 move on to the continued budget hearings of the Board of Supervisors. We appreciate those of you that have been waiting for this item. This is an item that we're hoping to get to about 7.30, but this is a continued budget item. If we could have a roll call please to begin the continued budget hearings. Supervisor Leopold, Coonerty, Caput, MacPherson, Chairperson Friend. Here, so we are all here. We'd also like to introduce Carlos Landeverry, who is available for translation. Mr. Landeverry, if you could introduce yourself in case anybody needs your services. Un placer, un placer. Buenas noches. Para las personas que necesiten traducción al español, estamos en el canal cero. Prenda el aparato. Asegúrese que el aparato esté frente a la pantalla. Muchas gracias. Thank you. OK, we'll open up with the remarks from our County Administrative Officer Carlos Palacios. Mr. Palacios, good evening. Welcome. Good evening. This week we have begun our county budget hearings for 2018-19 county budget. County department heads will present information during this entire week, Monday through Thursday, information on the programs that they administer and members of the public will address you about the impacts of the budget on a wide range of community needs. We believe our work to date represents a number of key successes that respond to your priorities as the Board of Supervisors and that this budget builds on that momentum. You will hear more about these successes as each department presents their budget throughout this week. And again, budget hearings will be from nine o'clock till approximately noon at the county budget office or county chambers at 7-1 Ocean. And also, we have all of the documents of the budget on our website. When I began this job, I laid out a three-year plan. And the first part of that plan was the strategic plan and to provide strategic direction for the county, combined with fiscal stewardship and augmented services. The strategic plan has three phases. This year, fiscal year 17-18, we are doing a six-year strategic plan, which will implement overall goals for the county. We presented that strategic plan to the Board. During the past year, we've had focus groups throughout the county in each supervisor's district. We've also gone out to the community. We've gone to farmers markets, for example, and community groups to seek input. We also had a survey that was online where we had over 2,000 people respond with what they felt the priorities of the county should be. This will be adopted by the Board next Tuesday during our final budget hearing. Phase two of our strategic plan will be to develop operational plans for our departments, which contain much more specific goals These will be a two-year operational plan that tie the strategic plan to our budget. Our budget will be also a two-year budget, and the link between the budget and the strategic plan goals will be these operational plans. So we'll be developing that in the next fiscal year. In addition, we are implementing an initiative called Continuous Process Improvement, meant on improving the services that the county offers to the public. Finally, in fiscal year 1920, the third year of the work plan, we will begin doing performance measures for our various county programs. In some departments, we are actually doing this already. For example, our Human Services Department, who I see seated, I see members seated out in the audience. Some of our Health Services Agency programs and also our Probation Department use performance measures extensively already. But we intend to do this countywide throughout the county, and so we will be doing training during the next fiscal year and then implementing it in 1920. In terms of fiscal stewardship, we have had a number of accomplishments. Number one, we've tripled our reserves. Right now, we have achieved the goal that the board set out for us in 2014. To triple our reserves to 10%. And the goal was to achieve this by 2021. And in fact, we achieved it this year, actually last fiscal year. And so we were three years ahead of schedule. And this has led to a number of good things, one of them being that our credit rating has improved. S&P Global Ratings last year in 2017 upgraded our rating for bond and other debt issuances to double A plus. That's for a lease revenue debt instrument. If we were to issue a GO bond, a general obligation bond, we would be rated triple A, which is about as high as you can get. And in their rating, S&P Global Ratings noted that Santa Cruz County has a very strong economy, that the county has a very strong management with very good financial policies and practices. We have had strong budgetary performance with a balanced operating budget. We have strong budgetary flexibility with a strong available fund balance, strong liquidity. And we also have very strong debt and liability positions with our debt service for all our current debt, being under less than 2% of all of our expenditures. So that points to the board's very conservative and prudent management of the county budget. We've also reduced our pension obligations. In 2007, the board took action with our labor partners to negotiate a cafeteria plan and a cap on retiree health benefits. By doing this action in 2007, we reduced our unfunded liability for retiree health benefits by $35 million. In 2012, the county with our labor partners implemented a health longevity schedule that links the level of benefit to years of county service and