 All right. Welcome back everyone to our Capitol City Council meeting. It looks like all our council members are here, so we're going to go ahead and just move on to the Pledge of Allegiance. If you can stand and joining me please. Pledge Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. Okay, we're going to move on to item two presentations. And we're going to start with item two B, the introduction of our new employee deputy city clerk, Edna Fasa. I'm sorry, Chloe, do you want to do the introduction for folks doing at home just to remind folks how they can participate? Okay. Thank you. And then I'll introduce our deputy city clerk. Thank you. As the mayor said, thank you for attending this Capitol City Council meeting in accordance with the current Santa Cruz County Health Order and the governor's executive order and 2920. This meeting is not physically open to the public. Council and staff are meeting via Zoom. And there are several ways for the public to watch and participate. Information on how to join the meeting using Zoom or a landline mobile phone, along with how to submit public comment during the meeting tonight, is available on our website, cityofcapitola.org, on the slides now shown, and on the published meeting agenda. As always, this meeting is cable cast live on charter communications cable TV channel eight, and it's being recorded to be rebroadcast on the following Wednesday at 8am. And on Saturday, following this first rebroadcast at 1pm on charter channel 71 and Comcast channel 25. Meetings can be viewed live from the city's website. Our technician tonight is Walter Von Tegan. Thank you. So now that everyone knows how to join us, I would be very happy to introduce Edna Bossa, our brand new deputy city clerk. She's here waving. We think Edna is great already. She's been working with us for about three weeks at this point. Edna comes to us with lots of experience, both in owning a small business and working and practicing the law. So she's very qualified for lots of details, contracts, everything you can imagine under the sun, and also excellent customer service. She's a pleasure to work with. So please let's give a warm welcome to Edna. Thank you. Welcome Edna. We're so happy to have you on board here. Minister Cusick is available. Good evening, Mayor. Unfortunately Gabe has not checked in yet. So we'll have to do this on another occasion. Thank you. No problem. There's a lot of technical issues with all this rain tonight. So thank you. Moving on to item three report on closed session staff. Do we have a report out? Yes. Thank you, Madam Mayor. Closed session was held on the agenda item and no action was taken. Great. Thank you very much. Okay. Do we have any additional materials? Mayor, there were two items sent out regarding item nine be a corrected resolution and budget amendment along with a new contract. And those are, that was all. Thank you very much. We'll move on to item five. Additions and deletions to the agenda. Do we have any additions or deletions? There's no changes this evening. We'll move on to item six public comments. Do we have any public comments of items not on tonight's agenda? I do see two. Oh wait. I do actually now see a hand, two hands raised. So we have Mr. Raymond can see now. I'm going to move on to item eight. We have a meeting. Council. How are you? We need bridges. I wanted to invite you and invited to invite the community. On February 23rd, we're going to be hosting a. COVID vaccination. Forum that is specifically geared to Spanish speaking, treaty speaking and the spec speaking populations. As we're targeting. The most impacted. And trying to alleviate concerns around. Vaccination. And so we're going to be having. Dr. Gale. Nule on our panel as well as. Dr. Martha Bernal. And. Mr. Handling as well from cert. And other folks that are going to be part of the. Discussion. And we're going to be providing. Tri-lingual. A translation and also be providing a. Rappel of five $100. Gift cards to try to incentivize the. Population we're trying to impact. So. Please share with your networks and that there's anybody that we need to reach out specifically in Capitola. That targets such. Populations. Please let us know. Mr. Can see now. And Larry, did you say there was one other person? Yes, Mayor Brooks. There's one other person. We've got Kirk. I hope I pronounced raise and see. And see. Yeah, this is Kirk ants. I'm the program director for lifeline, a program of community bridges. And I don't think it's on the agenda is the CBG. Defunding for additional COVID relief on the agenda. There's space for that. Or can I talk about during a public comment? Mr. Answered is on the agenda this evening. And so we'll hold your comments until then. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, Larry. Anyone else in the public? I do not see anyone else. Asking to talk on this item. Thank you. All right. Thank you, Mr. Kim. You know, for your comments. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Mr. Kim. You know, for your comments and Mr. And we'll hear from you shortly. Moving on to item seven city council and staff comments. We'll go ahead and start with staff comments. Do we have any tonight? I think we have three. And Steve, do you want to lead us off? Or. Okay. So as you know, we've had our first major storm of the winter. Last couple of days. I wanted to let you know, confirm that the so-called creek was opened on. Midnight on Tuesday. Everything went well. We got it well before we got your flood stage. We had some rain that night and had no flooding. And then the last 24 hours we've had quite a bit of rain. The creek got upwards of 1700 cubic feet per second, so we had a lot of rain that night. We had a lot of rain that night. We had a lot of rain that night. Although we had localized flooding and low spots throughout the city. Crews were very responsive. And we're not aware of any damage at this time. Thank you. Okay. And then. Chloe, you were going to make a note of correction to the minutes. Yes. There is just one correction. We wanted to note at the beginning of the minutes. Our previous council member. We wanted to make a note of the minutes. We wanted to make a note of the minutes. We wanted to make a note of the weeks ago, though I'm sure he would have loved to join. He was not there and that correction will be made. So thank you. Otherwise we can hopefully just have you vote on the minutes as normal. All right. Thank you, Chloe. And then the last thing I was just going to know was item eight D on the agenda, which is the Warhouse lease, which is on the consent calendar. It includes when the lease was prepared. It included an amendment that would waive the rent for the rent. It also included an amendment that would waive the rent for the rent. And then the new orders prohibited the workhouse restaurant from operating with the new orders that have come out since the agenda was published. The other clause in the lease, which will pro rate the rent for only the time when he's being allowed to open that will kick in. So. We can pull it up. We need to have discussed further. I just wanted to make sure that that was cleared everybody. The rent isn't waived through all of February now that date. We'll just whoever makes the motion just to make notes with that amendment that Chloe mentioned. Um, would probably cover that piece. So thank you. Um, any council comments at this time? I see council member Peterson, Henry. Thank you, mayor Brooks. I just wanted to take a moment to say thank you to all of our staff, but especially to our public works department. Um, with the storms that have been happening lately, I know that they took the time to open the creek. And recently I saw them even on my street, just checking out some of the drains and doing all the work that's required to ensure that our city remains un flooded during these, these torrential downpours. So I just wanted to give a big shout out and thank you to all of our staff and specifically our public work department. I have a comment. Council member for trans. Yeah, um, in addition to the minutes. Or a change rather. So if council member for trans, if you're interested in pulling an item, um, you'll go ahead and mention that on, uh, when we get to item eight on a consent calendar. Oh, this is an update Chloe mentioned updates. So I was going to jump in. Okay. Do we have any other council comments at this time? Okay. I just had a few. Um, so first I just wanted to touch base or just these comments are directed to staff about our garbage camps out in the village. I'm just noticing that there's just been, well, on the sunnier days, maybe not the last couple of days, but that we've had a lot of trash. And what I'm noticing are the garbage is that have a push in, um, live or not being utilized as much as the garbage cans that have the hole just simply on top. And I don't know if we have any more of those particular lives for trash canisters. So if that could maybe look into that. And then secondly, I'd be interested at our last council meeting, we decided to, um, extend the outside dining to through May and then we would, it would lead to a future conversation. I'd like to see if the BIA would be willing to, um, create a internal survey of the businesses and how they've been doing up into this point. Um, questions in relation to how the outdoor dining has affected them, what's worked with that, what hasn't worked. Um, so that in May they could reevaluate themselves again with the same survey. Um, just so that council can have some insight in the directions that we give them or decisions we make, uh, for the longterm. And then lastly, um, if we, uh, at our next, before our next budget hearing, if we can schedule some time to really prioritize, uh, for council to decide on our priorities, I understand that we'll be seeing that window of time for the budget, um, which is around mid-February. And I'm just hoping that we can have a bigger conversation about council priorities, um, in relation to, uh, our budget. Um, okay. So that's all I have for now. All right. Now we'll go ahead and move on to item eight, consent calendar and council member for trends. Did you want to pull an item at this time? No, I just want to, I just want to, uh, refer to the minutes and add to the, um, item for regional transportation committee that Sam story is the alternate that wasn't captured. Oh, thank you. I'll double check that in insurance. It's included. Thank you. Okay. Thank you very much. Okay. So consent items are all items listed in the consent. There will be no separate discussion on these items prior to the time the council votes on the action unless members of the city council request specific items to be discussed for separate review. Items pulled for separate discussion will be considered following General Gofferman. But any council members like to pull an item at this time? Vice Mayor Story? I just had a comment about the minutes as well. Okay is it just a quick edit? It could be, yes. If you want me to go ahead on the agenda packet page 20, item 7. It refers to Public Works Director Jesper Gennang from the City Received Bids for the Bay Avenue sidewalk, but I believe that was for the capitol. Oh, I did catch that. So if my memory serves me well, I would like to present that correction. Okay, thank you, Vice Mayor Story. At this time, do we have a motion to approve the consent calendar with the mentioned amendments to the minutes? I still move. Second. So that's a first from Council Member Bertrand and a second from Council Member Peterson. Can we have a roll call vote, please? Council Member Bertrand? I approve. Council Member Kaiser? Aye. Council Member Peterson? Aye. Vice Mayor Story? Aye. Mayor Brooks? Aye. Alright, that item passes unanimously. Just making sure I didn't skip anything because I'm known to skip things, as you know. I wear on item 9, General Government. 