 Okay, welcome everyone to the April 7, 2022 meeting of the Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission. It is 9am and we will begin our meeting with a roll call. Commissioner Bertrand. Present. Commissioner Sandy Brown. Here. Commissioner Johnson. Here. Commission alternate at first. I'm here. Commission alternate Hernandez. Commissioner Hernandez or Commissioner Kevin. Commission alternate your friend. Here. Commissioner friend. Commissioner Koenig. Here. Commissioner McPherson. Here. Commissioner Kristen Brown. You muted Kristen. I'm sorry. I'm present. I'm here. Commissioner Parker. Here. You have a quorum. Right. Thank you. So we will now take oral communications. Oral communications is a time for any member of the public to address the commission on any item. Within the jurisdiction of the commission that's not on today's agenda. It may not take action on items that are not on the agenda. So speakers are asked to state their name clearly so that it can be accurately recorded. Excuse me in the minutes of the meeting. And in order to. Raise your hand. You want to press that raise hand button on your. Computer on zoom or press star six. Star nine. Star nine to raise your hand. Community TV. It looks like we're still in practice session. And I don't see that the attendees have been let in. Oh, excuse me. I don't see any either. Okay. So we'll give that a moment. To. Here we go. Bring folks in. Okay. I may not have heard your announcements. I'll do that again. Sorry about that commissioner. No worries. Okay. So this is for members of the public who are just being admitted to the meeting. We are now on oral communications. And as. Per usual, any member of the public can address the commission on items. And you can. Indicate your interest in speaking by raising your hands. And I see hands are going up. We'll start with Brian from trail now. Brian from trail now you are up and it looks like you're muted. Yes, in a hospital room. I am people's thank you. I'm calling you today from the IC unit in Reno. I'm okay. I broke one in there at skiing. And. And I fractured nine ribs. Reason I'm calling in today. Is just to talk about the importance of opening the coastal trail. Because. People here were heard. And miss. The one factor that is stopping. The trail for being open is miss Clark. The private owner of roaring camp. Is so important. For her to get the message that she came. As a private citizen. Owner of the business. Prevent our community. From having the trail. So I asked you all. Please. Reach out to miss Clark. And say it's wrong. For her to stop. Our community. From getting that trail open. In saving lives. Thank you. Thank you, Brian. I, and I hope you. Are in good. Have getting good care and that you have a speedy recovery. Thanks for your comments. Okay. Next up, we have Michael saints. Good morning commissioners. Thank you. Good morning commissioners. Thank you. Chair Brown, Michael saint with campaign for sustainable transportation. I'd like to ask you all a question. What is the most effective actions individuals can take to conserve energy? Answer to that is public transportation. By eliminating one car and taking public transit instead, you will eliminate 30% of your CO2 emissions. Why? Because of the diversity in the city. So, I want to go to Canada crews. County or America in general. And why in Europe, Asia and Canada. Their public transportation is two to five times greater per capita and thus. Giving them a much higher ridership. The reason you're. who's RTC as well as Metro and voters see transit as a social welfare program. Our excuse of saying our suburban sprawl, our rural areas are not conducive to public transit is a cop out. Canada is much more rural than the U.S. and historically other countries combined suburbs and rural areas with better transit. We need to foster good public transportation by pushing people from their cars, by discouraging driving, eliminate fuel subsidies, hire charges for automobile ownership and use and use the revenues from those charges to enhance a sustainable, urban and suburban transport system. We need to pull people to transit. How do we do that? Provide good quality of service, develop infrastructure for transit and non motorized transit. Without an emphasis on transit, congestion, greenhouse gas emissions and car usage will continue to climb. Thank you for your time. Thank you, Mr. Saints. The next speaker is Trink Praxel. That looks like Ms. Praxel has dropped off. Okay, so while we're waiting for Ms. Praxel to, oh, there we go. There we go. Thank you very much. Sorry, I wasn't getting the unmute button. Great, I sent an email letter to the commission and to other county agency administrators yesterday and I'm not sure all pollutioners got to read it. So I wanted to raise it in oral communications. We have a kind of urgent problem regarding the Measure D campaign. The old signs from the 2016 Measure D campaign, not the campaign, but after Measure D was successfully passed, the Regional Transportation Commission actually sent out vehicle stickers to many local agencies to have them show appreciation for the funding support that came from Measure D. But that signage is still in use on some public agency vehicles now. And this is very confusing to people because a very similar slogan is being used now in the 2022 Measure D campaign as was used in 2016. In 22, it's now moved forward now. In 2016, it was moving Santa Cruz County forward. Some similarities in colors and fonts really make it appear as if these two are related. And it is already confusing to people in the public about these two Measure D campaigns and how they're related. But of course, a yes vote is very different from one to the other. And I really ask the RTC to work with their, with the other public agencies that still have these signs up and get them down immediately or covered. I really appreciate your support. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Praxel. Okay, our next caller is Barry Scott. And Mr. Scott, you are on mute. Thank you, Chair Brown. I was happy to participate in the last night's open house on the trail segments 10 and 11. And I remember too that last week was trail segments eight and nine. And I'm calling because I can't for the life of me understand why we're looking at the alternatives. I understand how SQL works. I understand we have to look at reasonable alternatives, but I wonder if the commissioners and the public really realized that the interim trail approach, which is we're told expected to lead to the ultimate trail which is basically the Monterey Bay Sanctuary scenic trail design, rail and trail. I don't know why we're looking at what is truly infeasible, expensive and inconsistent with all of the plans up till now. I was surprised to learn that the interim trail and the idea of, for those not familiar, the alternative that's being investigated is to take the tracks out, build a trail, later on take the trail out, put the tracks back and then build the trail again, which is coming in at almost twice the cost. And for those segments I mentioned, nine, 10 and 11, a little more than six miles, the cost of this alternative is 60 million for doing something that can't even be done. I wonder why we're looking at something that would require rail banking when rail banking is unlikely. I wonder why we're looking at something that would terribly harm roaring camp. And I hope that all of our commissioners who vote, obviously will pay close attention to the details. Thanks. Thank you, Mr. Scott. Next up, we have Sally Arnold for rail and trail. Thank you for all your service everybody on the RTC. I know it's all very complicated and I want to just add on and echo what Trink Praxel was saying about this confusion with the signs. It's really, it gives the appearance that county department of Parkwood Works trucks and buses and other things are actually campaigning for the current major D. And it's, I know that, I mean, it's no secret to people in this meeting that I've been working on this campaign, we're getting calls and texts from people sending photos saying it's terrible that the public works is campaigning on this issue. Are they allowed to do that? And we're trying to calm people down and say, no, it's a different major D, but the community's getting riled up. And it's unfortunate that I don't want to see people, I don't want to see voters angry at the RTC who's got that 2016 major D logo on the website, angry at the various city DPWs and the county DPW, angry at Metro, angry at Lifeline, all the various places where that 2016 sign is up right now. Those agencies are just inviting the anger of voters unnecessarily. And the anger of voters who are savvy enough to recognize that it looks like campaigning and just other voters who are kind of innocent and don't understand that agencies aren't supposed to campaign and just think, oh, I guess my local streets people like this major, I should vote for it. It's a mess, it's just a confusing mess and it really needs to be addressed ASAP as the election season heats up. And I just want to thank you all for really taking this problem seriously and addressing it immediately. Cause the longer you wait, the bigger a mess this is going to become. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Arnold. Our next speaker is Lonnie Faulkner. Hi, thank you so much, Chair Brown. I too am very concerned to see publicly owned vehicles, including the bus Metro. I was just shocked to see the posters on the back of public works vehicles and county buildings and other projects throughout the community promoting ballot measure D. And I just want to echo what Sally said that these posters need to either be covered or removed through this election season. That's very confusing. Using our public funds to promote the local ballot measure is not acceptable and the appearance of that is not acceptable and all these signs should be removed immediately. I'm sure you're aware that measure D is a highly controversial topic right now and so local voters need to not be confused about that. I just also want to mention, I'm shocked and disappointed that Brian Peeples or any member of this community would lay blame for holding up our trail on our beloved family owned business Roaring Camp and Milani Clark, the CEO of a 64 year old family business that brings so much happiness and money to Santa Cruz County. Not to mention the fact that Roaring Camp is incredibly generous giving back to the community in so many ways. Whereas I find that some other organizations are more takers, Roaring Camp is a giving community. There have been ongoing attempts, I find it ironic, by both Brian Peeples and another organization that's running the measure D who have been targeting Roaring Camp in order to destroy the Felton branch line in order to attack and destroy our own publicly owned rail line, the Santa Cruz branch line. These attacks have served to stall and jeopardize bringing the already approved Monterey Bay Sanctuary Scenic Trail to our coastal rail or coastal rail to our community as quickly as possible and not only threaten the construction of our trail but also our equitable environmentally wise electric light rail that we've been working on for over a decade. I do hope that Brian heals quickly from his devastating injuries but just wanted to put that to task about his accusation. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Faulkner. Our next speaker is David loves public transit. Good morning, can you hear me okay? Yes, we can. Okay, yeah. First to Brian, I hope you're doing okay and recover well. Obviously, I think you're sometimes kind of loony but we are colleagues in transit advocacy and I certainly hope the best for one of our own. So to reiterate Trink's point about measure D confusion, I literally did hear from someone who asked me because, gosh, I'm the local expert. They said, didn't we already vote on this? So it's a real thing. And I'm also on the website, there's a link that just says measure D which should probably get the full name like 2016 transportation sales tax measure. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Van Brink. Okay, I don't see any additional hands up. So I'm gonna give a last call for oral communications. This is for items not on today's agenda and seeing no additional hands coming up. Commissioner Brown. Oh, yes, Commissioner Schifrin. Sorry. Yes, thank you. I would like to ask staff to provide the commission with a report on the legality of public agencies appearing to advocate or advocating for ballot measures. I think the concerns raised by members of the public regarding infusion over measure D signs on public places needs to be taken seriously. And so I know in the past it's been a real issue where public agencies can provide information but they really can't advocate. And I think while I know none of this is happening on purpose in terms of what the public agencies are doing, I do think that unfortunately having the same letter for the Greenway ballot measure as was for the sales tax measure is unfortunate. And I wonder whether it would be, whether something needs to be done in order to avoid an illegal violation of the elections code. So I appreciate it if we get maybe get a report from our attorney on the next agenda to regarding this matter. Madam Chair, we can provide that report. Great. Yeah, that would be helpful. I'll say that I too have heard from community members who are genuinely confused, not calling to suggest that there's some kind of something that's untoward going on, but there is confusion. And I think that kind of resolving that is important. So getting that report would be very helpful. I'm just gonna also say, and then I'll turn, I see that Commissioner McPherson has a hand up and Commissioner Rock can, but also for members of the public who are concerned, it's probably worth communicating with your local agencies, your city councils and the County Board of Supervisors who have vehicles that are potentially in this situation. Okay, Commissioner McPherson. Yeah, I wonder if we can speed this up. I mean, the election is in June, this is April and it's before us. I don't know if council, is there any way we can speed up an opinion on that? Some of that? Yes, yeah, yeah. Super, Commissioner, we can. There are very specific restrictions on the issues. This issue is obviously a little complicated because it's two separate measures, but we can advise the staff and the commissioners very quickly on this issue and coordinate with the other agencies as necessary. Great, well, as soon as possible being really great. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, thank you, Commissioner McPherson. Commissioner Rocken. So my point would be, I don't think there's a legal confusion about, would it be all right for people to end agencies to endorse a measure that's on the ballot. This really is getting these signs down fairly quickly. Since the RTC sent these out, and we, all of us, Bruce McPherson, maybe in the charge, and me, not far behind in thanking the public over and over again for voting for Measure D in 2016, because the funding that it provided for public transit of all different kinds and quite then passed and some, it's not just vehicles. Every time you see a new project, for a path or a bike path or something else, there's a thank you for Measure D funding sign up there. So I think since the RTC sent these out, and people are using our logos and stuff for it, maybe you could, I'll give it to staff, we can't take an action on this, but the staff can act on this, just to send a simple message to all the various agencies who were transiting transportation agencies that were in contact with noting this problem and asking them to remove the signs until after June. They could go back, I hope they would go back up again, no matter what happens on the Measure D, the current Measure D, but I think we should not wait for a legal opinion in the month. I think we should just have staff send something out, pointing out the problem and asking people to cover up and take down these signs. Again, I don't think we can take a motion or an action on because it's on the, it was on the world communication that she came up, but the staff can act on this, certainly. Thank you, Commissioner Rackin. And I will also follow up with the staff on this. I've already talked with the city of Santa Cruz about it. And so other commissioners, if you wanna talk with your respective staffs as well, now that we've been alerted to it, that seems appropriate. Okay, thank you for the follow-up and thanks to our commenters. I'll ask now, do we have any additions or deletions to the agenda today? I have a chair, no, we do not. All right, thank you. We'll now move on to our consent agenda. All items on the consent agenda, this is items four through 18. We'll be acted on in one motion if no member of the RTC or the public wishes to remove an item for discussion. You can, I can also ask for questions now. So if members of the commission have questions, you can ask those without pulling an item. But I'll ask first, do any commissioners have an item to pull from today's consent agenda? And are there any questions or comments on any item on the agenda, the consent agenda? Okay, seeing none, I will take it out to the public to ask if there are any comments from the public on items on our consent agenda. This is items four through 18. All right. Approval of the consent agenda. We have one, we have one hand has come up from the public. So we'll, I'll go ahead and call on Michael Sains, Mr. Sainte, you're up. And then we'll take a motion. Thank you, Chair Brown. I'm just a little slow with my hand. Sorry about that. I just wanted to offer a thank you. I know I come up here and speak quite a bit and some of it may seem negative or I'm always pointing fingers, but item 17, I'm so happy that you guys are putting out this letter to the state and Governor Newsom. It's about time we spoke up. It seems like we always want to throw money at an issue and to help support driving vehicles, lowering fuel costs that the pump and stuff like is the opposite that we should be doing. So thank you so much for that letter. Just wanted to offer my congratulations on that. