelter during a disaster you know it used to be things like earthquakes and fires but this pandemic caused all county human service departments to have some role in what California stepped up and said we need to make sure COVID doesn't spread in our homeless community so that's why the federal FEMA money and the state money started flowing into the county to my department and we basically stood up a whole emergency operation which Alisa mentioned and that's been a dominant part of my first nine months here is sort of managing that operation in conjunction with all the work that Alisa's speaking to but I just want to if you don't know this I think it's important to share for two reasons one is with money and urgency we actually can do things pretty quickly as government but not to end with the glass half empty but put reality on the table as Alisa said it's still very disturbing that despite all the infusion of money and all the good work explained to you you probably more than anyone in the city see it has not solved the issue so I'm going to say with humility all the great things that have happened in COVID but recognize it still isn't enough because the encampment issue is just completely perplexing to everyone so I want to find the balance to share we actually in a very short order stood up a system that is touching a little over 1,000 people experiencing homeless every month which is a lot but again to what you guys see in the encampment it's still far short of what the whole total is and that translates to we have these six hotels that we've been able to lease through this program called Project Room Key which is a blend of federal FEMA money and state money which allows counties to move it forward and that has about 200 highly vulnerable people who would otherwise be at high risk of contracting COVID in their own hotel rooms we have been able to take about 15 existing shelters and this is what a lease of team did a lot of work on and help create social distancing and bring services there and make them 24-7 meal security staffing to kind of help support stability there we expanded and you guys know one of these two the Santa Cruz Zettall but also the Watson Vettall which has about 110 people who are able to expand into those spaces we stood up a Transition Age Youth site as a 7th Day Adventist location that serves about 15 plus people and then as your city knows all too well we worked in partnership with you all and are still working with it to stand up the Benchlands encampment that served at this peak about 100 people and then on top of that it doesn't get a lot of fanfare but mostly our health office and more is touching about 300 homeless people a month who are in various encampments around the community in the context of COVID trying to stop the spread by doing things like we stood up hygiene centers quarter parties hand washing stations bring water, fuel, food tents, sleeping bags and help wellness checks and ensures that people who have declined health are getting health care needs and as we can trying to refer people to all those systems into the very clogged up housing system that we have we just wanted to take a minute if you didn't know that all of that has happened and that is impressive but it is also disturbing that issues are still as pronounced as they are despite that and that is deeply on the backs of federal and state money that we're very, very anxious when that federal and state money goes away how are we going to keep not lose ground which we'll be talking about a little bit today. So I hope that preamble introduction a little bit of context setting was helpful as I now have the baton from Elisa as she described the three-year framework wasn't influenced by what happened over COVID in the last six, seven months and what is listed here is just kind of like describing the sort of backbone of what's in the framework so vision and guiding principles Elisa mentioned some of these actionable have to be county-wide have to be cross-jurisdiction we'll talk about that have to be data-driven we'll talk about the homeless systems are just sort of blowing with the wind without a good sense of what's happening and responding to anecdotal issues and crises without any real system without any sense of what the data is and seeing if the needles are moving in the right direction or wrong and then an equity lens we want to make sure that we're tracking demographics on all sorts to see if we have different groups disproportionately being affected Elisa mentioned something to repeat this has a number of goals that have very targeted results and capacity to measure success which we'll get to in a minute this is also rooted in a number of strategies and key objectives which I'll turn this back to Elisa in a few minutes and she's going to go a little bit deeper on it but you can read it in the actual plan itself and I forget Elisa we've sent it over to them and they're posted on your website but if not we'll get it to you so you can see this plan the second to last is very significant and that is that embedded in this three-year plan which serves as a framework is every six months to reset and reevaluate so that we have kind of very concrete actionable plans that help ground the work detail the work and then come back every six months the environment is very fluid it happens with the pandemic and the recessionary is very fluid so we're going to have to make adjustments every six months work plan process every six months and the last and I'll say a little bit about the end of my presentation is we have a number of assumptions that if those assumptions change that could impact kind of how we do until we need to name them because music city nor we the county can fix this alone so there are other parties that have a role in this particularly the Feds and States and more and then we also have tried to quantify what some of the resource needs are so we can be more clear and transparent with the community and between county and city about the distance between what resources we have and what we need and then we can figure out how to bridge that down the next one Alisa so this is a quick visual of if you have to just break it down to sort of what's the main thing we're trying to do just to kind of say in three years have we get our mark let me just put the elephant on the table this unlike some aspirational plans doesn't say we're solving all of this in three years but what it's trying to say is we're going to make a significant dent so we are hoping in three years if we are able to achieve everything listed in here that we will reduce the unsheltered homeless population by 50% and for those who aren't sure of the language unsheltered and what that means in this world if you look at the bottom left that's basically everybody but those who are in a shelter people who are in encampments or vehicles not their own home but then when you throw in people who are in actual shelters that's not their home but they actually have a loop over the head in the shelter system that's where we put all that together we want to use overall homelessness by 30% and there's a lot of detail behind that better on the slides that follow in the report so if you can go to the next Alisa so to break it down a touch more trying to look at two big goals is we want to improve the effectiveness of every single program we run we have a lot of details in this plan and they will be born out in the six month plan and we'll be tracking the data to see if we are getting these so reducing the length of stay you all probably know all too well the reason why shelters don't have any openings pre-COVID is because people are stuck in there and they don't move and there's reasons behind that rate of rehousing is something we need to track and do a better job of teasing out why is the rate so low and what we can do to increase that rate and same thing when people are stuck in some degree of homelessness why is it that we can't get them into programs so we're going to be tracking that as goal number one and then goal two it is not the only solution to homelessness but it is a major solution and a real conundrum for all of us how can we expand the beds capacity shelter is not a solution to homelessness so we need to have expanded shelter capacity we are able in COVID to expand significantly and we don't want to lose it if at all possible but really we need to focus on more housing slots and we'll say more about that because that's a big part where we need cities and county and planning departments to be working on this very very complicated issue that's very vexing in communities with not my backyard but until we crack this net we're only going to get so far in this plan the next one Elisa so this is my precursor to just put a big big frame on what I'll turn over to Elisa because her and her team and focus strategies and people before me get a lot of credit for really trying to figure out how to organize this very complex puzzle in a way that's somewhat digestible and organized so it really falls into these four boxes so the upper left box called better connect and serve that's basically saying four people who are at point in time in the moment experiencing homelessness in a shelter on the streets in encampments what can we do to enhance and improve our outreach our engagement and connection with people who are in the moment homeless the upper right box well we have to have an outlet we have to increase our housing stock and our housing options we have to have pathways to somewhere so that's the second the lower left is we kind of sorry this analogy is not appropriate but we have to stop the bleeding there are many many jurisdictions that including where I just came from in Alameda where you can track and track and track and people who are currently homeless and you can get them into housing but if the flow into homelessness is more people are as many people are becoming homeless you're not moving the needle and so there's a whole host of prevention strategies to try to help people who are currently housed even if precariously on the brink of to help make sure they remain housed so they don't become one of the people in the point in time count and then the lower right corner you know Martin and Mayor and Vice Mayor who on this two by two committee know a lot about this but we have a lot of work to do in the first six months of this to improve the administration of this this is the boring stuff that's not really interesting to probably public but in order to have a complex like system like this run effectively you have to have a structure that makes sense when you get to city and county you have to have better ways of determining how decisions get made these are very very trying issues that get people finger pointing really quickly and to do that you have to put some time and energy to figure out what the process is understanding what each other's roles are and get a better government structure some more transparency to get the relationships working better and that's even within county you know we have a lot of county departments who have roles and we're not we finger point ourselves internally before you even get to county city so there's a lot of work to do to get the administration right have enough staff I know you guys went through this you just hired a dedicated homeless coordinator you lost the person I saw Martin you're reorganizing all of us are trying to figure out how to organize