age at retirement. These reforms, again, that were implemented by the board with our labor partners reduced our unfunded liability for health benefits by $54 million. So these two actions alone reduced our unfunded liability for retiree health benefits by $89 million. In addition, in 2012, the county board with our labor partners implemented a second tier for a PERS retirement for all of our employee groups. This increased the retirement age for our employees, reduced the benefit formula and increased employee participation. This was done to make sure that our retirement system was more sustainable. This action implementing a second tier reduced cost by over $93 million in terms of our unfunded liability. And then in 2013, the state implemented retirement reform as well at the state level, which also further reduced the benefit formulas. So all of that taken together means that we have reduced our pension unfunded liabilities by a minimum of $180 million. And this, again, is another sign of the board's prudent and very conservative fiscal stewardship that has resulted in our improved credit rating. We've also controlled employee growth. In 2008, we had over 2,700 employees. This is right before the recession. Today, in this budget that we're presenting to you, we have 2,470 employees, 235 less employees than before the great recession in 2007 and 2008. That's a 9% reduction in that number of employees and continue to manage the county despite the lack of employee growth. And then we've also met some of our goals with deferred maintenance, although we continue to have significant challenges with regard to our facilities in that area. Despite our very conservative and prudent fiscal management, we have been able to augment services. In particular, we have implemented the Nurse Family Partnership, Thrive by Three, Whole Person Care, Medi-Cal Drug Expansion. We've made a number of significant investments in public safety facilities. We have our new Roundtree and Blaine Street Correctional Facilities, the new Sobering Center, all designed to reduce recidivism. We've also increased the amount of funds we dedicated to homeless services. So despite having a very tight budget, we have augmented our services significantly. Nevertheless, we have a lot of critical unmet needs. During the strategic planning process, we spent a year listening to the community and many thousands of people from throughout the county participate. And we heard strongly that there's still a great need to provide more behavioral health services, more substance use disorder services. We have critical needs for more parks and more recreation services. We have a lot of unmet needs in our deferred maintenance of our parks. And in addition, we have deferred maintenance throughout our county facilities. And of course, in our roads and transportation network, we have a significant maintenance issue. And in addition to the storm damage repair we're doing, we have a lot of catch-up we have to do in terms of our ability to keep our transportation network. Going now into the budget, our budget is very big. Overall, it's three quarters of a billion dollars. So $777 million dollars. Our general fund is more than half a billion dollars for $519 million. And again, we have 2,470 employee positions. We continue to see steady, if not spectacular growth in our tax revenues, in particular led by our property tax and hotel tax. This is our property tax, which represents our most important revenue for the county by far. And you can see that it's grown steadily over the last decade. Sales tax has stagnated, which is something that's new given that we're in an economic expansion. Part of this is due to online shopping. Part of it is due to people spending more money on experiences rather than things. There's lots going on there. It's being seen statewide that sales tax revenues are stagnating. However, our hotel tax continues to grow at a healthy rate, partly due to our agreement with Airbnb and bringing vacation home rentals into paying their hotel tax. You can see when you look at our overall budget, that 40% of it is on health and human services. You can see that when you look at our revenue sources for our overall budget, that almost half of it is under governmental, which means federal and state money. Tax revenues only 25% of our budget. This is very different from a city, for example, where taxes would represent almost all of the budget. These are expenditures by category. Again, health and human services taking a big portion of that. Most of our expenditures are for our employees, which provide services to the community. We also contract, however, significantly with a number of private contractors and nonprofits. Our general fund, $514 million. If you look just at our general fund, more than half of it is health and human services. These are expenditures in our general fund. If you look at just expenditures, 60% is health and human services. A quarter is public safety. This is our net county cost. This is our general purpose revenues. If the county were a city, this would be the most comparable thing. You can see it's about $146 million. This is our discretionary revenue that we get mostly from taxes. That $146 million, as you can see, funds 55% of it public safety. The county is, in fact, the largest city in the county. Half of the population in our county resides in the unincorporated area, which is unusual, just to give you the example of Santa Clara County. Santa