 Good morning, we'll now resume County budget hearings. It's the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors special meeting. It is Thursday, June 23rd, 2022. Look, could you please call the roll? Supervisor Friend. Here. Coonerty. Here. Chappett. Here. McPherson. Here. And Koenig. Here. Thank you, Chair. You have a quorum. Thank you. Teo Palacios, do we have any additions, revisions or deletions for the agenda today? We have nothing. All right, thank you. And we'll proceed with item 42, the budget managers overview for public safety and justice. Budget manager Pimentel will provide us a short presentation. Good morning, Chair Koenig. And thank you for joining us into day three of our budget hearings. Today, we'll be stepping into the land of public safety and justice. And then continuing to concluding actions on Tuesday to conclude our public hearings. I'm going to provide you an overview of the departments that are both providing you presentations today, as well as those that are on consent. And those are all in our public safety and justice departments. We'll start with our public defender's office and then conclude with the sheriff coroner. So included within this category are departments that are on consent. And many of these are funding where we're a member of we provide funding for, as well as county fire who provides our fire services through Cal Fire contracts. The departments and budgets that are on consent are the 911 communication center, our animal contribution, our animal control services, our contribution to the superior court, our county fire protection and our ground jury. The departments that will be presenting to you their budget for consideration today include the public defender's office, probation, district attorney and our sheriff coroner. I recommend that you hold any questions for those four departments for their presentations. In total, this category is $183.6 million of all funds for the county. The largest allocation goes to our sheriff coroner at 93.9 million or 51.1% of this category. When we, this particular category, all week I've been talking in terms of all funds versus journal fund. This is one of those categories that most of the funding is general fund funding. So of the 183.6 million, 169.6 is general fund funding. So the largest majority of our general fund lives here as far as proportion of the total budget. Probation, the district attorney and the public defender's office are the next three largest after the sheriff. The remaining costs are attributed to their contracts and our contributions that include again the provision of fire protection by Cal Fire, our contributions to this period courts, 911 communication center, animal services center and our support of the grand jury. In terms of how much the general fund contributes directly to support these departments, again, in terms of the funding that they're able to provide, these are the departments that are limited in their capacity to generate their own internal funding. Now that being said, the probation and sheriff coroner do a wonderful job of getting a lot of federal and state funding in total, they bring in $54 million. This category brings in $54 million is largely from sheriff, largely from probation to help fund using federal and state dollars to help fund this category. You might recall that across all general fund contributions we contribute the greatest amount to this category of 103.9 million dollars. The next category, health and human gets $39 million. So by comparison, we're prioritizing devoting most of our general fund discretionary resources to supporting these departments. The sheriff coroner as this pie chart shows receives the largest allocation at 64 million or 59% of these contributions with the district attorney public defender and probation each receiving between 9.3 million and 15.2 million of general fund support. As far as what has changed in the general fund support from last year, the greatest amount has gone to increase the funding in support of our sheriff coroner at 3.9 million. They received a 6.8% increase. A district attorney also received 1.5 million and probation received 0.7 million in additional funding support. A lot of it is attributed to just normal costs. There are some position increases but they're very modest for the 22-23 budget. So a lot of what's been driving these particular costs are normal cost of services, increase in costs and the big word inflation that we've been talking about that's starting this to show itself in a lot of categories. As far as positions, we've talked a lot about our success bringing the public defender's office to an in-house county service, fully staffed beginning next month. That is where the biggest position increase has gone into the 22-23 budget. There's been 40 positions that are added to this budget to finish the transition of that department from a contract to a funded county program. While the remaining of the departments have received just a few positions, a sheriff at two additional positions, probation at a half and a district attorney at three. What's notable is that the sheriff's corner and probation each added eight positions after the adoption of last year's budget. So in this current budget year, they already have added eight positions that have increased their force. While we would all like to see those numbers be greater, that is important to reflect but it's not just the two or the half. They've already got eight positions that they were able to help bring on board this year as a mid-year adjustment for next year support. That concludes my overview. Well, next actions are to consider the consent agenda, go to public comments, continue the budget hearings with the four departments they'll be presenting to you today and then consider the approval of those four departments and continue the budget hearings to June 28th. I'm happy to discuss any questions or comments you might have on the consent agenda item. And then I know that the departments will welcome your comments or feedback during their presentations. That concludes my presentation. Thank you. Thank you, budget manager Pimentel. Are there any questions or comments from members of the board? I'll make a general comment. The general comment, it really focuses on the sheriff's department and other police agencies throughout the county. But I think it needs to be mentioned right from the start about, to thank our sheriff in particular for embracing the 21st century policing protocols several years ago and aligning all five of our local law enforcement agencies to do the same. But our law enforcement and criminal justice leaders didn't stop with that. And with the national conversation about police policies and procedures becoming increasingly important, our criminal justice council in the county conducted, excuse me, what is believed to be the first regional comparative review in the country, in the United States, regarding how our law enforcement and criminal justice agencies align and are most effective. As a result of that review, multiple agencies in our community updated their policies, used to force technology oversight and privacy with the aid of to continually work together to improve the effectiveness of local law enforcement partnering within the criminal justice system. In May, the National Association of Counties honored the effort with an award which was very well deserved, the first in the United States. I want to thank Supervisor Friend, especially our county's representative on the National Association of Counties for his continual strong support with NACO and for our law enforcement and criminal justice agencies and officers, and congratulations to all the agencies for your hard work and participating in the multi-year review for the outstanding outcomes that are well-recognized nationally. This is, I know maybe a little out of line before we're gonna get down to the specific agencies, but this is really, really special and I just wanna congratulate the sheriff and all the law enforcement agencies in Santa Cruz County for literally getting their act together to better serve the people of Santa Cruz County. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor McPherson. Supervisor Caput. Yeah, thanks Mark for your report and everything. This is more of a general question because you're overlooking the whole budget, I guess. And philosophically with the market, the way it's going and the economy are the investments that we're making with the county where we put our money and are they doing, are they going down or are they sort of leveling off or do you have any idea? The portfolio that we invest in is very conservative. So our portfolio will always go up. It's just how fast will it grow is growing by a half a percent or a percent. We don't invest aggressively. We invest from the three tier priority of safety, liquidity and yield. So we prioritize the safety of our funds. We prioritize cash flow making sure it's available and the interest rate earnings on our investment is the last priority. So it's a very low priority for us. So to answer your question, we are not being impacted by any economic investments that are happening or stock market declines. That's not impacting us as an entity. It is indirectly impacting us in the terms of like CalPERS. They're heavily invested in the stock market. So as their returns decline and there are starting to see losses in their fund, they will increase contributions that all California agencies pay into pensions. So it's indirectly going to impact us, but we as a county, we invest very conservatively. So we're not impacted by what's happening in the stock market, if that's your question. And most of our investments are what? Very conservative and- Yeah, agency nodes. Yeah, bonds are every place we're putting our funding and that's guaranteed income and very low rates. It doesn't look good right now as far as stocks and all that. So anyway, that's good to know. Thanks, Mark, and take care. And I give the compliments to our controllers who manages our portfolio, either Triskal and her team, they do a really nice job of managing them. Yeah, I think Supervisor McPherson, you overlook the treasury and stuff like that, right? Yeah, I'm on the Treasury Oversight Committee now. Yeah. It is very prudent in fiscal, the conservative investments, as you said. All right, any further comments or questions? And we'll proceed with action on the Consent Agenda and we'll begin with public comment on the Consent Agenda. Again, this is to approve the budgets for the 9-1-1 Communication Center, Animal Control Services, Contribution to the Superior Court, County Fire Protection and Grand Jury. So please address your comments to how one or more of those departments. Good morning, my name is James Ewing Whitman. Although I wanted to address, I think it's the Consent Agenda item number 51 or 52 that had to do with fire and stuff. I'd rather kind of speak on some of the things that were mentioned today. First, I actually wanna say that I'm not jealous of the bicycle that you use to go to work, Manukuni, but you have a good taste. Believe it or not, in the past three days, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, I spent a significantly more amount of time in the court system than I did here. Significantly more amount of time. I experienced the law enforcement mostly being extremely courteous, if not funny. There was something that happened yesterday that really wasn't as courteous and it really wasn't funny. I have been in on the third floor and the fourth floor of this building literally hundreds of times to get permits and get information and that has assisted me with a livelihood where I have tens of thousands of hours working in this county and probably at least 250 signed inspections. So I'm only standing here because I'm okay with being the responsible party to be responsible for what I've said, 42 seconds. So I don't know, I have some stuff that's pretty interesting. This is about the Fabian Society. We have a supervisor that was trained at the London Fabian School. This is a delightful piece of information. It is titled, Guide to Overthrowing Tyrants and Putting a Stop to Government Abuse. It really focuses with the US Constitution. I have 17 seconds. I may make comments about you guys just being scripted actors. But what I'm holding in my hand is the Santa Cruz County Local Agenda 21, a sustainable community action plan on our agenda for the future. Final draft for consideration by Santa Cruz County Municipalities. Thank you, Mr. Mayor and the Board of Supervisors. Thank you so a lot of information in here. Thank you, you guys. Anyone else wishing to comment on our consent agenda items? Seeing none, well, is there anyone on Zoom that wishes to comment? Yes, Chair, we do have one speaker. Charlie Eadie, your microphone is now available. Okay, hi, can you hear me all right? Yes, we can. Okay, Charlie Eadie, Eadie Consultants. I work with the residents at Pajaro Dunes commenting on the CSA IV budget. And we have worked closely with Cal Fire and county officials as we do every year on getting to this budget and approving it internally with the organizations at Pajaro Dunes. One thing that was noted in your agenda item was the LAFCO reorganization report. And I just wanted to say that Pajaro Dunes is closely watching this. There's a lot of concern among the residents there about anything that might potentially reduce their fire services. And there's a lot of unknowns financially and service-wise related to the upcoming LAFCO process. And I just wanted to let you know that Pajaro Dunes wants to participate in this and has a lot of concerns that we hope will be addressed. We have met with a supervisor friend and he's been very helpful. And we will probably be talking with other supervisors as well as this process moves forward. We do support the current budget and we do want to continue to collaborate with the county and really want to understand the LAFCO proposal and all the information that comes out of that process. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Edie. We have no further speakers, Chair. I think we have one more speaker here in the chambers. Yes, thank you very much. My name is Becky Steinbruner. I am a resident of rural Aptos and a member of CSA-40A. I'm concerned about the funding for County Fire because I feel that the 2020 special benefit assessment that was levied upon the CSA-48 property owners was not properly done. I see in the newspaper, there is a public hearing next Tuesday for the assessments regarding this and the other fixed fire flow rate charges but there is nothing on the County Fire website about this. There's been no public notice regarding this public hearing next Tuesday. Under California government code 5078.2, it is not legal to levy special benefit assessments for fire suppression on areas on properties within the state responsibility area. And that is exactly what the County did with a special benefit assessment that was passed in 2020. This is under litigation, but I wanna make you aware that I have great concerns as one who is paying those taxes that the County Fire Chief at the time, Ian Larkin, as soon as this money was beginning to come in, he ordered type one engines to serve the rural areas of Santa Cruz County for fire suppression. Type one engines are very large, they're very heavy and are not suited for the narrow roads and bridges of Santa Cruz County Rural's area. There was a real need for type three engines but that's not how the money was spent. I also have concerns about whether Cal... Tuesday's meeting room. Mr. Chair. I'm sorry. Supervisor Caput, if you could, I think we'll proceed if you could. Yeah. Oh, thank you. Nice to see you. Nice to see you all. Thank you. Thank you. Chair, I'd like to make a comment on County Fire item number 51. I wanna thank and both congratulate County Fire for its successes this past year. A special note is the Zone Haven evacuation system, which was essential to the successful evacuation of thousands of residents in the CZU fire, as well as the storm-related debris flow evacuations thereafter. County Fire has struggled for years with volunteer recruitment, but I'm pleased to see that 13 new volunteer firefighters and EMRs graduated from the Academy this year. I'm sure that'll be a help. We'll be sure added protection for the people of Santa Cruz County. We have quite a bit of work to do over the next two years to revise our County Master Fire Plan and evaluate the best use of our limited resources, but it's really encouraging to see that we have some 13 new volunteer firefighters. And I thank County Fire for the services it provides. Thank you, Supervisor McPherson. Any other comments or questions on the consent agenda? To move the consent agenda. Second. Motion by Supervisor Friend, seconded by Supervisor McPherson to approve the consent agenda. Any further discussion? Seeing none, clerk roll call, but please. Supervisor Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. Chappett. Aye. McPherson. Aye. And Koenig. Aye. Consent agenda passes unanimously. Thank you. The budget for those departments being approved will proceed with item 44 on our regular agenda. Consider approval of the 22-23 proposed budget for the public defender, including any supplemental materials and take related actions as outlined in the reference budget documents as recommended by the County Administrative Officer. And for presentation on this, we have our public defender, Heather Rogers. Ms. Rogers, I believe your microphone is just to be turned on. Microphone button here. Thank you. Are we in business? Sure. Wonderful. Good morning again. It's very nice to see you. Our newest Supreme Court Justice, Katanji Jackson-Brown, the first black woman on the Supreme Court and the first former public defender, had this to say about her service as a public defender. I care deeply about our constitution and the rights that make us free. Defense lawyers perform a service and our system is exemplary throughout the world, precisely because we ensure that people who are accused of crimes are treated fairly. Strong public defense makes our system stronger. Strong public defense ensures procedural integrity and just outcomes. Strong public defense strengthens our community and it makes us safer. The Santa Cruz County Office of the Public Defender is committed to strong public defense. I wanna take this opportunity to introduce and thank Assistant CAO, Nicole Coburn, Principal Administrative Analyst, Sven Stafford and Public Defender Administrative Services Manager, Adam Spickler, who are co-presenting with me today. They have collaborated in the many hours of thought and work that went into this budget but also that went into building this new agency. We'll now switch over to our county's new budget website to give you an overview of our department's proposed budget which is publicly available at sanacruzcounty.us backslash vision Santa Cruz backslash budget. The mission, vision and values of the Office of the Public Defender drive our budget proposal. It is our mission to courageously defend the accused, to demand equal justice for all, to empower our clients with inspired advocacy in the courtroom and community. We're on a mission to elevate public defense one client at a time. On July 1st, 2022, we open the doors on our county's first ever Office of the Public Defender. Our office will provide public defense services mandated by the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution and necessary for ensuring a criminal justice system that is equitable, effective and fair. We'll represent the thousands of people a year who are accused of crimes in Santa Cruz County and cannot afford to hire their own attorney. In addition to supporting the new Office of the Public Defender, the county will continue to provide conflict counsel for cases where our office cannot represent the accused. For example, because two people are charged in the same case. The county administrative office will administer two levels of conflicts with the law firm of Page and Dudley handling most of the conflicts and a conflict panel of skilled local defense attorneys managed by county council handling the rest. Together, the