the this because it's so challenging on all of it so there's a whole host of work that might not be as interesting to the community but it's very important if we're going to do our job right have that foundation in place so now Lisa's going to drill down a little bit more and what does that mean Matt so I will try to not go too far but I do want to get into the highlights of each of these and just before I jump into strategy one so we have these four strategies across these four buckets 14 sub-strategies and underneath these two of those sub-strategies are what we're calling objectives there are 48 objectives in this plan and that is actionable specific work we want to achieve within the next three years we're not going to dump all of that on you today but I do think it's very important as we reflect on the 2015 all-in plan great plan big plan but part of the challenge was prioritizing what to do and what specific steps needed to be taken when and by who this is not just for the county this lift is going to take all of us so we'll talk a little bit about that but so with that I'm going to go to the first strategy as Randy said this is really this is really focused on people experiencing homelessness whether they're in shelter or they're living on the street in encampments and outside it's also where we really have sharpened our focus on encampments and in terms of both that experience of being homeless but also the impact on communities of encampments Randy already talked about one of the capacity goals around this part of the plan is increasing our permanent shelter capacity by 150 beds and the target within the modeling focus strategy to the predictive modeling for us was that we would increase 130 individual beds and 20 family beds about 5 family units talk about that that's assuming our COVID sheltering system demobilizes and that this is our increase long term over time it's to me it's two location centers it's stuff we were talking about before COVID how do we have a stable full service shelter system where people came in and moved on but so that's part of this highlights in each of these buckets I'm not going to go into that 1.1 there's four objectives and this is really around COVID learning this is health and safety we did a tremendous amount of work with our new programs and our existing programs to promote access to health disease prevention and security and obviously from a public health standpoint we have to keep doing that for the health of our shelter residents the staff and the rest of the community so this is that commitment there the second piece in strategy 1.2 is and this is another COVID learning moment this is really where we learned about the value of low barrier shelter many of the folks that have been participating in the COVID shelter system have not been connected to services before which is kind of striking so this is really where you're being trauma informed you are trying to create ways for people to stay in shelter and stay connected sometimes folks have addiction problems and how do you work within that environment so this is really again about how do we keep people engaged so we can get them back to that this is where we start getting back to those questions about our gaps this is really providing robust services in shelters so people actually leave shelters and move on to pathways to housing so that is the case management that is the housing navigation that's the connection to benefits essential services we've had that in a limited amount in some of our existing shelters but it is not a common feature of our shelter system and we have to get there if we really want to get to those goals of reducing homelessness by 30% in three years the last strategy 1.4 is really the strategy focusing on people living outside in encampments and it has seven objectives this is where we start talking about more outreach that is focused on housing and links people to essential services that we train that staff in deeper conversations about housing one of the critiques of our outreach today is it's been very health focused but not housing focused and we need to do that we need to bring crisis response services to the streets and help people that are living outside connect to get better and move forward further we need to collect data about that and then the last piece of this there's two objectives that is really around working across jurisdiction and for us across county departments to develop a shared approach to managing encampments on public properties so that is all stuff that is in this part of the strategy around people living outside key partners to making this we need them to have the service capacity and training to do this better model cities and county departments those are going to be the key folks involved in standing up this part of the framework I'm now going to find the arrow here and talk about the next strategy and Randy said it it's one thing to meet people where they are but if we really want to address this we need to have options and supply to reach our three-year target strategy 2.1 really focuses on extremely low income folks that's the population we're talking about and one of the measurable goal we're talking about is 100 units of permanent supportive housing we need to bring that housing that specialty housing to our community to really make a dent in the results we're looking for we need to the county and partners need to utilize all state and federal resources to acquire and build units and there is the concept in there and that first strategy around interagency pipeline group to talk about permanent supportive housing and that extremely low income unit so we can actually move people forward strategy 2.2 there are three objectives here this is really about our rapid rehousing rental assistance programs rapid rehousing programs are where you provide some level of sort of tight traded rental assistance combined with case management and housing navigation from moving someone out of a shelter into housing and you stand with them supporting them for a period of time to help them stay housed and really address their barriers. Specific in this strategy is a goal of over three years adding an additional 350 units shall I say of rapid rehousing programs so it's not a physical thing it's a program thing where you're getting rental the rental market today just in contrast with that number that 350 number today we have about 118 units of rapid rehousing for families and 86 units of rapid rehousing for adults so this is a sizable increase and I will say and some of you know this from the 2x2 committee the CMC our Homeless Action Partnership as a function of recently was allocated about $9.8 million through HUD with the focus on rapid rehousing this kind of program and addressing COVID related shelter so to the state for using those funds is about half of it needs to go to 200 units of rapid rehousing and that case management and navigation to really get people out of these shelters and into housing and then about the other half of it is towards supporting those COVID shelters in the first part of next year as our funding our FEMA funding with that is always a little bit of other care act dollars that the county has been using currently those have to be spent by the end of December so that is something that is really important around supply is that rapid rehousing programming the third strategy with three objectives is really working with landlords and property managers like we need to have a stronger tie to our renting community and figuring out those barriers that rightly stop folks from renting to people who are homeless and how do we work through that and provide the right incentive and information is really around our coordinated entry system and some technical ways to improve that and make that work better and one of the key things there is that we commit that entry we have a housing specialist that can have a conversation with that person whether they're they've lost their housing or they're about to and they reached out to help them reconnect to try and figure out that strategy to support that initial touch partners in this strategy are really again cities, counties, housing providers, developers, financing entities and quite frankly our community welcoming affordable and permanent supportive housing units you can't address homelessness without addressing supply that is strategy two. Strategy three is where we really come back on that issue of problem solving and prevention at the beginning of this briefing I talked a little bit about how 40% of our respondents in the 2019 point in time count share that this is their first experience of homelessness 40% so the question there is Randy said is how do we stop that tide? How do we stop people falling into homelessness another really important piece of our our work with focus strategies revealed for us is if you look at who's entering our shelter system right now and are entering from a house situation they're not entering from being out on the street so what we need to do is not have that we need to be having using our shelter assets for people who are living outside and have a different way to respond to people who are cheatering on the edge of homelessness but that strategy starts focusing on it really starts focusing on again those conversations just stop people and help them with problem solving using flexible funding you know is it they need to reconnect with a family member another part of the community another part of the state to get to secure housing is it that they need a little bit of help with rent and they can stay in their housing they might need to buy a bed a friend how do we do that so they don't fall into the system and that's really this idea of intake specialists that are going to have those conversations right as soon as they reach out and touch the system strategy here strategy 3.2 is really focusing on within our safety net organization homelessness and get ahead of them when people are already participating in a variety of programs how do we keep them how do we get ahead of that precipitous drop and really make sure that we can limit people falling into homelessness partners here are going to be community providers volunteers and county safety net programs really working together on prevention and I think as we all know it's far more cost effective to prevent homelessness than having to deal with an active strategy and as Randy said this is not the fun but you can't do this without a strong backbone administration there are I think there are 17 objectives in this particular strategy area the first one and we had a bunch of bits and start really looking at governance but as we have to design a new governance and decision making model that aligns all of us around the same objective and prioritization of funds second one here is authentically involve get the viewpoint of people experiencing homelessness and designing our programs talk to our clients some of you know I one of the things that work on here is continuous improvement and we always talk about voice of customer understanding what is the experience of the person you're trying to help what they need and so that is part of this is how do we how do we understand one the variety in the experience of a homeless we have working people we have that we have folks who have been living outside for a long time they all need different things we have South County we have North