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Sains. I'll make my motion to approve the consent agenda. Okay. And so we have a motion by Commissioner Rock and second by Commissioner Schifrin to approve our consent agenda. We'll now take a roll call vote on that. Commissioner Bertrand. Can I approve? Commissioner Sandy Brown. Aye. Commissioner Johnson. Aye. Commissioner Alton and Hearst. Aye. Commissioner Alton and Hernandez. Commissioner Alton and Schifrin. Aye. Commissioner Koenig. Aye. Commissioner MacPherson. Aye. Commissioner Brown. Aye. I'm sorry, Mr. Brown. Aye. Commissioner Parker. Aye. Commissioner Rotkin. Aye. And I also want to note that I did not include Commissioner Scott E. for the beginning of the roll call. And he is here. Okay. So that motion passes unanimously. We will now move on to our regular agenda and we will begin with Commissioner Reports. Any reports from commissioners? Commissioner MacPherson. Yeah, I might be getting ahead of our director's report but that exciting thing is going to be happening between now and our next meeting Friday, April 29th at 9 a.m. I think it's still scheduled to have the grand opening of the wildlife under crossing at Highway 17, the Royal Curve. This is one of the carve outs and Measure D of 2016. Tremendous project. We've seen it underway for the last, at least a month or so, but I just want to just point out that I think it's still scheduled unless I'm wrong, April 29th, Friday at 9 a.m. at the site. Really an exciting project. Yes, thank you. Commissioner MacPherson, that is, it's very exciting and it's a, this is a great opportunity to celebrate our successes. Absolutely. Commissioner Koenig. Thank you, Chair Brown. I just wanted to report that last week, Chair Brown and I attended the Central Coast Coalition Sacramento Legislative Day. So this is a coalition comprised of electeds and staff from Santa Barbara, San Benito, Santa Cruz, Monterey and San Luis Obispo counties. I shall also note that we had members of RTC staff with us as well, including Executive Director Preston. We met with Governor Newsom's cabinet and legislative secretaries, the chair of the California Transportation Commission, Leigh Ann Eager, the secretary of the California State Transportation Agency, Toko Machakin, Senator Laird, and Senator Lamone from Santa Barbara, as well as Assembly Member Cunningham from the San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara area. And in general, our coalition message was to oppose a couple of state assembly bills that have been proposed that would remove local control of transportation sales tax revenues. It was also to explain that one size doesn't fit all when it comes to transportation improvements in the future and VMT calculations and that there are some continued investment in auto infrastructure will be necessary on the Central Coast. We also asked for our fair share when it comes to state money on active transportation and buses. What we heard was that the state will be investing in highway improvements, but they really wanna see that these are multimodal projects that improve bus service and active transportation at the same time. And hearing that, I was really realized how ahead of the curve our own staff has been in positioning our projects in just that light. And I think a reflection of that of course is the $100 million plus that we got from the state in the last cycle for our multimodal corridors project. But I also heard that future awards are far from guaranteed because there's a lot of needs out there. For example, Santa Barbara's seeking state funding to complete their high occupancy vehicle lane project. Bistmo Beach is seeking state funding on an HOV lane project. Monterey is seeking funding for better safety on the 101 corridor as well as to build rail down the Salinas Valley. San Benito wants money to improve Highway 25. And of course we are seeking significant amount of funds for our future trail projects, Metro and auxiliary lane projects. So well, as we've all heard, there is a lot of state and federal money available. I think we all need to be cognizant that there are a lot of demands on that money as well. I think a hundred different communities could think of a hundred ways to spend 100% of the money. And as we move forward and decide on what bus on shoulder and trail project we're gonna apply for with segment 12. I think we need to be conservative in our ask and conscientious of all the competing demands across the state. And again, these were just the demands within our own coalition within the central coast region which is relatively small within the state as a whole. So that is my report on that. I also just wanna use the opportunity to ask staff for some clarification on some of the issues with the Greenway Initiative. And my intent is not to argue one way or another for the initiative here, but just to get information. I don't know if it, for example, one question is would passage of the Greenway Initiative prevent this commission from studying or pursuing funds for passenger rail if needed? I'm happy to send these questions to our legal counsel and executive director in the future if it's too difficult to answer now. But I do think it would be helpful for staff to clarify because I've seen a lot of different understandings on all sides of the issue and it would be helpful to have the experts weigh in. Commissioner Koenig, I'm gonna ask that you do go ahead and thank you for suggesting sending those questions in. We are in entering into a territory that we probably ought not to enter into for Brown Act reasons because this is just commissioner report time. So if you could, I can, and I know that staff is very responsive and we'll follow up quickly. And perhaps that can be part of the report back. If we do have something on the May agenda, just to clarify what's happening with the signage, we could also include your responses to your questions, but they will be responsive to you. So. Sure, that'd be great. Okay, thank you. Okay, I don't see any other hands up. So I think we will, that means that we'll move on now to our director's reports and so I'll turn it over to director Preston. Thank you, Madam Chair and commissioners, members of the public. I have a few announcements today. First is regarding a funding presentation that was requested by alternate commissioner, Jenny Johnson of the last RTC meeting. Staff is working on a presentation which is scheduled to be presented at this lands transportation policy workshop. And that'll occur in two weeks on April 21st. I have an announcement regarding Caltrans sustainable transportation planning grants. Caltrans has awarded Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission a total of $786,000 for two sustainable transportation planning grants for reports that will focus on climate adaptation and transportation equity in Santa Cruz County. The RTC and the County of Santa Cruz received $448,800 to develop a climate adaptation vulnerability assessment and transportation priorities report for unincorporated Santa Cruz County maintained roads and the Santa Cruz branch rail line. The emphasis of vulnerability assessment will be on identifying vulnerable transportation infrastructure and the associated hazards such as wildfire, mud debris flows, extreme weather flooding and sea level rise. The priority report will identify transportation projects that can be impacted by climate change and those then be prioritized for actions to enhance resilience. The hazards brought on by climate change pose a serious threat to the county's transportation infrastructure and in turn threatens the safety and quality of life of our residents. Santa Cruz County is already experiencing the impacts to sea level rise, coastal erosion, extreme weather events and flooding, wildfires and extreme temperatures on the county's transportation infrastructure. This report will be very impactful in guiding the RTC and the county as it works to maintain the existing transportation network and plans for transportation needs in the future. The RTC also received $338,000 to develop the Santa Cruz County Transportation Equity Action Plan to address transportation equity and other transportation disparities in the community. This plan will include an equity analysis of the existing transportation network, transportation projects and services, plans, policies, procedures, a public outreach toolkit to proactively engage disadvantaged communities, the establishment of an equity work group, extensive collaborative stakeholder and public engagement in the development of equity performance metrics. About half of the county's residents are transportation disadvantaged. Once developed, this action plan will provide us with the tools and information needed to prioritize transportation investments that will improve access, safety, health, mobility, housing and job access for marginalized, segmented and other disadvantaged communities in Santa Cruz County. RTC staff is excited to get started on these important planning studies and will provide more information regarding schedule and public participation opportunities over the next few months. Thank you, Caltrowns, but also a special thanks to Ginger Dicar, Rachel Morconi and Shannon Muntz for their work on the grant applications. I would like to welcome Stephanie Britt to RTC staff. We are very pleased to have Stephanie Britt, the member of the RTC team. She began her work this Monday as a transportation planning technician and she is in attendance today. You'll see her and it's a panelist on the Zoom link here. Stephanie has a bachelor's of art degree from UCLA with majors in political science and global studies. She has a master's of public administration from the University of Laverne. In May, she will have earned a master's of urban planning from the University of Southern California. For the past two and a half years, Stephanie has been working with the city of San Marino as a management analyst where she launched their very first economic development program. Stephanie also worked with a group of stakeholders to develop and present a city beautification streetscape program, which included community outreach, working with the public and presentations of the city council. Stephanie is fully fluent in Spanish. After completing her BA degree, she worked with the trade commission of Peru where she reached out to group of the in companies and helped them connect with American importers. She used both English and Spanish to write documents and translate for businesses. Stephanie is also familiar with the central close as she lived in Salinas for a period of time and was eager to return to the area. Stephanie will be working with Grace Blakesley on the regional conservation investment study and assisting other planners with other projects. Her education, experience in community and outreach and bilingual schools will make her a great asset and a number of RTC projects and help the RTC ensure improved public engagement. Welcome, Stephanie. And with that, I'll hand it back over to you, Chair Brown. Mr. Brown. Thank you, Director Preston and welcome Ms. Britt. We're excited to have you on board. Thank you so much. Okay, we do have, I see that Brian from Trail Now has a hand up, so I'll call on you, Brian. Yes, thank you. I'll keep it short. I just wanted to remind that I sent an email to the chair and co-chair on the ultimate trail versus the interim trail and the importance about communicating to the public. Right now we believe there's a miscommunication to the public on the ultimate trail. The plan is for a slow moving freight train, not the commuter rail transit that was approved by the preferred alternative transportation corridor analysis study in March, 2021, which would have 60 trains a day from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. go 45 to 60 miles an hour. As a reminder, Executive Director Guy Preston said that in order to move forward with the commuter rail transit, we would need a 30% design for the proposed rail system and a new environmental impact report. So it's important that the public understands that trail design team is designing a trail. They're not designing a rail system. So it's very, most likely in the ultimate trail, if you were to put in a commuter rail transit system, you would have to pull all those rails out. You would have to put in new stations, cross guards, passing sightings. So I think there's a lot of confusion in the meetings that I've been attending. Those questions come up a lot. And so I think it's important for the staff to communicate that the ultimate trail does not include in their cost of building the ultimate trail, it is not for a commuter rail transit. Thank you for your time. Very much appreciate the work that staff and Mr. Preston are doing. They're doing a phenomenal job. Very good work. Thank you. Thank you, Brian. Okay, I don't see any hands up from commissioners. Does anybody have questions or comments for on Director Preston's report? Okay, seeing none, we'll move on to our Caltrans report and I'll turn it over to, oh, it looks like Commissioner Hernandez, did you have a question or comment for Director Preston? Is that a leaping? Yes, not a question, you know. I'm excited about the grant, the equity grant as well, and the bilingual staff that we have now too, especially for South County, I think that there's a lot of opportunity and need as well here in South County. And if there's ever a chance to come in and meet some of the city staff over here and some of the folks over here in Watsonville, I think that we should definitely take advantage of that as well. A lot of stuff with the active transportation that we still need a lot of work on here in this area. And so with our Vision Zero plan that we have, so I mean, there's a lot of work that needs to be done. So thank you, thank you so much. And I appreciate all the work that you guys do with CQD's grants as well. And I'm excited that we have a bilingual staff too. Thank you. Okay, thank you. Okay, now we will turn it over to Scott Eads for a Caltrans report. All right, good morning, Madam Chair, members of the commission. Again, Scott Eads with you here today for Caltrans. First, I want to welcome Stephanie Brett, looking forward to working with you. Sounds like you're going to be another really qualified member of the SCC RTC staff. Director Preston beat me to the punch on the sustainable transportation planning grants. So just I'll just say congratulations to staff. Within all of district five, we received, or I should say that others received a total of about 2.3 million. And so the amount that RTC was awarded was about a third of everything that was awarded in district five. So again, I think that speaks to the quality of the work that staff is doing to put together applications to apply for these competitive grants. I also wanted to highlight that in addition to the ones that RTC received, there was also another awarded to AMBAG for a central co-sustainable freight study, which will cover the five counties within district five, and will also include Santa Cruz County. Also, I wanted to highlight that kind of a evolving world in terms of the Federal Highway Administration and how they're thinking about transportation and the types of projects that are important. And we're seeing a shift there that's really aligning where Caltrans has been going and the state has been going, State of California has been going over the last few years and that is moving to a Complete Streets design model. They just submitted a report to Congress, specifically on Complete Streets and that being a greater focus for how they're going to be thinking about projects and funding opportunities and the types of projects they'll be funding. So Complete Streets, I think you're all very aware is about making sure that it's facilities, the facilities that we own and operate work for all users, especially those that are most vulnerable on the roadway and that's bicycles and pedestrians and transit users. So Complete Streets is all about making sure that we're designing and building and funding facilities that work for all users. And then the last thing I wanted to highlight is at the last meeting, Commissioner Bertrand brought up a reconnecting communities, highways to boulevards program, caught me by surprise because I was aware of a federal program with that name, but I was not very aware of what's happening on the state level. So it turns out that there is a state program that's been, it's really a proposal at this point in time. The details are still being worked out. So we do not have a lot of information in terms of exactly how the funding program will be set up and what the criteria will be for funding. And I think the question was more specific to what types of highways and what types of boulevards and that information just isn't available yet. So as information becomes available, I'll share it or your staff will make sure and have that available as well. But at this point, it's really just a evolving proposal. That concludes my report. I'm happy to take any questions. All right, thank you, Commissioner Eads. Are there questions or comments about the Caltrans report from commissioners? Commissioner Hurst. Yes, thank you very much, Mr. Eads. You know, the influence of Caltrans is very important to Santa Cruz County and the region. We're really pleased to see of all the improvements that are taking place. You know, I went through the 129 roundabout, not too long ago and what a great improvement on that intersection in Lakeview Road for safety and transportation efficiency. I'm also glad to hear