three public defense providers in our county share a total budget of $14,999,279 with $2,975,000 of that total budget going to the conflict contracts. The principles I'll talk about today apply to public defense in general, but my focus will be on our new agency and the approximately $12 million will need to ensure that people in Santa Cruz County who are accused of crimes are treated fairly. The county's new budget website doesn't yet reflect our agency's operational plan because we're brand new. We open on July 1st. We'll propose an operational plan to this board in the fall. In the meantime, I'll preview some of our objectives later in the presentation, including early representation, community-based whole person defense, improved technology and training, increased services in South County, a focus on equity and a case management system that will help us track outcomes. Our new agency costs start where our contracted public defense services end on June 30th, 2022. The private law firms costs had increased on average roughly 4% per year since at least 2017. In fiscal year 2122, the contracted law firms cost totaled over $9.4 million. The cost required for our new agency to bring over the current private law firm staff and conduct simply a status quo operation is estimated at about $10 million. That's a 6% increase over fiscal year 2122. The increase of accounts for public defense staff having pay parity for the first time with the DA's office and implementing a structure that is transparent and accountable to the citizens of Santa Cruz County. Our proposed first year budget includes an additional investment to begin addressing recommendations for improvement. Includes staffing linked to national caseload standards and additional technology training and supervision to make sure that our clients receive effective representation. Our services and supplies budget funds modern technology including a robust case management system, laptops for onsite and remote work that integrate with courtroom technology and innovative tools for collecting and tracking data to provide our clients with access to social support services. These costs are offset by new state funding of $350,000 and $300,000 in savings from renegotiation and right sizing of the conflict contracts. We also expect our new service model to result in systemic savings as we work with our partners to address clients' unmet social needs and create collaborative models for providing upstream services to avoid downstream costs. In the next part of my presentation, I'll provide an overview of what we'll do with this budget as we work together to elevate public defense. My goal as the new county public defender is to bring model practices to Santa Cruz County as we learn from public defenders around the country what is working in communities like ours. We'll provide community-based whole person defense with a small executive division to guide policy, a lean administrative division for legal services, operational and IT support, a robust legal division, investigations division and holistic defense division to provide direct client services and a training equity and development division to support our defense teams. In addition to the aggressive courtroom advocacy that we've been bringing to this community for over 47 years, we'll have dedicated defense teams in each courtroom and a holistic defense division that includes social workers and client advocates. As whole person defenders, our defense teams will include advocates from different disciplines, including defense lawyers, investigators, holistic defense advocates, attorneys with an expertise in immigration, record clearance and legal writing, administrative professionals and outside experts. Teams will be assigned to a single courtroom like department three over in the courthouse or a single unit like juvenile justice and specialty courts. Our teams will work together to help clients lift themselves up and out of the system. We will work toward meeting or exceeding national caseload standards for public defense, which tell us the maximum number of cases of a certain type each attorney should handle in a year and set staffing guidelines for investigators, paralegals, social service case workers and supervisors. In 2020, the county commissioned the nonprofit Sixth Amendment Center to evaluate our public defense system. The center commended our defenders for their dedication, their talent and their skill, but the center also pointed out ways that we must move toward meeting national guidelines and standards. The center recommended the county to appoint a public defender and in the nine months since being appointed, I've worked with the county's transition team to carefully analyze our system, develop a plan for this new agency and create this proposed budget. Our recommendations for public defense position us to be a leader at a time when our state is focused on correcting problems that have burdened other county public defender offices. Problems that have led to lawsuits related to excessive caseloads, insufficient training and an effective representation. I've met with stakeholders, analyzed our caseloads in view of national guidelines, examined our justice systems revenue and expenditures, reviewed the current caseload of our felony attorneys, observed court and applied my own nearly two decades of experience as a public defender and nearly a decade as a defender in this county to project the budget that will need to stand up an agency that provides exceptional service to our clients and truly reflects the values of this community. If we apply the national standards to our defense teams, there's a discrepancy between what we've asked for and the national standards. To get a sense of where we've been and where we'd like to go, we've represented the private firm staffing in light blue to provide a baseline. The green column represents the staffing suggested by national guidelines. Our proposed staffing is in deep blue. Our proposed staffing is a compromise reached after looking carefully at current staffing across the system. We thought about how drastically increasing our staff during a transition would shift time and energy from client services to training and orientation. And we have determined that the wisest course is to build capacity gradually using workload data tied to Santa Cruz County that will collect in upcoming years. In the end, closing the gap between national caseload standards and our proposed staffing will require reduced caseloads or increased personnel. Reducing caseloads requires us to come together as a community and figure out how to use the other tools in our toolkit like housing, mental health services, social services and restorative justice to address the root causes of system involvement and bring down our prosecution rate. The only other way to close the gap is to increase public defense staffing so that we can keep up with new prosecutions. I think we can all agree that less crime and fewer prosecutions is better for this community. To that end, we're working closely with the district attorney's office and our other community, county and court partners to reach upstream, offer preventative services earlier in the process and together identify cases that are appropriate for alternative resolutions. The budget we've proposed achieves five objectives to fulfill our mission, realize our vision and reflect our values. With this budget, we'll move toward meeting national standards for public defense caseloads. We'll staff defense teams to provide community-based whole person defense using model practices. We'll embed equity in our culture, procedure and practices. We'll invest in IT, training and supervision to enhance advocacy and outcomes and we'll partner with our community. Our proposed budget funds dedicated defense teams, training and technology, holistic defense services, early representation, vertical representation, community outreach programs and partnerships to improve services and secure grants. In the new agency, we'll pair aggressive courtroom advocacy with holistic defense to provide community-based whole person defense. This is defense that focuses on the client behind the case. Holistic defense is a model that provides seamless access to services that meet each client's legal and social needs, dynamic interdisciplinary communication, advocates with an interdisciplinary skill set and a robust understanding of and connection to the community served. The truth is our clients need more than just traditional criminal defense. They need wraparound services to address root causes to ensure the best legal and social outcomes and to return to their communities. Whenever possible, we'll represent our clients as early as possible. We're developing a pilot program at the jail that will allow us to represent incarcerated clients after arrest and before first court date. We're working to create a pilot program in South County that gives youthful offenders ages 18 to 25 charged with misdemeanors the option of meeting with an attorney right after their arrest and before their first court appearance. By getting to clients earlier, we can reduce incarceration times, speed up the delivery of supportive services, explore options for diverting a case before it's even filed and mitigate the consequences of system involvement. Our defense teams will provide vertical representation which means our clients will have the same defense team from their first court appearance ideally through reentry. We'll aim to provide the same excellent consistent personalized service that paying clients get at the best law firms. And we'll partner with our community. We'll provide outreach to our neighbors who are struggling with issues related to justice system involvement. We'll have bi-monthly clean slate workshops in North and South County to help with record clearance, job resource fairs highlighting employers willing to work with our reentry clients and workshops for families supporting system impacted youth. We're developing partnerships with organizations aligned with our mission and pursuing alternative funding streams. This includes a contract with partners for justice to fund three client advocates to help us learn how to provide effective holistic defense. A grant award from the Board of State and Community Corrections which provides funding to work on post-conviction relief and relationships with local nonprofits that provide complimentary services like immigration advocacy, housing resources and job training. On behalf of our public defender team including the defenders who will join us on July 1st thank you for this opportunity to continue to serve our community. It's our honor. As public defenders, we are public servants and as public servants, we're committed to ensuring that Santa Cruz County is a beacon of courageous, compassionate, client-focused public defense. This budget proposal gives us what we need to fulfill our constitutional and our statutory mandates. The right to a public defender is a fundamental right guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution. As public defenders, we don't choose who gets arrested. We don't choose who gets charged, who goes to prison or who goes home. We don't choose which cases to file or how many. We choose the calling to defend. And this budget will give us what we need to answer that calling with strong public defense. As the public defender of Santa Cruz County I respectfully request that this Board approve our fiscal year 2022-2023 proposed budget and supplemental materials included in the continuing agreements list as recommended by the County Administrative Officer. Thank you so much for your time and your support of us during this transition. We're truly grateful. Thank you, public defender Rogers. Are there questions or comments from members of the Board? Supervisor McPherson. Yeah, Mr. Chair. Congratulations to our first public defender, Heather Rogers and your team for developing the first budget and the new department and for launching operations on July 1st. I'm sure there's gonna be some upcoming surprises as we go along. Being the first is great, but it's also real challenging. This has been a huge undertaking for this County. And we must once again thank Nicole Colvern and Sven Stafford from the CAO's office as well as our justice partners and longtime contracted public defenders that served Santa Cruz so well for over 40 years for making this initiative a reality. I'm truly excited about it. I look forward to hearing later updates this year on us through the progress as you go along. It's gonna be some tremendous challenges but we really feel confident that we have selected the best person for this position, Ms. Rogers, and we wish you well and for defending those who can't defend themselves in court. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor McPherson. Supervisor Caput. Okay. You're doing a great job. I don't think I've seen the term too well. Supervisor Caput, would you just pull the microphone a little closer to your mouth, please? A holistic approach to legal terms. When you say holistic, it's kind of involving the client or whatever. Usually I think of that as a medical term but anyway, it's kind of nice to see. Thank you. We're really excited about it. I think by really focusing on the whole person, we're gonna have much better outcomes. You bet. And then the staffing right now is 40, is that correct? But in the budget, it looks like 56 is good. How many attorneys would that be and how many analysts would that be our investigators? Sure, so we're looking at 31 attorneys, eight investigators, 10 administrative professional staff and three social workers. And then we also will have our three advocates funded through the Partners for Justice contract that you approved earlier this year, which I think will be tremendous for helping us really understand how to use this model to achieve the best outcomes. Yeah, and I think what strikes me about the public defender, when you get older, I haven't needed or people that I know haven't needed the public defender's office. But what I think about is it's the safety net that I have five kids. I don't know how they're gonna turn out all of them or my grandkids or whatever. And it's good to know that there's a public defender's office that will be there if they ever need it and hopefully they won't. But, and here's a history question. I'm sorry, I apologize. But how long, 100 years ago, did they have public defenders or were someone couldn't afford a lawyer? How did they handle that? Do you have any idea? I don't think there were. I think the Supreme Court provided in Gideon versus Wainwright the right to a public defender. And it's somewhat of a modern thing. And it's so critical, I think, to really upholding the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution. And we're just getting better at it every year as we share ideas around the country and try to understand how to use our resources to get the best outcomes. Yeah, you can imagine how frightening it would be if you didn't have an attorney defending you and having to go into court. And it would be terrible. Okay, thanks a lot. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Caput. There are comments or questions from board members. Can I ask, we're excited to have you, Ms. Rogers, and thank you for your hard work standing up this office. Can you talk a little bit about our approaches to chronic re-offenders, both low level and more serious, and then also how care court could impact your operations in the next year? Sure, that's such a good question. I think the first thing that we need to think about when we think about chronic offenders is root causes. What's keeping people in this kind of revolving door of recidivism and what can we do better working holistically with our partners in the court, the community and the county to address root causes so that we can help people lift themselves up and out of the system? I've been doing this for a long time and it's heartbreaking to see the same clients year after year. You get a good result and then six months later, they're there again with the same problem. And so what we're hoping to do is to just be more real about the fact that the best, most aggressive courtroom defense in the world only is gonna get you to that next arrest if we don't really think about how you ended up here in the first place. So I'm hoping that by having a holistic defense division with social workers and client advocates and by really training our staff and myself, all of us together on how holistic advocacy is working in other communities like ours that we will see those rates go down. I think it's also critical to just really give a shout out and props to the district attorney's office for their restorative justice programming and for their really deep commitment to working together to solve these problems. This is not a district attorney's office that is interested in getting a higher prosecution rate. They're interested in making our community whole and I think that together with all of the leadership that we have in this County right now, we're gonna see some really important changes. Care court is really interesting and we're trying to wrap our heads around how we can really make it work for this community while at the same time balancing some of the civil liberty issues that are at play there. And again, we have working groups and teams that are looking at this together so that we can think about how we can take this model if it's implemented and make sure that it fits our community because we have a unique situation here in Santa Cruz County, not just by virtue of the people that we serve, but also because of the leaders in this County and how well we are working together to try to use our resources to reach common goals. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Coonerty. I just take a couple of questions. The first is, I mean, I know you've got this gigantic job of opening a brand new office here on July 1st. How's it going, getting all the supplies that you need? I mean, computers, floors, everything to get all your staff working effectively. And I know also you've got a flood of cases to deal with there. So how's it going? It's going really well. It was a little bit of a cliffhanger there for a minute with worldwide glue shortage and COVID and a lot of curveballs thrown our way. But, again, the County team has been tremendous. GSD and the CAO's office and really everybody personnel, everyone's come together. It's a barn raising over there right now at May Avenue with floors going in and paint going on the walls. They're setting up furniture today. We only have a few days until we open and we're kind of in that moving phase where you look at all the boxes and you think, oh my goodness, what have we done? But I just know that on July 1st, we're going to walk into a fresh, beautiful space with a mission and vision that builds on what we've been doing here for so long and it's going to feel great. I hope that you'll come visit us. Look forward to visiting you and I'm glad to hear you're getting the support you need. Yeah, thank you. You also mentioned that the status quo budget continuing from the contract with the private firm would have been about $10 million and of course, your budget is about $15 million, about a 50% increase. Would you say most of that is going to those improved, somewhat improved case ratios? As you said, we're not at the national average or recommended average yet, but of course we didn't have case workers before and we will have some now. So would you say is that where the increase is going to or anything else? Yeah, so our proposed budget is about $12 million and the firm's contract was $9.4 million. So I wanna make sure that we're thinking about there's two different things going on. We have the total public defense budget and then the public defender's budget. And so the total public defense budget is administered by the CAO's office. We also have county council managing the conflicts contract and then our budget for our piece of it and we will handle most of the defense in the county is that $12 million number. So if you look at the 2021-2022 cost of the private firm it was 9.4 million and the cost required for our new agency to bring over the current private law firm staff and just do a status quo operation would have been about 10 million. So that's about a 6% increase over last year for what we're looking at just to do status quo. What we did in the last nine months is think really strategically and carefully about some of the recommendations that we received from the Sixth Amendment Center from the grand jury from other folks who've chimed in and let us know how we could do better and where we were doing well. And we've invested in those areas that we think we'll really make sure that we are positioned as a leader in the state rather than playing catch up or falling behind. And I also really truly believe and I can't wait until we can bring you some data with this amazing new case management system that starts on July 1st as well. But I really think that the systemic savings that we're going to see by reaching upstream and working collaboratively are gonna result in savings across the system. And that's just something that we're gonna have to watch play out. But I'm very committed to making sure that we track it and bring you data. I think it's important that we tie our spending to results and we hope to bring you those. There is additional staffing as well. So we're gonna have at least four additional attorneys from the private firm's highest staffing model along with three social workers, two paralegals and these three advocates. And what all of those folks are gonna do is they're gonna help us get closer to the national standards for public defense case loads which is really important because to be an effective advocate you can't be drowning in work. You can't be playing catch up. You have to be able to sit down with each human being, look them in the eye, figure out what they need and provide really great representation. It also allows us to do early representation which is going to keep people out of custody, get them home to their families and result in systemic savings that way. And then the structured supervision and the structured training is going to help us do better and help us be more efficient. So in these first few years of a new agency there's definitely some capacity building and some learning that we need to do. And I believe that this budget will position us to do that. Yeah, I think I've got the best possible budget for a first year of operations. I'm curious, I mean, and you mentioned, you know, really kind of the total client support that's necessary. Obviously our communities in desperate need of more housing among other things that will just help more work opportunities to support clients. You know, as far as investments that this board can make directly with the relative immediacy, I'm just curious to know now versus, you know, of course we'll get your feedback next year again, but at the outside here, what do you think some of those most effective dollar for dollar investments could be? Would it be investing more in restorative justice? Would it be additional case workers? What do you predict will be faster? Well, you say, you know, immediate and so I'm sure that building more houses is not the answer that you want but obviously housing is critical until we can house our clients. It's very difficult to really help them lift themselves up and out of the system. Basic needs, right? You know, beyond that, I'm really excited about having social workers in house who can coordinate with all of the advocates in every other part of the county system so that we get better at, for example, identifying beds for folks who need inpatient treatment, identifying outpatient support resources, really understanding better what our community already has to offer and mapping that internally so that our social workers every day can be on the phones, calling people at all of our different housing resources, substance abuse, mental health resources and saying, how many beds do you got today? How many beds do you have for this type of client with this type of funding so that we can get people into the services they need to address root causes? I think that our investments, we just really need to focus on using our dollars in a way that provides direct client services. And as we've put together this budget, I've tried to keep everything that we do really buoyed around supporting those people who are one-on-one with clients every day in the field, the courtroom, the jail and our office. And I know that you work toward that as well as you think about funding. And I think that's the right strategy. How can we get the resources to the people that need them in the most efficient way? Yeah, it does all come back to housing in many ways. All right, is there any other comments or questions from board members? I have one more curiosity question. What is the threshold for financial threshold for a family? Let's say that they needed a public defender. If they make too much, of course, they won't qualify. And in today's economy, it seems like middle class really can't afford to have a private attorney. So do you go from middle class or mostly income, how low does it go? Sure, it's a really great question. And the California Supreme Court has answered it very pragmatically. And they basically say that in your individual community, you need to look at whether this person could afford a private attorney for this type of a case. And so in a place like Santa Cruz, you have to think about housing costs. You have to think about how much attorneys cost and whether we have the right amount of attorneys to take that kind of a case that's before you. So it's a factor analysis that we will be able to do internally at the public defender's office. And then the court can always act as a backstop to that and say, well, you know, this one is borderline or this person doesn't quite meet the threshold. But for us, the most important thing is to make sure that everybody's represented. We find that the system works pretty well, that folks who are interested in hiring a private attorney and have the money to do so often do it right away. And those people who are struggling to hire an attorney, it's usually because they can't afford it. And that's when we step in and take over. And, you know, keep an eye on it, of course, to make sure we're using our funds in an appropriate way. But I absolutely agree with you that it's really important that everybody have an attorney that's up there with them in court. And one last, there's an overlap between criminal law and civil law. Percentage-wise, do you have some civil cases that you're handling? And how does that relate, is that less than 50%? It's definitely less than 50%. So what we handle is any case that could lead to an involuntary commitment or to incarceration. And so in any situation where a person is facing a potential deprivation of liberty, the public defender steps in. And so, for example, we defend folks who are contesting conservatorships, contempt proceedings that could lead to incarceration, we handle those. And then of course, we represent all of the children in our community who are charged with delinquency, which is a big percentage of what we do. So our bar is your liberty at stake. If your liberty is at stake, you're gonna have one of us standing next to you fighting for you. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Supervisor Caput. If there are no other questions from members of the board, we'll proceed with public comment. If you'd like to comment on the public defender's budget, please approach the podium. Hello, good morning. My name is James Huyen Whitman. I appreciate this presentation and I really appreciate all the questions. Boy, the notes I took were really pretty cool. And I don't know how it was that I stated earlier that I spent significantly more time in the court system. I think I took like 12 pages of notes. It's not like you can take pictures or things. I was, those folks were, one was represented by a public defender, the other one wanted to represent herself. So I think this was just fascinating. I know that there's some stuff coming up where some of the community involvement that I can do is I can submit a court paper that's gonna help a couple people and may help this case load with certain issues going on. I've submitted a couple court documents before and I'm just glad I decided to stick around and listen to this. This was excellent. And thank you all for your questions. Thank you, Mr. Whitman. Good morning. My name is Becky Steinbrier. I live in rural Aptos. Thank you for the presentation. I'm curious to see how this goes. I think it's a good new approach that's gonna, if it works, we'll really make some, I hope some long lasting changes for these people. As you said, Ms. Roger, it's disheartening to help someone get them off the hook, if you will, and then within weeks, they're right back there. So that's the issue addressing recidivism. I wonder how many of these attorneys are being brought on continuing from Bigam and Associates, the private firm that has done this work for the county and a contract for a number of years. And that especially speaks to what I think is the very good idea of keeping the same defense team from day one for the clients. There are people in the system now. It's not gonna be a clear slate come July one. There are people in the system now that I think would really benefit if there is some sort of continuous representation. I'm curious and thank you to Vice-President Caput for asking the question about civil versus criminal. What is the caseload like predominantly? Is it drug related? Is it theft related? Is it domestic violence? What is the biggest need out there? What will your attention be with priority to need? I have to take this opportunity to point out that the man who is accused of killing Sergeant Gussweiler is coming under the umbrella of public defenders. So we have a huge caseload out there with a lot of needs. I'm also in heartened to hear the pilot project that will happen in South County for ages 18 to 25. I'd like to hear a little more about that. Thank you. Thank you. Are there any members of the public on Zoom that wish to speak? We have no speakers on Zoom, Chair. Okay. Thank you. Then I'll return it to the board for action. Mr. Chair, I'd like to remove the recommended action and welcome our public defender's office into the County umbrella. And thank you for everything that you have done and what you're going to do. I have to say, there's a lot of people who said, boy, who would want to do that job? And when we unanimously selected you, Ms. Rogers to be public defender, we made the right choice of some very, very qualified candidates. Great. But I'd move the public defender's office through the motion. All right, motion by Supervisor McPherson, seconded by Supervisor Caput to approve the 2223 public defender's office budget. Any further discussion? Seeing none, clerk roll call vote please. Supervisor Friend. Aye. Community. Aye. Caput. Aye. McPherson. Aye. And Koenig. Aye. The item passes unanimously. All right. Thank you so much. Thank you, Public Defender Rogers and the entire public defender team. We will now proceed with item 45 to consider approval of the 2223 proposed budget for probation, including any supplemental materials and take related actions as outlined in the reference budget documents and as recommended by the County Administrative Officer. And leading us off for our presentations, we have Chief Publication Officer Fernando Giraldo. Good morning. Good morning, Chair Koenig. Good morning, Supervisors. Fernando Giraldo, Chief of Probation. With me today is my assistant chief, Valerie Thompson and our CAO analyst, David Brown, who'll be helping me take a tour of our website. It's my pleasure to be before you today to present our proposed fiscal year 2223 budget. We appreciate the opportunity to highlight our operational plan, achievement, successes, opportunities and challenges. I also want to thank CAO Carlos Palacios and his staff for their continued support of probation and allowing us to fulfill our vision and mission which is driven by my innovative and passionate staff. I want to thank my staff for their dedication to some of our community's most vulnerable individuals. They inspire me each day and I'm so proud of them. Collectively, my staff are driven each day to support our clients on their transformative path to wellness and healing and also serve as a connector bridge to capacity building services provided by our wonderful community partners. Our goal is to promote public safety, reduce recidivism and support victims and all those impacted by crime in partnership with our community. I also want to note that in July, July 17th to the 23rd, it's recognized annually by our governor as probation services week to highlight probation's immense contributions to our communities and state. Probation professionals across California are recognized for playing a unique and essential role in our justice system and communities. Probation is focused on helping justice system involved in the visuals transition out of the system permanently to transformative and evidence-based rehabilitation. Okay, now I'll show you an overview of our departmental budget in just a moment. So as you see here, as our mission statement what actually I just read that and this site here provides you a really detailed overview of our budget and I've found it personally very useful not having to scroll through hundreds of pages to find some detail. So I think it's working well and I hope the public finds it very useful. Our proposed fiscal year 2223 budget is $32.7 million. This is a 12% increase from last year due to increases in 8109 allocations and significant growth revenue from last year. Probation had a fiscal year 2221-22 mid-year adjustments related to the AB109 growth and SB129 revenue that funded additional staffing and help us balance negotiated salaries and benefit increases. We'll start with our divisions. We have our juvenile hall division which is funded primarily by general fund but the role of juvenile hall has been and continues to be a state mandate to provide temporary secure custody of youth of between the ages of 12 and 25 who were referred by law enforcement agencies, the probation department and the court. The facility provides detain young people with the best possible conditions of confinement, a safe and secure environment, trauma-informed or physical and mental health needs are met in the least restrictive environment. Just to touch on an emerging issue and then I've talked about a bit before in last year's budget and a couple other times that I've been before you is the DJJ realignment, the transfer of youth in the state facility to local counties. DJJ closed its intake on July 1st, 2021 and it will close permanently in July, 2023. One of the issues that we face and we can only sort of guess at this time is the fiscal impact for us because we're allocated a funding based on our historic commitment rate and also demographics in the county and juvenile crime rates. But we anticipate that we may have a higher number than expected at a youth who will need to go to the secure youth facilities track that could be an additional cost. So, but we don't know what that might be yet. I'll now move to our probation side of the budget which supports three divisions, adult services, juvenile services as well as our new pretrial division. Adult probation services supports public safety through pretrial assessments, pre-conviction jail alternatives and monitoring, pre-sentence investigation reports, community-based supervision for individuals placed on formal probation or those eligible for AB 109 and oversight of a high number of collaborative service engagement contracts that support really the outcomes that we're looking for, public safety outcomes through community-based contracts and our probation success center programming. On the juvenile division, juvenile services include intake, diversion, investigation, supervision for youth who reside both in the home environment as well as in out-of-home placement. Our intake unit completes investigations on active referrals and forwards information and recommendations to the court. We're also very responsible in our juvenile division for engaging families and natural supports to create an environment where youth and families can remain together and achieve success in their own communities. One of the emerging issues I'll just touch upon briefly as you see here is the expansion of pretrial services with SB 129 which actually brought in additional funding to the county going directly to the courts but also to the county to support a pretrial expansion which last March, I was before the board presenting on that and how we're standing up in new pretrial division to meet those new demands. SB 129 fund had helped us actually fund two previously vacant positions and also support the addition of a analyst as well as a director to oversee this entire new division that we're standing up. And we'll go to this tab of the budget which is the personnel details which I think is great and it's transparent and anyone can go in and really look at where the funding goes in terms of supporting staffing of our 132 fully funded staffing, you can see the different classifications, how many of those we have, what are the changes for this proposed budget 22, 23, we're asking for the addition of a 0.5 FTE which is an administrative position really to support pretrial expansion and all the details that go along with that's a lot of paperwork, documentation and moving cases through the court system. This slide really is more details of our budget really in terms of our salaries and benefits comparing fiscal year 21, 22 to our proposed fiscal year budget and you can see the changes there includes the services and supplies, our revenue categories which as you heard earlier from our county budget manager that most of our revenue in the probation department comes from state allocations and entitlement dollars as well as grants with 9 million of our $32 million budget being general fund. So a little less than a third but we appreciate the support of the general fund and it goes on to describe juvenile hall as well which is mostly funded by the general fund a little over $5 million in that and some revenue and nearing close to a million dollars. I'm gonna go on to our next slide and really why am I showing a photo of Halloween because it's still we're just starting the summer but I just wanted to show this because last fall my team teamed up with the DA's office and many other partners to support a very successful trunk retreat event at the Watsonville fairgrounds hundreds of families and smiling children drove through their car trunks wide open to get treats, books, public health information and just really in seeing all the costume folks delivering candy safely in a safe manner. Supporting community events like this is just one of many examples where my staff get involved in and serve others. So that's a photo of me and I forgot my costume that day obviously but when my costume staff, it was a fun event. I look forward to many more events like that. Here's the agenda for today's presentation. I'm gonna review our juvenile hall and the probation side which is the three divisions. Our proposed 2223 budget supports 132 staff to staff the juvenile hall pretrial services, adult and juvenile community supervision. We are also recommending the addition of a 0.5 FTE. Our proposed expenses are 32.7 million supported by 23.4 million in revenues and 9.2 million in general fund contributions. A little bit about our juvenile hall changes. There is a budget change of nearly $400,000 in 2223 which is almost all due to increases of salaries and benefits that are necessary to support the cost of existing staff with about an additional 35,000 to cover HSA nursing costs and professional services. A lot of this is balanced by our MA activities which is MediCal administrative claiming which our entire department is doing which this year I'm very happy to say that we've brought in nearly a million dollars in revenue which is astounding considering the size of my department. It's a lot of work but it's helped us in difficult