County different things how do we honor that diversity of experience the next item is really about this new division and Randy has spoken a little bit about it that that administrative structure to lead and coordinate this work that is going to involve all of us it's not the county alone but you need to have a backbone that's driving this forward that is adequately resourced that this idea of the six month work plan sticks and within that one of the intentions is that it it really articulates what are the costs of these various interventions so we are not just sort of talking about it without understanding what do we need to buy and why and how we're going to move forward so the work plan piece of this is really critical the last element here is really being data informed we are we've learned a lot in the last 18 months we have a couple folks that are much more in how they use data we have some of our providing partners but many people do not and while people have participated in HMIS our data system they've done it just because they had to but not as a way to actually promote improvement and really evaluate what's going on so that's going to be a key component of this and quite frankly one of the reasons why the county in figuring out where we wanted to home our efforts with sitting it with our human services department a very strong data analytics team they've been doing this across their other programs for a long time so the core competencies around using data both internal operational improvement but also to communicate externally is there we're not recreating the wheel we're applying it to a new problem and I guess I just want to stress there in that you said data it's not just it's not just for insiders but it's got to be available to the public we need to be clear on what we're doing and why so that is and my phone's ringing that is the quick summary of the framework I'm going to pass it back to Randy right if this is an in-person meeting I think I'd say it's the time we stand up and we go through an icebreaker exercise and shake out and we're almost there hang in there we're where I'm in the corner to the end here so these are what I said at the beginning some assumptions a little bit of a way of introduction of me to you having worked in county government with cities with advocates with community providers I just feel like I spend so much of my time trying to hone in on what is the role of each jurisdiction you know what can the county do and hold myself accountable to what the county can do what can you guys do hold yourself accountable this issue of homelessness is a symptom of at least three decades of a complex puzzle of causes that include federal and state policy actions that neither city nor county have any control over but we sure are suffering from the decades of sort of decisions that can make and I think if we're really honest with each other in a community like Santa Cruz where you have a huge unincorporated footprint city and county shares and choices that are not in so bad over a decade there's not a lot of affordable housing that has been lifted up in this community and that's a contributing factor and I don't blame that is what it is so we have to put assumptions out because we county and you as partners in city there are limits to what we can do but we can at least track and name and be transparent and honest with the community what it is we're tracking and naming and then let's focus our energies on what's in our control where collaboration works and then we're really going to hunker down and lobby at the state and the feds to fix issues that they've caused so it's a simple solution which makes it very very hard to know where to point a finger because everybody has a blame everybody has a role in the solution so first we've got a massive set of crises and Santa Cruz and a few other communities in California have the fires on top of the pandemic and the recession that is followed so we don't know what impact it will have on the housing market it's like a title wave the earthquake hit a few hours ahead there's going to be the title wave but we don't know what it's going to be so there's an assumption that it's not going to have a major impact we don't know state and federal resources lately have been throwing enough we've been getting some resources to do some things pre-pandemic during pandemic we don't have control over what the state and feds decide those are major factors and just so you know like my department 90% of my funding is federal and state so my ability to run my programs the county board of supervisors can say what they want but when 90% of your funding is outside homelessness is arguably kind of that complex we have a lot of money right now from FEMA and the state we can't control that but we can lobby the division that I'm going to be lifting up starting next week with the new director we will be pretty transparent with the county and if we get into any cross-jurisdictional resource sharing that would be a discussion decision we don't know what resources we need we're just going to launch this plan we're going to talk it through we're going to do what we can to be responsive but if we don't have enough internal infrastructure to do what we want I just have to be honest with the board about that but we're on a good start and better than what Elisa was managing with just her and Mighty 2 people which I don't know how she did that the department prioritized funding that's a little bit of a euphemism for a lot of times you know housing programs and planning departments have funding come in city or county and they have choices to make and I really truly say this is a benign statement sometimes those choices are made they don't go to crack the issue of homelessness they don't go to extremely low income vulnerable populations they go other places and the service department can't control how planning decisions get made and those are very complicated they involve planning commissions they involve public feedback but we have to see how other partners prioritize funding and if they don't get targeted towards creating more housing stock for extremely low income we're going to have limits to how far we can move the needle and we'll say that in a benign transparent way same thing below there's a lot of providers there's limits to what government can do we need partners to help do stuff and what capacity of a community have to do this work is something we need to track and talk about and then to kind of end and this is where it really gets to the rubber hits the roll with city and county you know I'm talking to a number of elected officials city colleagues this is a complicated world and we have a lot of challenges that whether you're county or city you have to work with and we will do our best to be good partners have open conversations but in the end of the day if neither city nor county or anybody can find a place to even if we have money to stand something back we're a little stuck so I think that's going to have to be an open conversation during these three years the last is a little bit of motherhood and apple pie comment which is I truly believe I've been in the safety net five years non-profit and graduate school and 25 years government every year that passes I just keep focusing on what's in your control is how we work together what's not in your control is all these other factors like said in state but I'm going to say the inverse of that is when we're pointing fingers my experience has been so a lot of time and energy trying to prove who's right and who's wrong to the neglect of actually figuring out how to work together on something and that is in our control we can't change the divided congress we can't tell the governor of the California what to do but we can figure out how to work together and roll in the same direction and I hope that over these next six months and years to follow this history of the county doing nothing forever and now we're stepped up in the last few years that we just keep moving in this direction of stepping up and keep burning your trust and conversely that we can be honest with you where we feel like as city we would like you to consider a different way of work with us let's just do that it's in our control so at least I forget if we have the pretty little boat on the longer slides we can go to the next I'm doing I don't know do we have we don't have the boat we go to the board archive this morning we just filled this because we were given half an hour rest with you guys but there was a picture of a row boat and some comments about my mom is all getting the boat together so imagine a really fun picture that inspired you to call the action okay so the closing here I believe so this is our closing is just to tell you where we are the purpose of this just to summarize to be back on Elisa's intro this is really like the unveiling of this 18 month of work focus strategy sort of on the wings here if you have questions for their technical work they've worked in multiple jurisdictions throughout the country and have been really good guide for us there's an opportunity to present and unveil this plan and open it up to the public after this work to date we did the board this morning we're working with you now City of Watsonville tonight the other two cities stays ahead and then really for the next two months we really want to get some feedback and there's going to be a couple ways to do that some people in the city and some of your vendors and partners are on some of these virtual meetings that we're going to be having with partners and stakeholders we're going to go out and be talking to people with experience social distance and safe but we're also going to be putting an online survey that's going to be open to the community and I don't know if we send that to you Mayor Cummings and our team but we'll get to you when that hyperlink goes live so you can send that around to your constituents or yourselves and we're going to be collecting all this information over the next couple of months organize that and then in early 21 we're going to be coming back to the board about all four city councils and ask you to do two things I think the easier one if you don't mind me throwing an opinion out there is to actually adopt this three year plan which will be done, we'll put some graphics in it it'll be more aesthetically pleasing and it will be like adopted by the four city jurisdictions I think the reason why that's conceptually easier this is just a very big framework that involved your partnership in helping us develop this or I think the rubber is going to hit the road and that's going to be the second part of what we do over the next few months is the six month plan because the six month plan are the test we are going to outline what we want to do we want to get people's feedback about where we should focus but the real challenge is then who is going to work with us and be willing to sign up and say all do that thing and so we're actually going to be asking partners including cities and you'll have ample time to look at it we'll talk to you about it and it would be a great the first six month plan had a nice balance that sort of city partners and county governments and other stakeholders each taking a piece of kind of how we're going to break down doing work over the first six months of the three-year process so that we're going to work on over the next few months very openly and we'll