Clara County, only 5% of the population lives in the unincorporated area. 95% of the population in Santa Clara lives in cities. So the city of Santa Clara, Palo Alto, San Jose, Aldo cities, Gilroy, and all of Santa Clara, 95% of them in cities. In our county, only half of the population lives in cities. The other half lives in the county. And so there's about 140,000 people that depend on the county to provide municipal services. And this is the amount of money, $146,000 that we have to provide municipal services. And so it's quite a challenge. And you can see that most of it is devoted to public safety. This is our general fund use of fund balance. And you can see that fund balance, which is the savings we have from any particular year we carried over to the next year. You can see that we've reduced the reliance of that from $8 million two years ago to about $5.3 million in the budget year. In terms of our budget, looking at the changes, you'll see that the biggest, if you can look at the public safety category there, in terms of expenditures, growing by almost $8.5 million. So the biggest growth is in public safety, which is actually very typical of a city. Most cities are seeing most of their growth in public safety, fire and police. We also have, of course, our correctional facilities. Also note our debt service, which is only $4.9 million less than 2% of our expenditures as a total general fund budget, which is very low. And it's a very healthy number. These are our reserves, and you can see that they've grown steadily since the board gave us direction to increase the reserves, now over $50 million. This is the county staffing, 2,400 positions. And you can see that most are in health and human services. To summarize, next year we will be developing our operational plans and two-year budget. We continue to implement our continuous process improvement initiatives and pilot projects. We are attempting to continue to have fiscal restraint. However, the challenge before the board is that there's some critical unmet needs that the community has told us very strongly, that they would like us to try and meet as we went through the strategic planning process. And so that will be the challenge of this budget hearings, and that will be the challenge before the board is how with the very limited budget flexibility, how do we meet some of the critical unmet needs that the community has identified over the last year. That concludes my presentation. Thank you, Mr. Plosios. This morning the board did ask some questions, so we're just going to open this straight up for the community since people have been waiting for the opportunity. This is an opportunity for members of the community to address us on the budget. There's no action taken tonight on it, but this is an opportunity for you to provide input on the budget. Anybody would like to speak, please feel free to step forward. Good evening. Welcome back. Good evening, Board of Supervisors. I'm Marielena de la Garza with the Community Action Board of Santa Cruz County, and I always like to start your once-a-year visit with a welcome to Watsonville. It is always a pleasure to have you here, and thank you for coming out. Today I want to talk about two things. Number one, you're going to hear from various leaders from our departments at the Community Action Board to discuss the first year of core impacts and what that meant for our agency and what that meant for our clients. So you're going to hear a little bit about that today and a little bit about that tomorrow through this open process. But I also would like to introduce to you and give you some information around our newest initiative called the Thriving Immigrants Initiative. We've been talking about it for a couple of years now, and there's been some movement in that area. And the Thriving Immigrants Initiative exists as a separate arm to the Santa Cruz County Immigration Services. SKIP has been around for 20 years. We all know and love Doug Keegan, who has led that initiative for over 20 years. And the Thriving Immigrants work is in conjunction to the SKIP services. And the difference is, SKIP exists for people who have a remedy, that there's something that they can do, can apply for, can move so that they get closer to their goals of citizenship or authorization. There's a remedy for them. The Thriving Immigrants Initiative is for people with no remedy. And as you know in our community, there are thousands of folks who are undocumented immigrants who need support now more than ever. I invite you to watch KSBW tonight. They did a small snippet on our services. But what it's important to know is what's happening out in the community. You've heard it. You've heard it from your constituents. You've heard it from service providers. You've heard it from your staff about what is how the community is responding to this political landscape. And so the Thriving Immigrants Initiative, what it is doing, it is creating a response plan to support those families without remedy. It's helping to address fears. It's helping to create a clear message that's consistent so that people are not being taken advantage of by notario públicos or by immigrant legal lawyers who are charging crazy fees for their services. And it's also bringing together a partnership specifically here in South, in South County of partners who are helping to address the issue like PVPSA, like YWCA, like Salud para la Gente, like Community Ventures and like