9A, receive an update on Pandemic Response and a presentation from the Director of Santa Cruz County Health Services Agency, Mimi Hall. Mimi, welcome. Thank you. Sorry, I apologize. It took me a bit to get off mute. Am I able to share my screen? Let me see if I can't. Jamie is saying yes. So thank you all for having me here tonight. It's my pleasure to be the guest of Capitola City Council. I'm going to go ahead and see. Alright. Are you seeing a slideshow? We are. Okay, great. Thank you. So again, thank you for having me here tonight. I know that the City Council is busy with a lot of things and it's my pleasure to provide you with an update and also offer a chance for City Council members of the public to ask questions because Pandemic Response is moving really, really quickly and things are changing in terms of direction and guidance we receive as well as the resources that we have weekly and sometimes by the day. So some good news for all of us. I think you all already know that the regional stay of home orders have been lifted for all of California. And the reason that that happened is because statewide we have a decrease, a dramatic decrease in every county across the state in both case rates and hospitalizations. So the situation that we were in post Christmas holidays with very, very limited ICU capacity in nearly every region of the state is something that in our rearview mirror, it's still a very tenuous situation. But on January 25th, the California Department of Public Health did release that regional stay at home order. So now if you all remember the blueprint for a safer economy that we left behind so many weeks ago, we are back under the guidelines of the blueprint and I can talk a little bit about what that means in future slides. I do want to know that in Santa Cruz County, our ICU capacity was at zero or less than zero percent, meaning more than full from Thanksgiving through a week after New Year's, like completely full. And that's really concerning. It was a really difficult time for our healthcare workers, our healthcare clinics and other staff. So I just wanted to give a shout out to all of the healthcare workers out there who worked many with out a day off for, you know, three weeks at a time during that time of surge. So we are now back to the purple tier. And the purple tier changed slightly from what it was before the stay at home orders. So open with safety modifications are critical infrastructure. So that's government is included in that schools and the schools are the ones who there's kind of like a tier system for schools. So the schools that had already been opened prior to the stay at home order can remain open. And there's also a process for schools to on the California Department of Public Health website to submit their applications and information for reopening, non urgent medical and dental care and child care and pre K. I think many of us also know I know Dr. Newell herself was excited about being able to get her first haircut in a long time. A lot of our services are now open are outdoor recreational facilities. The state actually updated their youth sports guidelines. So I encourage you to go to the state website and check that out because they're now allowing school based some limited school based youth sports that are low contact and including like practices and things like that are shopping centers or hotel outdoor dining is back. And so are those personal services and some of the visits that we like to do to museums and excuse me, museums and theaters. What's still closed are indoor playgrounds, bars, breweries and distilleries where it's just taking part in drinking and no meals are provided. So across California, we have improving state numbers. A few weeks ago, our statewide metrics, we had nearly 100 COVID-19 positive cases per 100,000 population across the state. So in just a couple of weeks, that's come down almost 30% and and the statewide positivity rate of all the tests that there are done. How many come back positive is now 12%. I want to compare Santa Cruz County to how the state is doing. So in Santa Cruz County, we have a daily case rate of not quite 50 cases per 100,000. We we also have come down nearly 30 from from our previous high. So just like the state, we've had a lot of improvement in Santa Cruz County. And in terms of our positivity rate, our countywide positivity rate, the average of the entire county's tests are 7.8% positivity rate. But when we look at our lowest health equity quartile, and that is a set of zip codes that are identified as the most vulnerable and the most vulnerable communities, according to a healthy places index. And those communities are primarily the Watsonville zip codes, live oak and beach flats. Those communities still are having higher testing rates, which means that we're still seeing higher case rates in our more low income communities. So now that we are back to the colored tiers. Now remember, our case rate is nearly 50 cases per 100,000. We shouldn't get too excited because we will be in that purple tier for quite some time. Our case rate needs to get down to below seven in order to get to the substantial tier, the red tier where more indoor operations and there will be less restrictions on activities. So we have a lot of work to do. But I think that we can get there as a community with a combination of vaccine becoming available, the holidays and travel associated with the holidays being over and warmer days ahead as well. This is just today's snapshot on our COVID-19 dashboard. And this is a spike that we experienced throughout that started in Thanksgiving and continued through Christmas and New Year's. But I want to draw your attention to the part that's bringing us so much relief is the downward daily case rate. And we see it on the ground. Every morning we get our new cases and there were days when we were having 200 nearly 300 new cases to put in our system every day. And our goal had been to be able to reach every new case within 24 hours and start a case investigation within 48 hours. And that was becoming impossible to do when we had more than 250 cases a day. So we're back to being able to manage our communicable disease outbreak response. And this is also the data that goes into the epidemiological projections that we use to project out future hospitalizations, future deaths and future case rates. So this is, you can find us on our county website. I just wanted to point out for the city of Capitola, the percent of the county population is 3.62. And in terms of case rate, the percent of known cases is 2.66. So the city of Capitola is kind of on par with just under its proportion in terms of population. And when you go to our county website, you can actually play around with the geography of the map. You can hover over different things. You can also hover over demographics and it'll drill down into more in-depth data for each of the indicators. This is, this graph shows the average daily number, the average number of daily new cases. It's a seven day average and it shows the last 14 day change. I know that's a lot of things put together, but in short, it's a snapshot of where we're going. And green means good, red means bad. And for the last several data points of this projection that we use to tell us, do we need to prepare our hospital systems or not? Where do we need to put our resources? It's been incredibly good news. We have a 14 day change of a 30% reduction in case rate. And again, I can't tell you what welcome news that's been for all of us. So one of the things that we follow is where Santa Cruz falls in terms of our case rates with our neighboring counties and our regional counties. And some of you might recall that early in the pandemic, we were always the bottom three lines, meaning our, our disease curve, you've heard flatten the curve. We were one of the flattest curves for a very, very long time. And I credit the Santa Cruz community for that. We have really, really good business compliance, really good mask wearing. There were a lot of things that together as municipal partners and together as community members, a lot of people were doing right. But because COVID is a communicable disease, the expectation is that everyone will will join the pack. When we have more and more and more disease, this is a population wide problem. And there aren't walls drawn or lines drawn between counties to prevent disease from spreading. So now we are kind of in the middle of the pack with our other county partners. And that's to be expected. And our increase happened when we started having our first outbreaks in our long term care facilities that happened much later for us. And it actually happened in conjunction with the Thanksgiving surge. So while we did a really good job of keeping us at bay for a really long time, we experienced all of our surge at once. So this is a graph. This is something, a depiction of something called the effective reproductive number. And we follow from an epidemiological standpoint, we follow the exponential potential of a disease. Meaning, I don't know, we're you're all of different ages. But when I was growing up, there was a commercial on TV that Farrah Fawcett was the main person. And it was about fabricated shampoo. And she would say, And I told two friends and I told two friends. And within like, five times of telling two friends, your entire screen was full. Of all the friends that had been told. But think about COVID in that way. If every person who gets COVID gives it to two friends, that's exponential spread. And if we kept it to just one person passing it to one person, we would have an effective number of one and keep it from explosion. And so this line right here is where we want to be. And this orange curve shows the times that we have exceeded that one to one ratio. And each one person, I'm sorry, each one person is spreading it to more than one person, sometimes more than two people. And when it's under that one, that means each one person is spreading it to half a person or nobody. And that's really what we're shooting for. So we are there now we are our effective number is not in the exponential spread area. And that bodes well for our future disease projections. And we've seen this happen. When there's we had surges in the spring, we had a surge in July and every time things get really bad, people kind of hunker down and become a little bit more cautious. And then we see the curve turn around. So this is our death rate projection. And this is also very good news. Before these last couple of weeks, this