bring that first six month plan back to your council and for anything where the city is committing to you'll hopefully have plenty of time to look at it and say yeah I can do that and that way you can adopt it as well and then we'll all hold ourselves accountable for the six months and we'll keep rolling in the right direction and really start to hopefully move the needle in the right direction or more in the right direction at least I believe that closes us out but I am losing okay so now we're all in best requires collaboration on the left is a quick summary of what we're going to work on in the right is we really need everybody to do it and there's the picture of the vote so we're all jumping together let's keep rolling in the right direction discussion, question I can do that, yes I mean comment and say how pleased I am this is probably like the most exciting thing I've heard all month and I'm really impressed with all of the work that went into it everyone that had a hand in it and Will in the future thank you thank you thank you my one question when you were talking about increasing that housing the very low was that for the city or for the county my only question is okay so then let's say someone individual or family gets in there if there's no turnover I mean obviously we want them to stay housed then like that's only 300 and something individuals or families does that make sense yeah so it is countywide so it's putting expanding our rapid rehousing programming countywide and this is where it starts I wanted when we talk about the modeling I almost want to say Kate help me out here part of the thing with the rapid rehousing is the concept is you provide rental assistance and support for a limited amount of time and then they get to a place where they can sustain themselves now there's still that as I mentioned that's like not new housing units it's basically new support for helping people get into housing units you did sort of sort of by way of your question we don't have in this plan a target around I will draw out there that it's not that's not there it's something that you know might we get feedback on that that's something we may want to discuss or not that it's something that the community the new governance structure wants to highlight moving forward I will say you know I think the city of Santa Cruz has worked very very actively do more affordable housing not all jurisdictions that's another piece of the pie that we're going to have to start honestly dealing with then the other follow question is I think one obstacle for individuals can be their credit and part of like the criminal justice system the ticketing you know affecting an individual's credit any collaboration with the courts to try and figure out how to overcome some of this and repair an individual's credit so that they can get to a place where they have more financial independence so I would say that I don't think that the framework does not get into that level of detail but when we talk about barriers that is exactly the kinds of stuff that we think that housing navigation and that care management needs to look at what is that specific thing that's holding someone back and have someone who is working you know whether they're criminally do or criminally injustice involved they're not but they have bad credit history so how do we bring the resources together and this is where I do think it's really important for us to again honor that it takes a village to address some of those things if that's the barrier that person has how do we work to make sure we can close it Renee I'd like to I don't know that informal it's told Santa Cruz is informal I should say council member Golder whatever the right way to identify I just want to say a touch more from my experience in the safety networking with vulnerable low income populations for many many years in a moment like this where we don't even have the bodies to get out there and work with people to dig down into like an exact issue like you're bringing up one of the things I hope we can work on is you can find out that you can just help someone navigate a complicated system and they can undo that and remove that barrier other time and this is really leading by main point you find out there's a systemic issue based on state law or federal law and what you have to do when you have communities all over California running the Jackson mission you have good data you can have a very thoughtful piece of legislation that says if you want to help solve this riddle of homelessness we need to do this and sometimes that's part of what we do but right now it's really hard to get organized because we're just responding to crisis and we have anecdotes so I'd like to think part of getting this organized better is we can be very targeted including trying to get legislative sponsors for systemic fixes that we can't fix at a local level thank you very much is that something that's under consideration like whether they're apartments or studios that as people are kind of stabilizing themselves they can move into where I may actually use one of my lifeline calls and say Kate help me because most of you know I am not a homeless expert I'm one of those generalists that your boss says go work on this and make progress but what I've learned is transitional housing that idea here you're in this one this thing for a little while and then you'll move to another thing that's kind of fallen out of favor it's like no just I'm going to use my lifeline call and say Kate is there anything you want to add about that concept of transitional housing and how we sort of what's the current best practice around that right thank you so actually so focus strategy actually does quite a bit of work in Demantale County where life moves is based so I'm very familiar with their program yeah I say Lisa's right and then I think I think what evidence shows from all around the country is the more people have to go from a place to a place to a place to a place to get housing the less effective that strategy is so I mean the goal is the few possible steps before someone's actually in a place where they can stay that's the most trauma-informed way to address homelessness and we'll get you the best results now having said that there certainly is a role for transitional housing for specialized populations that maybe need a little bit of a longer period of time to get stabilized but I think the thing I would tie back to is the parts of the framework that talk about bolstering the ability of the shelter system to provide people with the services they need so the idea is in a way shelter becomes a variant of transitional housing it's not as long but it's the same idea that people are able to get in from outside have a safe place to be where they're going to work on the things that they need to do to get to housing as fast as they can and really a lot of the transitional housing that life moves operates is really in another community which is called shelter because their lengths of stay are quite short privileged to work with these guys a lot through the 2x2 and I just mostly wanted to express my thanks again you guys have been under an incredible amount of pressure over the last six months actually over the last well coming up on a year it feels like so I just want to publicly acknowledge the amount of work that Randy and his team and Elisa and everyone at the county has been doing on this plan in particular is greatly appreciated I think that when you can kind of see a framework that sort of has the elements in it that maybe you don't quite exactly understand as a policy maker someone who is trying to respond to community concerns it's really reassuring even though it is in very hard road ahead it's just reassuring to start to see the puzzle a little bit more clearly put together for us so I think it gives us a really great guideline for how we describe the work to our community which I think is one of the most important things we can do because our community I think is compassionate about this issue they just cannot understand the ramifications or why it is happening and I think that just you know at a personal level it's hard for people to really understand how we got here and they want to help but they're just not really sure exactly how to do it within the system so I really appreciate you your presentation I think really shows that there's these pieces and these best practices and we have to knit these things together to build a road that we can all follow so again thank you for the presentation also I just have one thing because they are such a prominent part of our community throughout the whole year but I'm wondering if maybe you have done outreach with the university and potential just some communication with them around these goals you know we don't have a sense of whether students are becoming homeless or not we've had public presentations and public comments that does state that and I know the university has tried to kind of grapple with standing up and making sure that there's availability of understanding those threats to students but that might be one other audience to do maybe just a little bit of outreach with as well so I don't want to add to your plate but it just occurred to me that I heard the presentation so yeah thanks councilmember Myers thank you for that and honestly I have lots of conversations with university leadership around lots of things but around the edges of this so I feel like that's something we can and should do it's interesting we've actually done more work with Cabrillo around this I don't know if it's just of the student population and some of the experience but I think that's a great another anchor institution that needs, we're talking about getting in the boat they got to get in the boat with us we all need to be in this boat so I really appreciate that feedback thank you I'll just also express my appreciation of your time and just the comprehensive summary of this report it's really great to see this as a launch pad for our county and we stand poised ready to partner and to your point Randy I think it's really important that we remember that we are in this both together and that we need to think holistically about what we can do to leverage each other's partnership I just sort of maybe just piggybacking really quickly on Bisoner Myers' comment one potential way to really engage all of the education institutions is the Santa Cruz County College and Career Readiness partnership which includes the K-12 district the COE, the county office of education the youth state caprio and CSUMB so an opportunity really to hit all of those give it especially the breast unaccompanied youth and foster youth that are making up a good portion of our homeless population here in Santa Cruz County and really what an opportunity to help those folks who could maybe get out of those cycles early in their lives I think is really a hopeful space as well as just the heart of having to understand that these are the realities for so many kids and young people in our community I think this is really complex and I'm sure we can get into so many aspects of the many issues and causes of homelessness in our community just the whole the whole gamut of really all the deep rooted issues but one of the things there's actually a couple things I wanted to check in with you about is what is that you know if there's somebody who's experiencing mental health issues but is