Catholic Charities and the Watsonville Law Center. So it's bringing us together. The Packard Foundation gave us some seed money for these services, but we're just beginning the work. And what's critical about it is, you know, people are saying, look what's happening at the border. And it's intense and it's very difficult to watch. But we also need to ask the question, what is happening to the families here? Because similar things are happening in terms of families being separated and services being needed for those families. And so I ask you to think about supporting our Thriving Immigrants Initiative. We requested some set-aside funding. There's a recommendation to support some of that funding. And we're asking for full funding. And also to help us think about how do we work with the county to strategize what is the next level of services beyond Sanctuary City. So we have a lot of work to do. Thank you. And we did receive that request in the letters. Hi, my name is Elizabeth Lopez. And I represent Community Action Board of Santa Cruz County Immigration Project and Thriving Immigrants Collaborative. And tonight I'm here to share with you guys what we're doing at Community Action Board. And we are actually responding to those families who have been impacted by a deportation. We are responding to those individuals who are detained. And we are also responding to those people who come very anxious, very nervous, and scared when they get those letters to appear in court. And we also respond by supporting them and connecting them with an attorney that has the capacity to represent in court. And also by connecting them with emotional support services as well with community resources within our agency and outside our agency. And we ask for your support to continue to do this great job because the community needs this service to continue. And I'm going to share with you some positive words from a client who is very happy. And he says, this program lifted this big dark cloud that was around me. They gave me information that I didn't know. And I am able to sleep now. I am not scared anymore. I thank God every day for the people in this program that took the time to help being me and helping others. And I was assisted with emotional and financial aid. I feel like a new person thanks to them. Thank you for listening. Thank you for coming tonight. Good evening. Welcome. Good evening. My name is Maria Rodriguez. And first of all, thank you so much for your leadership and vision and supporting programs to improve the lives of immigrant families in our county. And I am the employment program specialist for the day worker center. It's under the community action board. The day worker center provides safe space for day workers to access job matches and secure dignified wages for men and women. And also provides family supportive services. As a response of the political landscape this year, we have team up with camps driving immigrants collaborative. And with the support of the county set aside funds, we have provided critical, important, educational, and supportive services for our immigrant families. Some of our highlights for this year at the day worker center that you have helped us to be able to come across this past month, to be able to accomplish. We have, since July, we have completed 30 child safety plans to support those at risk of deportation. We have also been offering weekly ESL classes and immigration education of workshops, job rating skills workshops, and no-year rights workshops, and offering leadership skills to day workers. In May, we have reported 61 registered day workers who generate $29,000 on job matches. Your maximum continued support for the set aside fund will ensure that we continue to support families navigate the process of finding legal representation, accessing needed services, and exercising their rights. On behalf of the day workers, I would like to urge you to support the full amount of funding that we requested from the set aside fund to continue to support the families in our communities and children. Thank you. Thank you. Good evening. My name is Javi Rodriguez, and I'm representing the Day Workers Center. And thank you for your service. I'm here to be an example in what feels like to be a day worker, and where I find a place where I can provide for my family and provide for others, because above my leadership. So I'm just, I'm representing the whole county of the day workers, which there is a lot of difference between staying, looking for work at the corners and the street, and have a place where I can find a job in a roof and leadership skills. So there is a lot of difference. And all this is probably taking most of the immigrants like to go to the day worker center because they can find a home. And I urge you and I to ask you to, if you can keep funding this service, because this is really making a difference in the county. Thank you. Thank you. Buenas noches. Mi nombre es Hermelinda Vázquez. Yo soy una emigrante y jornalera que recibe servicio del centro. En este tiempo con el clima político que tenemos, necesitamos más que nunca un centro como el centro jornalero que nos apoya a los emigrantes. Como mujer, en este centro me ha dado la oportunidad de buscar trabajo en una manera segura. Para esto necesitamos los fondos que hemos pedido. Y les pido, por favor, que nos apoyen para que este centro siga adelante. Esto, gracias. Gracias. Mr. Landeverry. Good evening. My name is Hermelinda Vázquez. I