this projected area was actually going up. And we were really concerned because we were getting consistently, you know, two death certificates, three death certificates, depending on the day, it could be five or six. And it was really concerning. It was super sad for our staff. And we didn't know when the end when when the end would be in sight. And the end is in sight. And we've seen a decrease in our daily death and our death rate. And the projections are really good to show that it's going to continue decreasing. And the same thing happened with our hospitalization projections. When we take all of these different variables and put them in our projection model, we can see that our hospitalizations are also expected to decline in the coming weeks. That's all hospitalizations. And then this graph shows ICU hospital projections. As I said, from Thanksgiving to to afternoon years, our ICUs were full or beyond full. And you can see this model had given us that the outer edges of projection, like the maximum number, we went beyond our model in terms of the number we had hospitalized over post Christmas and New Year's holidays. So very, very glad to see that come down. It bodes well for our community. So what are we working on right now? Some of the key areas of our local response were that when our hospitals were really, really full, we saw in that graph that they were absolutely over full, especially in our ICUs, our health officer ordered made a local order suspending elective surgeries that went into effect on January 8th. And as soon as we saw our ICU numbers finding some relief and our healthcare system having a little bit of breathing room and capacity that order was lifted. One of the things that I'm not sure that everybody knows is that each county's public health department has the legal responsibility for public health emergency response. So while our staff was responding to this huge surge in cases and also responsible for vaccine implementation, we got our first shipment of vaccine on December 16th. The first shot went in arms on December 17th. And our staff was furloughed all through the Christmas holidays. But of course, we had to work through our furloughs. But at the same time, we had fire evacuations in Boulder Creek and our staff staff the shelters as well. And then the same thing with debris flow. So we have been spread really thin and been really busy with like every emergency you can imagine happening at the same time. And I just wanted to give acknowledgement to all of our staff who have been working so hard. The other thing that we've been doing is with we have a number of residential care facilities that most of our hospitalizations and most of our deaths come from residents of those facilities. And many of those facilities are what we call COVID naive. They haven't had an outbreak yet. And so we have been working really, really hard in infection prevention, control education and outreach and giving equipment connecting connecting these facilities with the state because until they all have their vaccinations, which are actually now scheduled. There's about 2000 vaccinations scheduled over the next two weeks. But they won't fully be protected for about another month. We have to really, really focus on protecting protecting the residents of these facilities. Very recently, our medical health operation area coordinator had called out to the state and we requested 40 additional surge support staff to support Watsonville Community Hospital with some changes in operational leadership and everything there was there's a void in staffing and we couldn't let that happen. So that's another role that the county local health jurisdiction has is asking for mutual aid support for local health care system needs. I want to talk a little bit about vaccines because that's what's on everybody's minds right now. Let me see. I'm trying to move around my screen so I could see my slides. So as many of you may know, we are in a situation of vaccine scarcity. There's not enough vaccine in the nation and the state in our county for everybody who wants one or who needs one. So when we don't have enough of something in the public health world, we distribute and we prioritize based on data. So across the state, we all kind of all have local information. And our COVID-19 case disparities show that we have disproportionately impacted populations in the South County zip codes and a few others. The working age population and that makes sense because if you're an essential worker, you're going to work every day, you're being exposed because you don't have a choice and you're going to work. So we have a lot of workplace outbreaks. And we also have a disproportionate case disparity in our Latinx population. And when we look at who who is dying more of COVID, it's definitely people who are older. So 84% of the county's deaths have happened in people over age 70 and 66% of our deaths. That's a lot. A majority of our deaths have been linked with people who have lived in these long term residential care facilities. So using this data, we know exactly where we need to focus the first available allocations of vaccine to prevent where the deaths are happening in our county and where the cases are happening. So I wanted to talk a little bit about COVID vaccine delivery systems. I talked about the 59 facilities that we're providing assistance to to prevent outbreaks. Those are the same facilities as the federal pharmacy program is targeting for vaccination. So this is a federal program. We have no insight to it. We don't have any control over it. But it's a federal contract with CVS and Walgreens. And CVS and Walgreens are taking care of all of the logistics, the operations and the vaccinations of all of all the long term care facilities in the nation. And it's been slow, slow rolling out in Santa Cruz County. They've only gotten up until last week, they only got seven facilities. But we received a spreadsheet. I think it was about two days ago from them with their plan and a schedule to complete the rest of the facilities. And again, it's like almost 2,500 individuals. So we're really relieved to get that news. Vaccines also come to health systems. And for us, those local health systems are Dignity, Kaiser and Sutter. And those entities called multiple county entities are expected to vaccinate their own staff and their own patients. And then there's another way the third way that vaccine comes is to local health jurisdictions. So that's the county. There's 58 counties and three city health jurisdictions. So 61 health jurisdictions in California overall. And those 61 health jurisdictions are expected to cover everybody else. Our Medi-Cal populations are underinsured or uninsured or homeless. Anyone who isn't covered in those first two groups. However, we get the smallest allocation or proportion of vaccine. So it's really, really difficult for us to be able to reach the most vulnerable populations with such a short supply of vaccine. So how we're doing it in Santa Cruz County is we have signed up clinics to be approved providers through the state CalVac system. It's a state system that approves people make sure that the clinics have their proper licenses and certifications. And they attest to proper usage of the vaccine and proper reporting. We also have a relationship with Safeway pharmacies. So Safeway has been wonderful. They have four pharmacy locations across Santa Cruz. And right now they're helping us finish the phase 1A. So the healthcare workers, healthcare workers, it's gone, blown out of my mind who's in phase 1A. It's primarily healthcare workers. Oh, in the long term care facility adults that the pharmacy program is taken care of. But Safeway pharmacies is still doing vaccinations of residual phase 1A workers. And Safeway pharmacies also help us staff the Watsonville Fairgrounds drive through vaccination clinic. So many of those vaccinators and some of the support staff came from Safeway. It was Safeway pharmacists helping us with that. The other thing is the state had promised us a statewide sign up system called My Turn that was supposed to be operational a month ago. And we had planned our vaccination clinics and the system was not yet up and running. So as a quick fix, we have been using the Safeway registration site for their pharmacies. And we know it's not perfect. It's it's hard for us to target people by zip code or by other kinds of status. And it's not in Spanish, but it's just what we have for now. And the state has promised that their system will be up and running next week. The other way that we're delivering vaccine locally is through the fairground. I originally had said drive through, but with all the rain and the wind and the cold this week, we had to quickly switch all of our operations. And Wednesday night, everybody stayed late and shout out to City of Watsonville as well. And a lot of our community partners to move our operations indoors to the Cressetti building. And we did leave two lanes for drive through outside because we have a lot of older people where it's hard for them. We call them car bound. It's just hard for them to get out of the car walk and get back in. So those are our delivery systems. And I wanted to talk a little bit about the vaccine equity framework. When you see the three different delivery systems and you kind of see that the vaccine that the county gets is for everybody who has a hard time with accessing the health care system, we have to use a way to make sure that we're targeting those populations. So we use data to drive our decision making to understand who to target. And there's something called the Healthy Places Index. It's we call it HPI. And that is an index of community vulnerability that was a partnership with the Public Health Institute, UC San Francisco and the state. And it layers seven domains of social determinants of health from ethnicity to health care coverage to socioeconomic status to living conditions. I mean, many, many things. And it also layers life expectancy at birth from the zip code that you live in. And all of these things create a community vulnerability index. And what we're doing in Santa Cruz County and across the state, our partners are doing this too, is we're looking at the lowest quartile of that community vulnerability index. Because that rolls in everything that you're looking for from ethnicity to socioeconomic status to health care coverage. And you can see from this map that primarily our lowest quartile census tracks are in the South County areas. And then here's a little track in live oak. And then here's a little track in beach flat. So we have data which communities are most vulnerable. And we use this data along with some immunization registry data to target our vaccine efforts for the vaccine that the county gets. We work in partnership with Sutter Kaiser Indignity. And our local partners have been amazing through all the phase one a they have gone beyond their own staff beyond their own population and just dug in shown partnerships and based in vaccinating anyone we send to them. And we know that they have restrictions and may have restrictions going into phase one B. But for now they've been doing everything that they can. So kind