unwilling to accept to go into some sort of treatment and or substance abuse issues but unwilling to get substance abuse treatment and then they do decide at one point then the month long weeks long wait to actually get admitted so how given that that's one of the major kind of components of those who are experiencing homelessness in our community so I'll ask that question and then the second question is and then I know others want to ask questions as well as we hear from community members around what about purchasing old hotels and potential transitional housing so I don't know if you want to speak to that as well The question of on-demand treatment I mean that is a huge issue it's a huge issue for our homeless population it's a huge issue for our home population and really this is where I like need to turn to Eric Riera to like talk about that just the depth of what I can speak to a little bit in this specific area is our focused intervention team that we had a year of experience with but then with COVID basically had to put on hold and I have to say that was part of our problem we had some of our most challenging folk homeless well it wasn't a criteria to be homeless but it turned out most of the function that program were they almost all had alcohol and drug addiction issues and not only was it hard to get treatment many of them were they had to cycle through so many times programs didn't want them anymore so there is this whole question of where do you even place people what do we call it using jail time as a way to sort of one for people to get sober and maybe start thinking differently flash incarceration as I think what Eric called it but then that problem of placement and like I said that's not unique to homeless the question of treatment capacity what I know Eric has said to me is when he's paying what I would say market rates for treatment beds even though Medi-Cal covers a certain rate because he is literally competing with private insurers for those same beds so I mean I'll be honest this plan doesn't dig into that very very challenging component of addiction in our community and again you know it's an onion it's something we're going to have to look at for a portion of this population we have lots of people who are sober we're going to give you a hand I want to piggyback a little bit the first is just by further introduction the last position I had for eight years I was the public conservator in Alameda County which is Lantam and Pettus short LPS mental health conservatorship law so for eight years I watched the public homelessness and voluntary versus involuntary treatment had literally the public conservator so I just want to share I have that background where this issue has gotten so vexing and complicated you might have seen legislations been passed and only San Francisco opted in to try to figure out how to have conservatorship it's a very vexing issue because government has a horrible job picking and choosing who should have civil liberties even if it's due process in court number two what I did not say in my introduction but I think is enough on point that I'm going to say this Carlos our county administrator did not make the decision to have this office shifted from the CAO to human services he made the decision to have a transfer to health and human services and he left it up to me and Mimi Hall to make the decision how to do that because his direction the very big picture vision that he details he hires people like me in Alameda the population needs the vent the services of your shared safety net system and so I just want to let you know that but for the pandemic and some other financing issues that hit mental health more than human services this could have easily moved to the health agency because of some of the very issues you're bringing up but please know Eric and Mimi are actively involved behind the curtain in everything we're doing so we can keep working on that and then the last and please give Martina a little bit of credit here we had a community hiring process and who we hired who is the new director is a medical doctor public health professional who his last 13 years worked in the mental health system of a county as a housing director so this nexus of housing and mental health and policies and civil liberties needs more attention but I think we have the right people with looking at this so let's keep this conversational active because it's clearly need more discussion and more resolution. We didn't answer the question that simple question about go by hotels The application date was terrible and it was right when we were heading into the fire work to try and see if we could pull something together did invitation of the county we had I think we had one indicate they were somewhat interested in playing but at a very, very deep purchase price and part of the problem with that is the way that project home key program worked is you were most company you wanted to be around $100,000 $150,000 and $280,000 dollars per door so the amount of money we would have had to generate locally to do it was much more. The other piece of it was you needed an operator and because we didn't have a partner operator to actually run the program over time we were talking with a boat from over the hill who does a lot of supportive housing and affordable housing and rapid rental rehopping as well and because we didn't have an actual location they sort of said this is a lot of work and application that's not going to be very competitive so we did not we were not successful in getting it together for a project room key that said now that we've come out of the fires we've come through this project the team is coming back together we're bringing we're talking to other partners from other parts of places in the state about operators and we're going to go back at this again we're pretty confident that more funds will go into whether it's project home key or something like that moving forward just given the perceived success of the initial program so we're trying to gear up to figure out how we can be part of it moving forward. Thank you for the reminder Randy. This is really an impressive report I have not been involved in these discussions in any depth in last couple of years and I'm really impressed with the amount of work that has gone into this and structure of it I really look forward to looking at it in more detail I impressed with the idea of having more of the partners hopefully all on the same page about objectives and goals and so forth and a real focus on quality accountability, successful outcomes, whatever but feeling that we're making some tangible progress on this. The components just all make sense and I think there is the will to go forward it does seem like some of the assumptions that Randy mentioned are really optimistic in this horrible housing market here. It's way easier to do rapid reouthing in I don't know a central valley or something but this is brutal so I don't know how much that reality has to weigh into this anyway that's just my thought looking at it but I really was impressed with looking at the full report but it's not in the full report I would be interested in some kind of an org chart I mean you all know I'm not going to be sitting in this chair much longer but it is an interest and it's an interest to the general public. It's always been kind of a mystery to me how all these pieces sit together and whose charge of what and I know that people change that it helps to me it helps sometimes to see a map of who's in charge of what and who they work with and that's just a comment and who the key people are just to get a sense of how the whole animal fits together but it's really impressive work and thank you for this presentation. I just want to make one comment mindful I've never been an elected official but I've watched elected officials and worked with elected officials for a long time. I'm sort of keying off of Vice Mayor Meyers' comment about the community's hungry to know like what to do they care but it's like so complicated what do you do. You know somewhere in here to your comment council member Matthews I don't know if you know when you look back 30 years and you think about all the different decision points over a long rear-view arc when communities have made decisions to not create housing in a way that catches up with where we are today in my experience those turn into blame finger-pointing it's very hard to have a conversation people have polarized but hopefully there can just be a more honest like here's where we are today can't do anything about what's happening but just a really honest call to action that's not pointing fingers and blaming or asking for the impossible but that's why this plan is a three-year plan we are going to just slowly chip away at this and hopefully have a less finger-pointing conversation about what can a community do during these difficult decisions when you have money that comes in and you can pick this or that or pick a citing issue they seem to be very complicated and get very polarized really quick but maybe we can harness some of the interest in the community really to fix the issue if we can educate and do so in not a blame way but in empowering here is part of the solution so I think your comment is spot on not to be caught in the center in the mix of the sessions I had one other thing around the reality of the housing market here and I think that this was something that those of us who were able to do the life moves to our that was December 13 that was almost a year away from that they had honest conversations with people about what does it cost to stay they also did a lot of work with their clients they had really strong relationships with major employers like Safeway and Costco and places like that they were living in the sheltered environment with support, with behavioral health with case management and they were actually working and saving and then they had conversations about you can transfer because of the nature of your employer to another community and let's talk about what the actual average studio rent is across the state had different kinds of conversations and so I mean we don't know exactly how that's going to look here but part of it is I think Randy was saying we have to have honest conversations about what it's going to take and that in itself is going to be a set of changes that doesn't mean no everyone has to move on to conversations about what it's going to take to stay here versus what your options are in other places so I mean that's we can measure but so much of this is going to be us coming together to have frank conversations about what's going to work and what's not thank you for those comments thank you for the presentation Ditto all the kudos for really giving us an amazing overview of the work that's been done and planning for the future it's really exciting and I feel like a really positive turn in our the ways that we think about an approach addressing homelessness in our community and if I went into the weeds I would have a million questions because I really want to know more about a lot of this stuff but for now I just wanted to ask two kind of bigger picture questions and I think one of them is related so one of them is related to you know Randy you said that we've been able to demonstrate that with urgency and resources we can you know roll out effective approaches effective ways of addressing these issues maybe not long term