am a day laborer center worker. I receive services there now with our political climate. We need more than ever our day labor center. They support us immigrants. As a woman, this center has given me the opportunity to look for work in a safe way. But to do this, we need the funds that we have requested from you. So I want to ask you to please support us so that the day labor center continues and that's all I wanted to say thank you very much thank you good evening buenas noches mi nombre es victor sosa and soy un inmigrante que pertenezco al centro jornalero de santa cruz quiero decirles gracias por el sopor que han dado al centro jornalero y a la organización que nos patrocina también quiero decir que es muy importante tener este centro abierto ya que pues es un lugar accesible para toda la comunidad a donde podemos conocernos todas las razas no importa el color es un lugar seguro a donde podemos expresarnos y buscar un lugar seguro para trabajar y también me he dado cuenta que cuánto es de importante tener este centro ya que he salido a trabajar por medio del centro y he encontrado empleadores que realmente necesitan de personas como nosotros también me ha ayudado a desarrollar un liderazgo en la comunidad participo en otras áreas de la comunidad soy un inmigrante y quiero ser así para enseñar a las personas que podemos ser mejores personas siempre y cuando teníamos una oportunidad y un lugar como este ojalá que puedan seguir apoyándonos y gracias por todo el apoyo que han dado y es todo muchas gracias good evening my name is victor sosa I am an immigrant I am part of the day labor center in Santa Cruz I want to thank you for all the support that you have provided our center the organization that gives us all of these benefits I also want to tell you that it is very important to maintain this center open it is a very accessible place to the entire community where we can get to know each other people from different races different colors different place different backgrounds this is a safe place where we can express ourselves where we can find a safe job I have also noticed how important it is to for us to have the center I have I have found employment and I have talked to employers and I can see that they really need people with skills like us I've been able to develop leadership skills in the community I have helped and I also participate I volunteer in different areas of the community I am an immigrant and I want to do it this way because I want to teach people I want to show them what we can do as an immigrant if we are given the opportunity so I hope that you can continue supporting us I want to thank you for all the support you have given us and for all the support that is coming thank you so much thank you thank you good evening Mr. Keegan welcome Doug Keegan the director of the Santa Cruz county immigration project a program of the community action board I wanted to bring up that this year has been a very challenging one for immigrants in our county but it is gratifying to see the county affirming their commitment to the well-being and security of immigrants in Santa Cruz county the community action board has found critical support in collaboration from the department of human services from the sheriff's department and in fact from you elected officials as well who have given your time and have appeared at the events that we have held throughout the county and we appreciate it I I also am compelled to say that there are many challenges ahead we know that ice actions and raids will continue in our neighborhoods and workplaces we know that California is a target we see that the administration plans to expand the grounds of public charge to deny people who are applying for residency and already we see frightened families many of whom are parents with us citizen children declining the assistance that they need from the county or disenrolling discontinuing the benefits that they've been receiving such as Cal fresh and Medi-Cal so we know that this is going to have a huge impact but we look forward to continuing to work with the county in opposing these very malevolent actions that we see in our county we also hope to expand the immigration project located here in Watsonville by creating in a sense satellites at the day worker center and at the Davenport resource center so that the transportation and proximity won't prevent people from getting the services they need so those are some of the things that we're looking forward to in working with the county in the future so thank you very much thank you for your work mr. Keegan truly good evening welcome thank you for waiting good evening to all of you thank you very much for giving us the opportunity to come by and thank you to thank you all we greatly appreciate all the help that the county offers and through core i'd like to tell share with you how that has benefited 35 families that we've been able to assist from becoming evicted and homeless thanks to the funding in north mid county we've been able to assist families like there's a a senior couple who due to medical emergencies was unable to keep up with their rent and with such a limited income where at um pardon me being so nervous um before you but i go back to thanking you and being able to give them the peace and and calmness to be able to focus again on catching up with their rent filling that gap with that rent because of the limited funding they were able to pay it but not to catch up after falling