 Hello and welcome to the Capitola City Council meeting. In accordance with the current Santa Cruz County Health Order and the governor's executive order N2920, this meeting is not physically open to the public. Council and staff are meeting via Zoom and there are several ways for the public to watch and participate. Information on how to join the meeting over Zoom or with your phone is available on our website cityofcapitola.org on the slides now shown and on the published meeting agenda. Thank you for attending this Capitola City Council meeting. Mayor Peterson, I'll turn to you to call the meeting to order. Thank you Chloe. We're now going to call tonight's meeting to order. Can we have a roll call please? Yes. Council Member Bertrand. Here. Council Member Botthorff. Here. Council Member Story. Here. Vice Mayor Brooks. Here. Mayor Peterson. Here. Thank you. We're now going to do the Pledge of Allegiance if I could ask all the council members to mute themselves and if Vice Mayor Brooks could lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance. Absolutely. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to its republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. We can move on to a report on closed session. We did a helpful meeting closed session about the two agendized items and in both cases no option was taken. Thank you. We're going to move on now to item three, Presentation. And we're going to have one presentation tonight, a retirement proclamation for Ben Iro. And I would like to read our proclamation for this evening. We are honoring parking officer Ben Iro upon his retirement for 35 years of service to our city. Remarkable, 35 years. Whereas parking officer Ben Iro began his career with the city of Capitola police department in April of 1985 and officially retired on October 28, 2020 after 35 years about standing service to the residents of Capitola. And whereas parking officer Iro has selflessly supported the Northern California Special Olympics with annual fundraising efforts and participated in the law enforcement torch run, which is the largest public awareness campaign for Special Olympics. And whereas during his tenure as parking officer, Ben Iro quickly became a favorite member of the police department family, appreciated for his infectious smile and sense of humor. And whereas Ben Iro was well known about Capitola Village and the larger city as a valued, positive ambassador between the public and the city of Capitola. And whereas parking officer Iro's calm demeanor and dedication to his community will be missed by all of Capitola police department and the city of Capitola. And whereas parking officer Iro is deeply devoted and active with the local Twin Lakes Community Church where he participates in youth programs and counseling. And now, therefore, I, Kristen Peterson, mayor of the city of Capitola on behalf of the city council, city staff, and the entire Capitola community, do hereby commend and thank Ben Iro for more than three decades of excellent and devoted service. Thank you so very much, Officer Iro. You have committed more time to this service than I have been alive on this earth. And it is incredible, such an incredible accomplishment. And we are so grateful for all of your service. Thank you and thank you so much. If you have anything to say, please, please, any words. Well, at this time, I just want to thank the city and Capitola police department for allowing me the privilege to serve this fine city. It's been a privilege, it's been honor, and I am so grateful for the relationships that I've developed over the many years that I've been here. And I would not ever trade up with anything else. I am so grateful. And for that, I feel like a very lucky guy. And thank you so much. Thank you. One more round of applause, virtual round of applause. Mayor Peterson, can I make a comment, please? Yes, please. Yes. Ben, I'm going to keep it short because I want to bore you. I know you're a man of many facts. So I want to thank you for all your years of service. And I wish you in a way in a very happy and wonderful retirement. Thank you both for being part of our community. And thank you so much for allowing us to be honest with you. We will always be a part of this community. Yeah. And Mayor, if I may, Ben, congratulations on your retirement. And I just want to tell you, you know, the Capitola, and especially the village, is not going to be the same without seeing you around town over these many decades. I've really come to, you know, appreciate the work that you've done, your professional career that you've given to the city. Thank you so much for that. And the best of luck to you and the best of health in your retirement. So thank you. I would just like to add, Ben, congratulations. Ben, I echo everything the rest of our council has said this evening. You will definitely be missed, but enjoy your retirement. It's well deserved. Thank you so much. Absolutely. Well deserved retirement. And I think if I could just say, I believe that when I was a child, I may have met you a very long time ago. Because I believe that my grandpa introduced me to you and said, this has been jamming. Yeah, and that's how I met you. So, well deserved retirement. Thank you so much for your service. Thank you. All right. We are going to move on now to item number four, additional materials. Are there additional materials for tonight's agenda? There were two additional materials. One was sent out regarding item 8D and another regarding item 8G earlier this week. Thank you. Thank you. And we'll move on to item five. Are there any additions or deletions to tonight's agenda? Not as no changes to the agenda for this evening. Thank you. We'll move on now to public comment. This is the time for any members of the public to address the council on items that are not on tonight's agenda. And I will turn it over to our moderator to determine if there's any public comments tonight. Thank you, Mayor Peterson. I do not see any hands raised and I do not see any emails on public comment. All right. Thank you very much. With that, we will close public comment and move on to city council and staff comments. And we'll start with staff. Do any staff members have comments this evening? I think we have two items this evening from Public Works Director Jesper. Good evening, Mayor. Good evening, Mayor and Council. I just want to make sure everybody's aware that on Monday we are having a virtual workshop on the Richmond mansion project. It will be starting at 6 o'clock and that there is an announcement on our web home page. If anybody wants information or they can call the Public Works Department. The second item is just an update on the JETI project. I know last council meeting I said it was going to be starting this week. The contractor is kind of relooking at the tides and finding out, trying to pick a better time for him to start. He needs to work when he can get to the lowest tides. Right now they are earmarking starting on November 30th. Thank you very much. All right. Thank you. We will move on. Oh, I'm sorry. Is there any members of the council that have any items or comments tonight? And I see the council member Bertrand has his hand up. I just wanted to say I walked by the library a couple of times a week. Maybe three or four times a week. And it's so nice to see the work progressing. I take a picture almost each time. And it's just really turning out to be a beautiful project. And thank you Steve and everyone else on the staff that's working on pushing this and making sure we're on well forget the schedule. As long as we're getting a couple of you, I'm just very happy to see it going. Thanks. Thank you council member Bertrand. Vice mayor Brooke. Thank you mayor. I just wanted to let everyone know as we enter into the holiday season, the second harvest food bank is currently looking for volunteers to help distribute food. So if you know of anyone or want some more information on how to sign up, you can feel free to reach out to me via email. Thanks. Great. Thank you vice mayor Brooke. I don't see any other council members with their hands up. So I'll just say for my public comment one to echo what council member Bertrand has said. I'm really excited for the library. It looks amazing. For anyone who's on Facebook, you know that they sometimes show you memories, things that you've posted in years past. And I recently was reminded of the memory in 2018 of the groundbreaking. And so I'm very much looking forward to the completion of this project. And the other thing I'd like to state is that as we know, the county has seen a spike in COVID cases