of in summary we're prioritizing the healthy places index across the age and the high risk occupations criteria. We're also pursuing a pool approach with all of our partners. So we have meetings to regular weekly meetings all around vaccine allocation with our federally qualified health care clinics and also Sutter dignity and Kaiser. We know that we have to use data. So we're collecting information on the number of lives served by Medi-Cal and our F2HC providers so that we have a denominator like what's the number we're trying to reach. And right now we're in the phase for over 75. And we know that in the county there are 16,000 individuals over 75. And we know how many each F2HC serves. We know how many Sutter dignity and Kaiser serve. And we know how many are in the weeds that we really, really need to identify. So at the end of the day we're using data and science to direct our efforts. So the final message is is a vaccine a savior once everyone gets vaccinated or we're going through these vaccination efforts. Do we need to stop doing these things. And the answer is unfortunately no. Everyone still needs to distance where their masks stay home if they're sick and wash their hands because this vaccine was not developed to prevent COVID infection. The vaccine was developed to prevent severe illness from a COVID infection. So it's still possible that after you're fully vaccinated and you have protection that you can still be infected with COVID and still infect others with COVID, even though you'll be asymptomatic. So it's really important to continue the mask wearing and the distancing because our entire with the way what vaccine is rolling out very slowly. We cannot get everybody at the same time. So it's important for everyone to continue these and then there'll be a lot more to say in the coming months as we get more information about the variants and whether the current vaccines offer protection against the variants. So all more reasons why we should continue to be cautious for a few more months. And that's all I have. I'm open to any questions or comments. Thank you so much, Mimi. That was very informative. I believe this is the first time such a robust presentation was brought to council and for our community members watching this evening. So I really appreciate that. So we'll move on to questions and I'm just going to check to see if any council members have their hands raised at this time for questions. Okay, I see council member Kaiser's hand right. Hi, thank you. And I agree with Mayor Brooks, Mimi. That was a awesome presentation and it's definitely a hot topic. So we're all definitely wanting to know more about it. I'm just wondering. So the vaccine is preventing infection. Would you possibly get mild symptoms because sometimes even just like with a flu vaccine that sometimes happens? I'll just kind of two parts of the question. And then maybe three. And what is your what is the feedback as far as percentages of people that are eager to get the vaccine? Obviously, different demographics have different ideals when it comes to that. Also, I know that there has been concern as far as capital specifically our our police force and our public works, these people that are pretty much on the front line still haven't it hasn't been made available to them. So what is there a timeline on that? Thank you. Okay, I jotted down note so that I could make sure they answered all three. So the first question about the vaccine, so it doesn't prevent infection. It prevents illness. So you can so what's expected is that people will still be infected, but they won't become severely ill. But I think another thing that you might be talking about are post vaccine symptoms. And that's happened. It's happened in a lot. I saw a bunch of my co workers were out of work this week and couldn't work the vaccine clinics because of this very issue. And we are seeing that especially with the second dose, it's soliciting a really robust immune response, which means fever, headache, chill. And it doesn't mean that the vaccine got you sick. It actually can't get you sick because there's none of the actual virus in the vaccine. But it means it's working because it's making you those symptoms mean your immune response is kicking in and it's making you feel crappy. And so that's a good thing. So however, I'm actually going to put out this update tonight. We don't want people to keep people still need to follow the rules about if you have symptoms of COVID distance and or don't go to work. We actually recently had a healthcare workplace where there was an outbreak because there are a number of folks who had these symptoms, mild symptoms and continue to come to work. They were sure it was post vaccine reaction. And as it turned out, they had COVID. So we're spreading that message to our own staff and our other healthcare partners is, yes, it's likely that it's a reaction to the vaccine. But you can't be you can't be too safe. So still follow the regular precautions. Regarding the uptake, it's a problem. So phase one a was primarily the healthcare workers. And when we first launched phase one a with hospitals, we're not saying 100% uptake. And we also see differences based on community and ethnicity. And that's not a surprise. That's what we have seen in public health with immunizations and actually trust in the immunizations even amongst healthcare workers for many, many years. So when we offered vaccine to the hospitals, Watsonville Community Hospital only had a 50% uptake. The 50% refused the vaccine. On the other hand, in Dominican, where there are more Caucasian, white ethnicity workers and it's a different population that works there. There was a 80% acceptance of vaccine. So we are really trying to work with primarily our South County partners and our health system partners to start talking now months ahead of when vaccine will be available for the general population because we need to start working with all of these pockets of the community. And our all of our different ethnicities to start, start encouraging the safety of the vaccine and start encouraging getting people ready for that mindset to accept the vaccine when it's ready for them. And then your last question about vaccines for police. So further down in phase one B, for those of you who haven't like memorized the phases and the tears, we are almost done with phase one A which are the healthcare workers and skilled nursing facility residents and other residents of long term care facilities. And we've already partially started phase one B phase one B has two kind of big categories. One is age and one is occupation. So right now we're in 75 plus. And we think that we will finish the 75 plus, maybe in the next week or two. It's possible by the end of next week. But when we break down who's already been vaccinated and how much vaccine we have, it's actually kind of a small group. But the 16,000 I know that sounds like a lot, but we've already worked through like half of them. So we've already given instruction to our clinics, the federal all the steadily qualified health care centers like Salud and San Cruz Community Health Centers and ourselves and the mce's have direction that when we saturate 75 plus, we can move on to 65 plus. So there is no talk the state's not. Well, they change things every day. But so far they have, they have asked us to prioritize age base before we move on to occupation base. So our best estimate of the over 65 is only an estimate because we seem to be getting about two to 3000 doses of vaccine a week. And about half of those doses go to second doses because many, many people have gotten their first doses. So when you think about this numbers, unless something changes with the supply, it's going to take us a really, really long time to get to the occupations. I do know that when we move to over 65, which I bet will move to over 65 at the end of next week or the beginning of the following week, we're going to prioritize over 65 across the occupations. But there aren't that many policemen and teachers. And you know, there aren't that many folks over 65, but we will get them. And when we saturate that that over 65 group is when we'll be able to move. But you never know, the state changed that. It used to be still the occupation based. And then two weeks ago, they changed they added the age based framework. A week ago, they said that they were going to move to a wholly age based framework. And they haven't done that yet. I think they're getting a lot of pushback from different kinds of labor groups. So we'll see what they decide next week. Awesome. Right on. Thank you. Thank you, Mimi. I know it's getting late. There's just one more hand up council member trans. Yeah. Um, maybe it was great to hear that your department, your agency is contributing and working so hard. It's good to hear that. And I have two questions. One, where are the beds? You know, I know the Dominican. I know the community health hospital in Watsonville. But are there other areas or is that it? Well, it depends on what you mean by that. So we do have the places that patients can get overnight care here are Dominican hospital. We call it inpatient care, Dominican hospital and Watsonville community hospital. However, when it comes to covid, Pella hospital medical foundation, their Sutter maternity maternity and surgery center serves as a search site and we use them through that surge. So when you look at the licensed hospital beds in the county, we have over 400. But licensed hospital beds mean nothing when you don't have staff to staff those beds. So having a physical bed isn't really useful at all unless you have people to staff them. And across all of our health care facilities, we had like 30% of the health care workforce out six for the holidays. A lot because of covid but some because of other matters. So when you don't have a health care and that's part of the reason that we had to call in 40 nurses and other licensed health care workers for Watsonville community hospital. That was our request from the state because when your health care system is taxed, you need that help. So we have plenty of physical beds. What we really want to do is ensure that our health care workforce stays healthy and intact so that they can staff those beds. Okay, thank you. My second question. I hope I can phrase this well. So now I understand I'm learning a little bit about your presentation that the vaccine is going to protect me from the impact of the back of the virus, especially to prevent me from getting the virus. That correct. It's actually the other way around. Okay, it probably won't prevent you from getting the virus, but it's designed to keep you from getting sick from it. Yeah. Okay, that's what I'm trying to say. Okay, okay. So if I have the virus, is there a degree to how much I'm infected with the virus? And will the vaccination have any impact on that in terms of me transmitting it to someone else? I don't see a connection necessarily, but that's my question. It possibly could. So how how likely you are to transmit to another person depends on something called viral load? Okay, the virus has replicated and how much the concentration of it, right? And so if you have an active immune