times. On the probation side of the budget there's a change of 5.7 million and that's really related to $3 million in revenue that we received unanticipated growth and excuse me, the change is related to 3 million in expenditures and 2.7 million in revenues. These expenses are mostly due again to salary and benefit increases. Here's our proposed supplemental budget. There's really one item there that we've traditionally been supporting the Youth Action Network supported to the United Way. So $30,000 from the Local Innovation Trust Fund which is through realignment will support a network of youths, adults and organizations working to increase youth wellbeing in Santa Cruz. Some of the goals of the Youth Action Network are youth adult partnerships which will increase youth supported by caring adults and relationships with local decision makers, youth voice and youth development which is really about increasing knowledge of youth leadership critical this is our future. Many of them will be in this role that I have and your role possibly as well. So we're happy to support that. I'm gonna talk about our Juvenile Hall division for a moment, but the photo here on this slide illustrates how we've adapted and shifting during the COVID-19 pandemic. The young people detained in the Juvenile Hall are participating in a hybrid program provided by Music in May which is a festival of chamber music building community musicians from across the nation have brought this program to our facility and this photo was taken just probably a couple of weeks ago but you can see the hybrid version of that you have some in-person musicians but also others on the screen up there. So that's how we've adapted and shifted and we did that quickly right at the beginning of the pandemic. I wanna highlight a few major changes in Juvenile Hall. We have the STAR program which is a reentry program it's a STAR stands for Stable Transitions after reentry it's a partnership between probation, encompass, positive discipline and conflict resolution and it provides young people transition and support and linkages back into the community. It's a very, very important program. The expansion of Wi-Fi and secure tablet supports virtual visitation and hybrid participation for all detained young people, families, natural supports, court and program providers. And just as a note, we have opened the Juvenile Hall back up to visitation we do it safely but our families can now go and visit youth that's been going on for a couple months at least now as well as our other service providers who do important programming for the youth in there. One of the major outstanding issues that we have still is the completion of the multi-purpose gymnasium and renovation projects that will ensure adequate programming space and compliance with state requirements as you know we've been out of compliance for several years but the delays of this project have really resulted in some increased cost and then the project is supposed to replace an entire kitchen and a number of other things that are outdated and without the funding coming into us yet we've had to then just sort of piece together different parts and not fully do what we want but we anticipate we'll be moving forward very quickly in fact yesterday the state approved another some documents that we had submitted that will help us advance the project. Let's talk a little bit about our juvenile division and the picture on this slide is from the grand opening of the Luna Esol Familiar Center which took place on March 30th of this year and this is a photo of Watsonville that's on Madison Avenue. This is a new program it's a one-stop center that's funded by the Board of State and Community Corrections that was awarded to the Community Action Board of Santa Cruz but probation is a partner with this and helping design this program and that was the kickoff and I just love this photo which is so colorful and reflects all the partners coming together for something that's going to be great but this is a one-stop hub in South County and it provides linkages to basic necessity, life skills, development, academic support, job readiness, and it fosters community engagement. Just a quick reminder of again DJJ realignment it's transferring the responsibility of youth who normally have gone as 707B offenders which are the most serious charges who could go to be committed at the state level can no longer be committed, they'll be committed locally and as you're aware that we have partnered with Sonoma County to provide the secure youth facility track and services needed for that. And we are continuing to look for new options and expand that those options there are a few available that we're exploring but right now Sonoma County is the closest to us I know I've been asked if we have any neighboring counties that would host our youth and the answer is no at this time unfortunately but I will keep trying. Move on to our adult division. These are just a couple of photographs that represent our first probation success center in San Cruz that's at the top right in our new temporary location bond corner of the left this is in Watsonville. So while we're building or remodeling making the tenant improvements on the new Cal South County service center West Ridge where we hope to be able to have a success center and we will probation department will be moving in we've leveraged a contract with leaders and community alternatives to identify a temporary location for a South County success center similar to the one we have right across the street it's already open it's located on Freedom Boulevard near airport Boulevard we plan to have a grand opening July 15th and I will I will send you all an invitation when we do that. New legislation continues to impact how we all do our work for example, AB 1228 has reduced the period of probation supervision in many cases and necess necess necessitates really moving earlier and more robust engagement strategies with less time we need to move fast especially at front so we're front we're redesigning how we do supervision by front loading services. SB 129 as I mentioned earlier and AB 129 have allowed us to actually bring in mid-year eight new positions last March which is really gonna help us write size and really prepare for pre-trial expansion and the ongoing legislative changes. Lastly, this is our pre-trial division and this is a growing division these are just some of the pre-trial staff in this photo just taken recently at one of our Wednesday staff meetings that is the day that all the staff overlap these staff not all of them together but they have seven day for what we provide seven day coverage seven days a week a year round in order to service the jail and have a jail alternative program and that was really key especially at the start of the pandemic to really create space for the units quarantine units there. SB 129 requires the Judicial Council of California to distribute funding to all 58 California courts and county supervision agencies and provides them with the resources necessary to assist judicial officers in making pre-trial release decisions based on the least restrictive conditions while insuring public safety. We are fortunate in this county to already have had a pre-trial for several decades locally. So this funding is allow us to enhance our program not started from scratch like many counties are doing so I'm very happy that our counties has always been forward thinking and we knew we needed a pre-trial program years ago. We've expanded our pre-trial unit again adding two more probation officers and analysts and division director and we've actually moved a couple probation aid positions to the pre-trial unit to aid with the expansion and the chart at the top right here really shows how our average daily population has continued to grow and we continue to have outstanding safety outcomes with the majority of individuals appearing for court and not reoffending during their pre-trial supervision. So a big shout out to my pre-trial staff which probably I believe is the busiest unit in our entire department. State or federal opportunities and impact. There are a few of those. The customized mobile probation van you see here is what we envision, we don't have that yet but we envision this to be the future of probation and how we can meet our clients where they're at even better than we do now. We don't have a van like this but there may be opportunities in the budget, governor's budget to fund something that would support this. This is an emerging best practice and probation but these kinds of vehicles would allow us to reach clients that are hard to reach or are missing appointments or in the different camps that we have here and allow us to do not only check in with them but also perhaps check in on the battery on their monitor if they're on pre-trial services or even do remote court. So Placer County is actually a model for this. So I'm looking forward to visiting their county to learn more about this. Couple of the impacts that we have. We have grants ending about 47, cohort two. We were awarded that grant over three years ago and the total of $6 million that grant is about to expire at the end of this year but I'm happy to say that our county with probation the district attorney's office and the public defender's office partnered to submit a new proposal for cohort three for $6 million and we're eagerly awaiting the news on that. We're supposed to hear sometime in June or July. So fingers crossed. Another opportunity really is Cal AEM for us and that's been particularly for incarcerated individuals. It allows them to start their Medi-Cal that's suspended when you're incarcerated. This will allow it to be started up again 90 days prior to release so then folks can get services and be supported by Medi-Cal. So this has to be implemented in our juvenile hall this January, coming January 2023. So we're working on how we're gonna implement that. Touch upon our probation operational plan successes and our objectives, we have many but I won't go over all of them, just focus on a few. While focusing on objective 319 juvenile justice my staff stayed busy preparing for and implementing for DJJ realignment over the past year and a half. And a lot of that work was really partnering with Sonoma County developing an MOU going to the board for that approval and also just coordinating the treatment plan and how we're gonna support visiting a number of other things that are significant changes but we've managed to do that very well. Juvenile hall is remarkably not have a COVID breakout throughout this entire pandemic which is a extraordinary in attestment to the discipline and highly trained juvenile hall staff and medical team who kept everyone safe and healthy. So I'm just very proud of that. As per objective number 321, juvenile hall pivoted to promote virtual family visits during the time was not possible to hold in-person meetings. So we've expanded the use of tablets to support virtual family visits and maintain hybrid capacity for young people to stay in contact. Just reduces barriers. As you know, many of our youth today I have 13 youth in the facility. Majority of those youth are from South County which is a distance from Watsonville primary from Watsonville. So virtual access is just very critical to ensuring equitable access to our families. For objective number 322, our adult services division has stayed on track to meet our South County services objective. We open to South County success center if hired bilingual staff and are working towards Spanish speaking services and programming. This concludes my presentation and the recommended actions are as you see here approve the proposed budget for the probation department including any supplemental material is recommended by the county administrative officer. And I am ready for questions. Thank you for all the questions or comments from members of the board. Supervisor Caput, why don't you start? Yes. It's okay. Hey, thanks for the report. The gymnasium is finally coming around, huh? Yes, you say it is. Yeah, I was, I'm trying to think of because we've been talking about that. This is my ninth budget presentation and I think my first one I was inviting everyone to come play basketball at the gym. But it is, it's a slow moving process. Initially we were delayed significantly by the June, I think it was the June beetle and a few other things, but we've moved far past that. And now we are, we hope to break ground on that this coming spring. That's what we're truly hoping to. So we're like 80% or 90% of the way there to actually getting final of the okay to go ahead and start that. Well, I'd like to take the first shot. Yes. You will all be invited for that. That's about it. Keep up the good work and appreciate all that you're doing, county and I don't know, does it look like the last question? The trend less youth that have to go to juvenile hall or? Locally that has continued to be the case here as you know that the narrative and dialogue nationally many places are seeing spikes in crime and even in California, but that whether that's a trend or not, I don't know if it, that's just something that happens periodically, but locally we're seeing our juvenile detention use of that just limited to the exception, which is really serious charges, which is generally a murder, attempted murder or robbery, those kinds of things. So those 13 youth that we have in the facility at the moment need that care and to be in secure custody until we figure out the right path to support them. And thank you. And I seen you at the trunk or treat. I know I gave you some candy and you and your family were out there at the fairgrounds last October. So yeah, it was great that you supported that. Thank you, Supervisor Cabot. That was my first one. Yeah, thank you, our director Geraldo and your chief assistant Valerie Thompson, your whole team for your efforts. This is another area where in the state mandates have not been resourced fully like we'd like them at times, but throughout all of that, the probation department for the 10 years I've been on the board and before that to going in, it's been recognized as a state model to be as being innovative, caring and professional in all senses of those words. It really be commended and you're always looking forward. I also really especially appreciate the challenges you face during this COVID-19 crisis and how important it is to track how clients are doing so safely and for the officers and the clients, both. How often in general will an officer visit a client who would be once a week or? That's determined by the case load that they're on in terms of their risk and need level. So I'll give you an example. There are folks who are on pre-child services. It's pre-sentencing, awaiting court. Those individuals are often seen and some of them in cases weekly coming to the office or periodically we will go out to their homes. In fact, just the other day we had to go to a home. We had information that someone was potentially planning for something, let's say that pretty harmful. So we went out with our sheriff's office and conducted a search and thankfully everything worked out and we took care of the situation. So that's the pending circumstance that made that requirement. But if you are on a general supervision case load, meaning that you are generally not likely to recidivate and you have a lot of supports in place, you might be required to come into the office every couple of months. Then on the other side, we have our AB 109 population which is post-release community supervision. That would require a contact every 30 days to be out in the field, in the office and so on. We've really learned during the pandemic that a lot of the work we could do is also remote. We might say next month, let's just check in remotely if you're doing fine. We'll do a virtual contact with that capacity. And so not necessitating as someone to leave work and come to the office just for a 20 minute check-in. So it really depends on the information that we have the case, the risk level that they have risk to recidivate and information. And often maybe at the court's directive, how often we'll be out in the field. But we have folks out every day all over the county conducting visits, just largely it's a wellness checks. How you doing? Do you need anything? Particularly during a pandemic, we're handing out just a lot of vital things that families needed to support them. We were even letting them borrow, you know, MiFi so they can stay in communication with us. Right. Well, great. You're doing a great job. I was glad to work with your department in the food services program earlier. And we'll, I pledge to continue working with you on working with the neighboring counties and see how we can cooperate some effort and do some things in a cooperative manner. Thanks for your support. Thank you, Supervisor McPherson. Other comments or questions from board members? Just a quick one, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Director Geraldo. Can you give us a sense as to how the sort of oversight of specific populations, sexual predators, people been charged with are on probation from serious crimes. What that oversight looks like and how are there any remaining challenges left over from COVID or other impacts we've seen recently? Well, I'll start with what you call our clients who are on probation for sex crimes. We have what we call a sex offender case load, which probably has about 30 individuals. And these are individuals that are required to register through the Department of Justice and also required to complete the mandatory sex offender program. It's a state mandated. And so those individuals are supervised very intensively. A lot of that is going through their phones and computers to make sure they're not doing things that are illegal and downloading things that that's illegal. So that's a specialty type case load that would have more frequent contacts in periodic searches because of that level. We also have intensive mental health case loads, the most case load, which is the maintaining ongoing stability case load in behavioral court. Those are more intensive, meaning that these individuals are contacted sometimes a weekly that we will go out and see them whether they come to our office or whether we go to behavioral health offices or they might be in residential programs. So that's one kind of extreme of a lot of contact similar to our juvenile case loads, which we have the wraparound program, which these are youth who could end up an out of home placement if not given the support. So we have to do very, very regular contacts with the families and the natural supports. The impact of COVID absolutely, we saw across both the adults and juveniles, which was isolation and a lack of just engagement, particularly for our youth in school. A lot of youth as you know, like in PVUSD, they lost several thousand students, didn't know where they went and what happened to them. So those students who already sort of disengaged or weren't being engaged already, the pandemic really lost a lot of those youth. So a lot of our work is to with our partners is to team up and get them back into school where they should be in the right school, finding the right match for those individuals. I hope that answers your question, but is there? Yeah, I guess there was previously, there was challenges around staffing levels and number of probationers per... Oh, yeah, yes. So is that, are we in a better? We're in a much better place with our mid-year adjustments. We had, we carried four vacant, unfunded probation officer positions for over two years. And as pretrial numbers were continuing to grow, as you saw, we certainly could have used those, but now we are hiring them. We have, you know, when I came before the board, I had permission to go ahead and do that. So that will really support us. And so I think we're, you know, there's certain caseload standards, much like our public defender showed in her chart. There is something like that for probation and we're getting closer to meeting that. I believe we actually have met that because of certain legislation, our caseload size have been reduced. To the levels that we haven't seen