and those cases have been related back to gatherings for Halloween. And as we come up on Thanksgiving and Christmas, the guidance that we've seen from the county and the state is to ensure that no more than three households are gathering at a time and that it's best if those gatherings are outdoors. And I hope that we will all take that into consideration as we do our best to try to slow this spike of cases that we've seen recently. With that and seeing no other comments from council, we will move on to item eight, which is the consent calendar. All items on the consent calendar will be enacted by one motion in the form listed on the agenda. And there will be no separate discussion on these items unless a member of the public or a member of the council would like to pull an item for a separate consideration. So I see, if Larry can confirm, I see no member of the public that wants to pull an item for separate consideration. Is that the case? Yes. Yes. I do not see any in the audience with their hands up, Mayor Peterson. Okay. Thank you. With that, we'll come back to council. I see councilmember Botchard had his hand up. Thank you, mayor. Please, the mayor, I would like to pull item eight, G for discussion. Eight G is holiday suspension of the village parking fees. Do we have, just for the sake of determining if we should take this right away or add this item to our general government, can staff let us know from their awareness if there's anyone from the BIA on the call this evening, or if someone from the BIA could raise their hand if they're on the call and have comments on this item? Mayor Peterson, this is Larry. I do see someone from the BIA in attendance. Oh, God. Then let's go ahead and pass the rest of our consent calendar right now. And then before we move on to general government, we will move on to item G, so that members of the BIA can weigh in before we move on. I'll make a motion to approve the consent calendar bar in item eight G. I'll second that motion. All right. We have a motion from councilmember Botchard and a second by councilmember Bertrand. Can we have a roll call vote, please? Thank you. Councilmember Bertrand. I approve. Councilmember Botchard. Aye. Councilmember Story. Aye. Vice Mayor Brooks. Aye. And Mayor Peterson. Aye. Thank you. We will now consider item eight G was pulled from the consent calendar, holiday suspension of village parking fees. And I will start by asking councilmember Botchard for comments on his decision to pull this item and then we'll move forward from there. So I just, I'll short staff presentation to introduce the item. Sure. Well, we'll introduce it. Sure. Thank you. Natalie, are you available? Yes. Great. How about it? Perfect. I don't know if everyone can hear me, but I'll call on you. All right. Good evening, Mayor Peterson and council. I'll give you a quick, quick background. What we're talking about is the holiday suspension for village parking. Essentially since 2001, with the exception of one year in 2003, with at the request of the, either the chamber of the BIA, they've requested that suspend parking meter payment through only in the village area from Thanksgiving through December. So essentially it's from November 26th through December 26th. It suspends the meter and pay station payment, but it does not suspend a three-hour turnover time. And that's its own measure. Okay. Great. Thank you. Councilmember Botchard, do you have any questions about this before we can bring it to public comment for our BIA members? Or would you like to wait until we hear from them and then come back? I have no questions, Mayor. Thank you. Okay. I will turn it over to our moderator for comment on this item. Yes. I do see someone in the audience, Rodney, with his hand up. So I will allow it to talk. This is Rodney with their capsule of BIA. The board did vote on this and almost unanimously voted in favor of the free parking. They felt it did benefit business and it was something that a lot of locals were looking forward to. We do know there's a huge loss to the city and there has been because of the outdoor dining and we'll respect any decision you guys make. Thank you, Rodney. Larry, I'll turn it back to you. It looks like we might have one more public comment. Thanks so much for listening. I also agree with the BIA. I have been a long-term employee of the village. And while I realize that the parking has been taken up via the Esplanade dining experience that we are now allowed to have, which has also helped our small businesses prosper, I think that people are deterred from capital due to the parking. And I think if we can do some sort of incentive, whether that's, hey, buy an hour, get two free or whatever, if we can make some sort of maybe compromise on the matter, that could also help. But I think that going forward through the holidays to help the small businesses and small shops move forward during this time along with the restaurants, I think it would be a good idea to keep it in mind. I realize we have taken a cut. So I understand if that's not in the budget, it's on the budget. But I think it's definitely something to consider. And I totally am down with that. And obviously if not, then that's okay too. Thank you. Thank you. Are there any additional comments? I'll ask our moderator. I'm not sure if it was a found issue on my end or if you're muted, but I think you said there was nothing more, correct? I do not see any more comments. Okay, great. Thank you. Then we'll bring it back to consider, to continue considering item 8G. And I will bring it back to Council Member Botch or a control of this item. Thank you, Mayor. I think the way I'd like to begin this is, I've been a big fan of this program ever since the Conception. I think that the city has always in years past taken the position to do anything possible to help the village merchants. And we've demonstrated that by the long run that Captain Bailey shared with us of how long we've been doing this. With that being said, this is a different situation. It's 2020 and it's COVID. And COVID has been devastating the city of Capitol's budget. I think we've gone over all the numbers. We've been making cuts to approximately $2.75 million of the things that we've always took for granted and we just can't afford it. I'm a little surprised that the fact that the city manager put this on the consent agenda based on the discussions that we've had and how diligently this council has worked to make every cut possible the things that we never thought we would cut. I also am a little disappointed and not disappointed that I'm concerned about the council moving forward. When I watched the council forum for candidates talking about what was the number one issue in Capitola, it was about how we were going to survive a $2.75 million deficit and what cuts would be necessary to be made to get us through that. And I think that when we come here now, we look at something like the parking, this is an actual $30,000 loss to the city. And I think that we struggle, we time pass maybe if not paid attention to $30,000. But I'm going to tell you that when it comes to situations, you can think that $50,000 doesn't matter and then it becomes $500,000. And in the case of the library, it becomes $1.5 million that we took out of the general fund for a shortfall. And I'm sure we could all use that $1.5 million right now as much as we love this library. It's real dollars. And the other comment is that I think that it's really important that we remember some actions we've already taken. We've laid off employees, we've cut employees out, we've taken away coal. And I think that, you know, a lesson I learned at a recent negotiation I was involved in was the fact that the city councilor can set up and rank true with me and that is they should not get in the habit of balancing the budget on the backs of employees. And I think there's a lesson there because another thing we did as a group unanimously is we took $275,000 away from community grants. And my fear is that I love the parking program, but I also know that in actuality a lot of those parking places go to workers and employees. And we've already committed to 47 parking places, but we're losing approximately $132,000 to support these businesses to allow them to move outside so they can make a living. And I don't regret that. I think the council made a tough decision to waive all fees, waive all permits, and we're losing $100,000. By the time this is done, because I believe this is going to go well into July of next year, it will be about $150,000 rule of law to support those businesses. So this shouldn't be like we're trying to