response, when you get infected by the virus, your immune response kicks in quickly so that the virus replicates less effectively. So theoretically, you'll have less virus in general. That's why you'll be less sick. And so theoretically, you're less likely than being completely unvaccinated to transmit it to another person. Okay, that makes sense. Well, I want to know that that's good. Okay. Thank you. Well, thank you so much, Mimi. I'm going to go ahead and move this out to our attendees in the audience if we have any questions from our audience. Mayor Brooks, I do not see anyone with their hands raised and I do not see any emails on this item. Okay, thank you so much. Well, Mimi, we're going to move to deliberation and an emotion for the other half of this item at this time. But I just want to thank you very much for your time. I know how much you've been working. I see you everywhere. And I just really appreciate you staying on so night to answer all of our questions. So thank you very much. It's been my pleasure. Thank you, all of you for having me. Take care. Okay, so I'm going to bring this back to council. I believe we do need to vote on this item nine a if we can have a motion. I'd like to move the recommended action. I'll second. Okay, we have us first from council member Peterson and second from council member Kaiser. Can I have a roll call please? Council member Bertrand. I agree. Council member Kaiser. Aye. Council member Peterson. Aye. Vice Mayor Story. Aye. Mayor Brooks. Aye. Thank you. Okay, moving right along to item nine B. This is considered extending the partnership of Santa Cruz County Parks for the Trappitula Recreation out of school time program. Nicci, I believe this is your item. Good evening, Mayor Council member. I'm going to take a minute and share my screen. All right, everybody can see you. Okay, excellent. Okay, so the item before you tonight is about the partnership with County Parks for the out of school time program, also known as OST. So as a result of the pandemic and schools moving to distance learning, Capitol Recreation started the out of school time OST program that provides distance learning and recreation enrichment to the So-called Union Elementary School District. The we originally started this program under a fee structure and were in effort to reduce that fee to the families enrolled. We interest we entered into a partnership in October with County Parks. That original MOU was set to end in December as at that time, additional funding, if there was going to be additional funding, it was not clear. Now as we move into the next part of the school year, we are looking at extending the MOU with an amendment. The original MOU, County Parks provided to reimburse the city for expenses of the program that allowed for a more affordable fee structure. If we continue this partnership and amend the MOU for the remaining of the school year, County Parks would provide an additional $120,000 in funding to the city. This would go towards the expenses for the remainder of the school year. There is one funding condition and associated with this agreement. And it is that at least one CalWorks participant is enrolled at each site. And currently we are operating at two different sites and this condition is met. In order to maintain the net neutral budget, some expenses were reduced primarily around program supplies and food supplies. And we did that by the partnership with our school district for the meals that they're providing. We have extended that and we actually have meals being provided by the school district to families that have elected. So we have been able to reduce some basic funds as a result of that and then allocating any unused scholarship funds. So for the fiscal impact there will be, this would require a budget amendment. And Jim, I can control the slides. I'm going to ask our finance director to address the budget amendment portion of this presentation. Well, good evening, Mayor and Council. So as Nikki mentioned, there will be a budget amendment required and that will consist of originally when we created the budget before we had the county partnership, we were going to be relying on fees paid by the participant. Now that that whole model has changed, we're going to be getting rid of that revenue source as it's not really materializing. And so we'll be reducing the fees by three hundred and six thousand, but we'll be increasing the OST grant revenue by one hundred and twenty. And if you recall, I believe it was in September. We had increased that by one twenty five. So the total grant revenue will be two forty five now. We've also gotten some scholarships from Soquel Unified School District, as well as TOT coming in better than anticipated. So we'll be increasing the scholarship revenue by thirty nine thousand, which is a net decrease on the revenue side of a little over a hundred forty seven thousand. On the expenditure side, we're decreasing wages, which is really seasonal wages by one hundred and three thousand almost hundred and four thousand. And that's really a lot of that tied to when the program started and I believe we're running one less pod than originally planned is where that's coming from. And as Nikki mentioned, there's some other decreases on contract services, some training and memberships as well as supplies for a net decrease of just under one hundred and thirty five thousand. And if you could go to the next slide, so just to put that in context of a budget, the first column there has the adopted budget and there's the three thirty one one ten of revenues that we had planned originally. We knew when we got the one twenty five grant revenue that we would be back here at this time, reducing the fee revenue. We just didn't know what it would look like for the second half of the school year. So the first column is the adopted budget amended budget with the changes are all the way over to the right amended budget in the middle. And you can still see that the program is actually a little closer to net being that neutral now than it was off the original budget. And that is what I have for fiscal impact. I don't know if you have some other slides. No, other than the recommended action for this item would be to offer as a city manager to amend the current MOU with Santa Cruz twenty parts to collect revenue and reimbursed for the hundred and twenty thousand for the OST programs is remaining of the school year and adopted the post resolution approving the recommended budget amendment. And I'm available for questions at this time. Thank you, Nikki. Do we have any questions from council? OK, seeing none, do we have any questions from our audience? Mayor Peterson, I do. I'm sorry, Mayor Brooks, my bad. Sorry. I do not seem with their hand raised on this item. And I do not see any emails on this item. Thank you. I do that all the time, Larry. No problem. OK, we'll bring this back for further discussion and a vote. I'll move the staff recommendation as reflected in the agenda. I'll second it. OK, we have a first and a second. Can I please have roll call? Council Member Bertrand. I agree. Council Member Kaiser. I Council Member Peterson. I Vice Mayor Story. I Mayor Brooks. I thank you so much, Nikki. This is very exciting. And I look forward to learning more and hearing more about how it goes. We'll now move on to item 9C. Received presentation. I'm recommended uses for the second round of Community Development Block Grants Coronavirus Relief Funding. And, Katie, I believe this is your item. Katie, can you hear me? OK, we can't hear you, though. Take your time. It doesn't look like she's muted. We just we just can't hear you. Yeah. As a suggestion, why don't we consider taking these out of order? Maybe go to the tobacco grant and let's see if the sound is coming on now. Well, let's give Katie one more second. It's within 10 seconds. Give her a second here. No, we can't. Luckily, I can read your lips. So, Katie, oh, here we go. She's connecting to audio. Let's see. And now you're muted. Yes, you're on. Thank you. Thank you for your patience. Problem. It was raining so hard here. I had to I tried to get into different technology because I could hardly hear with all the rain on my metal roof. So but it stopped raining and we'll now move forward. Thank you, Mayor Brooks and Council. This evening, I'm presenting the CDBG CD grant resolution for round two. So Congress back in March on March 27th passed the CARES Act. We have given funds for round one of the CARES Act. And now the state of California has issued seventy seven million dollars more for rounds two and three of CDBG money. The disbursement through the California is going through the California HCD through the Community Development Block Grant program. During this round, the amount has increased significantly from our first round. There's three hundred and twenty thousand dollars available in the second round. The requirements for the application is that there's a public hearing for public comment, and that is what we're here to do tonight. During this meeting, it's really to have anyone interested in the CDBG money. Give them the opportunity to reach out and make public comment. I'll be returning to the council at the next meeting to adopt a resolution authorizing the city manager to submit an application for the grant. And at that point, some of the direction we received tonight will help inform that next meeting. So how can the funds be used? They can be used towards responses to the COVID-19 pandemic for preparation, prevention, response and recovery to the COVID-19 pandemic. And in this next round, in the first round, you'll recall, we were able to fund up to three events in this three activities in this next round, round two. We're only allowed to fund one additional activity, and then we can also put funds towards any of the, towards up to three of the previous activities that were funded in the first round. So the first round we did fund four activities. What qualifies for a CDBG activity? In the first round, we funded public services. We funded three food distribution services and CAB, the rental assistance program. Public facilities that, for conversions of public health care facilities, also, and we have none of those in the city of Capitola that are applicable, housing for the homeless. We also do not have any that are applicable in Capitola. And the fourth economic development for grants is something we'll be discussing this evening. So within the first round, community action board, Ray Bears and Second Harvest Food Bank were funded through the CDBG CD1 funds. We also had $80,000 in program income that we funded community bridges and also community bridges, so meals on wheels and lifelines. So that is just an update on where we are in that process. We've received our approval of the grant agreement, but we're waiting on our standard agreement. Once we get our standard agreement, we'll execute our subrecipient agreement with each of these nonprofits that I've mentioned, and then the subrecipients, the nonprofits can start to draw down the money. So the money, when this first came out, we thought it was going to be a very expedited process. That was last summer. And here we are in expecting the funds to