about the MBAC study for sustainable freight. You know, when you look at the logistic issues country wide and the supply train issues that we reflect back upon the necessity to get goods and to ship goods. And so I'm anxious to see what Caltrans will come up with and MBAC particularly when it comes to sustainable freight. So good luck. Thank you very much for your cooperation and your participation particularly in Watsonville and South County and getting our people moving. Thank you. Commissioner Bertrand. Thank you, Chair. Scott, I'd just like to thank you very much for the cooperation with Caltrans and the city of Capitola. We're trying to deal with some maintenance issues on our crossroads at 41st especially. And also thanks for getting back on that question I had to look forward to further reports on that. Thank you. Thank you. Commissioner Hernandez. Well, I have to say that I'm really excited about the complete streets of focus because for a while we've been really trying to get the whole 152, a little more walkable and also making sure that we have the back of the pedestrian state infrastructure built around it as well. And along all it's downtown too. So and you know that highway goes right through our downtown. So I'm really excited about the focus of complete streets because our downtown is essentially highway and it connects our housing to all of our downtown schools too. So it's definitely a project for complete streets that we can apply for funding in the future. If I could respond to that, Chair Brown. I just wanted to highlight the fact that we actually were successful. Caltrans was successful in applying for additional shop funds specifically to increase complete streets elements in downtown Watsonville. And so we're successful in that and we are continuing to move forward and coordinating closely with city staff on how to do that best to make sure it works with the remaining, the adjacent city streets and the needs you have there. Thank you. I do not see any other hands up from commissioners and nor from the audience. So with that we will move on to our next item. This is item 22, a measure D, potential financing options presentation. And I'll turn it over to Tracy New, I believe, our budget director and budget and finance director, excuse me, and director Preston. Thank you, Chair Brown. Good morning commissioners and members of the public. Tracy New of RTC staff and here with us today is Melissa Schick and David Leiper from K&M Public Finance. In June, 2019, K&M Public Finance, the municipal advisory firm contracted to provide financial advisory services to the RTC, presented a broad overview of the measure D expenditure plan, revenue allocation, cash flow model and the development of the inaugural strategic implementation plan. K&M also presented on funding and borrowing options for measure D projects and programs. K&M provided another broad overview of the funding and borrowing options to the budget and administration personnel committee at their meeting on March 10th, 2022. K&M Public Finance is here today to present the commission and overview of bonding as the RTC evaluates funding options and strategies in the pursuit of securing SB1 grant funding for highway and coastal rail trail projects. Executive director Guy Preston will start with the overview of the presentation. Thank you, Tracy. Let me share my screen. Can you see my screen okay? Yes. So I'll start with a quick overview. Fortunately, I'm having a lot of issues with my screen. Staff has been gearing up for some funding opportunities on the horizon that could potentially fully fund construction of some of our priority projects under development within both the highway corners and the coastal rail trail active transportation categories of measure D. As you are aware, there will be a call for projects for two Senate bill one programs, the solutions to congested corridors and the local partnership program later this year and information about these projects and their costs have been presented to the commission last month. The local match for these grant programs will be needed to be locally funded by measure D which requires a commitment by the commission for the local match as part of the grant applications. In addition, the call for projects for the active transportation program will be released this spring with applications scheduled to be due in June of this year. Staff is considering sales tax revenue bonds to help fund the local match requirements of both measure D programs. Staff also recognizes that there may be future opportunities for sales tax revenue bonds to fund priority projects in the other regional programs including the rail and highway nine categories. So let's provide a little background on previous discussions on financing for measure D. First staff and K&N presented to the budget administration and policy committee and the commission as part of the development of the 2020 measure D strategic implementation plan but we decided not to implement bonding at that time. As part of that discussion, the county and RTC staff also discussed bonding for deferred maintenance that was decided it would be better suited if the county implemented their own financing and finally financing was determined to be needed to fully fund the highway 17 crossing project from the measure D program but instead of bonding the commission authorized an inner program loan and the project is under construction now. The needed funds were borrowed from the measure D highway program and will be paid back over the remaining life of the measure. Finally, we made a similar presentation to today's presentation to the BAP last month and with that I'm now gonna hand it over to David Leifer and Melissa Shig from K&N Public Finance to discuss financing in more detail. Thank you, guy. Can you hear me okay? Great, thank you. Good morning, David Leifer here with Melissa Shig from K&N Public Finance, the commissions Public Finance or Municipal Advisor. And as Guy mentioned, I have a short presentation just four slides to provide somewhat of a high level introduction and for some of you a reintroduction to the process by which we go about planning for potential bonds so that if a bond proposal is brought before you we all will have a basic understanding of the concepts. So on this first slide of outline, really the two primary options, if you will, are approaches for funding, large municipal public infrastructure projects. And they are pay as you go or leveraging revenues through bonding. And just a word about both of them. Pay as you go, of course, requires that you have ample cash on hand to cover whatever costs that you may be incurring for capital. And of course, when there's a large capital project, often those costs become a bottleneck and there isn't enough cash coming in each year, though there would be adequate cash coming in over time. And that's when we talk about bonding. But pay as you go certainly is the lower cost option in some respects in that you're not having to borrow and repay with interest. But it does present challenges for accelerating the delivery of projects in a single phase. And there can be some costs incurred from a pay as you go approach in terms of inflation costs related to construction if one needs to wait multiple years to actually incur construction. So that's the trade-off. And then on the flip side, borrowing is an opportunity or using the capital markets to accelerate delivery of projects that are ready to go. We call them shovel ready, but that they've been through design and engineering and planning, et cetera. And as I mentioned already, there in one respect you can minimize costs by avoiding the future growth and inflation and in construction costs. But the flip side is that you are paying something for that in terms of the interest rate on the bonds. And then of course another benefit, and I'm on page four, another benefit of doing a borrowing is that you're spreading the costs of financing the project over a long period of time which lines up nicely often with the useful life of the project that you're building and the users that will enjoy the benefits of that project. At the end of the day, what's optimal usually we find in projects like this that the optimal financing plan tends to involve some sort of mix of the two. You want to maximize the pay go to the extent you can but use other funding, grant funding certainly is preferred first. And then of course borrowing to be able to accelerate and deliver projects both in a timely and cost effective way. And sometimes we'll look at where the municipal market interest rates are and try and maximize the borrowing portion of the overall financing plan when rates are low. Okay, we can move on to the next slide. Yeah, this is just an introduction to the idea of a cash flow model. And we work with staff closely on this and we've together developed a cash flow model for measure D. And the goal in the cash flow model is to sort of manage just that analysis that I was talking about. What's the optimal use of cash and potential borrowing and how do we identify when you need a borrowing and whether you need a borrowing and how much and the cash flow model sort of tells us that we have these are just illustrative examples. We're going to be coming back to you in a matter of weeks or shortly with some specific cash flow models with actual dollars but wanted to introduce the concept here revenues in, they get allocated both direct allocation and then for the regional projects. And then we sort of look at the construction costs and the timing and amount of construction costs and see where we go into a deficit. And where we go into a deficit that's obviously an opportunity to fill that deficit with a bond and then we would drop in we would calculate how much bonding would be needed to meet that deficit and bring you up to at least a minimum cash balance that is comfortable. And then we would drop in the debt service for those bonds including the principal repayment and the interest and see what impact that has on overall cash. And so as I say in the second bullet, staff is in the process of developing the five year programs of Measure D regional categories which requires us to update this model and then look at your bonding needs and bonding capacity. And so we've listed here some of the updates that are in progress. We're gonna look at the actual sales tax revenues that have come into date, project them out using some reasonable growth rates, assumptions and then look at the actual project cost schedules and amounts, layer in any other funding sources, identify what we think is a reasonable cash balance target so that you can maintain any fluctuations and in future revenues or expenses and then see where inter-program loans might be efficiently used if at all in lieu of capital markets bonding. So we're gonna come back to you but I just wanted to introduce this idea of the cash flow model because this is really what determines whether bonding is even needed and by how much. Okay, on the last two slides, if you can go to the next slide, I just wanna introduce a couple of considerations when we think about bonding. And again, this idea of do we need to bond? How much might we bond? And what's the optimal use? And so the first consideration is how much or whether you need to borrow. And again, that's gonna be driven by the estimated expenditure and construction schedules for the projects as they get dropped into the cash flow model. Those are gonna be the primary drivers of the timing and amounts. And of course, before bonding, the projects must be sort of fully baked in terms of bonding. So evidence of compliance with Sequa and other permitting that might be required really should be done prior to going out to the market for bonds. So we don't jump the gun too much. And then we have to take into account the tax law requirements. And basically without doing a full digression into sort of municipal finance tax law, there's a requirement when you borrow with tax exempt bonds that the borrower has a reasonable expectation of spending the bond proceeds largely within three years of issuance. So that's critically important. When we're gonna look at that cash flow model and we see it goes red, we're gonna look ahead for about three years of red and combine those three years and say, okay, that's sort of the maximum amount we might bond for because that's the amount, it may be a little bit more because we might be able to expend other monies as well in that timeframe. But that sort of is our guideline. And keep in mind just what is it, to digress for one minute, what is a tax exempt bond? What does that mean? A tax exempt bond is a loan from an investor to you. And by tax exempt, it means that the investor does not pay income tax on the interest that you are going to pay to them for the right to borrow their money. So because they don't need to pay income tax or at least federal income tax on that and probably not state income tax, they're gonna lend to you at a lower rate than they would lend to another entity that can't issue tax exempt bonds. And tax exemption is sort of a preference under the tax code for local governments and governments, corporations don't benefit that way. So that's why we wanna use this tool when we can. So that's the idea of the borrowing need in terms of the timing is based on sort of a number of variables, again, having to do with the construction schedule but also that IRS expenditure requirement and your borrowing capacity. That's gonna dictate to us, sort of when's the optimal time to get into the market that we might also look at where our interest rates today versus where we might think they're gonna be at some point in the future. And for those who have followed interest rates have been on the rise recently as the Fed tries to tackle inflation and slow down the very high cost of inflation right now. So there's an expectation that rates will continue to rise in the future. It's not uncommon for surface transportation programs that are secured by sales tax to see multiple borrowings over the course of an entire tax measure. So you do a borrowing maybe for three years of expenditures and then perhaps wait and because these expenditures are often transpire over a long period of time, there might be a second borrowing needed down the road. We try and minimize the number of borrowing certainly but at the same time have to work with the constraints of the tax code, et cetera. And basically the tax code is saying, hey, we don't want you borrowing money today for a project that isn't gonna be for five or 10 years because then you're just gonna stick the money in the bank and you're gonna earn some arbitrage and the federal government doesn't like that. They don't want you to borrow in order to make money. They want you to borrow to deliver projects. In terms of how long you're borrowing can be, really the primary restriction is the term of the tax itself which is March 31st, 2047. So we can do a borrowing up to the term of the tax. So it really depends on when we get into the market. Is it today? Is it two years from now? Is it four years? That'll dictate the final term on the bond. Obviously you can't go longer than that because you'll have no revenue with which to pay back the bonds beyond March 31, 2047. There's some other rules that we have to be mindful of that the tax law requires about the average life of the borrowing not extending beyond the useful life of the projects being financed. I don't think that's gonna be a big limiter here. The useful life of most of the projects are likely to be largely coterminous with the borrowing term. So I'm not too worried about that. Finally, on the next page, just a few other factors we often get questions about, well, how much can I borrow if I wanted to borrow? And we realize that's dictated by the cash flow model and part whether you need to borrow, but your overall capacity, there are some constraints. You don't have just unlimited capacity to borrow. And that starts with the actual sales tax revenues that you have with which to pay back the bonds. And from a market point of view, what we do is in the year in which you borrow, we look at your actual sales tax revenues really going back the last 12 months. And we assume that that is what you will be receiving going forward, even though we know that you're probably gonna have some growth over time, but the market really doesn't let you bond against that growth. So any growth that occurs will be available to you for pay as you go or some future bond issue that you may do three to five years down the road. And that's really the second point, issuance is further in the life of the tax benefit from that growth or as does your pay as you go dollars. And then higher actual sales tax revenues can support a greater amount of annual debt service. That's pretty straightforward and that results in more bonding capacity. The more debt service you can encourage the more principle you can borrow upfront. But how do we really calculate that? Like what's your maximum debt capacity? If we know you have a million dollars a year in sales tax revenues, just to use a simple example or a million and a half in this example, how much could you borrow? Well, what the market says is we wanna be able to demonstrate what we call debt service coverage. Bonds are sized in a way so that sales tax revenues that you're expected to receive exceed the amount of your annual debt service by a certain cushion factor. And that's to help protect against fluctuations in revenues because the investor is looking only to the sales tax revenue to be repaid. They're not looking to the general fund of the county or the cities or any entity or any other revenues. It's just secured by the sales tax. So if there were to be say a recessionary event as we have seen during the pandemic as we saw back in 2009 and 10 and as is predicted frankly for 2023 perhaps and sales