solutions but given that and given our CARES Act funding will be disappearing and we don't know what the future holds you do make some in addition to the housing market some optimistic assumptions and I hope those come true that we do have funding to maintain and expand upon the wonderful work that's been done I'm just wondering if you could say a little bit more about how you see that transition in particular with respect to the Benchlands encampment which has been from my perspective very successful and I've heard wonderful things I've been there and talked with people so that now we have to move and it's kind of the story with the fighting issues and all that we always kind of get something good going and then we either run out of funding or we have to move so I'm just wondering how you're thinking about that and what the potential is to keep given that we are trying to make a transition to expand states of the armory ongoing operations for that because the issues are not going to go away so that's one question and then the other one it's kind of more of a comment but I would be interested to hear if there's any big picture thinking about how you are intending to involve people who are experiencing homelessness in the work moving forward in program design and operations I'm really excited to hear that I think it's something I've advocated for pretty consistently in the long time that I've been working on these issues and so I'd just love to hear anything about that that you might want to add to help us understand where that's going I'm going to talk first so I can leave the hard question for you Elisa those are a couple different questions I want to start with under key assumptions I agree with you there was some ambitious optimistic heck I'm thinking in this community it's safe to be like maybe we have a little hope with something that happened at the federal level I don't know if that's an appropriate thing up here but there is an increasing amount of certainly state and a little bit of federal narrative that's forming that because of FEMA money and states like California that put project rooms money on the table large numbers of people who had been in the streets that were and again the context was not get rid of encampments because I don't like to see them it was stopping the spread of COVID we've been successful in this community we did it well now what so this gets back to one of these assumptions is this is federal and state money not city of Santa Cruz and county of Santa Cruz so how you know I'm talking to elected officials here but you bump this up to state elected and federal elected in my comment about federal we have a different we think federal administration there's going to have to be a lot of advocacy is this country and is this state going to accept the hundreds of thousands of people who have maybe for the first time in a long time a loop over their head thanks to federal and state money and then they're just going to go back on the streets where their finances are being pulled that's the political moment and that's going to be politics and you are elected and you know the city tensions you deal with with competing priorities but the state elected and the federal elected and the federal administration are going to have to make some hard decisions I think there's a lot of advocacy lobbying media et cetera so that the run doesn't get pulled and maybe they reset the funding to say let's atleast not make it worse and hold this base funding so I think there's a larger conversation all communities to really lift up in pressure state and federal and a recession. So it's tough. I've used that up so I can let Elisa talk about the bench lands because she has the solution. And then we do have your third but we'll come back to that one more time. So I guess I just wanted to say I just think pre-COVID as you know we were watching the state legislature start one of the key issues that was was coming forward was you know this one-off money every year from that date but that that you don't build a system with not getting not sure what's coming and what you can use it for and that was going to be one of the big focus points for the state legislature around starting to recognize that one local government cannot you know fund this problem solve this problem alone and that that was going to have to be a part of it hopefully we'll come back to that and in future legislative session. We do need to come up with local funding sources you know and one of the things that we we talked with our city partners about we were looking at raising our TOT with an idea that some piece of that would be focused on this community challenge so we I mean I'm not going to we have to figure out a way to find the quality programs moving forward. We have to and we have to you know turn every dial for that in terms of I mean the armory is a class is a classic one all of you know the struggle to get that location and we are so appreciative of the initial work of Ron Prince to make that happen and the fact that we're still there you know that we are all very fat acquisition did not happen we have to have locations to do this work and we're gonna we are just gonna have to you know roll up our sleeves as as you know appointed people like myself elected folks like yourself to really work through that problem and figure out where are we going to cite quality programs and by quality it's yes getting the outcomes but it's also been a responsive to community concerns that we that there is a there's a way to say we can do this we can do this in a way that does not cause undue negative impact to the neighbors around it the city started that with that with the River Street camp you know I think of everyone goes back we had the police mobile site you know mobile fan thing on site we had little by little back that up and you had neighbors at the end of that program saying it was fine it was fine so we have to have those conversations and we have to make the commitment to those conversations Randy so I hope that starts to be a little bit responsive it's not I don't have a but I mean I think those are the things we're gonna need to do open to the plan so I can actually read the specific items that we're talking about for how do we authentically get the voices of people experiencing homelessness that we've articulated but if there's something you want to speak to in that I'm happy to yield my time well I just want to say I heard you councilmember around to have the meaningful thing to you I just want to name in my career when I work in the foster system I had the honor of standing up the first emancipated foster board in my time in Alameda County it was painful and difficult and challenging but very rewarding to actually have to confront the real people who you serve and hear really from them how short you fall and then when I promoted into aging state law in California requires in the in-home supportive services program which is a blind and disabled medical client to get home and care and home a consumer board that I met with for eight years and to hear from people in wheelchairs what how hard it is to navigate this so I'm forever changed as a public servant having been a participant in consumer groups I want to answer that in two ways one is in our presentation we did say and it is going to happen it's going to be a sample there is going to be in the COVID context interviews to get feedback of people with lived experience now but that's just part of it the other part of it is there is expectations both by federal mandate but not heavily policed but it is best practice to figure out a way to weave in current and past people with lived experience into your thinking systems we don't do that here from what I can tell I mean there's different pieces but they're not built in and I can tell you having done those two previous efforts and cost to clear an IHSS it's not a simple task because you really have to build support and systems in place and sometimes it's very traumatizing for people to come in with a bunch of people who have a good life and then have to leave and go back to their life I mean it's there's a lot to it so I think part of this three-year plan I'd like to think that we can if we choose to have this be a priority we're gonna have to get the best heads together figure out how to do it but provide the support so that's real and meaningful and not just something that makes us feel good but something that actually we really truly listen and I've seen both happen it's I don't want to be part of anything that's in generous and tokenizing so we have to be really hold ourselves to task to do it correctly thank Randy's answers better than me reading anything from page 19 have the framework but it really I think we already have some experience well we we have folks who've lived experience on the half currently and they struggle to get gas money to come to the meeting you know they you know we we we need to look at this you know I'm paid to be there you know how do we as Randy said how do we support people to fully participate and and and not have it be tokenism one of the things we are saying about this is like create a working group of advocates and those experiencing homelessness that there's a group that comes together so they're not a single person that's on this larger team that's supposed to represent that experience and then that's the sort of commitment that you know they're squishy but they're real and those are the best and we're gonna and that's something that comes with trust you know you don't just move your magic wand and make it happen it's gonna it's gonna come with trust and just sticking with it and I actually I think you know when Robert comes our new director I think Robert has a lot of experience and you know I'll say that this is this is who we've hired he's not yet moving down to Santa Cruz but he plans to be here on a regular basis he's kind of leading a team and Randy shared this with me I'm sharing it he's like well can I just stay at one of the hotels that you guys are using for COVID shelter so I could be with the people that we're serving now of course our rooms are all full so no he can't you know I want to be with the people I'm serving I want to understand their experience he's here on Monday 8,000 other ideas and things that I'd love to talk about but I know you guys have somewhere else to be at six and we and we have other things to cover this evening so I was just wondering so for us or other electives to get involved in this new strategy like what's the timeline and can you give some more details about that you got the police are you on me well can I with a healthy and appropriate lean on the mayor on the vice mayor on my team I don't want to enter I don't want to tell you how to do your process but what I can say is you know there's this existing forum called the two by two where everybody I just named as a participant that will or won't be our recurring form over the next two months but we're really the doors open for a couple of months you can individually respond to the survey you can engage those and I know you guys are rotating those who represent you at the two by two or one off you know reach out reach out to us and again it's probably worth naming it's not as if the door closes in two months when we finalize the plan we can just celebrate the plan it'll look nice to be a frame throughout the three years there's gonna be ample