actually come through in February. So sorry, that was us. When we talk about what qualifies as CDBG activity, I wanted to bring to your attention this next round. The county of Santa Cruz is expected to receive $8.1 million in rental assistance through the Treasury Rental Assistance Program. That will equate to we're thinking at a minimum $200,000 for a Capitola residence and hopefully more, that we haven't figured out exactly how the money will be broken up yet at this time or divided, but our local residents will be, will qualify for that money. And then during our round one, we had discussed economic development and business grants for this second round. So and I should be clear that within round two at the HCD, they referred to this as round two and three because to get the money out faster, they put this into one program. So in round, I'm just going to refer to as round two, there's $320,000 of available funds were limited to one new program and up to three of the previous programs. In preparation for this discussion and knowing that there was interest in possibly doing economic development surveys, economic development grants, we put out a survey in December. And it's quite startling the facts that we found from the survey. We did have 132 participants. The first question we asked is whether or not a business is in danger of closing within the next 12 months. And startling 44% said yes, that's 58 out of 132 businesses. We then asked to the best you can predict how long can you continue to remain open. And you can see on this slide, there was quite a few stating three to four months. So that would be March, April, quite a few unsure. And then it extended throughout the year, different time frame. We also asked for a few words, tell us a few words of your most immediate business needs. And you can see the words of funding, pay rent, staying open, money, employees, loans, so you know, over and over again, we're hearing there is a great need for help with funding. I in the survey, I outlined exactly what's required for CDBG grant and that's having up to fund businesses that have at least 50% low income employees. And when asked when told what the criteria was and then asked if they'd be interested in the CDBG grant to cover rent and utilities or COVID-19 related expenses, we got a very high response of 69% of the 124 businesses would be interested in the grant. We then asked to estimate the amount of funds to cover one month of rent and utilities. And this slide breaks that down. You can see there's quite a few that are under the $2,500 a month for one month rent. And then it goes up from there. Our ad hoc committee, which is made up of Mayor Brooks and council member Peterson, Larry Laurent, and I help with the ad hoc committee. We met we've met twice since the NOFA came out announcing the grant. And during those discussions, we first went over the results of the survey. And then we had a discussion on what should how should we divide up the money in round two? Because the need is so great across the county and knowing that food distribution continues to have such a great need. The ad hoc committee landed on a recommendation of providing $15,000 to each of the food distribution nonprofit within round two. And this money can be spent up for up to the next 24 months. So it gives them plenty of time for spending. And then to put towards the economic development project in the far right column is the total of $233,000. And there's some project management that goes into that, as I've said in previous presentations, CDBG money is there's a lot of paperwork and documentation that's required. So the third party, we've had some conversations with El Pajaro Community Development Corp to manage this. There's costs that go towards project management for it. And then the actual grant funding would be at about $186,000. What this means is if we were to put out a $7,500 award, we could fund up to we could fund 25 businesses, but probably upwards of 30, knowing that maybe if there was a cap of to fund businesses, rent and utilities for up to three months, there may be some businesses that don't quite get to the $7,500 with the three month cap. Or if we also looked at what would, how effective would it be to have an award of $10,000 each. And that would fund up to 18 businesses. So or more. And then. Next, we're going to be after after we get direction from council, our ad hoc committee will reconvene to talk about exactly how what will qualify someone and how to make this how the award will be granted. But businesses for the HCD and they'll have they certain qualifications that they'll have to meet is they must be open prior to the pandemic. They must have a physical presence in the city. They must show job retention through the grant and also that more than 50% of the employees working for the business are low income. So again, next step is set up the guidelines for the new program working with ad hoc committee. When I come back for the resolution will have the guidelines worked out and present those to council adopt a resolution on February 11. And then the deadline for the if you choose to go with economic development, the deadline is March 5. And our recommended action tonight is to accept the presentation on CWG round two and take public input, discuss allocation for round two and then direct staff to return with a resolution from preparation for the grant application. So with that, I'll be happy to answer any questions. Thank you, Katie. I most definitely can hear the rain behind you. Now we'll just go ahead and open this up for questions of our council members and I see Vice Mayor story Henry. Thank you, Mayor Brooks. Katie, I was open quite clear whether the lifeline was eligible as a continuing recipient or whether they were ineligible because of being a new recipient. Did you clarify that? They were a recipient in the first round, so they would be eligible in the second round. Okay, without disrupting any of the other recommendations, other than the amount, right? Yeah, you know, in working with community bridges, they may have to decide with the $15,000 to either utilize the money towards lifeline or towards meals on wheels, but I'm not 100% sure if we can just funnel it into just under community bridges and then they can divide it. So but community bridges can definitely be funded in this next round. Thank you. You welcome. And just for clarification, Katie, what I don't know that if you want to bring up the past slide that it does say there's 15,000 for those three. And here you go. This is the recommendation here for round two. Okay, I see council member for trans Henry. Yeah, thank you. Katie, I have a question about what are the qualifications that are existing already? But do we ask anything about how they use the money? Your volumes are really low. Is that better? Yes, that's much better. Thank you. Okay. Yeah. So there are qualifications and we have to show that we're meeting one of one of HUD's missions. And usually it's with the all of the food distribution and economic development. It's really to serve low income family or low income residents. So there is requirements, a lot of paperwork and documentation to making sure that those requirements are met. Okay, so I understand that could a requirement be that a business in terms of the idea of economic development is trying a different way to meet their mission or meet their business plan. So in this particular COVID situation, businesses down, they have a normal way of doing business, whether it's distributing food or whatever. But now they're going to try something else that's not necessary part of how they performed or done in the past. Could that be a requirement or an option? As you asked that question during our next ad hoc meeting, we're going to be discussing just that exactly what criteria do we want to tie to the grants? Should the city council direct us to move forward with economic development grants? So we'll get more into that those criteria during our next ad hoc meeting. And then I'll be bringing those back to you at the following city council meeting. I thought I was ahead of the game here. Thank you very much. Thank you. We have any other questions? My first story is your hand. Right? No, okay. I'll take it down. Thank you. Katie, I have a question for you. Can you remind me of the timeline of round one and round two? So in round one, those covered what months to what months and round two from what months. What it was like a year round one with a year or something like that. Can you help me remember? So round one was 12 months and we're just getting the award now, but they can backtrack. They can go back towards to March when the pandemic started in order to qualify their expenses. So if second harvest had greater expenses starting last March, they could, what those events would qualify and they can backtrack their receipts to last March of 2020. This next round is for 24 months. So with the next round with $15,000 to each of these entities, they have two years to spend that money. So there's plenty of time for this next round to get spent. I did reach out to each of them and the need is there and I don't think they'll have any problems spending it. Yeah, that's going to be my next question in terms of they obviously have more time to spend with the recommendation of less money. We anticipate any additional funds coming in within the next 24 months that could possibly go to these groups or any other options at this time. So we do anticipate more funds coming in how they come into us may change as we're I mentioned the most recent legislation that or the most recent money that came through the Senate is is for rental assistance is coming through a whole another way through the Treasury rather than through these programs, the CDBG and HUD programs. So I do anticipate more funding. It's just how they how it comes to us may be in a different format. Okay, thank you. Council Member Bertrand is your hand still raised. You have another question. Council Member, you're muted. Are we working with our Chamber of Commerce on this? Are they a partner in any sense? Part of the ad hoc committee meeting? They're on our business recovery task force. They have not been involved in this piece of it. We have been working with the small business, the SBDC at Carrillo College. Right. With the Brandon was instrumental in helping me with the survey and also connecting businesses with SBDC that wanted to be connected through the survey. So that that's occurred. That was one of the outcomes of the survey. Yeah, they're a good partner. Thank you. Okay, we'll go ahead and move to audience questions. Council Member questions. We have any questions from our audience this evening? Yes, Mayor Brooks. We have two people with their hands up, three people actually. I'm going to go in order. We have someone calling in with the last three digits of eight, five, four. I welcome. Can you say your name, please? Still muted. They're asking you to know. Yes. Hi. Good evening, Mayor and City Council members, Lisa Berkowitz, Community Bridges, I'm the Program Director for Meals on Wheels. And I wanted to thank you for the past CDBG funding we've received and to ask you to please