tax revenues were to decline, the investor wants to make sure there was enough money there that they get paid back. So they require that we size the bond so that the annual revenues exceed the annual debt service by a cushion factor. And in this example, say a million and a half of annual sales tax revenues are projected. So maybe we structure your bond so that it has a million dollars of debt service each year. And that's what we call 1.5 times debt service coverage. Then we can back into how much you can borrow and what your capacity is. And how much that capacity is will also be dictated by how many years is left on the tax. The more years left on the tax, the more that you will have in terms of debt capacity, the fewer years on the tax, the fewer the lower the debt capacity because all those years of sales tax revenues will have already come in and you will either have it in the bank or you will have spent it on projects on a pay as you go basis. Final factor that impacts that capacity are the interest rates, of course, the borrowing rates. Higher interest rates result in lower debt capacity and conversely lower rates result in higher capacity because every dollar you spend on interest is one less dollar to pay back the principal amount of your loan. Just like a home mortgage, frankly, in a lot of ways. So these are all the variables that are juggled in the context of analyzing your debt capacity. So we always start with that cash flow model. We layer in actual sales tax revenues. We come up with a debt service coverage factor. We look at the years left in the tax and then where interest rates are at the time of sale. So we will run interest rates scenarios right now for you and come up with debt capacity and we'll probably build in some cushion. We'll say we know you're not bonding next month so let's take the current market interest rates and add whatever, 50 basis points, maybe a hundred basis points if we want it to be really conservative or a full percent when we run your debt capacity calculations. So Guy, that really covers the slides that I was gonna cover. Are you Tracy covering the conclusion or did you want me to do that? No, that's okay, David. I'll take it from here. So the next steps include receiving input from the commission about the possibility of implementing bonding as a strategy to advance regional projects. We are currently planning to give a presentation about bonding to the TPW in a couple of weeks. We are developing the five-year plans for the regional programs to evaluate the near-term pay-go capacity of each program and then we're working with KNN to develop the cash flow scenarios which David mentioned earlier and they'll include some level of bonding needed to fund the local match for the upcoming grant opportunities. So today, your input will be helpful in preparation for our TPW meeting. Madam Chair, that concludes our presentation and I now hand it back over to you for commissioner questions and public comment followed by your discussion. All right, thank you so much to our T.C. staff and KNN consultants for the presentation. I'll now open it up to questions from commissioners, commissioner Rockin. But thanks, thank Guy and our consultants. Thank you for the presentation. I think it's very helpful and clear to the public to understand sort of what we're considering getting involved in here. My question has to go to a comment that Guy Preston made in his presentation. Talked about the fact that we're currently developing a plan for highway and which includes bus on shoulder, I assume, and active transportation funding. And then I think if I got it correct in your comments later we're gonna be looking at rail and highway nine possibilities in terms of the funding model or the stuff that we were just talking about. And the question I have members of the public have been asking me this. I wanted to give Guy a chance to explain how is the decision made or how do you make the priority decision that obviously it's been rail supporters been arguing like, why is that later? Why do we do that now? Is that part of our stuff? Now we had a vote. It was a split tied six, six vote on the commission. So you didn't get clear direction from us full steam ahead on the rail. That's certainly one background piece of information but in general, the argument's been made that if you had, you were asked earlier, for example, from the public, why don't we apply for more grants for the rail program, passenger rail program? And the answer was, well, we didn't think we're like in some at least particular cases that doesn't look like a grant we were likely to get. The highway thing is underway already, we're moving ahead we have indicators that we're going to get funding for that and so forth. But I'm trying to get a comment out about, you know, how do you make the decision that you're going to apply in these two areas? The other two areas are later. If you had a 30% design and EIR done, you'd be in a better position to apply for grants than simply a vague desire to have some kind of rail program in the future. So it's a pretty open-ended question but I wanted to give you a chance to sort of explain to the public how these decisions are getting made and sort of what your thoughts are about the prioritization of these issues. Thank you. So one of the comments that David Leiper made in this presentation was the need to have compliance with CEQA to be able to issue revenue bonds for the construction capital. Right now, we've got two programs that are advancing fairly quickly, the highway program and the active transportation programs. Environmental documents are underway. We expect to complete them next year. We will be in position to be able to say that CEQA will be completed and we would have a reasonable expectation to be able to expend the bond proceeds in three years subject to grant funding. Those grant funding programs that we're looking at, some of them require CEQA compliance, the ones for the highway do, the ones for ATP do not, but those programs are already advancing EIRs and we would be looking for spending the bond proceeds on the capital costs and we would be in position to expend those funds in the next three years. We did talk about and looked at the highway nine and the rail pots and those programs are not as far along. We don't have an EIR for passenger rail like you mentioned, but there is the possibility that we could try to find a way to fund any EIR for passenger rail service and we can talk about that a little bit more at the TPW meeting about what funding opportunities there are and we could certainly look to do that in the future. One of the challenges about the rail pot of money is it's only nine, excuse me, eight percent. Eight percent, right? Measure D revenue total. So there's not really the funding to construct rail. In fact, it's prohibited from measure D. It only provides funding for preservation of the rail line and for additional studies on the rail line. So we couldn't bond off of the measure D funds for the rail pot to do any construction of passenger rail service. We could potentially bond for freight rail repairs, but with only eight percent of the revenue right now, we show that the total revenue generated over the 30 years would not be enough money to complete all the freight repairs that are needed on the line. So to bond to bring the money forward, we wouldn't have enough money to complete the program and also pay back the loans. So I hope that answers your questions. I would certainly be willing to talk about it a little bit more if you have additional questions. It's a start. I'll say that. Thank you very much. I appreciate your comments. Let's see. Commissioner Koenig, you're up. Yeah, I mean, just wanted to say I'm totally supportive of going out for some revenue bonds to complete the active transportation and highway project. I did check in with County Public Works, well, Community Development and Infrastructure Department. Again, yesterday on whether it would be any renewed interest in bonding. And we're really in a very different situation there where we've got a ton of different small projects and need to maintain flexibility in the future as far as having money available to deal with things that come up in the short term. But I think in our situation here at the RTC where we really just have a handful of key projects that we want to complete. And we're doing this high level of design and environmental review on them. I think it makes perfect sense. I guess my question is, I mean, you touched on this a little bit, Mr. Leifer. But I mean, as you said, interest rates are rapidly increasing. We expect the Fed to potentially increase base interest rates more than 2% this year. And it sounds like we're limited as far as timing goes, as far as having to have those EIRs done. So I mean, just, is there any way that we can go out to the market sooner? I mean, it seems that time is of the essence. Yeah, it's a good point, commissioner. Couple of comments first. Yes, there's been some significant run up in rates since January. And as you pointed out, the Fed has telegraphed multiple potential increase in the Fed funds rate over the remaining part of the year. That said, increases in the Fed funds rate, which are the short rate, the short term borrowing rate, don't always equate to increases in the long term rates. In fact, it's intended in part to dampen that. Now that doesn't mean that can't happen, especially with the intense inflationary pressures that we're seeing. So that's just one point. But in terms of your other question about are there ways to accelerate, we need to really get our hands around this cash flow model first and see what the needs are and see how fully develop those construction expenditure figures are. And is there a reasonable expectation that you will incur and be able to spend money within the three year tax limit? So that's really the first issue. And I think once we get our hands around that issue, hopefully quickly we can get back to you with an idea how quickly we can get into the market. I think generally the idea of getting into the market quickly is a good one, if you're going to need to borrow anyway. And I've already shared the bad news. The good news is rates are still very attractive sort of on a historical perspective. And we're still well below the averages of certainly the last 20 years in the municipal rates. So we want to kind of move forward as quickly as we can. The bond issue itself, I know Guy himself is very experienced from his prior work at Sonoma. Bond issue can be brought to market relatively quickly the course of several months, probably three months, four months at the outside. So we just have to sort of follow the steps. There really is no way, however, to answer your question finally with more fullness, to lock in rates today to deliver bonds in the future. I mean, there are sort of derivative instruments that are used to do that. They carry with them some risks. If you don't issue, you might owe money. So, I think we want to dip our toe cautiously in using derivative instruments. And I think for an agency with your sort of size you want to keep it simple and make sure we're making good decisions. So we're certainly happy to present all those options, but I think the best is to borrow once all the ducks are in order. Okay, thank you. I look forward to seeing those cash flow models. Yes, yeah, yeah, we too. Thank you. Okay, Commissioner Johnson, you're up. Thank you. Since you brought up Sonoma County and what Guy had been there and has a lot of experience, what happened with the smart train with respect to their bonds? I don't know if you're familiar with that, but I think we've been watching that from afar where they went out, tried to get another measure because, and I don't fully understand why, but I think that one failed. So was there a risk there or what? Yeah, that's a good question. I don't work on the smart program, particularly I do work on Sonoma County Transportation Authority generally. So smart, they got their tax pass and eventually they bonded for, as much as they could support with the tax. They had some timing challenges because when the tax was passed, immediately the subprime crisis hit almost immediately. I think Guy, the tax was passed maybe in 06 at the earliest, maybe 08, I can't remember. And then of course in 0809, we had huge drops in the stock market. We had a big recession and the great recession. And so sales taxes suddenly dropped plummeted. And so they were able to borrow less than they thought they would be able to borrow, first of all, so that was one challenge. And as a result, they had to phase the program. They didn't get some of the stations done that they had wanted to get, which were further up County in the North, all the way up to Healdsburg. Obviously some of that was gonna always depend on federal money and state money. And there wasn't a ton of it back then due to politics and the different administrations, et cetera. They had a lot of challenges. And then now they're just dealing with low ridership challenge. I mean, that's really the reality and with low ridership in part due to the pandemic. And so that creates stress on operations and they need to use more of their sales tax for operations than for capital. So it's a little different because they're running a transit system. And there isn't a transit system in the country that is fully self-sufficient based on Fairbox. That just doesn't exist. They all require federal or state or other aid or voter approved aid. And so that's their challenge right now. I know that you're right. They went out to the ballot box. I think they lost pretty handsomely, handily. And I think what happened, Guy, you can remind me on the first ballot and that was Sonoma wanted it and Marin didn't, I think when the first vote happened, but there were more voters in Sonoma at the time, so that outweighed the sort of negative sentiment by the Marin voters. This time, I think they all were feeling a bit overtaxed and didn't come out to support. So I think they're hopeful that they'll be able to go out and go again with a measure. So that's what I know, but again, I'm not an insider. Thank you. So I'll elaborate a little bit. There's a lot of parallels between Sonoma and Dacrus. Their initial transportation sales tax measure was had an expenditure plan that also didn't allow money to be used for new rail service. It was just for work on an environmental document and on the repairs of crossing locations. So they needed to issue their own independent sales tax measure to fund the actual passenger rail service. And that's the measure that David was mentioning was passed in 2008, right after the beginning of the rape recession. And that they did borrow off of that, but that funding was not enough to complete the system. And so they tried to issue a second revenue bond a couple of years ago, and that did not pass. And that was the issue with Sonoma. So their system is being phased. They started with an initial operating segment between San Rafael and San Rosa, but they've been able to get some grant funding for extensions down to Larkspur and up to Windsor, but they're not yet up to Cloverdale. And there are some constraints on them being able to make it up to Healdsburg as well. So that's the issue with Sonoma. You. All right, are there other questions from commissioners? It sounds like we'll be diving into this further at our next transportation policy workshop. So look forward to that and thank you so much for your presentation. Looking to see if any members of the public are interested in speaking and I see a hand up. So let's see, it looks like Michael St. you're up first and you are muted. Hey, thank you, Chair Brown. Just a quick question. That was a very good presentation. I answered most of my questions I had originally. So my question I guess is, does the citizenship vote on this bonding? And if it doesn't pass, will there be any studies on what the alternatives might be? And would it be a possibility if it does not pass that the highway widening Oxlain project would not be feasible? That's mainly my main question. And if it's not feasible, can monies that we've already received be used on maybe a less expensive project? And I know you're waiting for me to say this. Could we go just to a dedicated bus on shoulder project which would be considerably less expensive and use the cash at hand and maybe a very small funding effort? That's it. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. St. We'll continue with the participants. We can just give them just a quick response. Bonding doesn't require a public vote. So if there's other questions are not necessary to be answered. So yeah, thank you. I know this would not go out to the public for a vote. This is bonding on already approved sales tax money. Okay, thank you. Looks like we have another attendee and Jacob Wozowski, Wozaki, you are up next. Hi, can you hear me? Yep. Okay. So thank you for the presentation. What I'd like to highlight is the comment that cash flow needs to be considered very carefully. And I see you have models that are sensitive to rising interest rates and of course, interest rates are exploding right now. And a reminder that the interest rates are being raised in order to tame inflation. And the other word for that is to cause recession and to kill demand. And so some of the comments that Guy Preston made about bonding outright in front of a recession should be very concerning. And so I'm not gonna say that bonding should never happen, although that does fundamentally involve giving money to Wall Street out of taxpayer funds. But they should be taken very conservatively only at the last minute and only when absolutely justified by the numbers. And so I'd just like to make sure that everybody stays very conservative and not rush to bond out unless absolutely necessary. And thank you, that's my comment. All right, thank you. Looks like hands are going up. So we'll just keep going with public comments. Lonnie Faulkner here up. Hi, thanks. I just wanna point out that was a great report. Really appreciate it. That was helpful. Again, I know I've expressed this in past meetings, but just concerned given the climate issues, given the fact that we know that highway widening is really not the best way to address traffic with induced demand and study after study shows that, given that our direction needs to be moving towards robust, equitable, environmentally friendly public transportation. To me, anything that supports highway widening is really the wrong direction to go. And especially at a time where we don't have funding for highway widening and that we're prioritizing the energy towards doing this highway winding without funding being identified. I mean, I don't think it should be done anyway. And I just want to give a shout out. I think it was Michael St. earlier who spoke about true bus on shoulder. And this can be seen in some people know Rick Longianotti's campaign for sustainable transportation. So instead of highway widening, a very, a smaller amount of money can be put into creating these bus on shoulders that would help alleviate traffic for people using public transportation and then urge people, it would actually inspire people to use public transportation. So I'm not sure why that hasn't been more thoroughly considered considering that it is much cheaper to go along that route. If for those of you who are new to the RTC commission, I would urge you to look at Rick Longianotti's plan and his video online and appreciate your time. Thank you so much. Thank you, Ms. Faulkner. Next up, Trink Praxel. Thank you. I just wanted to raise a couple of questions which we can also be addressed at the TPW meeting, but important to raise with the full commission that just the timing of any decision on this, would it be done, for example, for the Measure D election? And while in a way they're not related, there's certainly Measure D will give an indication to the commission and the public as whole as to the community's interest in rail. And it just seems that if we commit any, commit ourselves to bonding for the highway widening and for the trail, it could be that we leave no room for ourselves to consider any bonding or other financing for rail if it becomes clear that that's the way we need to be going and the community is interested in that. So I would just ask the commissioners to keep that in mind. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Praxel. Let's see, I'm gonna do a last call for public comments. On this item, before we bring it back to the commission. And seeing none, this is an information item. Oh, looks like Commissioner Rotkin. So comments. All right, here's a comment that'll make me popular on every side of the divide in our community. I myself am not a fan of the highway widening project. I didn't support it in general, but when we voted in 2016 on Measure D, there was five areas of funding. It was a compromise in which people voted for it because they thought there was enough in this funding proposal, this tax for the things that they wanted that they were willing to suffer the parts of it they didn't like. So, Brian, people's constantly reminds us, he didn't like to train at all, but overall they like, given the percentages worked out, he was in favor of the measure and they supported him, he believes his group is singularly responsible for its success. And something I believe is probably not the case, but whatever it is, a lot of people voted for this measure with a variety of different kinds of responses and feelings. And even though as I said, I voted for it, I supported, not only voted for it, went out and worked for it and did public speaking and a bunch of other stuff and knocking on doors. But the public have told us that they want this overall project, which includes the auxiliary lanes, even though, again, I don't particularly like them, but that's what we did. And so when people constantly tell us over and over again, like, well, why are you widening the highway? And there's all these reasons why it doesn't make sense. I mean, I can make those arguments myself, but the fact is the public have come up with a compromise and the pieces of it they like and they don't like. And I think the commission is faithfully following the will of the voters in the way that we're spending our measure D money. This doesn't bear on the question of whether we might do something. Rail was also part of that. And so the question I asked earlier that there's still gonna be further discussion about what prospect is there for moving the rail studies for, not the construction, but the 30% design and the IR work, that's still a viable issue and a question that's out there. But the reason that the commission just seems so unresponsive when members of the public tell us, like, well, why are you doing this? I'll go in and there's induced traffic, there's this, there's that. It's because the public with all that information in front of them basically told us, go ahead with this project. And so the commission is being faithful about responding to the will of the voters. And as I said, even though I don't personally like where it's going in terms of that piece of it or something, I'm on board because I wanna do what the public wants us to do. So people, if people wonder why we just don't jump on this stuff for, it's not because we don't care about climate change. We do live in a democracy and we need to respond to the will of our voters. Thank you. Thank you, Commissioner Rockin. I see Commissioner Schifrin is up next. Thank you. I wanna thank the staff for and the consultants for the presentation. This is the second time I've seen it. I'm afraid I may have to see it again at some other meeting. It was presented at the Budget Administration and Personnel Committee. The way I look at it is that bonding is a potential tool in our toolbox for getting projects done. And I think that that's really what it's all about. It makes sense to me to allow for this tool. I have concerns about having to pay interest. I have concerns about bringing projects forward within the three-year period. Things tend to take longer. But it's something that we, I think we need to consider when we're trying to get funding for whatever projects the commission has approved to go forward with. And that isn't limited to any one area or any other area. The commission has been very successful in getting funding for both active transportation projects and for highway widening projects. And one of our abilities to do that has to do with how much of a local share we're able to provide. And that I prefer to provide that local share through pay as you go. But there may well turn out to be circumstances where a very high priority project would need a higher local share and other open for when we hear from our staff that that's what has to happen for us to get the outside funding that makes the project happen. So I appreciate getting this information. And from my perspective, that more work is going to be done. And I look forward to learning more of the details. But at this point anyway, and as it's been used with other public agencies, it's an important tool that we need to pursue. Thank you, Commissioner Schifrin. So our next up, Commissioner Hearst. Looks like you're muted. Lowell. Well, thank you very much. Thank you very much, Chair. I appreciate the reminders as well. When it comes to sales tax, we're really talking about how it's related to goods. And when you're talking about goods, you need to think about how the goods are delivered or where the goods come from. And so the availability of goods has a big impact upon the sales tax and certainly the supply and demand aspect of it. And so how those goods get to and from market is really important regarding sales tax. And so I don't want us to lose track of the importance of all forms of freight shipment and all forms of commercial transportation of goods because without that, you're not gonna have any sales tax. Thanks. Thank you, Commissioner Hearst. All right, so seeing no additional hands, I'll just add my appreciation and support for exploring the idea. I think there are, as have been mentioned, strong reasons to consider this for in terms of leveraging and also for just large scale infrastructure projects that don't really lend themselves to a pay-as-you-go approach. Oh, I see Commissioner Rock ends up. So I just wanted to add that I'm looking forward to continuing to explore the conversation. Commissioner Rocken. Just really quick in response to one question from the public, we're not gonna be bonding before June. They asked the question of like, should we do this bond before we know what the outcome of the current measure D is on the ballot or something? There's no way we're gonna bond before June. So that's not a factor, I don't think in any way. That's my only comment. Thanks. Thank you. Okay, so with that, we will move on then to our next agenda item. Thank you, everybody, for bringing this item to us. The next item, I believe, I'm just scrolling back up, is our update on the Go Santa Cruz program. Sorry, scrolling. Item, yep. Item 23 is Amy Naranjo, take it away. All right, can you hear me okay? Yes, we can. Thank you. All right, well, good morning commissioners and members of the public. My name is Amy Naranjo and I'm a transportation planner for the RCC. And I'm here today to provide an update on the Go Santa Cruz County program. Okay, let's see if this will click through. There we go. So the RCC provides transportation demand management services or TDM services through the Cruz 511 program and provides online carpool matching, multi-modal trip planning and distribution standards through our new Go Santa Cruz County platform that we licensed through a third party vendor called Ride Amigos. So the primary focus of our programs is to reduce single occupancy vehicles, vehicle trips and reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Santa Cruz County. And we do that by supporting the efficiency and of the existing transportation system and providing resources and information for sustainable transportation options. So the employees can use the Go Santa Cruz County platform to find carpool partners and individual rides, join or start a van pool, plan their transit trips or bicycling or walking trips and participate in reward programs and challenges. The platform also includes an interactive user dashboard where users can access and track 30 minutes in progress towards personal goals all in one convenient place. Beginning this spring users will also have access to find and connect with partners for transit, walking on top of the existing options that we have for bicycle, carpool and van pool. Additionally, participants have access to the zero interest bike loans, e-bike demos and one-on-one commute consultations with through ecology actions member, employer membership programs. However, participants must be, the participant's employer must be enrolled in this program to access these benefits. For employers, we offer or we provide new options, excuse me. So employers implement new options programs for a variety of reasons including to provide additional employee benefits, address parking shortages and challenges and to reduce employee vehicle trips to their work sites. So our team supports organizations with their commute work plans and we offer one-on-one consultations with HR managers, office administrators, facility managers, employee transportation coordinators, essentially anyone who will listen to us. And with that, what's the goal to facilitate the employer's participation in our new Go Santa Cruz County online platform. We also offer employer, we also participate in employer-sponsored or environmental health awareness wellness fairs. We provide commuter task benefit information and then pull management through the platform itself. So one of the new features that we have available on the Go Santa Cruz platform is the ability for employers to create customizable commute networks for their employees. Go Santa Cruz County is essentially, it's the primary commute network for our entire County on the platform and then organizations can set up customized employer-based network under our program. And then let's see, sorry, I missed my spot here. The employers also can use this specific network to connect their employees with commute options. They can distribute incentives and rewards directly to their employees. They can track their organization's savings and carbon emission reductions and as well as have access to a variety of survey tools to understand a bit more about their employees' commuting patterns. In addition to the commute network, we also offer the following commuter workshops and safety trainings for participating employers. We have INSO2 eBikes, which is our most popular workshop, bike commuting 101 in urban bicycling. Workstops are tailored to the organization's needs and participants must enroll in Go Santa Cruz County in order to receive their free bike helmet and bike lights as part of their participation. Go Santa Cruz County participants earn points for logging their transportation trips on our platform, which can then be redeemed for $5, $10 and $25 e-cards. And these cards are redeemable to 75 plus national retailers online or the commute or the rewards can be donated to a nonprofit organization of the participant's choice. In addition, we also run monthly raffles where participants have the chance to win a $25 piece of gift card which can be used at local retailers. And in the last year, we distributed nearly $2,000 worth of commute reward gift cards to participants. So many of our usual PDM activities were scaled back this past year due to COVID and related restrictions with social distancing, reduced service and so forth. So we really try to focus our coverage on promoting the program itself, making people aware of the offerings that we have and announcing the commute rewards that we have. We just, we offered. In addition, we created bilingual brochures and flyers for employers and participants. We created a new website landing page. We participated in radio and TV interviews. We had email and a variety of social media campaigns where we were posting tips and tricks for getting the most out of your commute. We participated in the Midtown Fridays local events in Santa Cruz, as well as working with Dominican Hospital and providing e-bike demos at their employee sustainability fair and providing information about the program as well. So the difference we've made so far. So in the last couple of years since we've had this program available to commuters both in the downtown core, as well as throughout the county, we've had more than 2,700 participants in a role in the program, and that's as of this week. Since the county wide expansion in 2021 are in April 2021, so under a year, I've said, we've had more than 1,500 new users join. Our participants have logged more than 50,000 walk, bike, carpool, dance pool, transit and telecommute trips in our platform, saving over 76 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions and saving nearly 100,000 in commuting. So this part that's on the screen in front of you essentially shows the new registrations in a timeline. And if you look at the early portions in December through January, February, March of 2020 is when the city of Santa Cruz announced their downtown launch of the program in a pilot version. And then you look into March, 2021 in this area. And that is when COVID hit and when people began working remotely, taking less transit, taking less community to most people who were office-based workers, for the most part did a rapid shift to remote work and telework. And then you'll see in February or, excuse me, in March, April, May of 2021 is when we launched the or maybe announcement for the county wide expansion. We had still, it was still during the pandemic and it was, we had minimal increases in enrollment. However, when we launched our participation with the university of Santa Cruz and got them on board, we saw our membership in our enrollment increase as well as the participation for our users logging. So as I've alluded to in some of the other slides here, we've faced quite a considerable amount of challenges during the pandemic trying to launch this new program. In particular, some of the usual community events that we go to that we attend were canceled or postponed, two of the major events, for example, were open streets, both open streets events in Washingville and Santa Cruz were canceled, as well as the bike door activities that were canceled last March, excuse me, last May. Those events were reconfigured to support any trip, any bike trip. And so we participated in the outreach with those. And then also another challenge that we faced were that our commute rewards were an insufficient incentive to get new users to participate and to keep participating. And that's also with our low participation rate. We've had quite a few new users continue to join in our enrollment and continuing to go up, but we're not seeing the level of trip logging that we would like. And that likely has to do with folks are required to register in our platform to attend our commuter workshops and other activities, but they don't necessarily have to log trips to earn those rewards. And so we're working on improving our incentive offerings this coming year to track a bit more of the trip logging requirements that go with the incentives. We also, the other issue we have is getting more employers on board in our program and working with them. We had a lot of employers who were focused on other things during the pandemic. And so enrolling in one of our voluntary programs wasn't the highest of priorities. However, we found that most of those calls have been postponed and many are calling