behind as a widow of two children and with the recent passing of her spouse during bereavement also lost track of of all the other things that mattered that you can imagine but through the assistance of the funding that you have provided we were able to assist her to get back on her feet and focus and not on this downward spiral but actually um getting back to her job and providing um the security for her children due to that as you can imagine what a what a difficult time but thanks to her bereavement counselor that referred her to us we were able to assist i want to thank you once again um sincerely you know the you can imagine the amount of stories we had to share but um a positive i think um expresses our gratitude even more thank you and you all have a great evening thank you and i know you've been before us before but if you could share your name for the record again that'd be great that's where i should have began huh that's okay yeah but i this is this never gets easy my name is laura this at agiannopérez and i am the coordinator for the rental assistance program through community action board thank you very much thank you thank you for your work good evening thank you for waiting good evening uh my name is Juan Luis Romero and i'm the assistant program director for alcance uh under the community action board um and thanks thanks to your uh core funding for the first year uh we were able to support our efforts on violence prevention uh for youth we were able to create a street outreach program uh the supports uh that's going to be supporting 40 youth and being able to navigate uh different systems like the judicial system or the academic system and help them help them just to better themselves and and stay out of stay away from violence right and so with our programs we've been able to to provide that support we've been able to have mentors uh to work with them on a one-on-one basis being able to take them to different places uh different exposure like uh uh colleges we've been able to take them out to CSUMB being able to take them out to san jose state uh we've also provided a different opportunity as far as like job court and being able to to assist them with those pieces um thanks to the the funding as well we've been able to to support youth and being able to get their licenses getting IDs to be able to get employed and so we've been um providing services for for about 40 youth and we also have created a a program a curriculum called uh hoben noble which is an evidence-based program that has supported the 17 17 youth to go through a 10-week curriculum uh where if they've uh learned from leadership to being able to understand themselves and being able to support their families and being able to move from being a youth into adulthood and so we just like to thank you for for being able to fund us through this and we also like to take in advance for approving the local innovation trust fund so thank you thank you and thank you for your work anybody else like to address us just during the public comment period good evening welcome back good evening steve trio personal commissioner for the city and resident of watsonville and paharo village um first of all i'd like to address the sb gas tax funds there is a ballot initiative in november that may very well pass um if it does we're going to lose 12 cents a gallon um 25 of the budget may be taxes but we all drive on the roads and frankly in south county the roads in the unincorporated areas are third world i know i drive them every day and that affects anyone on a bicycle a motor scooter a bike on a bus you feel every dip every crevice so i'm hoping the county is going to come up with a plan that if that is repealed on the ballot initiative in november um what happens to those projects in order to redo the roads and then we also have to remember that there will also be a ballot initiative concerning rent control it may be a bit draconian for many owners so we need to address the fact that we don't have to put it mildly anywhere near enough low and moderate income housing for people especially people who work here who are working two jobs and more sometimes more than more than two and you can't even afford rent the recent survey that said that people who are making uh 12 50 an hour working 40 hours a week can't afford a two better apartment any community in america that's how bad this is folks we need to really address tiny homes tiny houses the sacramentals doing and we also by the way a good place to start would be freedom boulevard we had lots of empty parking lots there and also buildings that are older that have vacant second and third stories like bain street downtown Watsonville converting them with the owners to usable low-cost housing we have to think be creative and think out of the box and i'm sure all five of you uh recognize the problem because it's not going away the homeless live right behind me in the raspberry field where i live on bronte avenue and i hear them every morning thank you very much thank you anybody else like to address us during the public comment on the budget okay seen on the synon action item the board of supervisors meet again tomorrow morning in santa cruz and also take public testimony again tomorrow evening regarding the budget and we appreciate you staying up late with us tonight and coming here to Watsonville for those that aren't from Watsonville and also appreciate the board coming down we'll see you in the morning