support the recommendation to provide Meals on Wheels with additional CDBG funding this evening. With seniors still being advised to stay at home to protect their health and life, we know we're providing a lifeline to seniors and especially low income seniors needing meals delivered to their homes. We continue to address the need for a second meal by providing a five day breakfast pack in addition to the dinners that we've been sending out. Additionally, we were, we have schedules with, I'm sorry, with the scheduled and unscheduled power outages and whether emergencies we face this year we provided in October to over 600 home delivered meal participants throughout the county, a two meal shelf stable emergency supply of food in addition to the regular meals that we provided. We've responded to capitol seniors by having served over 7,000 meals since the first of July. So as frequently the case, the seniors we serve do such an eloquent job of expressing their appreciation for the meals and I wanted to share with you just a quick note that we received from two of our recipients, Jane and Tim. So the note says as follows words can never say how very much we appreciate you all. This year in particular has been a more needy one and I know that of you have heard from so many people the volunteers taking their time to deliver and Carol and others making sure we are taking care of the sacrifices you and others have made and then on top of this an emergency kit Thanksgiving and Christmas special goodies. I don't know if we would ever be able to thank you for this but our words hopefully will suffice. Thank you for what you do and who you are. We are more grateful than anyone can imagine for what you do every single day and every single week no matter what. Love and hugs from two grateful seniors. Thank you very much city council. Thank you Miss Berkowitz for your comments. Larry do we have is it Mr. Amp? Yes, yes, Mr. Amps is next. Hello again this is Kirk Amps I'm the program director for Lifeline a program of community bridges and I'd like to thank you for the past CDBG funding. Every bit helps a lot and I'd like to kind of update you on what we've been doing in the COVID environment. We did lose some funding about 300,000 and that was mainly due to elder day mostly closing down their congregate site where they've reduced down to about four participants a day where we used to used to transport about 75 participants two ways so about 150. Someone went private about 125 rides a day. So that impacted our service. We had to reduce staff and just gave us less resources to meet some of the transportation needs out there. But even with that we retooled to meet some of the needs during COVID. So we added an essential service program which now provides transportation to grocery stores or will pick up food from restaurants and any food markets and stuff like that. I'd like to back up a little bit. Lifeline as most of you know we're the Consolidated Transportation Service Agency for Santa Cruz County and we serve low income seniors and individuals with disabilities and we have about 800 enrolled participants currently and we keep adding to that. But now fast forward again to the services we added. So we added the essential services and then with meals on wheels or the congregate meal sites shutting down we had to retool a little bit. So instead of taking clients to the meal sites with big groups on the bus we now deliver the meals door to door for some of these clients. And we have a couple of drivers a day doing that or a couple of routes and then we participated in the Great Plates Project which was getting meals to some of the most vulnerable residents and we've continued that program. We received a fund from Kaiser so we're going to continue delivering meals for Great Plates which is really now a connection with Team Kitchen and we'll do that three times a week. And then with any kind of additional funding that we might have we just increase our services to food access COVID vaccines. We are taking people for COVID vaccines now and put a press release on that. And then we provide medical appointments and any essential services as I mentioned before we will continue that and social service programs as well for residents. So again thank you for your funding and thanks for listening to me. Thank you Mr. and for your comments. You're welcome. And I believe we have Mr. Kempfino's hand. Yes that's correct. Thank you City Council. I really appreciate your time as well as your partnership. We really appreciated your support during round one after the acknowledgement of some hard time for your budget and understanding that you had to defund all the other community partners and you had this extra funding that came in and you prioritize these critical service needs based on what we knew in terms of the highest impacted communities due to COVID seniors being the primary target. So I really appreciate your equity lens and that decision making and I hope that you would consider the following remarks in your decision and deliberation. So first I want to make sure that you understand that the county funds for CDBG funding that were mentioned for rental assistance the last time excluded capital city residents. So I want to make sure that you understand that you do not bank on the county you know primarily giving some of the rental assistance to allow a flexible funding stream where city capital residents might be able to access rental assistance and it's really an unmet need that I think needs to be addressed and should be addressed especially with these types of dollars. We ourselves are going to be exploring again and Sam might laugh because what the law center started out as a community bridges project and we might be bringing in some form of future housing assistance legal aid to deal with the evictions and eventual dealings of the moratorium where we were going to all have to face a tough reality around figuring out what it's fair for both landlord and tenant. And so we are going to be in the process of doing that and you need added support in order for that to be a realistic pilot project that we hope to be opening up not only the city capital but to the rest of the county community focusing in on places and people that are not served by the legal aid community at this time undocumented low income Latinx folks in order to have legal representation for them. I think that it's important to also look at the data that was provided to justify two hundred and thirty six thousand dollars I believe or two hundred and thirty three thousand dollars for an economic development fund. I just want to first caution in the fact that CDBG was created to improve blighted communities and low income communities. When we start using those funds to use for economic development it is a very, very gray area and a thin line that we just all need to be cautious of and understanding that we want to impact low income communities with these dollars and some examples are one fifty six percent are not fear and closure. So let's just use the data as it really relies and look at the majority of not fear and closure and look at some of the responses many of them are not even going to be able to apply. Many are single proprietorship when you're looking at low income qualifications you have to make sure that you fully understand what low income definition you're using and those folks will probably not be able to be part of that acceptance of those dollars. Second secondarily look at some of the comments people are making and how they would use it in case they're not profitable I would like to pay down debt and close advertising and customer acquisition. All these things are really important in those decision making to make sure that whatever funds you do use and you do allocate which I do think is a very important part of your strategy to make sure you have the infrastructure and the tax base to continue such programs in the future are put into that consideration and that you ensure that you make commitment with these these landlords or these individuals one minute. So those individuals that are owners of businesses are committed to the community are investing into the community and invested into the future of the city of capital like we all are as you know Lisa and Kirk talked about the needs of covid are significant and they're significantly impacting seniors and people of Latin X community and we just hope that you look at that lens when you are looking at some of the reprogramming and maybe make some adjustments and reduce the expectations of how many people you might help through the economic development part and actually help some other needed resources that might be needed to ensure that we all get through this together. So thank you. Thank you very much for your comment. So we're going to bring this back to council for comment and deliberation. I see council member Peterson can raise and then vice mayor story. Thank you mayor Brooks and thank you for our speakers and their public comment. Mayor Brooks and I along with Katie and Larry spent quite a bit of time reviewing this and determining where this funding should go and I appreciate the comment about us needing to understand where this money will go and how it's being used and I would like to make it clear that we spent a lot of time reviewing this money and where it will go and how it's being used. I believe community bridges is receiving about eighty one thousand dollars of the two rounds and if I'm not mistaking the economic development grants have some requirements tied to them from the state based on the fact that these businesses are employing a low to moderate income individuals if I'm not mistaken. So the idea that this funding isn't going to to people of lower to moderate income I think is is a misrepresentation of how we're spending our dollars in this community. I think that this is really important also that we clarify one of our public comments indicated that CDBG funds were not going to be capital residents for rental assistance but can we clarify that the funding through the community action board is in fact provided to capital residents for rental assistance and eviction prevention. I'll clarify so in the first round of CARES money that went to the county capital residents were could not qualify for in this next round that's coming down from the Treasury which is the eight point one million dollars that we all the cities within the counties will qualify for. OK so to clarify that's the money that came through the county but the first round of funding that that we allotted to community action board for rental assistance was was assisting capital residents. Is that correct. OK correct. So I just want to clarify that. OK great. Yeah so so with that being said as I mentioned Mayor Brooks and I along with our staff assistance from Katie and Larry have spent numerous hours amongst I think it was three or four meetings now to review this funding from from round one and round two and as mentioned we will be going into round three. So far several of our local businesses have I've spoken with our business owners who have indicated that they've been waiting quite a long time for this. Several of them have