not help our businesses. We've definitely shown that. But I just think there's a little icing on the cake or maybe a little salt in the wounds. I think this is something where I also believe that if the surface take those places, and employees take those places, and we've given 47 places to the restaurant, there's not going to be places for these customers to park. And I think it's really going to upset a customer as he comes into town and he's got to hike up to the upper village because there's 52 search boards parked in the village where he can't get to the store. So I think this is the common sense decision. I think it's something that I absolutely hope that next year, when this all returns to normal, that you return this to the DIA, because I think one of their concerns was that we always wanted to take it away, and that's not the case. This is something that I believe we all support, but I think right now these are difficult times, and it calls for difficult decisions. And trust me, you're going to continue next year to have to make difficult decisions over and over again to balance the $2.75 million deficit. So with that, I'm prepared to make a motion to not approve holiday parking for this year. We have a motion on item 8G. Do we have a second? I'll second, Mayor Peterson. Okay, we have a motion and a second. We'll continue for discussion. Are there any other comments on this item or questions? A question, Madam Mayor? Sure. Yeah, in terms of employees parking down at the Esenade and surfers parking down at the Esenade, my question to staff is would it make much difference if there's charging for the meters and not charging for the meters? Because my understanding is they have permits to do that. That's my question to staff. I'll refer the question to Captain Daly. I think he's still on the call this evening about the experience during the pre-parking period about seeing an uptick in employee parking in the village. So as far as the surfers occupying those spots, and I think we do have a surfer and coffee permits that we issue out, and those are for the morning hours. But other than that, the only employee parking that we have is for the PAC code locks, so it does not impact that. But when we do have the free parking in there, and people do take advantage of those spots down there as far as employees or employees of businesses down there, they do take up those parking spots. They do, okay. Now, I may or if I could ask and follow up a question to the Captain. So in terms of the PAC code program, has that expanded to all the employees? I mean, I knew that was just covering some that chose to do it. So, and you sort of answered it recently. I just want to know some of the permits as far as I know still allows employees to park downtown in front of the Esenade businesses they work at. Yeah. But so they do all employees have access to those to their employers, they get the code, and then they can buy the per the monthly permits to park in the PAC code locks. Just the PAC code, okay. For each and every part of the engine. And okay. Okay. So, you know, I agree with Ed in terms of having too many employees parking in front of the businesses that seems to sort of work against the businesses that their employees are parking there. Maybe that's part of the issue we should address. So, that's just a comment. Okay. Are there any additional questions on this item? Okay. I just want to make a comment briefly. I do want to acknowledge one that I understand your concerns, Councilmember Bautourof. And I'm kind of at a, well, I want to acknowledge your concerns. And I first want to let you know that it was not the city manager that put this on the consent calendar. That was my decision only because it's only been on the consent calendar. And I felt that if anyone felt the need to pull it that they would. And so it's completely, you know, within your right to do so. So, I do want to acknowledge that that was my decision to do so. I understand the concern. I also feel that our village businesses have suffered a great deal in this year. And we've seen several of our businesses closed down completely. And as we go into the winter months, and there's going to be the cold weather and the COVID restrictions. And as I mentioned before, our COVID cases are rising. So, we may even find ourselves sliding back into more restrictive tiers that I'm concerned about what this means for the economic vitality of our village. And so I'm not, I'm not prepared to entirely decline this, but I am wondering, Councilmember Bautourof, if you're willing for some kind of, some kind of in between, whereas we're not entirely getting rid of the suspension of village parking fees, but perhaps moving it back a week. So instead of having an entire month, would you be more comfortable with three weeks or two weeks of suspending the parking fee so that we still allow our village businesses to have a couple weeks where people are more likely to be spending more time in the village and in our businesses? And I'm interested in your thoughts on that if you're willing to have that discussion. Thank you, there. I'm happy to comment to that. I just wanted to, I wanted to make sure that I would allow any other Council person to comment before I did. So if nobody else wants to make a comment, then I would be happy to address your question. Sure. Thank you. I do see that Vice Mayor Brooks has her hand up. Councilor Bertrand, Councilmember Bautourof, you both still have your hands up so if you could take them down so that as we move forward, I know who's reaching out for new comments. So I'm going to move it over to Vice Mayor Brooks now and we'll keep the conversation going. Thank you, Mayor Peterson. It doesn't, in response to your comment about securing and supporting the economic vitality of our businesses, my concern is that if we can't support the economic vitality of our city from the beginning, from the get-go here, we're going to be in trouble. We won't be able then to really support any of our businesses further. We wouldn't be able to do the things we do if we can't support just the fundamentals of our city and our staff and those who have truly been affected with cuts. So I respect your comments there but this is really, I really appreciate Councilmember Bautourof bringing this work because I too, this has been on my mind and I was prepared to school that item as well this evening for the same reason. We're at $30,000 is a huge amount and if that is the amount that we can see but as we know the, with the COVID impact, if people aren't going to be able to go outside and shop around, it's not at fault because we're not, because they can't shop because of the meters, it's because they just can't go outside and be outside to shop freely. So I would carry that weight for myself or for those reasons you had mentioned. So those are just my comments and I would maintain my second on Councilmember Bautourof's motion. Thank you Vice Mayor Brook. Are there any other Council comments or questions? I do have a couple comments but I don't want to, Councilmember Bertrand go ahead. You're still muted Councilmember Bertrand. So if this is off the subject, let me do a little stop but the subject was brought up about permits to park in front of the businesses downtown and I am concerned that so many of the people perhaps, you know, I've heard it mentioned since I've been in Capitola who work at the restaurants, maybe even the owners of the restaurants park in front of their places and to me I think that's an issue that maybe is being driven by what they're talking about. I mean it's making it a lot worse. So, you know, I support supporting the businesses and I think the other issue of permits should be addressed later which I'll bring up maybe at the next meeting. Those are my comments. Thank you. Thank you Councilmember Bertrand. I guess my only comment or concern is that we've had other situations since we've had to cut back on our budget where we've had surplus funds and we chose not to put them back towards things like community grants or staff because the question with those funds was always how do we decide and who decides where that money is going to go. And so I guess my only draw back here is if we're saying well that's $30,000 of loss to the city where are we suggesting that that $30,000 would go? Are we suggesting that that $30,000 would go back to community grants and if that's the case which grantee would receive it? Are we suggesting that it goes back to staff and if so how and to who? And so I do have concerns with the idea that if we were not to move forward with suspending the parking