back currently and scheduling employer workshops and consultations in the coming months. And then like I mentioned before, we also just limited our outreach and promotions regarding ride fair encouragement. So any promotions that dealt with carpooling, taking transit, we really pause those to kind of comply with social distancing and so forth. So as I mentioned, so we do have a couple of upcoming activities that we're hopeful in that this year will improve our overall impact in the program. We'll hope and we hope to partner with more employers, increase our presence at community events and offering a more robust menu of incentives for commuters to try alternative modes of transportation. Today, we are staff are attending the Pajaro Business Expo and Job Fair in Watsonville enrolling our program as well as RTC programs. And then coming up in May, we have bike month, what we call it the action. So we'll be participating in those events as well and have a bonus commute rewards for participants who log their bike trip during the month of May as well. And then in June, we'll be coming out with our more enhanced commuter benefits rollout with additional incentives for carpooling, biking, taking transit and so forth. And then in the coming weeks, we also have some commuter workshops scheduled with employers who are in the process of onboarding. And that's, we have an intro to E-Bikes at Polly, our plan time. We have another workshop coming up with the County of Santa Cruz and with the city of Watsonville. And we're currently in the process of onboarding the seaside company into our Go Santa Cruz online platform. And then so finally, the last item in my presentation is the staff recommendations. We've been using the Ride Amigos platform to host the benefits and the resources that we make available for Go Santa Cruz County. And Ride Amigos, as I mentioned previously, is the underlying software provider for this platform. Our current contract with them ends in June and the staff recommendation is to have the RTC approve the resolution authorizing the executive director to extend this agreement. With that being said, that concludes my presentation. I'm happy to answer any of your questions you may have. Thank you. Thank you Ms. Naranjo for the thorough progress report and overview of what's happening with Go Santa Cruz County for all of your work. I see hands up from commissioners. I'll call first on commissioner McPherson. Yeah, thank you Amy for that presentation. I've been supportive of the 511 program from the start. And I think you're on the right track and your outreach efforts and so forth and then COVID hit and mess everything up like everything else. But is, and we have at the high point we had 2,700 participants. Is that, is there any comparable data? How well we were doing? Certainly you've made the effort to reach out. So I just wanted to find out if you had any, is there any comparable data of other commissions, organizations that have tried this? You seem like you've done a good job of outreach but I just wanna get a sense of how well or not so well we're doing for one region or another. Right, I don't have that information readily available however, and in the research that we have done in other comparable programs. We found similar, I guess, trends as far as participation in the platform and in right parents muting, carpooling and so forth. But the programs themselves that we've looked at as far as in the Bay Area and other areas are much more heavily resourced and heavily staffed with multiple participating agencies and in the Bay Area, their programs are required or mandatory as well as they have a joint powers association that handles all of this. So we have essentially two staff in our office working on this program and then our partners that we partner with as far as consult consultants. But I can get that other additional information. Yeah, well, thank you for your efforts and your outreach efforts. It's really thorough. So hope we can get more participants but thank you for their work you're doing with the limited staff that, well, it's you, I guess, but thank you. Hey, Commissioner Koenig. Thank you, Chair and thank you, Mr. Rano for the great comrades with previous presentation. I'm kind of building on what Supervisor or Commissioner McPherson asked. You mentioned there was a discrepancy between total users who have signed up and monthly active users, people who are actually logging in to use the platform about how many active users are we seeing? We're seeing probably between 150 to maybe 200 users a month who are actively logging their trips. And so we're working on trying to figure out what additional efforts we can do on our side to continue getting users to log their trips. And a big portion of the users that have come in have come in either through the downtown program who are getting their free transit passes. The downtown program doesn't have a requirement to log transit trips to continue receiving the free transit pass. So in our current efforts as we move forward, we want to have some of those other requirements set in place so that our users are participating both ways, that they're logging their trips and for the effort of logging their trips will provide additional rewards and benefits. Okay, thank you. And then you mentioned that carpool and vanpool matches is rolling out so those haven't been tried yet on the software or have they? They currently are available. The new features that we are adding are transit pool and walk pool options. And so if someone is willing to take transit to try that new commute, they can create a carpool or a transit buddy to take that route and try that new mode. Okay, and do you know how many carpool or vanpool matches have been made or are being actively used? I don't have that at the moment but I can get that info for you maybe before this meeting is over. Okay, and then I noticed that the go Santa Cruz, I think it's the downtown program specifically was offering e-bike rebates. Do you know how many folks have taken advantage of that program? Yeah, the last I checked there has been 74 applications that have been submitted for that e-bate program. Okay, that's cool. Yeah, I mean, I guess I really appreciate the program and I think it's really timely, right? I mean, as we see gas prices rising and unsustainable trends that have a real impact on people's bottom line, people are looking for alternatives. And so I think this program is well-timed and suited to the moment. I did have a chance to download the Ride Amigos app and use it a little bit. And I mean, it works well, actually surprisingly well. It syncs, it knows when I've moved and logs a trip or records the trip and then I have to click a button to log it. But nevertheless, there's some amount of automation there, which is impressive. But nevertheless, I think it's just creating more, it's just one more thing that people need to do. I mean, I don't see it as making the activity of getting on a bike or taking transit actually easier, right? I mean, if anything, you're asking now that person to change their behavior and log it on the app. And I think that's represented in the active users that we're seeing for the application. I mean, around 6% of all the signups are 158 people a month of 2,700 that are signed up. And so while I'm certainly optimistic for the program as a whole, but I'm not sure that we're gonna see significant changes in that kind of usage for the Ride Amigos app as functionally good as it is. I don't know that it's actually the right product to get people to mode shift. As I said, we're at this really critical time where gas prices are really eating into people's monthly budget. I'd actually like to see us not renew the contract with Ride Amigos and take all that money and put it into more e-bike rebates and scooter rebates. I don't think we're giving out rebates for scooters right now, but the average entry-level e-bike cost 700 bucks at least. Entry-level scooter cost 200 bucks. And I mean, let's get, even if we took 69,000 over the next year or two that we're asking for for this app, I mean, that's $690, $100 rebates we can give to people to use the new complete streets in Watsonville or help people get around live oak. And that'll have a real impact on people's monthly budget. So that's really where I'd like to see this program go. And I know that there's three CE, the Central Coast Community Energy is also giving out e-bike rebates. And probably ultimately they'll have a bigger pool of money to apply to this, but maybe we can also collaborate with them and help get more people to apply for those rebates, make the process easier, streamline it and just get more of these light electric vehicles as e-bikes and scooters into people's hands. So they can see a real difference in their lives every day. Thanks. Thank you, Commissioner Koenig, Commissioner Bertrand. Thank you, Chair. Simple question, the app partner, the Suffer Amigos program, they must be running other programs than I don't know. So in a sense it depends if they are, which I assume they are, do they have comparable stats that sort of gives us a better idea of how our program is doing relative to other situations, factory name, population and such like that so we could get a better comparable. Yeah, you're right. Right Amigos is the software solution that I would think up and down California is they provide that. And recently they're partnered with the entire Bay Area as well as the Monterey County, Central Coast. So the platform is being used throughout all of these areas. And I can reach out to our contracts, our vendor and get an idea of what other programs are doing and how their usage compares to our usage. Thank you very much, yes. And learning what they have learned to lead to success and ultimately as the last speaker of wanting to spoke about the ultimate here is to get more people on bikes. And I commuted from San Francisco on SB and took my bike to the rail station. I would have welcomed a program like this. Thank you. So I wanna, Commissioner Rock and I see your hand but I do see that Deputy Director Mendez has a hand up and perhaps that's a response directly to the discussion that we're having. So I wanna call on you, Mr. Mendez. Yes, thank you, Madam Chair. I just wanted to add a little bit to what Ms. Naranjo communicated. When we entered into the agreement by me it was actually quite a group of time that we were looking at various different potential partners for that effort. There were other companies trying to provide similar types of services for managing services provided through community programs. And basically Red Amigos in a sense became really the only one available for that because their product was very good compared to others as Commissioner Goni mentioned and it works actually quite well. I mean, it's not perfect like anything. And so basically their product became the one that was really the best product out there. And certainly, yes, there were other agencies throughout California already using Red Amigos. Some had actually started with other programs but then changed over to Red Amigos. And then as Ms. Naranjo said in Bay Area that's shortly after we entered into the contract Red Amigos, they were also adopted as the program and software to be used in the entire S.H.E.M.S. Corbett area. It says they're kind of like, I suppose we could research to see if there are others after that had come out since we started Red Amigos but my guess is most likely not given the whole like COVID situation that we had over the last couple of years to expect Red Amigos is the only program out there. Thank you for sharing that additional context for us. Commissioner Ratkin. I just wanted to add that, you know, when the city of Santa Cruz made its decision to provide this program like this for people who work downtown, including city employees, I was amazed at how much difference the incentives made. I didn't, you know, I almost didn't believe it when I first saw the numbers. I thought, really? I mean, the real reason for taking alternatives is it's better for your health, probably what you're doing are certainly better for the environment that it happens and it saves you money in a significant way. And that was not apparently the biggest motive, but when they introduced the incentives, a 20, you know, you get in a raffle where you might win a bicycle or, you know, $25 gift certificate or something, the participation just shot up like crazy. And I know the downtown program has had its issues and I don't want to get into that many until now. But I do think that experimenting with the issue with our consultant there, the Amigos group, if to look at the question of what kind of incentives are being used because, as I said, I was just astounded that it made such a big difference that, you know, people, the chance of winning something or a small, you know, token amount of money. Look at the city of Santa Cruz, which has, I think, 700, 800 employees, something like that and 200 plus people are participating out of that workforce. So a big issue here as well is trying to get more employers involved because once you get the employer involved and they do presentations to their group of employees and we have some largely, you know, relatively speaking, large employers, that can really make a difference here. So I think that's really worth investigating in the current period and sort of this partly response to Nana's earlier comment. You know, whereas I also agree that it's great to get people bicycles, it makes a difference. I took advantage of the RTCs program years ago and got half the price off on an electric bike. But I do think that the getting people rideshare arrangements and giving them incentives and having an actual program that the employer promotes makes a much bigger difference than I would have thought it did. And so that's really something that I think our staff should be looking into and I appreciate that this program does make a difference. I was skeptical. I shared Randy Johnson's earlier comments about a year ago, is this really bang for the buck here, wouldn't this money be better just to substitute you to the transit district or buy new bicycles or whatever? But I think that this program actually has some real promise. It just needs to be followed up on it and can make a really big, again, in the past. And a big problem with this program right now is the COVID issue. I mean, that's why it's not taking off. I think it'd be doing a lot better if everyone for the fact that people are still telecommuting or not necessarily going to work and the employment numbers are down. So we shouldn't be surprised that the numbers are not jumping up in the way that they otherwise might be doing. For one for COVID. Thank you. Thank you. Commissioner Koenig. Thank you, Chair. Yeah, sort of a follow-up to a question that emerges from Mike's comments is, do we know whether the people who are actively logging trips were, let's just use biking as an example, were they biking before? Do we know if we know someone's activity before they use the app versus afterwards so that you can know if those are new bike riders or simply people who ride their bike anyway, but have started logging the activity because they can now get a $25 gift card for something they're already doing? We don't have that information available. We do have some surveys that are survey tools that we can use to actually measure that. And we're in the process of getting that that enhanced survey pool setup is part of our spring release, product release that's coming for the Red Amigos platform. But really what we've tried to do in this early phase is just to get people on board, get them aware of the program, get them aware of how it works. And then this next coming phase during this past year or during this coming year is going to be putting out the pre-survey and then tracking their behavior during the year with the additional incentives that we're providing and then measuring our impact or our success in the following year. Okay, yeah, because that's my primary concern. I mean, as I said, it's relatively easy for me to sign up for the platform and record my rides, but I'm already doing those rides. I don't, and it doesn't really impact my bottom line. I'm more concerned about someone who, maybe they don't have a regular employer and isn't hearing about this program through their employer and they're not, they're driving today and they're not gonna mode shift because of an app and all this extra effort it's taking to track people's behavior. So that's why I'm more for trying to just target that transition point and lowering the barriers for people. Okay, I will now take it out to the public for comments and then we'll come back to the commission. We've had quite a few comments already but we'll come back for deliberation and action. Okay, and I see Sally Arnold. You are up. Thanks, am I unmuted? You are. Okay, great. So I just wanted to thank commissioner Bertrand for doing such a nice job of explaining how well bikes and rail work together to help people get out of their cars and expand their range in ways that, just a bike alone could not do for them. And I also, on this program, like commissioner Rocken, I kind of surprised that the external incentives are so motivating for some people but I also wanna point out that the best way to get people to shift away from their private cars is to provide a convenient alternative, something that is actually superior to the private car option. And if we had like a dedicated corridor where we could run some kind of time-certain transit that was not with the cars or the buses and that would allow, like bring their bikes on it so their first mile, last mile problems were solved, could really lure people out of their cars and the UCI, by adding some kind of transit system like that, it's called light rail, to our system, we could increase our public transportation ridership by 150%. That would also include additions to metro ridership. And so this app sounds really interesting and I'm really glad people are using it. And let's remember that just exhorting people to leave their cars behind is insufficient. We need to provide them with an actual convenient realistic alternative. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Arnold. Let's see, next up, David loves public transit, your turn. Mr. Van Brink, you can begin. I just got the unmute button, am I live? You are. Okay, so believe it or not, I'm not going to talk about trains. Encouraging public transit uptake are really anything to reduce car usage is very near and dear to my heart. It sounds like you're doing a lot of great work on this area and of course you have to prioritize because we can't do everything. But transportation and climate management are very related. So that said, an area I wonder about is encouraging uptake among, I'll just say it, encouraging uptake among relatively affluent users. Over here on the West side, we benefit from UCS, he's excellent Santa Cruz metro coverage. The route 18 started less than a year ago and I myself have radically increased my bus and bus plus bike usage. The 18 route runs every half hour into the night. It goes basically from my home to a safe way into downtown. Sometimes I like to cheat and bike down the hill and take one of the buses back up the hill. So I've got no data, but I really feel like there's an opportunity, you are with some outreach, to make public transit more mainstream and acceptable to, and again, I'll just say it affluent people who largely rarely consider it. Now we can't do everything, we have to prioritize, it's all very resource constrained, but I wanted to put that idea out there both for Go Santa Cruz and for the commission in general. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Van Brink. Our next speaker is Lonnie Faulkner. And you are on mute. Hi, thanks, I just saw that come up now. I just wanna get on the same train along with the last two speakers, Sally and David. Unfortunately Sally's voice kept breaking in and out, but I wanna just support that, as Mr. Patron noted, and so true that bikes and rail go hand in hand, this is seen throughout the world, like with Biddy B, if you look that up online, these two forms of transportation are very, very well suited with each other. But I also wanna point out that, as Sally mentioned, as we bring funds in for electric light rail, this would also bring in funds for our bus metro system. And in order to serve our public and ensure that more people get out of their cars and into public transportation, we can go back to 2018, when Jared Walker came, he's a transit expert and he talked about how in order to get people out of their cars, we have to provide robust public transportation so that people can access every 15 minutes. And in order to do that, we will need more buses, we will need light rail, we'll need as many options as possible, and then this wonderful program that allows people to access both buses and rail by their bikes. And as a cyclist myself, really value that relationship of bikes, rail and buses together. Thank you so much. Thank you, Ms. Faulkner. Hey, I will now bring it back to the commission for deliberation and action. With the staff recommendation. Second. All right, we have a motion and a second on the staff recommendation. Commissioner Koenig, you're up. Like to make a substitute motion. As I said, I'm not ready to approve, you know, this significance expenditure for ride amigos today. So I'd suggest that we come, that staff come back before June when the contract actually expires with more information about daily active users on ride amigos in other communities, including car pools formed and what an alternative go Santa Cruz County program without ride amigos and more money available for e-bike and scooter rebates could look like. Hey, is there a second for the substitute motion? I'll second that. Okay. We have a motion and a second to consider a substitute motion. We now will, Commissioner Rock and I see your hand. I just want to explain the process. Sure. So we will now vote. Well, we can discuss whether or not to accept the substitute motion, just whether or not to accept the substitute motion at that point. If the motion is accepted, we will discuss that motion. And if it is not accepted, we will return to the original motion for discussion. So please limit your comments to that piece of the process. Commissioner Ratkin. I guess my feeling is that this is not a good time when we're still facing the significant impacts of COVID to sort of change horses in this midstream. And so whereas I'm not against the idea of studying alternatives as Director Koenig has suggested, I don't think this is the time to do it. I think we should proceed with the current program as recommended by staff. And then, you know, next year, perhaps when we have more normal data about people using how their people are getting around on their way to work and so forth and we have a more traditional profile, it might be a time to consider his alternative idea. So I'm against a substitute motion. I want to go back to the main motion. That's my comment. Thank you. Thank you. Commissioner Bertrand. Yeah, my question is of Amy. So based on the request from Monu, to provide more information, I'm sure you are in agreement that the board needs more information when they're making decisions, but do you have the time? Would this be something you could prepare in time so we can make a decision whether or not to continue the contract with the Migos? I believe there may be time. We may have to, depending on the time, we may have to do just a minor contract amendment while this goes through. But what I did note though, is that this contract that we're moving forward with is also the same platform that the city of Santa Cruz uses in their entire program. And so if we were to not renew this platform, that would also mean that this platform is no longer available to UC Santa Cruz, who has a great number of active users, as well as the city of Santa Cruz and their downtown program. And so we would all need to look for additional solutions for not only our incentives and rewards program, but also carpool and rice pool matching. We wouldn't have anything at that point set up to provide those services. Thank you for that important information. Okay, Commissioner Schifrin. Yes, I have a question for Amy as well. The contract that we have, what's our termination procedure of, what's the termination language? I believe we can, well, we pay an annual licensing fee every year. So when the contract ends, that means our licensing term ends, and then we just lose access to the platform. So yeah, and then I believe it in our contract itself, I think we have a 90 day termination if we canceled the agreement earlier than our original agreement. But I can expect on the verification on that. The follow-up, I wanna ask Commissioner Koenig if he would consider withdrawing his substitute motion if the motion, the main motion on the floor, would add the questions that he wants as, have that return at the June meeting for consideration. We have an ongoing program to put it at risk without any information, I think would be unfortunate. I think the questions are worth, good questions are worth being answered. If the commission does decide that there are good reasons to terminate the contract, we at least would give a time period for the commission to find an alternative approach if that's what they wanna do. So rather than have, rather than put the current program at risk at this time, I would request if you're willing to amend the motion that I made to approve the staff recommendation to add the questions that you are raising and have that come back in the, at our June meeting. So to clarify, you're suggesting that we approve the contract today as per the staff recommendation and then get more information in June after we've committed to another two years. I mean, my answer would be no, I don't see why we shouldn't get more information before making that commitment since we don't have to until June. And personally, I think all of the people who will suffer from us not using this app, I mean, we're talking about 6% of total people who've ever signed up, 158 people, we could give out four times as many e-bike rebates with the same amount of money. So, and I'm not asking that we make the decision to change the program completely today, I'm just asking that we hold off and get a little bit more information and look at what an alternative could be. Well, I think it really does put the program at risk to create that level of uncertainty. And I think our process is a weird process where we first accept the substitute motion then we vote on the substitute motion. I don't know why we do that. I'm certainly willing to vote on it. I won't be supporting it because I don't, you know, I think we have a program that's a difficult program to run as Commissioner Rodkin said, particularly during a pandemic, it's important to have these kinds of alternatives continue to be supported by the commission. As Commissioner Connick said, the community energy nonprofit is providing incentives for electric bikes. So I don't think we're moving into an area that isn't already covered. So I think we should move, we should continue to find this program. Commissioner Johnson, I saw your hand was up, but it lowered or did you have a comment? Well, I guess just I want to compliment all the people, you know, Andy, Mike and also Manu in terms of thoughtful, you know, consideration of this measure because it's on the one hand, spending the people's money wisely it's very, very important. On the other hand, continuing a program that has prospects and maybe, you know, more capacity to improve is also important. But I like the fact that we're at least discussing this and not just kind of all of a sudden saying, yeah, that sounds good because I believe the total amount is somewhere around 250,000. Am I correct with everything that we're talking about? Not the contract with the app provider, but it's a lot of money. And I know the goals are laudable, but we always have to keep an eye on the bottom line. So thank you. Thank you. Commissioner Bertrand. Yes. So my original question was basically can we learn from best practices across the platforms users? And so, you know, I'm wondering if we could go for a one year or a two year contract because I think there's some room here to take a look at our program and try to improve it in different ways. And I realized that COVID is rarely going to help us out in situations like this, but give us enough time in a year to look a little more closely so we could augment this. In terms of the brightness, excuse me, bike rebates and stuff like that, I would never, even though I'm retired, I earn enough on Social Security that I would not be able to get that. So, you know, if we're gonna talk about giving out rebates to people who buy bikes, you know, we have the whole thing of what are the classifications and are the categories and stuff like that. So that's something, you know, we haven't even started to talk about. It's just a year and, you know, can we take that time to take a better look at our program? I don't know, we'd have to have three years basically. Commissioner Schifrin? I just wanted to clarify based on Commissioner Johnson's statement that the resolution that we're being asked to support is to increase the total contract value by $77,150, so while the overall program, I think Commissioner Johnson is probably right, might be $250,000 and I'm not sure I understand all the details, this $77,000 in contribution may be the way we leverage a much wider program. And I agree with Commissioner Bertrand's comments about, you know, if we're gonna get into the business of doing rebates for e-bikes and it may make sense to do that as an owner and a rider of an e-bike, I can certainly attest that they make a huge difference in terms of not being able to get around the city, but they're not for everybody and they can really scare the heck out of you when you're driving on the street. So I think it does warrant some consideration, but this is a program that I think is an important program. And it's, as we've seen over the years, getting people to do ride sharing is difficult. Getting people to accept alternatives to driving their car everywhere is difficult, but we've gotta keep struggling to do it because the consequences of not doing it are really negative. So I think I'm not going to support the substitute motion. Again, I'd offer a commission of kind of the alternative of, you know, adding to the motion, the main motion on the floor, the questions he raised and have that come back and maybe with the consideration of the commission getting involved in an e-bike rebate program for consideration. I think it's worth looking into, but I don't want to hold this program hostage for that option. I'd like to provide two clarifications on the questions that were previously asked. As far as the contact cancellation language that we have, we are required to give 60 days notice to the contractor if we'd like to cancel our agreement and not continue our services. And then as far as the resolution itself, so Rite Amigos bills us annually and for our agreement and we pay annually. So the current budget has authorized for the upcoming year. And so there is the potential. So just not past week did not renew at the following year. And let's see, yeah, so we do have the contract itself that is just on an annual basis. And if we were to cancel in the middle of a contract term, we would essentially just lose out on the money that we've already paid for the annual licensee. And then the reason why we were bringing to the board a two year extension is to try to prevent any additional price increases. And so to lock in this price versus having to have an additional price increase the following year. Commissioner Bertrand. Yeah, so it was mentioned that the city of Santa Cruz uses this program. And I was wondering, would there be any detriment to the program overall in terms of, I understand what is being said here. We need to approve gradually, excuse me, work gradually. So we get a general acceptance on the public side. I totally agree with that. But if we just bagged our program here, how would that influence the city of Santa Cruz's program? Do you have any idea? Maybe you don't work with them. We coordinate together, yes. And they would have to find their own platform and a new tool to offer their downtown commuters any of these available resources and incentives. Yes, that's the short of it. And I think I mentioned previously that when we created this contract originally the city of Santa Cruz contributed 40,000 to our initial implementation cost of the program. And then as we continue building the program they offer their set of incentives, RTC, our program, the county-wide program offers another set of incentives. But we work together on all of our marketing and outreach programming and build off of both of our budgets to try to get the biggest bang for our bus and its program. Well, thank you very much. That really helps me understand. I did not know we were joined with them. I thought we were standalone. So that really helps me. But going back to Andy's comments earlier about trying to get this information out before we make a decision or before June. Manu, I sort of agree with this idea. We need the information. And maybe this will give us some more food for thought if there is information that leads us in that direction. So in a sense, I'm not supporting this alternate motion because I see this program as being quite well-known with other agencies, Santa Cruz. And I do agree with the comments that to get generally accepted mode changes in the population is something that takes a lot of work. I was involved in other traffic studies. And once you make a motion, once you try to make a change it is really difficult for the public to accept it. And I think this sort of falls in that venue. So I won't support the motion as well. So. Yeah, just a couple of questions. So Amy, you said if we canceled, we have 60 days, we have to provide 60 days notice to terminate which I assume then is any data outfits if it's an early June. Is there a penalty if we are not going to go 60 days or are we just like billed for the next year or how does that work? We get invoice for the following year. And so if we were to cancel, we would then, I guess we would just lose access to our platform. And so we would need to, well one we would need to coordinate with the city of Santa Cruz. We need to coordinate with our marketing and outreach efforts. Last month, the board approved our additional contracts with Miller Maxwell, then the college asked them to continue the marketing consultant services as well as the employer outreach services with those consultants. So we would have to terminate those contracts as well and or revise our contract and our scope of work to something else that has yet to be determined. Right, and just to clarify, I'm not proposing that we cancel the program or cancel our contracts with marketing. I'm simply suggesting that maybe the content of the program needs to change. The other question is if we agree to your, if we approve this to your contract today, you're saying to lock in the pricing, we could still have the same discussion next year and choose to cancel the contract without penalty. Is that correct? Right, right, because we're billed annually. And so with our contract extension going into the following year, the new contract will start at the beginning of the fiscal year. That'll go through end of the fiscal 20, I don't know, June 2023. And then they'll send us another invoice. And at that point, if there's been something that a termination has been made, we could provide the 60 days