before. And a lot of cases are being diverted, leaving us though with some of the more, you know, higher need, higher risk type clients. When I say higher risk, meaning more likely to re-offend and a lot of that is through due to substance use disorder, behavioral health issues and so on. So, but to answer your question, I think we're in a really good place right now. Great, thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Coonerty. Just take a couple of questions for you. Chief Sheraldo, you mentioned in the, as one of the emerging issues, the possible discrepancy between, you know, what the funds were receiving for realignment and, you know, the requirements in terms of services would provide. And it seems like there is some significant funding. I mean, from reading this correctly, about $2.6 million additional funding coming from the state and about a million dollars in additional service contracts. I assume that's this, for example, potentially the Sonoma contract. For realignment specifically, we know what our three year allocation is. And so for our current fiscal year was 250,000. For year two, we will get 2223. It's about 500,000. And then in year three, we will get $900,000 to support that. I mean, you know, we have just one youth that's been committed, which clearly that would support that. And, but we've done some calculations. And if, for instance, give me an example, we have six youth and DJJ right now who were there committed before they stopped intake, but they will all need to continue to serve time once DJJ closes, which is in July of 2023. So they will have to come back, serve time in a potentially Sonoma, but we will have to pay to cover that six youth. And I don't believe that the amount allocation that we have currently would cover that expense. So that's sort of the dilemma that we're at. Even with those increases of 500,000 and 900,000. Yes, I believe so, because those commitments then could be, at one time we actually had about three years ago, we had almost nine youth at one time in DJJ, not committed at the same time, but because of the way they serve our sentences, they all happen to be there. And that time, of course, the state was covering most of that. But if that were to happen, and we hope we don't hopefully with our partners and strong work to go upstream, we will really prevent that from happening. But these are what ifs, but I think it's just important to acknowledge that the potential for that is a big responsibility for all counties after the state decided to close a commitment facility. And pretty much said, counties figured out without getting a lot of money. And what's that schedule to anticipate those six youth coming back under our responsibility this year? No, it would be next July, 2023. Yeah, and I believe they will have still have time left from their commitment to serve. And the question and challenges is, would Sonoma take all six of those, particularly after youth have already been in a commitment facility. Are they gonna be older? These could be youth that are young adults, actually 20, 21, 22, going into a facility, a secure youth track with others who are 16. So these are all logistical issues that all chiefs are struggling with and urging the governor actually to reconsider that hard closure. That sounds like a challenge we'll have to continue to grapple with. It's great we're making these investments in juvenile hall. And I mean, I know the capacity of that facility is somewhere around like 60 or I mean. It's 42 big capacity. We have 13 there today. Yeah, we've been under capacity fortunately for a number of years. And as we, I mean, as we create a really state of the art facility with the gardening and kitchen programs in the gym, is there any opportunity to rent some of that space to other counties? Is there any demand? That's a good question. We've never, you know, explored that possibility. I think there isn't a demand because a lot of our neighboring counties, for instance, Monterey County built a new juvenile hall. And I forget how many beds they have like 150 beds there and are probably have full same as Santa Clara. All counties have done a great job for a variety of reasons reducing the number of youth or in detention. So I don't believe that be a high demand for that something that we could explore, you know, if we after the renovation and so on. But I don't, yeah, I know the neighboring, the Bay Area counties are not looking, it's we who are looking actually, particularly for our DJJ are realigned youth. Okay, thank you. If there are other comments or questions from board members, is there any member of the public that wishes to address us on the probation budget? Thank you. My name is Becky Steinbrier. I'm resident of rural Aptos. I didn't see any mention at all of the facilities that I know to be present in the Mid County Safety Center. Probation has a couple of offices there. At least they did when I went with for meeting there. So can you please talk about if it does still exist there and how much it's used, the County is paying quite a lot of money to the Aptos Village project developers for the use of that space. I didn't see clearly how much Prop 172 money probation is getting. Is that part of the 23 million intergovernmental revenues or where is the Prop 172 money and how much is that? I am really glad and hopeful that there will be a gymnasium come about, but I wonder because of where that site is, if there are other physical activities that are done there to just get these youth out and moving out in the outdoors, it certainly is in a beautiful place and could be making use of what is already there. I saw your Seed to Table project and something that it would be completed by 2024. That's been something that I have advocated, getting these youth out, busy, connecting with the earth, growing food, raising animals and really developing a sense of relationship with something in a nurturing way, I think would be very helpful for these people. I also want to, before my time runs out, say that I really would like to encourage visits to these clients because you can get a lot more information by doing that then on a Zoom meeting and that often helps seeing a bigger picture. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Steinberger. Is there anyone on Zoom? We have no speakers on Zoom, Chair. Can you just quickly address the question about any mid-county facility? Yeah, probation has an office at Aptos Village and we have three staff there who are permanently there, our pre-sentence investigation unit. They've been there throughout the pandemic and we have another office and the purpose was to have a floating office and for instance, myself will often stop by there and hold meetings there because we have a nice conference room and we'll have management team meetings during the pandemic, a little bit less traffic for obvious reasons but now that we're, we've never shut down but we're fully back, that office is pretty full. Great, thank you. Right, motion would be in order. We would recommend that actions approve the probation department budget. Second. Motion by Supervisor McPherson, second by Supervisor Friend. Any further discussion? Seeing none, clerk roll call vote please. Supervisor Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. Caput. Aye. McPherson. Aye. And Koenig. Aye. This item passes unanimously. Thank you. Thank you, probation budget being approved for 22-23. Thank you. Thank you. Ms. Thompson. Mr. Aldo. Mr. Brown. We'll now take a short 10 minute break. We'll resume at 10.55 a.m. to hear the DA's budget. Thank you. If any of you answer my question about top 170? The world. I am at your service. And I'll resume the budget hearings for the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors and we'll move on with item 46 to consider approval of the 22-23 budget for the district attorney public administrator, including any supplemental materials and take related actions as outlined in the reference budget documents. And for a presentation on this item, we have our district attorney, Efra Zell. Thank you, Chairman Koenig. I wanna first take this opportunity to thank all of the board members for being able to be here today and to present our budget. I wanna thank from the CAO's office, Carlos Palacios, Marcus Pimentel, Nicole Coburn, and Sven Stafford, our direct administrative analyst for the hard work that they have put into helping us get the budget that we need to properly protect public safety in Santa Cruz. I also wanna thank the two chief deputies from the DA's office that are here, Tara George, Chief of Criminal Prosecutions, the attorneys investigative staff and Eric Saib, Chief of Administration for all of their hard work. And also for the entire staff of the DA's office, we truly operate on a team basis and without the hard work and dedication of all those folks, we would not be able to protect public safety as it were. And before I talk about our proposed budget, I do wanna just take a moment to thank the board for its continued support of the DA's office and for its support of public safety. So we tend to get right into the ask, but I just think it bears a mentioning and acknowledgement that you folks are the ones who have provided the financial means to our office to ensure the public safety of this community that we are also blessed to live in. So I wanna thank you for that. And the first thing that I wanna talk about is consistent with your supporting us and public safety is that the California Constitution lays out that really public safety is the first responsibility of local government and local government officials have an obligation to give priority to the provision of adequate public safety and services. And you all deserve credit for doing that with our office over the past years. The second thing I wanna talk about is the DA's office. What are our duties? Well, our duties to follow the United States Constitution, the California Constitution, California statutes and rules of professional conduct. It's also our duty, our solemn duty to protect the rights of victims, protect the rights of defendants, review cases, investigate them and to prosecute cases when appropriate. Our duty is to seek justice and to act ethically. The mission statement from our office is to promote and ensure public safety through ethical and just prosecution. And this literally hangs on our wall and is the driving force for everything we do. It is our guidepost. It's the North Star for the DA's office. And the DA's office gets referrals on criminal cases and some civil cases from all of the sources and some other sources that aren't listed on this slide. These cases are investigated by the various police agencies. They are forwarded to our office for review. We are by no means a rubber stamp for law enforcement. We independently evaluate cases and make determinations about A, whether a person committed a crime, B, whether we should file that case, whether we have enough evidence to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt or whether we should enter into some sort of alternative programs of which we can discuss later. The proposed budget from 2023 is going to be called up on the slide for the county. And I just want to say the county really, the CAO's office in particular should take some pride in the fact that they have through innovation and some vision been able to provide a very transparent streamline and easy to access summary, not only of the DA's offices budget, but of all the other agencies in this county's budget. So we're looking at a criminal prosecution slide. You can see the total expenses at the top of that slide and you can see emerging issues, services. It's really kind of one-stop shopping and all sort of laid out in one space. And the next slide that is also on the website specifically focuses on staffing, consumer protection, victim witness and criminal prosecutions. The DA's office is made up of three divisions. One is the criminal prosecution division, which does what it sounds like it does. The second is the consumer protection environmental division. And these are lawyers that are dedicated and staff that are dedicated to protecting consumers from fraudulent claims by various people from automatic renewal. We've seen with gym memberships and those sort of things. And in protecting the environment, the bay, streambed alteration and a lot of other things. And finally, the victim witness division is literally designed, they do outreach, but they are designed also to assist and help victims navigate their way through the criminal court system. So those are essentially the three sort of divisions and how they break down. There we go. So you can see in a nutshell, as you've seen with the other departments our proposed budget for 2023. We have laid out sort of the differences in what we're asking for this year. And those differences are, we are asking for two fully funded attorneys. We're actually asking for those attorney positions that we had to be refunded. And the reason that those were unfunded is the DA's office has always in the past when we had lean budget times, which I know you will remember, tried to ask for what we need. I can't tell you how many times I've come to the board and said I've really asked for what we need, not to try to just empire build or pad numbers or anything like that. So we're asking for the refunding of those two full-time attorneys due to the backlog based on a pandemic and a lot of changes in legislation that have really sort of increased the workload for the DA's office. We are also adding in terms of a full-time employee for an office assistant three. This is somebody who will assist in production of Discovery, which is literally the police reports, all of the body cam footage now that we have, all of the media information, phone information, computer information that is now literally so voluminous on almost every single case that we touch. We really need to catch up frankly and having another office assistant who can focus on that is something that is important to us. The other issue is this adding for the first time these three paid law clerk assistants. And what we're interested in doing here is providing sort of an avenue for those folks who couldn't afford to take an unpaid law clerk sort of a job. People who frankly will help us increase equity, increase diversity and increase as you might imagine in the legal profession, people who come from different socio-economic backgrounds that might not be able to afford to take an unpaid law clerk position. So we think it's in line with the county's vision. We are very pleased to do that. And we are really pleased to have the support of the CAO's office in that and having that align with the county's vision and goals. So the MDIC is something that we can talk about. This is the Multidisciplinary Interview Center, a child-friendly center that was developed by the DA's office. It has the support of all of law enforcement in the county and it is something that we are coordinating with social service agencies as well as law enforcement to minimize the number of interviews on children. So we are working on trying to get more robust Spanish-speaking interviewers for the center and to close some of the gaps that we have now and to make the transition to having somebody on call in a very sort of easy way, fast and seamless. The increase in expenses that you can tell are essentially due to scheduled negotiating staff costs and a new case management system which I will talk about at the end. So one of the three divisions, the criminal prosecution division, is where we have asked for the staffing changes that I have addressed for you and I have talked a little bit about these issues and why we want those staffing requirements to be met and how we think that is going to assist the DA's office and it's essentially laid out here. Technology, strengthening pathways for diversity and as well as addressing increased demands on our office through new legislation and the COVID backlog. So the status of our objectives, I have listed the last one, the CJC council I haven't spoken about that is listed here, 308 and the DA's office partnered and worked with the criminal justice council to evaluate and improve local public safety procedures and policies. This report was completed in November 2021 and it was essentially talking to people who've been through the system, finding out what their experiences are and then taking that information in to see how we can better respond to those folks who are frankly involuntarily in the system. The next thing that I wanna talk about and I heard the public defender touch on it a little bit is the DA's office along with a conflict resolution center and probation have started literally, I wanna say the fourth example in the state of a neighborhood court. Well, a neighborhood court is something where community members essentially become involved talking about causes, addressing root causes for low level criminal offenses. People who go into this, it's not about guilt or innocence, they need to admit their guilt and it is about addressing the root causes. It is something that it has been incredibly successful. To date we've had 63 total conferences with community members and there's still some that are in the works. It takes about two months to complete the process but we've had 51 participants successfully complete this program and by completing it, what it means is that they are not filed on in the court system that if they complete it successfully they are essentially diverted. They don't wind up with criminal charges and we have had remarkable results in this. We have had a lot of folks who have come in who have done dumb things, who have committed low level crimes that are not recidivating, that are literally addressing their issues. We've had examples where they have literally wanted to thank the police officer who arrested them and I gotta tell you that in our business does not happen very often. So this is an incredibly successful partnership that the DA's office spearheaded that we are very excited about and I think it's a lot of upstream work and it's really designed to help people get their lives back on track. In the second division, the consumer environmental protection division, there's a lot of things that are taking place. There was, as the board knows, a lot of fire related fraud investigations after our CZU lightning fire. So they have been educating the community and combating that. They have continued to investigate and have really focused in the last couple of years on nursing homes and elder abuse, automatic renewal subscription cases, which I mentioned, and really doing a lot of front end outreach so that we can educate people about the ever-changing fraud schemes that are out there. And we really are also looking at ongoing claims about medical remedies and dietary supplements and those sorts of things that are frankly misleading that people are being conned into using. On the environmental front, we have identified some of the objectives that we're interested in and it really is outreach. Like I say, in the DA's office, we have small opportunities, although in consumer protection, larger opportunities to prevent people from entering the system as victims. So we have increased our presence and want to increase it in the EDD task force, produced PSAs, both in English and Spanish, to educate the public as to fraud and schemes that are out there trying to take advantage of them and also working with APS to produce PSAs focusing specifically on elder abuse. The Victim Assistance Program, the third branch of the DA's office, as you can see, we are focusing on recruitment and retention of those folks. We are emphasizing diversity and inclusivity of victims. That was also part of what I spoke about earlier in our partnership with the Criminal Justice Council trying to sort of identify where we can do a better job and also trying to align with the county's blueprint for shared safety. So the ensuring that the MDIC is running smoothly, I spoke about a little bit and that is the Spanish-speaking interviewers. We need to make that program more robust. We're working on that and we're working on still communicating and coordinating with