and for ample conversation and a reset every six months so plenty of moments to engage in the process at least if you want to say anything more specific but I just don't want to get in your house I would just say the same exact thing I mean the framework we're gonna have to adapt over time this is not the last moment but what's more important is that you're involved moving forward and I think part of the conversations we have to have is what does that look like well and I don't know the answer what does that look like you want a champion that you want to watch that you want to challenge us on and and just you know that you want to say hey I can help you connect with this part of the community for this piece of the solution because that's what it's gonna take I mean we need to engage you know a whole bunch of our real estate and property management professionals to have hard conversations about what are people's fears about renting to very very low-income people who may have that you said bad credit or whatever there is work that we can share you know it's not it's not Randy's new team is it gonna do all that work we're gonna this is gonna be a collective impact we absolutely welcome your participation right now and moving forward so then I have my one idea I'm gonna throw it on the table so I know that we're thinking about this as getting these people into houses where you're thinking apartments or studios but there's a lot of people in our community that and I'm not trying to be rude but they're probably a little older than me because their kids has moved out but they might have an extra bedroom and maybe they haven't rented it out in the past and they don't need the income but maybe they have a part that wants to give and and then like reaching out to that segment of our community that maybe they could be an opportunity where they haven't rented before I think that's a great great concept and quite frankly there is a program with our with our YGPR youth homelessness demonstration project and we have a team that actually is trying to work on that and of course great ideas like that you know that could pandemic kind of put a big wrench in those kind of create approaches to riddle really utilize the assets we have in place so I think but that's exactly the kind of stuff we need to do you guys mentioned a new government kind of a new governance structure and I'm just kind of maybe just a few seconds timing kind of what this may mean I know there's a lot acronyms involved but probably from maybe the perspective of sort of elected and you know how you know we have the two-by-two but there's two other cities in the county just just curious if you could just provide a tiny bit on that on the continuum of care the kind of money has come in you know do we do we do we fix that the other idea that has come up is do we have some kind of commission right where it's like it has elected it may have some other stakeholders on it and and there's some functions that that the COC has to do that makes it challenging to mix the two up so we've been wrestling with do you need more than one and how do they relate to another each other work group that was convened talked about and actually I think was the really the strongest preference was ultimately and then we really mature as a system is you probably need a JPA need to do something that tension to how you manage finance and there's you know good and bad examples of that in this field area but we don't have the answer we have to I think we're gonna have to we're gonna have to move with something that where it's you know that classic don't let perfect be the enemy of the good or how about don't let the good be the enemy of doing some and it does have to I think it has to have to reflect the broad representation of the county as a whole you know because the issues of homelessness there's a lot of commonality but the faces quite frankly from me from a staffing standpoint I really would welcome the support and help of our elected officials with these dang citing issues because it's hard and it takes so thank you I'd like to throw one more thing out there the vision I would have to your question about what can what's the elected officials role so it's a little bit sideways on the government if we can do this right and we all agree to using this frame we all buy into the six-month plan and who's gonna do what and who's willing to you know help me on a committee I think it helps all of our elected city and county be able to have the same story they're telling constituents because people for the most part are very hungry you know what the heck's going on and it's hard to answer that so call of governance call something else if we all got in the same boat and this is where I think my department the baton being passed to me if we can start producing information that more consistent and tells the story and it's a story that's owned and embraced by everybody I think there's an efficiency there because I mean unless you are different human beings in my last 30 years experience in my other job I mean you all huddle behind we all huddle behind closed doors and figure out who to point a finger at what to do I mean a ton of time and energy that if we could kind of refocus it and but I think we have to get the system up and running and then get to a point where we're all telling the same story we're all communicating on more of a flow basis and it's just more efficient now it's the time to call in and once you dial then please press yeah this afternoon we got by email a letter challenging the work master plan a legal challenge and so I'm just wondering if Tony's had a chance to take a look at that and how you want to communicate with us about that prior to the hearing like street revisited yeah thanks your patience while I shut off my phone I have not had a chance to fully digest that but I know that the staff and our consultant from due to Stephanie Striello have been working diligently to prepare a response and I hope that they will be able to respond point by point at this evening hearing I think it would be appropriate an appropriate question to ask at the outset so that we don't waste everyone's time if there's a recommendation for a continuance but I'm not prepared to make a recommendation at this point and if I could continue do you think that that recommendation would come as I'm not hearing councilor Matthew oh my question was do you see any recommendation coming from the staff after their consultation with Stephanie Striello and due to deck if they felt there were substantive issues that we should continue that is the question be posed to them at the beginning of the meeting yeah yeah that's correct I know that they've made good progress in identifying the issues and my sense is that we're probably going to be recommending moving forward but I haven't had a chance to circle back during this meeting okay thank you thank you and welcome to the 7 p.m. session so if you continue to listen through your television we're streaming device you may miss your opportunity to speak an announcement that you've been unmuted the time will then be set to two minutes and you may hang up once you finish your council member buyers here Matthew here here Golder here what can your vice mayor Myers and mayor coming I would just like to add 5 or 10 seconds delay while my wife and daughter take our dog out of the house unfortunate timing there you get excited yeah so thank you I'm gonna make my comment there fairly brief the work master plan is a comprehensive document to update the planning for the fantasies for work for this the upcoming you know long-term future and it's an exciting time for the city to really think about potential future uses of the work preserving its character and history while still making it a more enjoyable place for youth by members of the public and the community I believe that the process for developing the plan started as early as back in like 2014 so it's been a very long-term process and in the course of that process we have also spent a considerable effort in preparing an environmental impact report pursuant to the requirement of the and generally the way that work is that an initial study is prepared that looks at potential environmental impact of the project and then the notice of preparation goes out in which members of the public have an opportunity to comment on and raise concerns about potential environmental impact associated with the project and those are all taken into account in determining whether or not an environmental impact report is required or if any potential impact impacts to the environment associated with the project can be mitigated to a level of insignificant then it's possible to go forward with a shorter process and adopt a negative declaration or a mitigated negative declaration in case the city went back tomorrow and prepared an environmental impact report and what happens then is that address is put out and it's circulated and and then it's distributed to all potentially responsible public agencies entities that have oversight over certain permit aspects of regulatory aspects of the project as well as members of the community have the chance then to come in and make comment and address what are perceived as issues that have been overlooked or deficiencies in the analysis and and then what happens is those comments are taken into account and each and every one of the comments are are analyzed and responded to and so the initial environmental impact report and the comments and the staff responses to the comments and any adjustments to the environmental impact report that are made in response there too are then compiled into the final environmental impact report and so that's what's happened in this case the the project here is the work master plan it has been reviewed by the planning commission and the planning commission has recommended that it be adopted and so now it's come before the city council for consideration of adoption of the work master plan and certification of the environmental impact report and here's what happens frequently in these situations is that there will be a potentially a flurry of last-minute comments that are made that require further analysis or at least a response from the city staff and that's what happened in this instance is that we got comments that weren't formally submitted to the city clerk as far as I am aware that they were sent to council members and and made their way to city staff and that happened late last evening and didn't cross my desk until after 1 p.m. that means the staff have been diligently analyzing and looking at these comments and as a result of that I'm afraid that at least as far as the staff recommendation goes this evening hearing maybe anti-climactic because we would like to have some additional time to review analyze and and really be able to more meaningfully respond to some of the last-minute comments that we got and so the recommendation and I'm happy to allow planning director or the economic development director to weigh in here but recommendation is to like we did earlier this afternoon as much as I would fit continue this item to provide us with more of an opportunity to fully analyze and meaningfully respond to the last-minute salvo that we got on this project happy to answer any questions respond to comments I think your sound is a little tell me now I don't like wasting time and again I just stop something