notice and work with the city of Santa Cruz that we're not going to extend another year with right amoeba potential. Commissioner Parker. Thank you, I'm interested, Amy, also, I'm really just interested in a lot of information. So I'm interested in the fact to have the other cities in the county of Santa Cruz been able to access this partnership like you're talking about with the city of Santa Cruz. And has that come on board? Has that been offered? Is that a discussion? Is that something we can look into and see if that's a viable, because we're moving as many of the commissioners have said from a pandemic status, trying to get people back and moving on the bus. And I'm really interested in seeing how that works in a broader sense. So the information that supervisor Monty asked for, that's what I'm looking at. I think it's really important. And that's why I seconded this motion. I just think there may be other ways in which we could utilize this program and then what we've done now. And of course, it's because it's hopefully becoming post pandemic versus we're just starting the whole circus again. Thank you very much, Amy, though, for your report. Appreciate it. Yeah, thank you for the question there. As I mentioned earlier, some of the challenges that we've had was connecting with major employers and signing them up. So when we started the program and in our early development, it was having the city of Santa Cruz taking the lead on the initial pilot program of this, of the Go Santa Cruz platform. And then also working with our partners, ad equality action and at the university of Santa Cruz to test out the program to see what's working, what doesn't work, to test out the tools that are available in the platform for employers and just kind of fine tuning that. And then the city of Santa Cruz did their initial launch and we were supposed to launch our countywide program a couple of months after, but we delayed that due to COVID. And so our efforts as we're moving forward and activities that we have planned currently are to actually provide the major employer. So we're trying to get on board with the county of Santa Cruz with the city of Watsonville and some of the other cities and other jurisdictions to get their employees on board, to provide a similar presentation like this to employees and their staff and working with the organizations lead contact. We found that was challenging during the pandemic and during the last year is that there was little interest because employers were faced with the uncertainties of what are they doing with their employees? Are they bringing people back? Are they focusing on a hybrid work policy or are people coming down? And all these other uncertainties or any increased workload, people losing their jobs, people transitioning to other jobs, moving out and so forth. And so anyhow, that's what we're saying. We're really hopeful that we can get these other larger employers on board and we're hopeful of that because we have these activities currently planned with them and employers are actually being a little bit more responsive now and connecting back with us to reach out for these services. Commissioner Koenig. Okay, well, thank you. I hear that you're eager to get a year of runtime on this, first of all, post pandemic and second of all that there might, that there would be penalties if we, that we don't actually have two months before the contract expires to receive more information because essentially there'd be penalties and if we don't cancel it in 60 days we'll still be billed for next year anyway. So I'm going to withdraw the motion if the maker of the main motion would add that we are going to review this in a year's time rather than just roll this into two years. I'm willing to do that. I'm willing to amend the motion if it's okay with the person who's second. And that's me, it's fine with the second. To direct staff to provide the information that you've requested. Okay, thank you. Then I will draw my substitute motion. And as a second, if I have to say anything I'm fine with that as well. Thank you. Thanks. Yes, I was just going to ask. Okay. So we are, thank you for the lively discussion and thank you Commissioner Cronig and Parker for reconsidering. So we can just take the motion that is on the floor which is the staff recommendation. I am going to make a comment here. I think that this, and I'll try to reframe my comment in light of the withdrawal of the previous, the substitute motion, this program is, it's a relatively new program. As we've heard, the platform itself is functional and it works very well, which I think is in and of itself is a real coup for us. We have a staff that's been working very hard and to try to make this, the platform and the program functional, working with these larger employers has as we know been a challenge. And it just takes time, these things take time. The city of Santa Cruz participation came as a result of the city council supporting this approach and really as a partner agency but also as an employer being involved. And so I'd like to just offer up and ask Amy, Ms. Naranjo and anybody from our staff, if you have thoughts on ways that we can help. I'm reaching out to them right now. Wonderful, thank you. I don't know if my comments need to be recorded for posterity, I'll just finish them. Recording in progress. I, thank you. So we are recording again. So from my perspective, it's a relatively small investment for, and there's a whole lot of potential in it. With respect to the question of whether or not these funds might be used more effectively, for example, for incentives, I want to use that opportunity to mention that in addition to the three CE, Central Coast Community Energy Incentives, the Monterey Bay Air Resources District also offers incentives. And we have had, I serve on that board. We have had difficulties actually expending the funds because there has been low, you know, a small number of applicants. So we have worked to revise the qualifications and what it takes to actually demonstrate income eligibility in order to raise that. So there are funds out there available for people who want e-bikes. And the idea of the RTC, I'm not opposed to the RTC considering something like that, but the administration of that kind of program, that also takes staff time and there's a cost to that as well. So given that there are other incentives out there, probably more coming with changes in kind of the state and federal approach to transportation policy, I think our efforts are better spent on this and our resources on this coordination program. So I guess with that, I've been wanting to thank you. Let me just clarify if I could. Yes, please. That what the motion is. Yes, please. The motion is to approve the staff recommendation with an additional direction to staff to return with the information that was requested by Commissioner Koenig. Yes. Is that sufficient? I didn't get all your words right. So I want to make sure that the motion is clear on what that additional information request is. Yeah, I think that's sufficient. I mean, and also to return at this time next year before we go and roll into the second year of the contract for review. Correct. Okay. Good. I just wanted to make that be clear that the motion included that additional direction. Over question. Okay. So I will stop talking then. It sounds like people want me to stop talking. So I'll call the question. I don't think we need to vote on calling the question. I'll just call her. No, exactly. That was my suggestion. Let's just call the vote. I'll share more thoughts on it when it comes back around. So we'll go ahead and take a roll call vote now. Commissioner Bertrand? I agree. Commissioner Sandy Brown? I. Commissioner Johnson? I. Commissioner Alternate Hearst? I. Commissioner Alternate Hernandez? Yes. Commissioner Alternate Shifrin? I. Commissioner Koenig? I. Commissioner McPherson? I. Commissioner Kristen Brown? I. Commissioner Parker? Yes. Commissioner DeRotkin? I. Passes unanimously. We are moving on now to our last regular item before we go into closed session. And that is the proposed budget for fiscal year 2022-23. This is item 24 on our agenda and we will return to Tracy New, our director of budget and finance. And Louise Mendes, deputy director. Thank you, Chair Brown. Good morning, Tracy New of RTC staff presenting the first 2022-23 proposed budget. This budget is presented early to allow the RTC to inform claimants of projected apportionments of Transportation Development Act funds and projected Measure D funds for use in developing their budgets. Revenue estimates for the new fiscal year include GDA revenues from the county auditor, state transit assistance and state of good repair from the state controller's office and Measure D from HDL companies. RTC maintains an 8% reserve for DEA and is responsible for administration and allocation of revenues to eligible claimants based on a formula share. The RTC is also responsible for the allocation of state transit assistance and state of good repair revenues. Actual Measure D revenues received each month are distributed in accordance with the ordinance expenditure plan. Presented to this commission is the fiscal year 22-23 budget. Program and project revenues and expenditures are based on the estimates for work to be completed in the county fiscal year and meet the TDA and RTC operations cash flow reserve targets. The proposed staff budget includes $132,328 for additional payments toward the pension unfunded approved viability and $62,290 to establish a pension section 115 trust for a total of $194,618 and $81,972 to establish a Calvary section 115 trust for retiree health benefits. In June, staff will prepare an amendment to the budget based on actual spending to determine the carryover of revenues and expenditures based on work completed. The budget and administration personnel committee and staff recommend that the Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission adopt a resolution approving the fiscal year 22-23 RTC and measure D budgets as shown on exhibit A of document one, accept the transportation development and act revenue forecast for fiscal year 22-23 except the measure D revenue forecast for fiscal year 22-23 except the 30 year measure D revenue projection except the five year measure D revenue estimates as well as adopt a resolution authorizing the executive director to sign the California employer's pension free funding trust program agreement and election to free fund the employer contributions certification of funding policy and delegation of authority to request disbursements. And lastly, adopt a resolution authorizing the executive director to sign the agreement and election to refund other post-employment benefits through Cal CURS certification of funding policy and delegation of authority to request disbursements. In fact, I'm happy to take any questions. All right. I just want to apologize for not having my screen on. I've limited connectivity. So it's just helps to not freeze up, but I am here and I will see if there are members of the commission who have questions for Ms. New. Okay. Seeing none. Any members of the public? Commissioner Johnson, I'll come right back around to you. Any members of the public who would like to speak on the budget? Okay. Seeing none. Commissioner Randy Johnson. Just real quick and it's been a while since I visited this. There is a small discrepancy in terms. I know a lot of the funds that are distributed are based on population. And maybe three or four or five years ago after 20 years of Capitola and Scotts Valley being exactly equal in terms of monies distributed, they crept a little bit ahead of us. I think based on sales tax considerations, even though we have placed the square mileage and I think maybe 10 to 15% more population, I just want to look at that. It's not a lot of money, but a big part of what we do here is in terms of equity. I just wanted to kind of revisit that to make sure that everybody gets their fair share based on population. So I would have to be reminded of where those monies come from, but maybe staff can do that for us. Thanks. I would be happy to send that information. And the percentage that's allocated for each type, which is the road miles, the sales tax generation in the county as well as population numbers also matter. Thank you. Okay, commissioner Rockin. Should I wait for the public for a month before we get a motion? I took it out to the public. Okay, then I'll move that we approve the staff recommendation for, it's basically claim purposes or delaying there. It's not as preliminary budget and I'll move it's approval. And I will ask that the questions that Randy Johnson asked be answered before we get back to a final budget. Is everybody's clear on how the- I'll second the motion. I'll have the district- The spanning that includes all seven recommendations, staff recommendations. Yeah. Yes, that's the intent of the motion. Okay, commissioner Bertrand. Being that Randy's going to get some information that concerns capital, I'd like a copy of that too. I think we'll all like to see that, thank you. We'll just keep monitoring you guys. And I'll provide you with the sources where we get the information. Yeah, it was half in jest. I know this is a big issue and our city managers are constantly working on it. So it hasn't gone away for a long time. So I call the motion, I'll quickly call the question. Okay, every time I open my mouth, somebody else wants to talk. So I try to give it a moment, sorry. If you can give a pause. You can have a right to speak as well. I like to make sure everybody's done. Okay, so we'll go ahead and take a vote on the motion to approve the preliminary budget. Commissioner Bertrand. I agree. Commissioner Brown. I. Commissioner Sandy Brown, sorry about that. Commissioner Johnson. I. Commissioner Alternate Hearst. I. Commissioner Alternate Hernandez. I. Commissioner Alternate Schifrin. I. Commissioner Connick. I. Commissioner McPherson. I. Commissioner Kristen Brown. I. Commissioner Parker. Yes. Thank you for walking. I. I pass this union. Okay, our last. Could I just clarify that this isn't, if I'm understanding it correctly, this isn't the preliminary budget. No. This is the budget. Is that correct? I believe we have a final vote on this in June though. No, I don't think so. I think it comes back in October to be revised based on the expenditures in the fiscal year. But as I understand it, that's why I wanted to clarify we're not going to be voting on this again. This is our approval of the, and the reason that we do it is so the member agencies, particularly the transit district conveys their budget knowing that the commission has approved their allocations. Thanks for the clarification. That's correct. Anything to add? That is correct. It is commissions for fiscal year 2023. And we will come back for amendments, you know, typically in the fall after we know the carrier from the fiscal year as your staff member, Tracy, you communicated, you know, in June, we'll come back with some information for the on the carryover based on this screen. Okay. So that has, I think we've now clarified the motion we have adopted is the approval of the budget for fiscal 23 and we will now move on to our final item is closed session. And we have two items on the closed session agenda. I'll ask our RTC council to give us a overview and then whether or not we'll be reporting out from closed session. Thank you, Madam Chair. We have two items on closed session. First we have a labor negotiations both for the mid-management unit and the core units. And then secondly, we have a closed session related to potential litigation with significant exposure, one case. And this relates to potential repairs near Manresa Beach to the right of way that RTC owns. And do you anticipate a report out? I, there's a possibility of a report out but I don't, we'll see the direction from the commission. Okay. So with that, we will adjourn the, oh, I see another hand up, commissioner Hearst. We will not adjourn. You're muted. You're muted. Sorry again. I've been just checking to see where the link was for the closed session, is that separate? Yes, it just got sent to us this morning. You should find it in your inbox. Who would that be from? Ian Berry. Berry. I'll look for it, but I don't see it. We'll send it to you again, commissioner Hearst. We usually don't send it to alternates automatically unless we hear from the commissioners. So we'll get that out to you immediately. Thank you very much. You can make sure to send it to me too. I didn't see it before the meeting. Okay. We'll do it again. I just wanted to clarify whether we need to hear from, if there's any members of the public who want to speak on the closed session items. Yeah. Okay. I don't see any hands up, but I will, I'll just put it out there. If there are any members of the public who would like to speak to items on our closed session agenda. Okay. Seeing none, I will adjourn this meeting. We will now move into closed session and there is a link for that, see you all soon. So we are, we've now returned to our open session agenda to report out on actions taken during closed session. I'll turn it over to Mattis, our RTC council. Thank you, madam chair. The commission had two items on the closed session. There were no reportable actions from the labor negotiations items with regards to the potential litigation item. I'm reporting out that on a nine to zero vote, the commission directed the executive director to not execute the contract for the erosion repair project at Manresa Beach. And that is the extent of the report out. Thank you. And I believe with that, we can officially adjourn today's meeting. Thank you all for being here and we'll see you at the transportation policy workshop. I believe that's our last item next meetings and that will be the third Thursday, so 7th, 14th, 21st. Okay, thanks everybody, meeting adjourned.