meter and pay station fees that somehow we're getting $30,000 back to something but we're not quite sure what. So that is my concern with this. So I'm as much as I am very much understanding in an agreement with Council Member Botsworth and Vice Mayor Brooks' concerns, I'm not prepared to support the motion because I'm not sure where the benefit is in not doing this. But with that being said, I see Council Member Bertrand-Pand is still up. Is that for additional comments or is that from the last comment? Yes, it is, Mayor. Comment I wanted to make earlier than I thought. Well, maybe I don't know. So the idea behind the CARES Act that we've been hearing about is to support small businesses. And economic analysts all the way up to the Fed have realized that with this support at the onset and maybe into the next administration, we don't know, it helps small businesses and it keeps the economy going. You don't want to lose these small businesses because nothing is going to fill the vacuum that fast. And I think that's particularly of concern in Capitola. We have a lot of small businesses and as we know, the Christmas time is one of the times they make up for the walls caused by our weather and stuff like that. It's not easy to be a small business in Capitola. As we all know, there's been a lot of vacancies over the years and we lament the loss of some of those businesses. So I'm in support of keeping this program going. I understand what Ed is saying and what Yvette is saying in support of that, but I think that we have to think in terms of it's a short-term issue here. We want to keep what we have going. And it's a recognition of the fact that it's so difficult for our businesses down at the Esplanade to keep going, especially when it's tough. And the COVID has made it even more tough. So in normal circumstances, we do it, but now that we have COVID, I think it's even more tough. So I'm just not in support of what Ed is bringing forth. I understand where he's at and I totally agree. I think we should directly address that with the permanent issue, actually, now that it was brought up. Thank you, those are my comments. Thank you, Council Member Bertrand. Vice Mayor Brooks and then Council Member Story after. Yeah, to your point, Mayor Peterson, I was curious about I realized that coming in the next few months, we'll be reviewing our budget and setting some priorities. I was wondering if our city manager could speak to that. Sure, Vice Mayor Brooks. So our next scheduled agenda budget review is going to be coming up in four weeks on December 10th. And at that point, we'll be looking at the first quarter sales tax data as well as our hotel and parking meter data to date and identifying whether we have budget shortfalls or surpluses and where the council will be looking to allocate them. So we will be having a larger budget conversation coming up in four weeks. Okay, great. Thank you. Council Member Story. Yes. Thank you, Mayor. I wanted to respond to Jeff's concerns about the businesses in the village. And I shared that concern. I think all the council members share that concern. However, at this time when the city is it's amazing that they can cut. And the fact, you know, in my view, there's been no clarification or assurance that having fleet parking meters leads to more business or leads to more retail traffic in the village. We've generally done this just as a matter of seasonal generosity without requiring any kind of proof of its efficacy. And I think that Ed has pointed to the circumstances where maybe it's not being used for the intended purpose that it's not necessarily generating more retail sales. And because if it clearly would, you know, some of this loss will be reflected if asking greater sales taxes. Well, you know, there's nothing in the record that indicates the best case. And I think with that, and with the significant touch that we've made, and with the mid year budget review coming up, and that's where we will make those decisions about if we have additional money, where, what holes are we going to attempt to refill? But we're not at that point yet. And I think until I were to see some sort of improvements in our budget, I would want to, I think support and motion. And not to say that if we come to the mid year and December 10th and the things look they're moving in a very positive direction, maybe we could re-inform that some of the free parking like a week before the actual Christmas holiday. Because in my view, you know, we've done this part of just the holidays season. And maybe we would be in a position to do that at that time. But I think at this time, there's all we know is that we have serious budget issues. And we should, I think, use our money judiciously. So those are my comments. And, you know, at this point, I will support the motion. Thank you, Council Member Story. Council Member Tron, you have your hand up. Is that for new comment? You know, in one sense, I agree with Sam. I have not seen a study that shows for a month a month, year to year, that free parking downtown at the Espanade has helped our businesses. The only thing I know is that the businesses say that it does. And, you know, the streets are crowded. And, you know, the time when the weather is usually pretty bad, I think that's a good indication that there's probably increased economic activity. So he's right. We haven't done a study. We don't know. It's all evidence of your eyes that we see a lot of people down there and evidence of what the businesses have told us that this is a great boom to what they consider a great business environment. So I think there is a benefit. And short of doing a study, you know, we can't really say that there is no benefit at this point. We would have to do a study to follow up on that point. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Tron. Council Member Botork, I'm going to come to you next and then I have a question for you on your motion. Thank you, Mayor. Sure. I think I just want to adjust to one concern that you have because I think the real crux of what we're talking about now is if you remember when the City of Madrid came to us and said, members of the City Council, we have a serious problem we have to deal with, we immediately cut out all discretionary spending. Okay. And when you categorize things, this is absolutely discretionary spending. And the fact that it wasn't cut out, I believe it's an oversight. And to your question, Mayor, position about, you know, when I said this is going to cost $30,000, $30,000 that we may have that we don't have, I can't tell you that I'm going to give you this $30,000 to put someplace else. This is money that we're just losing. Okay. And I don't think we are in any position to say that we, I know that if we give away the free parking, then we definitely will not make that $20,000 to $30,000. So, but I don't think that we have the money yet to say, okay, we can give it to a community grant or something. This is still money that we don't know because as the city manager alluded to, we have no evidence. We have no returns back. Our last report in August showed us that our TOT was down 50%. Our sales tax was down 33%. We have every reason to believe that we are on track to lose the money that the city manager forecasted. So, as Council Member Storey said, you know, this is the time that you need to strap on your hat and be ready to, you know, to deal with this next year. This is not going to go away anytime soon. So, I just see this discretionary spending up. And I may preclude your question because you asked me a question already and that was, what do you see as a good answer? You know, I've given this program some thought and we're not here to re-create the employee parking or the Christmas parking program. But I always thought that it would be better to sell the merchants. But if somebody came in and bought something in their store, somebody shopped in their store, they could give them a free parking coupon. Or they could pay reimbursement for their parking and then submit a bill to us for how much they gave away in free parking. And I would feel good knowing that the merchants were trying to reimburse for the parking and they were offering it and sent it to shoppers. That way I would know that it wasn't going to surfers and employees and anybody else who wasn't down there. It was truly going to offer something to a merchant like somebody comes in to rebonds and they buy a draft and they go to the counter and they say, here, here's a token for, here's some money for free parking. I think that would be appreciated. But it would also be absolutely, you know, we would