already shut down in my role as the liaison to the BIA I've been talking to them about this for almost a year now to just hold on. We're going to get you some funding. We haven't forgotten about you and if I'm quite frank in our discussion about round two I was pushing to give even more money to our businesses because they have received nothing in in in the funding from us so far. So if anything I do implore the council please don't remove any more funding away from our businesses. If the reason we chose to give 15,000 each to gray bears second harvest and community bridges is because we felt each of those activities are equally important in the second round. But I do implore you please don't take any funding away from our small businesses. These are people's livelihood. I have heard that some businesses at this point were two weeks away from closing down entirely. And again there is a work requirement that this funding goes to businesses that employ low to moderate income individuals. So that is my outreach to my to my fellow council members to please consider continuing with this round two funding as as recommended by the sub committee. Thank you. Thank you council member Peter said vice mayor story. Oh thank you Mayor Barats. Yeah I just want to give my thanks to all the speakers who gave us input. And Ray it didn't make me laugh that here and I think that's great news that the community bridges and the Washington Law Center is working on a partnership concerning rental evictions. Well done. And I think in hearing all this also I want to thank committee for making these recommendations. I know you've been through a lot of work to come up with these distribution numbers. But I wanted to before going I wanted to ask a follow up question if I may. When the amount for economic development if for some reason we're unable to exhaust all the funding once it comes of it can we do lie down in transfers or does it revert back. If there's any money that left over from any of these boxes they can be programmed into a different program. So if for instance gray bears could not use $5,000 of their money that money you could choose to have that put into second harvest basket instead or economic development if it's not utilized could go towards food distribution. We just need to contact HCD and do the correct paperwork to make that happen. So we could do budget amendments later down the line. And could I get a clarification about the total amount available for economic development on the chart that I'm looking at. It has grant funds of $186,901. Is that the amount that's actually available for on the small business grant or is it 233,636 but it looks like 46,735 of that is going to program management. Speaking with El Pajaro Community Development Corp. Who would it will probably be an identity to manage this grant. There's quite a bit of administration that goes into it. So when calculating exactly what would be utilized for the grant funds and not towards the administration there's once you take out the $45,000 for the food distribution you're left with 233,000 for the economic development piece to manage it $46,000 goes towards managing the program and then there's 186,000 left for the actual grants which equates to about 25 grants at the 7,500. 7,500 for grants. Yeah. Yeah, okay. So that's project management is the Apollo Valley organization. That's not capital ahead man. Yeah, that's for the El Pajaro Community Development to manage the grants. Yeah. Okay. Oh, well, thank you for that additional information. And, and I guess what the way I look at it, I think that we should approve the recommendation is made by the committee. But even our eye on utilization or the economic development grants. And if for some reason there is a great deal of ineligibility or it's not used, then we can do a transfer later on in time. There may be some other service needs. But yeah, I think the need for the small businesses in capital is essential and important. And in that which is maintain the funding that we have for the community development. All right. Thank you. Thank you, Vice Mayor Sturry. We have a first. Do we have a second? I'll second it. We have a first and a second by Council Member Bertrand. Are there any other comments at this time? Okay, I've seen none. We'll go ahead and go to move on to. Oh, actually, sorry, I have a comment before we make go to roll call. Just real quick. As I asked earlier about additional options becoming available, what I understand is that there's different types of seed DBG grants that are available to cities. And I would be interested in having staff look into those options for our city. We've never done anything like that before. And as Mike, our story question, you know, it does take a recognize that there is a lot of work that goes into this. So I do realize that it takes some some manpower behind doing this sort of work in terms of processing these types of grants. But if we can have staff look further into that, that would be really great. So if we can go to roll call. Yes, Council Member Bertrand. I approve. Council Member Kaiser. Hi, Council Member Peterson. Hi, Vice Mayor Story. I'm Mayor Brooks. Hi. Thank you, everyone. Thank you, Council Member Peterson for your work on this very, very important work here. Thank you. Okay, Item 9D, consider a resolution accepting a tobacco grant. Captain Daly, this is your item. Yes. Good evening, Mayor Brooks, Council Members and staff. The City of Capitol is committed to enhancing public safety through education, community partnerships, crime prevention and enforcement. This evening, I'm proposing to Council to accept grant funding from the Department of Justice Tobacco Grant Program and to discuss the possibility of creating a focus group to identify the best methods to educate and inform our youth about the dangers of tobacco use. So let me provide some background. As far as the funding mechanism for this grant came from the California Healthcare Act of 2016, which was Proposition 56. So that's what created the funding for this grant program. And as you'll probably recall, back in 2019, this Council banned flavored tobacco products and that law took effect on January 1st, 2020. So in February of 2020, staff then began researching other grant opportunities looking for tobacco education and compliance. And we identified a grant from the California Department of Justice and the tobacco grant program. And the grant officially opened in July of 2020. And we have appropriately submitted a proposal to the state. In December of 2020, staff received an award letter authorizing or award letter for a two-year grant from the Department of Justice and the total for the grant for the two-year period is $21,036. So let me just kind of talk a little bit about the grant. So we have three components of this grant. The first one is education. The second is compliance. And the third one is enforcement. I'll start with the education. I want to kind of circle back that towards the end because I think that's going to prompt some discussion. So I'll start with the education piece of it. This funding will allow us to conduct youth outreach and educational seminars to prevent tobacco use. And that our goal for this particular component is to have a minimum of four education seminars throughout the two-year grant cycle. The second is the compliance. And this funding will allow us to conduct a minimum of six compliance checks at tobacco retail establishments. And our goal there is or basically these inspections will cover compliance checks and educate the not only the owners of the businesses but also the staff that's selling the product. And then the third component is the enforcement. And this funding will support a minimum of six. There's terminology here but it's called a minor decoy operation and shoulder tap operation. And very similar to alcohol, ABC enforcement. And what we'll do is we'll have a total of like I said six minor decoy operations and six shoulder tap operations throughout the two-year grant period. So let me kind of get back to the education piece of it because it is so important. And we feel that our local resources can really identify the most effective ways effective ways to educate and inform our youth about and their parents about the risk of tobacco products. And so currently we've received really good support from New Brighton Middle School and also the Santa Cruz County Public Health Department. And we understand that there may be interest from Council to participate in this focus group. And I'm happy to discuss any elements of the grant itself or the formation of this group. With that I'm open to any questions. Thank you Captain Daly. Do we have any questions from Council on this item? Council member Bertrand. I have no questions but you expressed an interest in involving City Council members in this focus group. And Captain Daly, you know, I would have been very pleased and honored to participate. Thank you. Any other any questions? Do we have any questions from our audience? Brooks, I do not see anybody. Look at your hands up. Thank you. Sorry Larry jumped the gun on that. I can see them too. I will leave that mastery to you next time. I apologize. Okay, coming back to Council for comment and deliberations we have in common. Council member Peterson. Thank you Mayor Brooks. I just have a quick comment. I think this is really important and I I'm excited for us to vote on it. I am just in the same vein of this item. I received an email yesterday that I think a lot of you probably received from the American Lung Association saying that the city of Capitola now has a B grade for our, you know, clean air and tobacco programs and banning of flavored tobacco products and whatnot and in 2017 we were at a C. So we've brought ourselves up and I'm excited for the possibility for us to keep on getting better through these kinds of efforts. So I will make the motion to move forward with staff recommendation on this item. I'll second. We have a first and a second. Any other comments from council? I just want to say thank you to Captain Daly for moving forward with this. I was nervous when we brought forward the initial ban on flavored tobacco without any plan for enforcement and so by taking these extra steps really shows how important it is that we focus on the safety of our kids in our community and really just take the way and follow through to this really important matter. I too am interested in working on this part of the education outreach. If there's room for me, if you guys will have me. So thank you. Thank you very much. So we have a first and a second. No other council comments. We'll go ahead and take this to roll call. Council Member Bertrand. I agree. Council Member Kaiser. I Council Member Peterson. I Vice Mayor Story. I Mayor Brooks. I All right. Let's get us an A plus in that next year. Okay. All right. So that brings us to item 10 for adjournment. I think we did some really good stuff tonight. Council Members, I appreciate all of you very much. Thank you to our staff and our participants and your comments this evening. Please remember to find the good and others and in yourself. Good night. Meeting is adjourned. Wait. Thank you. Good night. Goodbye.