because somebody's not happy about it and I think it's disappointing for both of us that are here prepared and have taken off work or wherever we're wherever these and we're here and prepared and I also think it's kind of almost weird and ominous for the public listening in that we've now canceled like both of our might cancel both of our main items I'm wondering I know someone asked about having that last correspondence the public record I'm sure eventually it will be but for this one I'm just like wondering is there a way that we can at least the public know why we're doing this and I just yeah that's because it seems you know disappointing for people that have been waiting so many years in such a long time for today and hear me my my sound was turned off but not my the letter is the public record it's been received by the city clerk and so it's available to members of the public on request and will also be included in the agenda packet when the item comes back to you if the council's pleasure is to to another meeting yeah yeah thank you mayor yeah I mean certainly disappointing I think I spent pretty much most of my weekend meeting with people about the war project looks like there was a letter received went to only four three of the council members not quite sure why it wasn't given to the full council but I mean I think to the point of Mr. Condati's I think it's important for the city especially with our financial straights that we're in to evaluate all necessary you know risks that we have to evaluate as we move through different project considerations and approvals so kind of a double strike today and also this afternoon's agenda item in terms of you know definitely working with a lot of folks who are very interested in trying to understand how to get more housing downtown and so it's disappointing to have two major items at this point time with these late letters arriving basically be postponed I guess my support would be that or my proposal is that I think we have potentially have the front street project coming back in December December 8 I hate to kick the work back and staff can correct me but I think realistically the worst gonna have to move back to January at this point and hopefully we can address some of the issues brought up in the letters and you know provide the opportunity for our community to weigh in on on this important feature in our community certainly we've gotten lots of correspondence on it and just yeah regretful that we've got two big projects and both of them look like they probably have to be continued in the late late communications so my preference would be to try not to load up the December 8 meeting with two big hearings and I think realistically the work should probably be pushed back to to January I know there's incoming council members but I believe that those council members can be adequately brought up to speed with regards to project and I think it's I think it's important to recognize their you know their role on the city council in moving something as important as the war forward which is a major piece of infrastructure that I think they deserve you have a vote on so those are my thoughts thank you mayor before I make a motion I just wanted to ask Tony Elliott if if I postponing this we that we would have had if we had moved the project or at least come to a vote today have a comment about that good evening mayor members of the council just one comment we would make is there was a there is a grant that we were hoping to apply for in December December 19th is the deadline so if it was possible if it would be possible to hear this at the November 24th meeting that would be preferable and I just got off the phone with director Lee Butler planning and he seems to think that's that's doable as well and David McCormick who is our asset manager has been tracking closely at this and so if you have additional questions about that grant opportunity he could answer those questions I mean I think Bonnie said it the FPP grant which I believe Claire from Public Works recently brought forward for the Riverwalk it's a substantial pot of money it's the last round of it it's my knowledge up to eight and a half million dollars and we're watching as the state continues to cut funding for grant programs across the board so it's very likely that you know who missed these rounds there won't be a lot of money for a while for anything on the wharf or more broadly as you may recall this summer we applied for a number of design grants for wharf landings we missed that timeline we were not able to get the IR certified in time for them to make the decision with the wildlife conservation board and so we lost lost out on the $10 million worth of design grants for these landings so every time that we defer this and don't take action because someone's legislating legislating through a lawsuit you know we're risking the future of the world so just disappointing but understandable can I go ahead and make a motion and I know those are the people that have comments so I can hold off if you want but maybe I'll wait till my colleagues make the comments and I'm happy to make a motion yeah I don't have any specific comments other than being disappointed as well and but I do think it's important for us to try to get this done to potentially be able to access some grant money I mean that's that's really one of the primary drivers of getting this done so I would suggest if we can't fit it on the 24th I mean I definitely be willing to all a special meeting and make sure that we get this done so that you have the time you need our air clear has the time and other staff to get a grant proposal and I think it's I think that's really important so thank you mayor yeah no I echo everybody's comments that's far and I'm just kind of curious as to whether you know the 24th is actually soon right in terms of preparing for a response and so in terms of the timing I don't know if you know Lee wants to share or others but what is actually necessary to have a response to the letter we received today so that we're able to make a decision because we absolutely don't want to miss out on planning opportunities we don't know if you want to weigh in or or Tony if you want to elaborate further sure I can just weigh in and say that for cause they come in during the public review period we are legally required to provide written responses we're not legally required to provide a written response to the information that came in today however through the conversations that we've had we have started preparing response and we're we're striving to be able to provide that information to the council tonight verbally if nothing else to establish that we can address those issues we while we don't have that legal requirement to prepare a written response you know having that extra time would give us an opportunity hopefully to not only more carefully analyze what has been provided to us but also to thoughtfully prepare a response that otherwise you know may have missed something through the quick turnaround that we had during the council meeting today if I may may or for follow-up then so if I'm hearing you correctly Lee then what you're saying is that you know essentially you were anticipating us to move forward with the item this evening with a verbal response but given that late nature of receiving this document that we're not legally required to have a sort of a written response but if I'm hearing Tony correctly then I'm hearing you say that legally we want to defer so I'm just trying to make sure I'm clear on what the recommendation we do want to continue this to make sure that we can provide a thorough and complete response it's not mandated that that is a written response but nevertheless we even though we were striving to provide a verbal response tonight in our in our hustle to respond we didn't want to miss something we said you know it's it's better to take a step back and make sure that we're fully evaluating everything in the comment butters you know we don't want to miss something and then you know have to you know start over from scratch six or eight months from now through a lawsuit as a result of not putting this off for a short period of time okay no thank you for the clarification I appreciate that this is disappointing it's just so far inadequate the work that's gone into this for literally years and making the decision to pursue an EIR and a very thorough process and vetting to the Commission and to have this come at the 11th hour again I think probably most members of the public don't realize how really demoralizing this is to those who've worked on trying to preserve the war both structurally and economically and as a as a couple destination for years and it's been it's been said we have and will continue to lose major grant opportunities to sustain what is really a community tracker it's very well spelled out in the staff report and I would suggest to those members of the public who wrote take time to look up the staff report and read at the agenda report it really is exceedingly complete so I do support unfortunately continuing this you know abundance of caution but I also do want to get questions answered and forward the FPP program is really centered around engagement with disadvantaged communities so there's a little bit of outreach and which is always challenging in this time but that needs to happen with the most likely the beach flats community and the areas around the work of each area as far as sort of focusing on a project and what they'd like to see out of it you know the abundance of hearings we've had helped support that case but potentially working through the community bridges or somebody I know no end parks was very interested in supporting the effort and to that end you know if council is able to support that or direct staff towards conducting that outreach even in advance of approving master plan you know that that's sort of a necessary steps done we were hoping that approved already so we could do that but just a written material coming forward I really think that the focus should be on analyzing the comments and then council with a more detailed response even if it's just you know a verbal response at the meeting at the when it when it comes back so I don't see any problem with getting that preliminary direction at this tone okay thank you given the the information we received this evening then I'm happy to make a motion I know that councillor Golder was planning on doing that as well so however we would like to do it in regards to sort of just to move that we would have this item continued until our next meeting and also give direction for community outreach and preparation for the grant application to occur prior to that official action on the 24th I believe again I just raised the possibility of putting this on a closed session agenda item as as a closed session agenda item as well so we can ask questions in that environment that we may have regarding legal issues I would note that the email thread that presented to you with the letter from the attorney mentioned possible concessions that might avoid the possibility of litigation so there is a threat of litigation that has been made in this case yeah I mean yes a threat of litigation yeah and so it would qualify for discussion in closed session as a significant exposure to litigation yeah with significant exposure right to litigation Matthew aye aye Golder vice mayor Myers