be able to say this is going to merchant. And I think that's a good way to spread it. But that's a little too hard to implement at this point. Maybe it's something you could think about next year. But I definitely think it's a better use of art. As Sam said, this was always a just, a generosity thing that we did without anything offered in return. Well, thank you. You were muted, Council Member Batur, if we lost the last maybe five words there. If you have another question, I'm open to that. Yes, I do. So I completely understand and don't disagree with anything that any of the other Council Members are saying here about the concerns with our budget. What I will say is, yes, you're right, this is something that was done out of generosity in other years. And while I'm completely understanding the need for us to repair our budget going forward, if there was ever a need for generosity, this is the year for it. However, as you mentioned, I am understanding of the concern. And so I'm wondering if you're willing to accept a friendly amendment to your... If I understand your motion correctly, it is to... And please, please let me know if this is correct. If I understand correctly, your motion is not to authorize suspending the parking meter and pay station for November 26th through December 25th, correct? That is correct. Okay. So if I understand that correctly, what I'm asking for is if you are willing to accept a friendly amendment to cut it from a full four weeks to two. And that as... And that I could at least give you my commitment that as the Council Representative to the BIA, that I will ask the BIA members to please speak with their staff and ask that they not utilize the free parking in the village because it is to the benefit of those businesses not to have their employees park there. Now, I can't guarantee they'll do that. I'm not... And they can't guarantee that their staffers will do that. But for the sake of compromise, I am asking if you will accept a friendly amendment for it to suspend the holiday parking village... Village parking fees for the two weeks prior to Christmas rather than the full four months... Four weeks. And that would give us back about $15,000. You know, Mayor, I'm... Let me tell you what I feel. You know, when Sam said something about, you know, when the city manager comes back to us on December 10th and there's some good news there, good news is what I think we need to hear. And for us now to say we want to still get something away. I mean, I guess what I want to say to you is I appreciate that you are really going to back to the BIA. And I don't want to minimize that. But, you know, I saw some members on this council that were deeply hurt when we took away money from community grants. But I do know that unanimously, you all fucked that up. Okay? And I will never forget that we unanimously took a very difficult stance. And I don't see this one with the BIA as difficult as I do that one as I do when we took our employees and took money out of their pocket. So I really don't feel like I'm being consistent by giving money for parking places while our employees don't even have jobs right now. We laid off three people. So I'm going to reject that from the amendment. I appreciate your standing on this. In that case, I think that for the sake of at least saying that I tried that I will offer a substitute motion that we authorized to spending parking meter and pay station operation for the two weeks prior to Christmas rather than the full month prior to Christmas. I second. Okay. For the attorney or city attorney. Sure. I don't believe the mayor can make a motion. I think the mayor can make a motion. It's Rosenberg says it's not common, but yes, the mayor can make a motion. I haven't done it all year, Adam Holden. I held out until my very last full meeting as mayor to do it. I think Councilman Stone is laughing because he finds it highly irregular. I don't know, but you know what? I'm going to withdraw that point of order. All right. Well, never a dull moment. I'll give us all that. Okay. Okay. All right. Is there any... Hold on. Let me get back so I can see all the participants. Is there any additional questions or comments from Council? And I see none. So I believe that substitute motion goes first. Is there a second on that motion? I second it. Oh, thank you. Okay. Okay. Can we have a roll call from the clerk on the substitute motion to suspend parking meter and pay station operation for the two weeks prior to Christmas? Yes. Thank you, Mayor. Councilmember Bertrand. I agree. Councilmember Story. No. No. Mayor Peterson. All right. Motion does not carry due to a lack of majority. All right. Can't say I didn't try. We're going to go back to the original motion then, which is to suspend the to not suspend parking meter and pay station operation for the four weeks that we normally do. I do see that Councilmember Story has his hand up though. So before we go to the vote on the original motion, I'm going to go to Councilmember Story for comment. Yes. Thank you, Mayor. I just wanted to maybe suggest, and before we take a vote on the motion that's on the floor, that maybe we could have an understanding that this matter could be reconsidered at the time of our December 10th, maybe a budget review. Is that a friendly amendment to Councilmember Vautor's motion? Well, we approve it now, but come back to it later. Well, I'll be there, but I wish you all the best luck. And I think that if Councilmember Story wants to pursue that item, I support his endeavor. Well, I was going to ask the City Attorney whether bringing it for reconsideration at a later meeting required an amendment at this time. So you guys are really putting me through my procedural patience or not. And the answer is no. A motion for reconsideration must be made at the same meeting in which the item was voted upon. It must be made by someone who voted in favor of the item. So a motion for reconsideration would not be an option here. What I might suggest is that if you would like to bring it back to later date, you likely don't need a friendly amendment. You could simply give direction to staff to bring it back on a later date. I would propose that after this motion is taken, that you give direction to staff to bring this matter back. Now, there's a logistical issue that staff will have to address as to whether by December 10, you know, the two weeks before Christmas, that starts on December the 12th, whether or not there would be position time if we were just inside to suspend parking for that two weeks before Christmas or a week before Christmas for the staff that have the ability to do that. So that's my decision. Like a response from staff about the timing or would you rather take this motion off? Are you looking for a response from staff, Council Member Story? You know, if staff are saying that that's impossible, there's just no way that can be done. Well, I'd like to hear that now. Then we can just put it to rest. But if they don't feel that way, I'm willing to wait until we get there and see if we have consensus to ask staff to bring it back to us on December the 10th. If we got the direction on December 10th, I'm confident that we can have it up in place, not running within seven days at the longest, probably less, probably two to three, maybe four days. No one over promised, though, without doing more analysis. So, you know, we need a little bit of time to set it up, but I don't think it shouldn't take, certainly shouldn't take a full week. I think we can get it done in quite a few days less. Thank you, Jen. All right. Any other comments from Council? Seeing none, can the City Clerk repeat back the motion? Did you understand it? If I might wait for just a second. My understanding of, and please correct me if I wrong, Council Member Bothor, my understanding is that Council Member Bothor's motion is to essentially maintain a status quo. And if I have that right, the Council does not need to take any action. No, if I understand, I guess it depends on what we're considering the status quo, because the status quo for other years was to prevent, to stop the payment, excuse me, let me go to the agenda. The status quo for other years was that we would authorize suspending parking meter and pay station operation to allow three-hour parking to be free. And that was the status quo in other years. But if you mean allow the status quo to continue as parking fees are now, then yeah, that's what I understand this motion to be, correct? That's my understanding as well. So if the motion is simply to continue with the parking fees as they are now, the Council could simply