local law enforcement agencies to use the facility for something even outside of children who are direct victims, but children who are witnesses to crimes. Like I say, it's a child-friendly interview center and if you haven't been there, I would encourage you to reach out to us. We're happy to take you there and it's the first of its kind in this county ever and it's something that we should be very proud of as a county and I know as a DA's office, we are proud of. The second sort of prong dog we're working on is a facility dog for that multi-disciplinary interview center. We have a dog already associated with the DA's office to assist victims who go into court. It's essentially a comfort dog. It's a dog that is there to provide emotional support for people. It's a model that we are very blessed to have and it's something that we wanna expand out into the multi-disciplinary interview center. And finally, we are also working on a major new case management system. Since 2003, we have had a system which has functioned better than what we had before but we need a new system and we have been blessed to work with the CAO's office to get a new case management system. And this system, like I say, pushing out discovery, pushing out information to the defense, all the body cam video footage, all of the media information, the phone information, the phone records, the computer records, all of that stuff have turned cases that I can remember in the old days would be maybe a half an inch thick to the average file now is several inches thick with all this information. It requires us to process it. It requires us to push it out to the defense in an efficient way and this new case management system will allow us to do that. And by getting that information out quickly and efficiently and comprehensively, we are able to reduce court appearances. We're gonna try to streamline cases and get them resolved in a quicker fashion because as you might imagine, if defense attorneys don't have all the information, it's difficult for them to do a complete assessment. So that is literally sort of the last large piece of our budget. And at this point, I just wanna say I would ask the board to approve the 2023 budget. Happy to take questions from any of you. And I wanna thank you once again for your continued support for public safety and also for the support of our office. Thank you very much to circuit attorney Roselle. Other questions or comments from members of the board? Supervisor McPherson. Oh, thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I wanna thank the district attorney, Jeff Roselle and your team, Mr. Chair, I'm gonna see about Mr. Stafford of CA's office for your ongoing great work. And especially at this time in this year for the respect you've had in the past and you certainly have exhibited that as we go into having our own district attorney under the county or district public defender under the county umbrella. It's very impressive and it's highly respected by everyone involved. Like other justice departments, I know that COVID has presented you some, the number of challenges when it comes to trial schedules and meeting with witnesses and evaluating evidences. And thank you for getting through this. I hope that COVID experience we've had is going to be over. And I'm glad to see a modest increase in your staffing to address the backlog of cases. And I really especially wanna thank you, and this is another example of Santa Cruz County being out in front for your continued work on the neighborhood courts concept. I think I don't know how many of those courts are in the state now, but I know we are one of a few to begin with. And I think that's an important investment in reducing our overall crime numbers of justice involved. And reducing citizens that need some help and reducing recidivism. A couple of questions. The consumer protective services, has that been increasing in recent years or over this last year? We have had various increases. Do you, are you talking about like the issues, the constantly evolving issues that are taking place, the fraud issues? Yeah, it's funny because you get a handle on one sort of scam. And before you know it, there's a new scam. I got one on my phone today that your UPS package needs to be tracked. And really all they're trying to get you to do is to click on that phone and give them some information. So the answer is those are constantly evolving. And as those evolve, our outreach evolves. And I hate to say it, but it almost is never ending. Like as quick as we explain, it's the jury duty scam or it's the, you know, your granddaughter in Mexico got arrested scam. They're coming up with new scams one after the other. So it is something that we are committed to sort of pushing out information, like I said, so that we don't have sort of backend victims. Just directly, if somebody had a question and it just happens daily, who do they call? What's the number they call? We have, if you go to the district attorney's website, there is an actual consumer complaint form that you can fill out online and that comes into our office and we review those. If people wanna speak on the phone to somebody before they do that, or instead of doing that, they are all welcome to call the general number for the DA's office. And we will put them in touch with somebody who will listen to their consumer complaints. And what we find is oftentimes people who fill out the online applications, it's a consistent theme, it's a new scam, it's the PG&E turned off your power scam or it's going to, if you don't pay, you know, in gift cards and those sort of things. So it's constantly evolving, but it's something that we are deeply committed to in terms of providing public service sort of announcements and also, as you know, Supervisor McPherson, meeting with constituents for any of the board members and particularly vulnerable constituents, we're happy to go do trainings on that. So, okay. Well, congratulations on your foresight and continuing service to the people. As you say, in the constitution, public safety is our first responsibility, cooperative effort and congratulations on being reelected on a post. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor. Thank you, Supervisor McPherson. Supervisor Friend. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Mr. Roselle and the entire team. You know, I just wanted to point out that it's a very progressive and forward thinking budget that you're putting forward over the last few years we've worked on, even during the pandemic, a number of initiatives together from the great fraud trainings that Doug and others on your team have provided to constituents within my district to the work that we did together on the MDIC and to see it expanding to ensure complete access is pretty remarkable. I really am supportive of the idea of the paid blocker program. I think that that is absolutely necessary, the county. And I believe that the CAO has really taken a strong stand on this, is really trying to work to ensure that we can have the next generation of talent and that we don't shut the door on any potential people that would be wonderful county employees. And I think that your program, this program would be an outstanding option. And to just highlight the Criminal Justice Council work is you and I serve, obviously I'm the chair, but we serve on the executive board together. You know, it's really, it's been really remarkable to see what we've been able to do in our local law enforcement community, including through your agency on regional collaboration and forward thinking in that regard has been obviously recognized nationally, but the recognition is irrelevant. The changes and the progressivism that have been shown in this community and the really unified approach, even from what would traditionally be viewed as disparate interests like the DA's office, public defender, probation, non-profit organizations, really coming together to say what's the best approach to addressing frontline law enforcement issues, including root cause issues has been pretty remarkable. So I appreciate that you've had a strong hand in that over time. I'm looking forward to supporting this budget. Thank you, Supervisor Friend. Thank you, Supervisor Friend. Supervisor Caput. Good to see you first, okay. Well, how are you doing, Jeff? I'm doing fine, thank you for asking Supervisor Caput. You're welcome. By the time, I'm just going to make a statement. I don't have any questions. When I was a kid and growing up and all the way till now, the district attorney's office, if you look at the history of it, it's had a lot of drama in all the years. I go back to when I was young and I was first reading district attorney Moore. He helped the register for Heronian get their Pulitzer Prize for reporting because of some improprieties. Then of course, Peter Chang came in and we've had good ones and not so good ones, but it just seemed like there was a lot of drama. After a couple of years, there'd be another big drama going on with the DA's office. And then of course, your personal friend in mind, Bob Lee, a fellow alumni from Santa Clara. So anyway, he had very big shoes to fill and this is a compliment. Are you as good as Bob Lee? Yes, you are. That's a big compliment. So anyway, thank you and hopefully we'll have some more years without a lot of drama in your office. I wanna say thank you, Supervisor Caput. I owe more than I could tell you to my dear friend, colleague and mentor, Bob Lee. And I've been in the office since 1994 and I've lived through a lot of that, different DA's and not Bob, but before Bob's time. And believe me, it is our mission to promote and ensure public safety. And the way that we do that is by not having internal drama and by moving forward. So I appreciate your comments. I appreciate you mentioning my dear friend. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Caput. I'm going to put my hand up. Thank you, Mr. Chair. So thank you to Trini Rizal. I too appreciate the progressive efforts and also frankly, the nuts and bolts thing of improving your technology and creating more access for law clerks. It makes tons of sense, everything you're doing. I guess I wanna take a step back and ask you the big picture question which is getting an enormous amount of frustration from the general public about criminal justice in California. And I'm wondering one, what you're seeing locally in terms of rises, rise or fall or staying the same of crime rates. So then secondly, as the state has experimented with all kinds of reforms, is there anything we can do locally to get better outcomes than maybe we're seeing across the rest of the state? So I will say that, I think you're talking about various district attorneys in certain areas, one of which has been recalled at this point and another who looks like you may be on track for that. All I can say is this, RDA's office has tried to be a blend of progressive sort of thoughtful solutions when appropriate, but also understands that people need to be held accountable for the things that they do. And so that balance is something that we strive to achieve every day. Crime rates in various instances have gone up, property crimes, those sort of things. And some of that I think is due to COVID issues when people are not housed and are not acting responsibly. If they're out, they're probably not going to be acting responsibly until there's some sort of an intervention and that sort of thing. So I don't think those are a surprise. In terms of what we can do, I will say this and the people of Santa Cruz County are, should be understanding how blessed they are. Law enforcement in our county works together. Law enforcement in our county from probation to all of the police agencies, this MDIC, taking the children to this interview center with buy-in from every agency. We do not have conflict that exists in other counties. We work together, we have a common goal. And frankly, you even see it with the public defenders who you heard the public defender mention our support and we are supportive of the public defender. We may have differences on cases here and there and what we think about for sure. But at the end of the day, we are all striving to make Santa Cruz County a safer place. So I would say a long way to get to the point of the continued cooperation and the support that this board has provided us in the other law enforcement agencies, I think is probably the most important thing that I can identify at this moment. All right, thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Kinnerty. You know, I know addressing the backlog of cases is a huge priority for you. And it's good to see in this budget that we're adding those two additional attorneys to help with that. Just to give us a sense, how big is the backlog today and what kind of progress are you going to be able to make with these initiatives? We are going to make progress on it. We have already talked to the public defender about trying to sit down with cases. It's difficult. We had a period of about eight months initially where cases are not going to trial. And as you might imagine, without sort of the trial date looming, a lot of cases don't resolve. Some do, some don't, but there were clearly probably more cases than if we had consistently been able to impanel juries. Fewer cases were resolving. We then resumed for a while and we have had trials here and there. And then there was a period of in 2021 where it was very difficult to get cases out. So there is a backlog. We know that getting specific numbers is a very difficult thing. We've tried to look into the court system and our own, and it's difficult to get exact numbers. But I can say with confidence that you have highly motivated individuals from law enforcement, the DA's office and the public defender to get these cases moving in to get us back on track to where we were. And we do appreciate refunding those two attorney positions. And we think that that will really, really help us get where we need to be. So. If you had to estimate, is it a real time? I knew this was going to come up. I wouldn't say thousands. I would say we're probably talking maybe an extra thousand. It's very difficult to put a number on. I've asked the courts and I can't get a, I don't get a very clear number there. And it's difficult because when you, you and I talk about cases, is it the same individual who has multiple cases? Because if that individual was not housed and didn't have a trial date, they have now picked up other cases. So if you want to go by individuals, it's one thing if you want to go by cases. So all I can tell you is it's a difficult number to put a finger on despite us trying. Got it. Yeah. And certainly the progress with the neighborhood courts is really encouraging, especially those outcomes as far as no recidivism and I mean, just the quality of the outcome for the participants. Do you see, I mean, is there an opportunity to continue to expand that? Yes. We are working on a monolingual court so that it can address people who aren't speaking English and in Spanish primarily. And so, yeah, it is a program that we are really excited about. We spooled it up slowly just to make sure that the kinks and the bugs were out of it. But it's clearly something that we believe can be expanded, that we are interested in expanding. And like I said, these are people who will wind up successful without criminal records who are not coming back and frankly have some appreciation. And you have community members who in the past have been frustrated business owners or various people who wanted to get involved and now that can have a direct dialogue with somebody who is taking responsibility who has committed a low level offense. Great, thank you. Thank you. We'll now take public comment on the district her knees budget for 2223. Thank you. My name is Becky Steinbrunner. I live in rural Aptos. I am very grateful for the consumer protection and the environmental legal help. When Mr. Brown, the main leader of that was brought on a few years ago, it was my understanding that that department is self-funding. Is that still the case? And if so, I'd like to see that change. I was very grateful for Mr. Brown's help in getting some action that resulted in the Aptos Village Project developers having to be accountable. Like you said, people have to be held accountable for what they do. And nothing would have happened with that whole soil contamination, pulling the tank out and hauling it in the middle of the night away and covering it all up. Nothing would have happened at all about that if it had not been for Mr. Brown's help. And that came about from the insistence that it be from the County Environmental Health itself. So I'm grateful for that department. I would like to know if it's still self-funded. I would like to support it publicly being funded if it isn't. I would like to ask, I'm supportive of the neighborhood courts. I would like to ask that one case in particular. We talk about people just doing stupid things. The whole tire skid thing across the Black Lives Matter mural in downtown Santa Cruz. I think that is a perfect example of something that should be in neighborhood court, not being prosecuted at a higher level, which I think your office has announced it in DINs to do. So I hope that that can go instead to a neighborhood court. How much is the child friendly interview space being used? I've heard in previous budget reports that it is very little used. And while I like having a dog there, there's some kids that are really afraid of dogs. And I think having smaller animals would be of benefit. And I'm out of time. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Steinbrenner. Gary Arnold, there was talk of the cooperation between the various departments and so forth. A lot of attempts for so-called fusion has been ending up on the people's side by there being run around from a district attorney to a sheriff or whatever. And what I'm talking about is that has to do with politics today where people are being threatened. There were two supervisors on this board of directors that threatened the granges. I think most of you have a grange in your districts. Both the people and the property were threatened in my phone by people that will testify. That's to the sheriff and to the district attorney. The two of the supervisors made those threats. That has been a squash on free speech for a long, long time. And if somebody can tell me how we can get the people that we elect responsible and answering two threats for speech, this one speaker happened to also have spoken at the resource center. So it wasn't that much different if you're looking at, you know, just aiming across the political spectrum. It was a speaker that should have been allowed to speak and it's put a soil on or a wet blanket on other people that want to use those facilities. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Arnold. Hi, my name is James Ewing Whitman. I'm glad that the DA's office is going to get more funding and have more assistance. I hope anything that I submit to the DA's will be of use in this county, this state and this nation to set precedence. So thank you. It was nice to witness this. Thank you, Mr. Whitman. Anyone else here in the chambers? Is there anyone on Zoom? We have no speakers on Zoom, Chair. All right, thank you. Then I'll return to the board and just if you could quickly address one question about this self-funding of consumer protections. I do see in the budget, revenues of about $2 million. I mean, just had to fully cover the cost of the consumer protection. No, the consumer protection is funded by various sources as I indicated, one of the ways that consumer affairs brings in money is it goes into, frankly, the county coffers and then it can be used to fund various things by law. The money is required to go back into funding consumer protection actions. So that does take place for the balance of that. Okay, thank you. All right, our motion would be in order. Mr. Chair, I'll move the recommended actions. Also I could motion by Supervisor Friend, second by Supervisor Caput to adopt the 2223 district attorney's budget. Any further discussion? Seeing none, clerk roll call vote please. Supervisor Friend. All right. Coonerty. All right. Caput. All right. McPherson. All right. And Koenig. All right. Item passes unanimously. Thank you. All right, thank you to the DA team. We'll now proceed with the final item on our regular agenda, which is to consider approval of the 2223 proposed budget for the Sheriff Corner, including any supplemental materials and take related actions as outlined in the reference budget documents as recommended by the County Administrative Officer. Welcome. And for a presentation on this item, we have Sheriff Jim Hart. Thank you, Chair Koenig, Board of Supervisors Jim Hart, Sheriff Corner. And with me today is our representative from the County Administrative Office, Melanie Sereno, who's been with us for a long time. It is a great job. I have my fiscal manager, Kathy Samms, and my law enforcement chief, Chris Clark, and my undershare of Mitch Padinas behind me and our corrections chief, Dan Freitas, is here as well. And before I get started, I do want to thank the Board and the CAO's office for the work on getting this budget prepared and in front of you. And I also want to acknowledge my staff. We are correctional officers, our deputy sheriffs didn't have the luxury of working from home or working in an office. They're out on the front lines or they're in the jail, working hard with people who have a lot of different types of lifestyles. There was weeks that went this year in early March where we had over 50 staff members a day off with COVID positive tests. And so they've been out there, they've been doing the work, they've been showing up every day, and I just want to acknowledge them. So let's go ahead and talk about the agenda real quick. So today we're going to just give you a brief online review of our budget. We're going to talk a little bit about positions and some crime data, and then go forward with the recommendation. Okay, you can see our mission statement and I won't read it, you guys can read it yourself. But in this day and age, as a law enforcement profession, I think we really need to get back to the protect and serve motto that we used to see on all the patrol cars across the country. I think at the end of the day, that's really our job. And that's, I believe in this mission statement, but I believe at the end of the day, we're here to protect the community, we're here to protect the incarcerated population that we're in charge of and take care of. And we're here to serve the people of Santa Cruz County. You can see in this proposed budget, our total expenses have increased by about 5%. We're looking at roughly a $94 million budget this year. Our revenues have gone up a little bit at about $33 million with a net county cost of about $60 million this year from the general fund, that's a 7% increase, which is largely salaries and benefits and then the addition of two non-sworn positions. And we don't take lightly that number, that $60 million number, that's a big number. And I get it, that's general fund dollars, but at the end of the day, we need to run our jails, we need to have enough deputies out on the street and do all the things that are mandated from a sheriff's office, which there are a lot of different requirements that we have. And so we're broken down into three divisions on this org chart, and you can see that the seven areas that we have under operations or we call it our law enforcement group, investigations, community policing, coroner, civil, abandoned vehicles and operations administration, which is basically all the administrators in the office. And then on the correction side, the main jail and Blaine Street are lumped in together. And then we have our roundtree facility, which is the roundtree medium security jail and then the roundtree rehabilitation and reentry facility. If we can just click on the medical services, I do want to call this number out. Our medical services costs and contract are increasing and they're tied to the San Francisco CPI, but they're also having a hard time finding health professionals to work anywhere, whether it's a hospital or a jail. And so the costs are going up in terms of trying to attract qualified people who are willing to work inside of a jail facility. And so this year we're anticipating spending about $7.7 million on medical services in our correctional facilities. And then as you might recall, a couple of years ago, we transitioned to a contract for food services. And that cost is 1.6 million, which is substantially lower than before we did that. And so we are seeing a cost savings on this. Our vendor, Aaron Mark, is doing a fine job and providing quality food to our incarcerated population. So with that, let's go ahead and move on to the next presentation, Melody. Excuse me, can we talk about court security real quick? I do want to touch on court security because this is turning into a substantial general fund expenditure. By design, court security is supposed to be fully funded through the state and it was back in 2011 when we signed our last contract. We've been at a contract with the state for many, many years now. And their funding has not kept up with all the cost increases that we've experienced the last 10 years. And so this year our court security funding of 24 personnel plus transportation and some other things that we do is going to run about $5.3 million. And that's to provide judicial protection in the courts. It's also to move incarcerated population to their court appearances and different types of visits that they have. And the general fund hit now is about one and a half, 1.7 million, something like that. That's how much underfunded this contract is with the state. And so I've worked with the state sheriff's association. We've spoken with the governor's office and our legislators to try to have the state catch up. I know Mr. Palacios has concerns about this as well. We've had a number of discussions about this, but this is an area that we really need to work on and get the state caught up to meet our growing expenditures in this area. Yes, please. A number of, I'm sorry, go ahead. Yeah. Okay, can we move on to just one more slide? There we go. So briefly, this is our proposed staffing, including the unfunded positions is 36 and a half. We're gonna be adding two positions that are non-sworn for our corrections bureau for programming and visitation. You can see our expenses have gone up about four and a half million dollars in the proposed. And our revenues increased a little over a half million dollars. A couple of board members have asked about how we're doing in terms of our unfunded and our funded positions. And you can see in this graph here in the fiscal year that we're concluding right now, we did have 32 and a half unfunded positions. We did receive some unanticipated growth money from our prison realignment AB 109 fund that comes down from the state. We were able to refund a number of correctional officer positions and then adding in the two non-sworn positions. If should your board approve this budget will be at 23 and a half unfunded positions. And then just another way of looking at it. This is our funded positions. So we're gonna be at 344 this year. Three years ago or at FY 1920, we were at 368. And when the pandemic hit, we've had to unfund a number of deputy positions, correctional positions and some professional staff positions. And you can see now that we're at about, really about a 10 year average at the 344 funded position mark. On our law enforcement side, some major program or staffing changes is that we have increased our funding for officer training in this proposed budget. We haven't done a lot of training outside of our mandated training during COVID. And so we're gonna be going back to our monthly trainings that we give every deputy sheriff 10 hours of in-service training. And then this year we're putting 85 deputies through active shooter training in light of what's going on, sadly around our country. And that's taking place this week and next week along with many other local law enforcement officers. We've also restarted our crisis intervention team training on teaching our deputies and reminding our deputies the best way to deal with people who are experiencing mental illness. And we've already held one session this year and we'll be holding another one in this calendar year as well. We did complete our DNA lab design. We brought in the consultant and use some DNA trust money to pay the consultant to come up with a design. And that has been completed. Our focused intervention team is up and running with one deputy and one sergeant. We're gonna be adding the second deputy back here in a few months when we get a couple of people off of training. And then your board might recall that we brought to your board a contract where we have leased, the county has leased a new sexual assault friends examiner's office. It is a, it's a much better office. It's, it provides survivors of sexual assault much more dignified care when they're going through an exam. Our safe team is conducting exams at that location now and it's going really well. And then some major emerging issues are gonna be the DNA lab construction. So we have the design now. We've hired our forensics team has a manager who has spent 20 years with the department of justice working on DNA cases. And so now we have to go into the construction phase of this. And I do have a substantial amount of money in several trusts for the construction. And I'm gonna need to work with your board and the CAO's office in terms of how we're finding those remaining dollars are gonna be needed to build that lab. And I just wanna remind you of what the value of a DNA lab is. Can you imagine you're sitting, my staff sitting across the table from a sexual assault survivor and the case is gonna hinge on DNA evidence. And we have to tell that survivor, hey, listen, we can only send a small number of samples to the state lab. And it's gonna be six to 18 months before we get a return. That's a tough conversation to have with the survivor of the family of say a homicide victim or the survivor of a sexual assault. When we have our own DNA lab and we have that sample or that evidence, we can turn that evidence around in 48 to 72 hours, two to three days versus six months to 18 months. One, to give some closure to the survivors of those crimes and also to get the perpetrator off the street so they don't violate or criminalize somebody else. I think it's hugely valuable. It's gonna be a game changer for law enforcement in this county and it's gonna serve this community well. Some other emerging issues that we're experiencing is our recruiting, hiring and retention. And we're doing pretty well on the law enforcement side, but the correction side, we're really having a hard time finding qualified applicants who can pass a background who are willing to work in a correctional facility. And we're not unique. This is going on around the state. And so right now we have 14 vacancies. I have 11 correctional officers off on family leave or injury. So of the 100 correctional officer positions, I only have 75 filled right now. And then the last emerging issue I wanna just briefly discuss is the fentanyl crisis that we're seeing every night. Our deputies and our police officers are coming across people who have fentanyl in their possession. They've overdosed on fentanyl. Our coroner's office is seeing a significant number of fentanyl overdose deaths. Every police officer and deputy sheriff in the county carries Narcan and it's routine now for the police to be saving people with Narcan. It happens all the time. And so we're really gonna have to focus on not just enforcement because we can't enforce our way out of a drug problem, but really just the education piece and the treatment piece of getting people to services they need to get them off this drug. Cause this drug is killing a lot of people. All right, moving on to the corrections bureau. Some of our changes that we're gonna be seeing coming up is we're gonna be opening all jail facilities. Let me back up. We still have two facilities closed, but the existing facilities that we have open, we're gonna open up to a visitation and the court is anticipating pulling the zero bail or a zero bail order that's in effect right now. So bail is gonna be reinstituted into the local criminal justice system, which is gonna cause our numbers to tick up. We're at about 360 people system wide right now, which is fairly low for us. Usually this time of year, say June of a non-pandemic year would be at roughly 500, 480, 500 somewhere around there. But we're gonna start seeing those numbers tick up and I was really happy to see Fernando Gerardo's report on the number of pretrial releases that his team is working on because we rely on those guys to keep our numbers down. And what I'd like to see moving forward is the courts, the DA, probation, public defender and sheriff work on a pretrial plan. 65 to 70% of our population is pretrial. They have not been convicted of the crime that they're in custody for. We have one guy who's been pretrial since 2013, almost nine years now, going on 10 years he'd been pretrial. We have a large number of people pretrial three years, four years, five years. And so we need the courts to take control of this and push these cases through so that the people can either be found not guilty and released or found guilty and move on to stay prison but our jail is not built to house people for this long a period of time. We've just completed our first year of our contract with WellPath on the mental health side and they're doing a fine job and that contract is going very well. Assembly Bill 1863 was passed and that has provided free electronic monitoring services to anybody who's on electronic monitoring meaning that the county can no longer charge. So some $500,000 was built into this budget to cover the charges that we used to refer back to the clients then now that the county is responsible for. I briefly touched on our staffing increases and going on to the major emerging issues. We talked about recruiting, hiring and retention on the operation side and I touched on the correction side. We're, your board last year approved a large project that we're going to replace all camera systems, alarms and control panel in the main jail. It's a very expensive project that's going to take two years to complete and then in terms of emerging issue, our jail and particularly the main jail is an aging facility that we're going to need to come up with a plan on because just the design, the way it's built and the maintenance on it is, it's in need of replacement. We've been working with real property on finding a modular building to replace the recovery center out front of the jail. And so we anticipate that modular building being put in place in the spring and the recovery center restarting either late spring or early summer of 23. And then I've touched on the jail meta. And so we talked to, or I heard the district attorney talk a little bit about crime rates and this is something that we monitor or I monitor very closely as does my executive staff and we report monthly to the FBI on a uniform crime report where all agencies have to report in on what the crime stats are for that month. And so this is a very accurate snapshot of where we are in the last 12 months. And so in Santa Cruz County in the unincorporated area, not the city of Santa Cruz, Capitola, Watsagore, Scotts Valley, but unincorporated Santa Cruz County, the number on the far left, the 9.87 is the number of crimes per 1,000 residents in unincorporated Santa Cruz County. And so the state average is, it's about two and a half times that. So we're at about 40% of the state average for our overall crime rate. Our property crime rates, less than half of the state average. And then you can see our violent crime rate is very low 1.6 compared to almost 4.4 on a state average. So crime-wise we're doing pretty well. This is a graph showing since 2010 how our overall crime rate has been going and what direction. And you can see before prison realignment we're at almost 27 crimes per 1,000 county residents. And now we're at about 11 crimes per 1,000 residents. So a reduction of about 60% in crime over the last 10 years. And then just touching on the homicide rate, fortunately we have not had a homicide in an unincorporated Santa Cruz County this year. We had three last year, there was a slight uptick in 19 and 20, but I was getting concerned that we were gonna start seeing this number elevate. You can see in the late 80s, Santa Cruz County in the unincorporated area was a particularly violent time in the late 80s, early 90s. And compared that to where we're at now we're doing quite well in this area. And then just one last slide on this in terms of five year increments, how we're doing, you can see from 88 to 92 there was 32 murders in Santa Cruz County. And then in 2013 to 17, there was two. That's a very significant reduction. For the last five years we've been at about the average that we've been for the last 30 years at 15. So some operational successes, our data transparency was completed. I wanna thank Sven Safford for his work on that. Our staff is about 75% complete on our profiling and bias training. Our forensic lab, which will be running the DNA lab there their accreditation is gonna be completed in February of 2023. And then the practice range is still in concept right now. And I already touched on the DNA lab. Other successes, and I wanna call this out because in our world, this is very important in terms of our lateral and hiring incentive program your board authorized us to provide a $25,000 incentive to experienced police officers that were willing to transfer to the sheriff's office. And before this program started it was rare when somebody came to the sheriff's office most people transfer over to Santa Clara Police Department Sunnyvale or some agencies over the hill where they can make up quite a bit more money. And so with that hiring incentive we've been able to hire and put to work 14 police officers in the last couple of years and we're scheduled to hire three more this month. So it'll be 17 lateral hires in about two years. And so I know this program's working I meet with everybody each person that we hire I meet with for an hour and I asked the laterals I said, Hey, I asked him does this incentive program did that help you come over here and absolutely it does not just the 25,000 but the way that it's structured and it's structured that once they complete training they receive that $25,000. Scott's Valley Police has a $40,000 hiring bonus but they structured over three years so they get pieces of it over three years. And so the attractiveness is that one lump payment of 25,000 it might help them get a down payment or first last on a rent or something like that. So it's been a very helpful program. We are allocated for three more and I anticipate coming back to your board in the future to keep that program going. And the same goes with the correctional officer hiring incentive program. We are getting people who are applying to us because that $10,000 hiring bonus is an incentive. Another success is we've been able to reestablish a relationship with the Pajaro Valley Unified School District and reestablish our school resource officer program at Aptos High School. And we had a deputy on campus all year working in conjunction with a mental health worker and that team did very well. And the school and the district was very happy. I don't know if you guys saw the article in the paper but there was a survey that was completed with students, faculty and parents and overwhelmingly there was support for that program at PVUSD. Because of the pandemic, we stopped our volunteer program and now we are starting to re-institute that program. So you'll see at your different service centers that you sometimes visit, you'll see some volunteers coming back and restaffing positions there. And then the last thing I wanna touch on is the arm prohibited person system grant with gun violence being at the level that it is with some of these terribly remarkable school shootings that we're seeing, we've been trying to come up with ways that we can reduce the chances of gun violence in Santa Cruz County. We've done gun buybacks. We have a team that only works gun and drug cases but we were selected by the Department of Justice as one of three counties to receive funding to pay for a deputy to work on cases where the court has ordered somebody to give up their firearms, whether it was because of a gun violence restraining order, they were convicted of a felony or certain misdemeanors. And there's several other reasons why, if they have a mental illness and the court rules them to turn in those firearms, oftentimes they don't. And so this deputy's job and the team that he works on is to go to these homes and make sure that those firearms are confiscated when the court tells the person they can no longer possess firearms. And we've seized a lot of rifles and guns behind that program. So that concludes my presentation. And I'm requesting that your board approve this proposed 2223 budget for the Sheriff Coroner's Office including any supplemental material as recommended by the County Administrative Officer. And I'm happy to answer any questions. Thank you. Thank you, Sheriff Coroner Hart. Are there questions or comments from members of the board? President Fearson. Yes. Thank you, Sheriff Hart and your team, your whole team for your work that's been very difficult years with the CZU fire, the evacuations that in the aftermath of that of COVID you really held steady as you can for your services to Santa Cruz County. And this is in addition to your ongoing work in investigations of patrol and other corrections and other roles including the substations in Felton and Boulder Creek which are very much approved. And I'm telling you, you have a great representative and Sergeant Jason Dunn and his team up there. They've done a fantastic job and the people of Santa Rosa Valley appreciate it very much. The, you've answered my questions on staffing and capital improvements, but I want to reiterate what I said at the first before I think you were in the room about the criminal justice council that you conducted in cooperation with the other four police agencies in this County for a comparative review, a regional comparative view that's been recognized nationally as the first one of its type. That's our Sheriff's Department, that's you and your personnel and I just really appreciate it and please pass that on how much we appreciate your leadership in this and congratulations on being re-elected without opposition. Well, thank you and I'm glad you brought that up because I felt like that was a really important report that the criminal justice council put out and supervisor friend was the leading voice on that and he did a really fine job of wrangling all those chiefs and people from my office into the same room to get that work done. So thank you for acknowledging that. Thank you, Supervisor McPherson. Supervisor Friend. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Sheriff Hart. First, I want to acknowledge your most recent promotion. I want to acknowledge Chief Deputy Freitas outstanding promotion in your department. You've done a really good job developing internal talent as has under Sheriff Medina with Chief Clark and Chief Freitas. I have a lot of confidence in the next generation, so to speak of the Sheriff's office continuing to do. Well, I want to reiterate a point that Supervisor McPherson made in regards to the San Lorenzo Valley, but make it in regards to my district, which is that the service centers in and of themselves are not a guaranteed thing. As you know, this was something that was brought by a previous sheriff that you had served under but needed to be maintained by you in particular during some of the downturns and even through COVID. And they really do play a very important role for our neighborhoods and for us, we've had a little bit of turnover there, but everybody that you've put within the office in Aptos has been unbelievably responsive to my constituents and always available. And so just a real deep appreciation for the neighborhood service model that you've created. And I think that the degree that we can maintain those service centers and doing forward is important. I'm glad to hear that the volunteers will be back because then we can probably get them back open a little bit more than they've been able to be to the public, which is also great. And to a point as well, I know we mentioned that the Criminal Justice Council before, but your agency was one of the first to really take a deep dive into what the findings were and to proactively decide that there were gonna be some upgrades made to what you're already doing. Now, with that said, your agency was also way ahead of number of other agencies within the county for some of the policies and procedures that you and your team had implemented about five years ago. Well, in advance of that with the 21st century policing, but we're not done yet. And I appreciate the work in particular of a undersheriff Medina in regards to what we're working on this year with behavioral health, which is one of the real underpinning issues with its relationship with frontline law enforcement and really the data collection around what that looks like within our county. I don't think that I think people take for granted how progressive and forward thinking our local law enforcement community is. It just doesn't look like this across the country in the same way, this level of collaboration, this level of forward thinking and the fact, quite frankly that you ran unopposed and as did the district attorney, I think is a very strong statement about what the community feels in support of its local law enforcement community. And you should take a lot of pleasure in that and also recognize that you are serving this community very well and creating a culture very well. Lastly, I'll just end on this. Your agency's been through a lot of trial and tribulation, not just with COVID, but obviously with the loss of a remarkable person. And I just want to appreciate your advocacy and support and family support over us working on the Wilbrook Park project in Damon's honor. It's really an unbelievable testament to the entire community coming forward and your line level deputies. I mean, your line level staff contributing $100,000 out of their own paychecks in order to help convert this park in his honor. It's just a beautiful thing to turn tragedy into hope. And I appreciate your entire partnership and support on that. Thank you, Sheriff Hart. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Friend. Supervisor Kennedy. Yeah, thank you, Sheriff Hart. Two quick questions. One is I really appreciate the full staffing of the FIT team and I could see their vehicles moving around town and I know we're all grateful for it. It's the secondary component, which is the jail beds available and what's the timeline? If not, what's the timeline looking for that? Yeah, the beds are available and we are using them now. We're using them a little bit differently in that we're not dedicating a unit. The FIT clients are being spread out throughout the facility as they're getting classified, which according to our FIT team right now is the model that they want to use rather than putting them all together. They think they might be more effective this way. Thank you. That's the best news I've heard in this budget hearing. I really appreciate it. Second question is we are coming up on July 4th and I know our beaches from the North Coast all the way south are always impacted and I imagine with high gas prices we tend to be a destination in the region for folks who are looking to get away from the heat and have a good time. How are preparations coming for the July 4th and frankly the rest of the summer in terms of basic public safety in our beaches and coastlines? So I'll start with the summer wide question. We have three deputies who are dedicated full time to beach patrol in addition to the deputies that are working their regular beats and they are present at a lot of the high volume, high use type beaches and they're doing a good job out there right now. And then in terms of the 4th of July we're gonna have a lot of deputies out all weekend long starting on Friday night all the way through Monday night and we're gonna start our messaging here in the next day or two in terms of fireworks, alcohol and all the issues that go along with that. So I agree with you, I think it's got potential to be sort of a weekend long challenge for residents and law enforcement but we are well staffed for the weekend. All right, thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Coonerty. Supervisor Caput. Thanks for the report. I, you know, every job has a risk and responsibility but I can't think of one where you're damned if you don't and damned if you do like being a deputy sheriff or working in the sheriff's department. The level of expectation is set so high you can have a career of five, six years everything goes real well but if you make one mistake that the public focus is incredible. That's really tough, you got a tough job and I respect you for doing it but there's voluntary overtime and then there's involuntary overtime. How bad is that with your department right now? Voluntary overtime I can understand sometimes but involuntary is basically you don't have anybody to take an extra shift you just tell somebody you got to do it and that's where you get into trouble you're tired, you're irritated, you're hungry and you got to do another shift. So on the law enforcement side we're doing okay where we don't have we call it mandatory overtime on the corrections side with only having about 75 working correctional officers we are doing a lot of mandatory overtime and some of these folks are working their regular four day a week, 12 hour day job and then they're having to pick up one sometimes two shifts a week in addition to that depending on their team and who's off, we only allow one person off on vacation at a time but there's also been a lot of sickness so people are coming down with COVID or something else and they're not able to come into work so to answer your question it is a burden on the correction side and our staff is overworked and we really as managers try to keep an eye on how they're doing and checking in with them and if they need a day off we try to get them a day off. We're hiring as fast as we can but there's just not that many people willing to do this work so we're doing the best we can with that but I truly believe our correction staff is working a lot of hours but they're hanging in there. Yeah, and then I did see in there the word it was invent at all or something like that I have no knowledge of that at all I'm assuming it's a drug though. It is, it's a synthetic opiate and it's a lot stronger than heroin and people are thinking they're taking maybe a stimuli cocaine but it might have some fentanyl in it which is a depressant and so they are overdosing on it and people are taking pills that are made in another country or somewhere else that aren't pharmaceutical grade that have fentanyl in it and then some people are just taking straight fentanyl because of the high or the low or whatever it is they're trying to get and it's very powerful and it's knocking them down and it's killing people. Okay, what age range is worse and most prevalent? It's not a college drug, is it? It's an interesting, and heroin is the same way but there's really no demographic we see all ages as young as 16 as old as 75. It doesn't matter how much money you make, where you live, if you get caught up in that it's pretty indiscriminate. It's gonna get you eventually if you're using that drug. Yeah, well anyway, thank you for all your service and good luck. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Cabot. Sheriff, I'm glad to hear that we've got 85 people in active shooter training. I mean, as you said in response to some of the worrying trends, we're seeing a country-wide. There's a lot of critique around the country for school resource officers but it does seem like with the approval rating particularly from the Aptos-Paro Unified School District that we're doing something right. Is there a significant difference in the way that we carry out the school resource officer program with maybe the way others around the country do? Well, I've heard a lot of the advocates talk about this school-to-prison pipeline and it doesn't exist in Santa Cruz County. We did it, we looked back on some data and so for the three years preceding COVID when schools were fully functioning and all the kids were attending between the three high schools we service, Aptos, Soquel and San Lorenzo Valley, there was a total of two physical arrests in three years and the only reason why we arrested those kids is a parents refused to come pick them up and so we had to take them to the hall and then eventually their parents came and picked them up. But we try to work with the school on solving problems without getting justice system involved. We don't get involved in school rules and violations. That's up to the school to handle those and we encourage our school resource officers to establish relationships with the students and the faculty so that people are comfortable around them. And I think it's a good program. I've always been an advocate for it and I think now that people are seeing the value in it in PVUSD, I think they appreciate the program as well. Yeah, it sounds like it. So I mean, that's fantastic to hear that the officers are able to serve as a resource, an informational resource and that we've only really relied on the arrests very seldomly. That's right. I mean, of course, it's also fantastic that we're able to put those school resource officers to use through the summer, patrolling the beaches. I know that's been very much appreciated by constituents in the first district as the live-up beaches, as was mentioned, can get a bit rowdy in the summer. How certain are we that the courts are going to change the zero bail policy and is that like July 1st or was it contemplated day for that? Last I heard it was July 1st and Chief Radis is nodding his head. So yeah, it's an effective July 1. Okay, well, that's good to hear. I know I've also heard a lot of concern about revolving door at the jail lately and I know you've had your hands tied in many ways. So it'll be good to, somebody's get back to normal. And as the city moves forward to move up the San Lorenzo camp down here, are you gonna be assisting them and not operation at all? Yeah, I've offered some resources to the city police and Chief Escalante and I have talked on the phone. We're gonna meet in the next week or two and really figure out what it is they need and if there's any way we can help, we will definitely provide the services. That's great. And then, I mean, it's also nice to hear the success of the lateral programs and hiring deputies, that's very encouraging. Is there anything we can do on the correctional officer front? Is, as you said over and over again, just really demanding work? Yeah, it is, it's hard work and the folks that work there are locked in the facility for 12 hours a day, just like the incarcerated population and with COVID, it's wearing an N95 12 hours a day is also very challenging. But we're working internally and we're always talking to the personnel department about what else it is we can do to attract people. And at the end of the day, I think money talks and that's what this generation is looking for. And we're unfortunately right next door to a massive economic engine that can afford to pay people more than we can here in Santa Cruz County. And so what I find to be the most successful recruit is somebody who's grown up here, who's from this area, they have established family, they might even have established housing and they wanna stay here and serve the community where they grew up. And that's the group that we're really targeting. Okay, challenging, but hopefully, yeah, we can find more hometown recruits. Yeah, and I'll just end by also praising the community policing program. If folks feel very well resourced with Sergeant Hopp and Lieutenant Baldridge. So thanks very much for that. Great, they do a fine job. Thank you. All right, any, not take public comment. Anyone who wishes to address us on the sheriff's budget, please approach the podium. Thank you. My name is Becky Steinberg. I live in the rural area of Aptos and this is a tough time for law enforcement at a time when our nation has been screaming defund police. You've really gotten a little respect for the important work you do and I think we've seen the effects of that. So I wanna thank you and everyone that serves in the Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Department for the good work you do. I have some questions. Whatever happened with the North Coast Radio Tower that was supposed to improve emergency communication up on the North Coast? I heard it was canceled. I'm very interested in effective communication up on the North Coast especially. And I wonder if that tower did get canceled or if it is just put on hold. I'm happy to hear the volunteers are coming back. The Mid County Safety Center has essentially been closed to the public even though it's been supported financially by the taxpayers. So I'm glad to hear that that will be reopening. There's a huge problem with mail theft in our county. Huge problem. And I don't know what your office can do. The post office seems rather unconcerned because it is so rampant. But I would be interested in working together with your office to try to figure out something to do in the rural county areas for mail theft. I am really happy about that. I didn't hear anything about it but the abandoned vehicle abatement program, I fully support and hope that that can remain funded and removing these vehicles that often get left out in the rural area and sometimes even get set on fire, which is really scary. So I'm supportive of that program continuing. I am still worried about the number of jail suicides that I have heard about, especially Mr. Kohut, which really should have been prosecuted but he's not, he's gone. Finally, my question is how much Prop 172 money is? Good afternoon now, I'm James Healing Whitman. I'm glad I stuck around to listen to this. I really appreciated the definition of the danger, the fentanyl. Boy, it's never been worse to just don't do it. What's happened in our society where up through the 70s, and I even believe when I went to high school in Palo Alto in the 80s, people brought rifles to school and it wasn't an issue. What has changed in our society? There are so many things going on. I appreciate this. There was a lot of information I shared to, I wrote two pages and it just seems like let's just keep working with law enforcement. I mean, my personal experience and I was thinking about this for several minutes, probably 199 out of 200 times I've engaged with law enforcement, it's actually been positive. I honestly couldn't think of something that was bad even if we were almost yelling at each other. So I think law enforcement has a really difficult job. I know after the recent shooting in Texas, so this time I'm going to look at my notes. Previous police chief Andy Mills put out an article within a week of that and he had some really interesting observations to say about law enforcement. And I wish I knew the date, I could say it, but law enforcement has a very challenging job and for the most part they're doing great. I don't always witness that with other people, but mostly with myself and I stand up when I need to. So thank you. Thank you, Mr. Whitman. Anyone else here in the chambers? Is there anyone on Zoom? We have no speakers on Zoom, Chair. And I'll return it to the board for action. Mr. Chair, I'll move the recommended actions. All right, motion by Supervisor Friend, seconded by Supervisor McPherson to approve the 22-23 Sheriff Coroner budget. Any further discussion? None, clerk roll call vote please. Supervisor Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. Caput. Aye. McPherson. Aye. And Koenig. Aye. So item passes unanimously. Thank you. To the entire Sheriff Coroner team. That is the last item on our regular agenda today. We will now recess budget hearings until Tuesday, June 28th at 1 p.m. And we'll do a final review of the 22-23 budget. Thank you.