opt to not take action on the item on the agenda. Even though it was pulled from consent and the consent item was to authorize it, we don't need to vote against authorizing it. You could just take no action at all and nothing has changed from the status quo. Okay, I guess I will turn it over to Council Member Bothor for that decision, since you made the motion. Would you like to have a formal vote on this, or do you want to just stick with no action? I always like to deal with legal and appropriate. If I'm following our city attorney's advice, since we've already approved the consent calendar, and if we just go ahead and move on to general relevance, then we've essentially taken no action. That's right. Would that meet the city attorney's guidelines? That's right. It would just maintain the status quo as is. What the Council will be doing is simply not changing the current parking fee, and so if the current parking fees are what you like to maintain throughout the holiday season, then you don't need to take any action to not change them. I see that if we do not vote to authorize it, then it doesn't happen. And if we just proceed with the on the general government, then no vote would take it. Because we've already voted on one motion and it's there. Is that correct? Would you turn it? Yes. You voted on the motion to change it from the status quo and that motion failed. So now if you're not used to changing it from the status quo, you don't need to take any action. That being said, if I have confused things too much, you are welcome to take action to confirm that you're all on the same page. Mayor Peterson, I'll call the question. So you want to vote? Let's do it. Okay. All right. Vice Mayor Brooks has called the question. So can we have a roll call vote, please? Yes. Council Member Bertrand. Is our is is Chloe is our state clerk still on the line? You did. I apologize. Here I am. Council Member Bertrand. No. Council Member Bahtor. Council Member Story. Aye. Council Member Brooks. Excuse me, Vice Mayor Brooks. Aye. And Mayor Peterson. No. So motion carries three to two. Without we are going to move on now to our general government items for the evening. Item 9A, Santa Cruz County presentation of draft action plan addressing homelessness. And I will turn it over to staff. Camera takes a moment to pop on. I'm not quite sure why. I'd like to introduce this item. This is going to be presented to us from some different staff in the county. I think I'm going to turn it over to Alyssa Benson. This is the deputy county administrative officer. Alyssa, do you want to jump on? Sure. Hey, thank you. Good evening, everyone. Alyssa Benson and Jamie is actually assistant CAO. No, Biggie. Thank you so much for letting us join you tonight. I'm really, really pleased to be here with my colleagues, Ranie Perez and Randy Morris, who I'll introduce in a moment, and our consultant, Catherine Gale. So tonight, we wanted to provide you a fairly high level overview of work that really we started about 18 months ago. And quite frankly, this city was part of our effort and our funding for this work. Tonight, we're presenting to you our final deliverable of this engagement, which is now our Housing for a Healthy Santa Cruz, a three-year strategic framework to address homelessness in Santa Cruz County. And so really, this is started with a collaboration across jurisdictional partners, provider partners, people experiencing homelessness to really assess how our system is working and design an action-focused improvement plan. So I'm here with Randy Burr, our new Human Services Director. And the reason why Randy's here tonight is, quite frankly, on Monday, we will be starting our new division within Human Services, and Randy Perez will be part of that division. That is focusing on Housing for Health. And really, it's going to be our new engine to address homelessness and implement this plan moving forward. So Randy's going to share the presentation with me tonight, and I am going to share my screen. We have a pretty short PowerPoint, and we're happy to answer as many questions as you guys may have. So let me do that. Can you guys see that okay? Wait, no. Now you can't. Can you see that okay? Okay. Randy's saying yes. Great. So that is, of course, our little cover slide, and I'm going to just very quickly what we're going to go through at a pretty high clip. It's kind of the context how we got here. A summary of the framework, some quick next steps for community input to finalize the framework, and really, most importantly, help us craft our first six-month work plan, and then we'll have time for questions and answers. I think it's always important to start with the data. I think everyone's painfully aware that homelessness is a critical issue, not just locally, but at a national level, a state level, and here in our community. Pretty much, you can visit nearly any West Coast community, and the impact of sort of unaffordable housing, poverty, addiction, mental health challenges, lots of housing or health care crises are some of the root causes for homelessness in our community. But what we find here in Santa Cruz County, and this is this chart around the number of persons experiencing homelessness per 10,000, in Santa Cruz County, the orange bar, we're nearly double the state average with about 80 people per 10,000 residents that are experiencing homelessness. What's the highest? There are other counties that are higher than us, and we're clearly not the lowest, but it's really remarkably disproportional to our population. One of the impacts for us with that is, when you see state dollars flowing, and we see the top 13 cities in the state giving special earmarks, we're not in there, and several times, they had actually lower concentrations of homelessness per thousand than we are. So we do have, while it's a prevalent problem, we do have our, there is a unique characteristic to it here in our community. Again, going with the data, I want to just make sure everyone's up to date with the last point in time count from January 2019. Our number, we were starting to sort of trend down a little bit with about 2,167 counted that evening in January, but it's really important here to look at the breakdown in terms of the populations within our homeless community. We have a large number, 403 of that, that were identified as chronically homeless. 151 were veterans. About 419 were members of families. That's 122 households, and that's including children. We had 51 unaccompanied children, and probably the one that catches people's eye quite dramatically is nearly a quarter of our homeless were transition age youth. So this is 18 to 25. Some of you may be familiar with what we do, and Rainey was part of this. We were one of the first communities in the country to get a special grant called the Youth Homelessness Demonstration Project. And we are starting to get those programs off the ground and really trying to make a difference. The other two important statistics I just want to start with as we talk about this tonight is 78% of these folks are unsheltered. So that is something where other communities have a much stronger sheltering program than we do. This is something that is not one of our metrics that we're proud of. The other really important metric, and we will come back to this when we talk about one of the strategies, is in this report, 40% of the folks counted that night identified this was their first time being homeless, 40%. So we have a large number of people who are becoming homeless regularly. Our flow is high. So that's kind of that data background. With that, I'm going to jump right into what we do. Really quickly, Carlos Palacios, my boss, asked me when I started here with the county in 2018, along with Rainy, to look into some Howard County departments trying to implement the 2015 all-in plan. And what could we do? And we recognize that aside from having a great plan, people just did not have an operational framework for really focusing and prioritizing. And with that, that sort of led to this broader recommendation to ask for some outside technical assistance. And so our board approved in February of 2018, I'm sorry, 2019, an engagement with focus strategies, the consulting firm that we hired that is an actually recognized firm that works solely on the issue of homelessness with communities across the country. And the charge for that work was an inclusive and collaborative process to assess our current performance and then really develop a recommendation on system-level performance measures, targets, governance and decision-making, and a detailed action plan to get there. So that's what we're going to bring to you tonight. So you look through this phase, and we were at a good clip. We were working hard in phase one and phase two. And in phase two that March, many of you may have actually gotten invitations last March to a community convening where we're going to share data and do the planning. Lo and behold, we were all in a global pandemic. Now, so we also then came together as a larger community for a very extensive response to COVID and how to address it within our homeless community. And I will say that's been ongoing. It's really taken a lot of our attention, but it also provided us some amazing opportunities for learning. Rapid coordinated decision-making to implement some things, the importance of low barrier shelter, and really an expanded and redesigned approach to outreach around COVID and public health. And that has influenced where we've gone in this plan. So here we are today. We got a little bit off truck again because of a massive wildfire, as you all know. But we are here today with our proposed framework and we took it to the board on Tuesday and a number of other cities. And we're really pleased to bring it to you tonight. The first half was assessment. What did we find? The finding of focus and really all of us recognized it as we started down this path was we had a lot of the pieces. The strengths of our system was we had the components, but the issues wasn't really to scale. And wasn't integrated the way you need it to be really effective to help all people who are experiencing homelessness. Our gaps where we needed more diversion of questions of engagement with every person around a pathway back to housing that our shelter was really just focused on basic needs and not that pathway. We have low success rates in terms of actual successfully getting people to permanent housing. And our governance in decision-making was not transparent or results focused. Staffing capacity, not adequate. That's why we're starting this new division. And we really did not have a mature use of data to drive decision-making or improvement. So this is a really honest assessment, a hard look in the mirror. And I want to say that while this started as county work, everyone, providers, cities, stakeholders in the community have all sort of the focus strategies work, as we've called it, became everyone's work. It's really been a village. And we have said, we know we have to do better. You look around, we're not doing our community justice around this issue. And people are ready to do that. So the goal is to move from this loosely coordinated system of programs and activities that addresses some homelessness to really a strongly coordinated system that addresses all homelessness. So with that, I'm going to pass it to Randy. And Randy, please introduce yourself. I'm not sure folks know you. Yeah. So Mayor Peterson and Vice Mayor Brooks and the council members and staff, Jamie, I've had the pleasure of meeting in a few meetings. But Randy Morris, the county human services director, and I started in February and about three weeks later, COVID hit. So my journey here has been one in crisis. If you don't know county government very well and what human services offices do, you might know some of the programs that we run throughout California. Three big operations, which is foster care, welfare and employment programs, like CalFresh and MediCal and CalWorks. And then aging and disability programs like in-home supportive services and bill protective services. And the transition that Alisa just mentioned of the CAO's office being the administrative hub of the homeless service program, being transitioned to human services is somewhat consistent with the conversation that's happening throughout all of California, which is what is the role of county government versus city government. And then if county government's going to take a leadership role as Carlos Palacios took our CAO, because before him, I understand the county did not take as active a role. Where's the administrative hub? And more and more counties are putting it in the direct service programs like health and human services because it aligns with our mission and it lined up with a lot of programs we provide and a lot of the people that we serve are experiencing homelessness. So I am very mindful it is 8, 10 at night. And I just watched democracy and action and I just want to recognize the respect I observed you guys walk through in a difficult issue in COVID with the recession and the challenges we all face and I just wanted to take a minute to recognize I really appreciated watching the respect you guys shared with each other and took a vote. Mindful what's happening in DC it's nice to be part of a democracy that seems to be functioning or you guys fake it very well. It looked very real. But anyhow, this is from parking meters and businesses to the thousands of people who are homeless. These are all challenging issues we're facing in our work that we do. So this through your plan just going to briefly talk about the framework and where this all leads to just if you're kind of wrapping your head around why we're giving you this presentation is this is the unveiling of this plan that's the byproduct of 18 months of work. And then in early 2021 we're going to be coming back to the board and all four cities if you will welcome us back to ask for your adoption of this plan we're going to sort of pretty it up get some feedback from people get some nice graphics in the plan and then really mindful of the recession that you're all struggling with we're all struggling with ask for participation in the plan because as Alisa said we're not going to be able to solve this issue unless we can get engagement in whatever capacity you might have even if that's participating committees and helping be thought partners along the way. So that's where this is going vision and guiding principles Alisa mentioned a number of them this is really going to be built on some data we're really asking for countywide cross sector involvement we've really built in a number of actionable items it's not just a visionary document it actually has real action steps in here and we're really trying to keep an eye on equity there's a lot of north south dynamics in this community and we want to keep an eye on what equity issues play out with those experiencing homelessness it is very specific in the goals that we're looking for with very specific targets that we're going to be able to measure it breaks down into some strategies and objectives and we're going to walk through a little bit of them and then as I mentioned throughout this three years given the environment is very fluid every six months we're going to re-upping a work plan and this too is something we'd like to do in partnership with the four cities in this community and then finally I can't speak to how you all feel or what your thoughts are as policy makers about the issue of homelessness in Santa Cruz County and in your city but it is very very complicated to determine what the role of city versus county versus state versus federal government is so this framework also outlines what resources we need what assumptions we have and who we think needs to do what and we hope to work on that with you so that we don't assume what you think your role is and you assume what our role is but we work together on that so that's the basic frame Elisa as the one clicking the button if you can go to the next one so this if you take away anything this is the ambitious but if all things work we think actionable and achievable goal which is by the end of this plan in 2024 we'll hit two targets and have to give you a little bit of semantic check about what these words mean unsheltered versus overall so unsheltered homelessness is basically all people who do not have a home and they're not living in a shelter because there's a real distinct difference between people who have a shelter to stay but it's not their home so unsheltered are people in encampments and vehicles and other places that aren't their home and we would like to reduce that number by 50% using this point in time count that is done every two years and we might increase that but when you include those who are actually living in shelters hopefully temporarily but way too often they're there longer than temporarily we'd like to reduce the overall number by 30% so that's the big big targets that we're looking for with lots of details underneath it so Elisa if you can move to the next one this breaks it down a little bit further we want to make sure that all the different programs we run are more effective and the bullet points sort of break down what that looks like in action with some measurable goals which I'll get to in a minute and then we also have to increase our capacity we have to have more shelters and we have to have more housing slots and we can't just be serving people who are homeless in shelters if we don't have a place to put them so next one Elisa so this is how we break it down into sort of four legs of a chair and all of these need to function well to be successful so the upper left box is that we want to better connect and serve so that means we want to reach those who are experiencing homelessness even if they're in our shelter systems or they're unsheltered for the work through a host of measures we want to figure out better ways to connect to those people who are experiencing homelessness the upper right box is we need to have a pathway to go somewhere this community like many high cost coastal communities does not have a lot of affordable housing so there's some very concrete effort to we're going to try to increase our capacity to have more housing slots the lower left is we can't just focus on those who are homeless now and try to get them into housing if we keep having people falling into homelessness and I think this recession and the fires in Santa Cruz County is going to make this issue worse so we have the whole host of prevention strategies and then the last one and this is where Jamie has some experience connecting with us as your city manager but we need to have administrative functions to make decisions as city and county together and within county together with our elected and with our staff colleagues so those are the sort of four pillars of the plan and Elisa the next one so this is where I mentioned assumptions we are being very honest and transparent with the community what it is we are assuming along the way because these variables are not all in our control the housing market is very fickle and we don't know what the pandemic and the recession the fires and the federal elections will do in terms of impacting our housing if you don't know county government very well we are heavily dependent on state and federal resources my department for example 90% of the funds in my $150 million budget are state and federal very similar in housing and homeless services so we don't know what's going to happen with the state budget or what's going to happen with the federal landscape Elisa mentioned her and some of you know Rainey very well and you might know Tatiana who's the other person who's worked with Elisa that's a mighty team of three they're trans Tatiana Rainier transferring to my department next week or standing up a new office we're just going to be a little bit larger but we don't know how many staffing resources we need to manage this plan we think we're staffed well but we're going to have to track that prioritizing available funding city planning departments and county planning department sometimes receive money and they have discretion where to purpose that money and sometimes for reasons that makes sense within that jurisdiction they're not purpose towards making low income or very low income housing thoughts available so we don't have control over that that's something we have to track capacity amongst developers and service providers to you our elected officials both at the county level at the city level there's going to be choices you have to make during this three year when moments are presented to you about issues like siting when housing developers are here that are going to be complicated for everyone to work through and we don't have control over that but we're going to hopefully be honest and share what we think would be needed to help move the needle and then working together effectively there's tensions between cities and counties throughout all of california because there's not their guidance from the state or the federal government actually whose role is what and there's a lot of finger pointing going on so we hope to maximize collaboration and minimize the finger pointing that just happens with this vexing public policy issue so next alisa and we're almost done for those of you hanging in there so here's a fun little picture I'm going to call it a rowboat we want to have our oars moving in the right direction and on the left it talks about these are a summary of what we just walked through and on the right we just need the partnership and I think this is just going to segue to what that would that look like what was the takeaway was the actionable item we're asking of you you go to the next one alisa so here's where we are as alisa mentioned we present it to the board alisa and I on Tuesday morning that made it to the sentinel the next morning we're now in our tour of the cities thank you for hosting us and then what's going to happen is in the month of November and December probably around mid-December we're going to be having an online survey we're going to share that with your city office and if you can encourage people to respond it'll be a survey monkey asking people to take a look at this share your thoughts we want the end product to be something that represents with those who are interested in this topic have to share we are going to be doing some in-person social distance survey of people with lived experience throughout the county and then there's a few meetings that Alisa mentioned our consultants focus strategies are coordinating with some of our stakeholders that are pre-existing and then we would like to come back to the board and all four city councils in January and we would like to have you all officially adopt this as a framework I think that's going to be the easier ask the plan is going to be very I think easy to get behind but also the first six month work plan and that's where we have some asks of you to consider over the next few months we'd like to be able to see that we have participation even if it's just thought partner participation on committees to be a participant in some of the work we want to do during the first six months and we'll detail that between now and January we'll come back and I think if that close it out for any questions that you might have for us and thank you again for hosting us especially this late hour after that parking discussion Thank you both so much really appreciate that presentation I'll bring it to council for questions at this time and we'll start with council member Bertrand and then we'll go to council member story thank you very much for the presentation Randy and nice meeting everyone that's going to be working with you so in terms of the goals I think 50 30 just to remind you how would those set what was it what are the metrics I mean I suppose it's based on funding and the success of the programs that you have now in terms of track record can you just sort of give me an idea how you've got to that sure and we have um as I mentioned we have Catherine Dale who's one of our principal consultants on this one of the pieces of this work was quite frankly some predictive modeling in that second bucket of that second bucket of work when we did our quantitative analysis this was taking all our data out of our HMIS system this is our homeless management information system and looking on how different various interventions lengths of stay exit rates were working and looking at the what the different types of housing stock we have our shelter beds how they were working and so we built a baseline model and then and we talked about we worked with focus strategies to think incrementally over the three year period if certain kinds of our interventions were improved what could we expect so we did this sort of working our way through setting stretch targets this is all in the 20 page plan but where we could understand if we could meet those metrics operationally if we could add the kinds of capacity that we articulated in the highlights we would be able to to hit those targets at the end so it was really based on how our system was functioning today in a very specific way and then if we were able to improve in very specific ways what that would look like at the end of three years so that's how we did it it was not sort of just pulling something it would be nice to cut our own shelter down to 50 it was okay if we can add 160 beds of this type and we can add case management and housing navigation that improves the throughput of how long people are in shelter what will that do that's how we got to these goals and then there's a bunch of as I mentioned specific operational metrics we'll be working on to get us there thank you very much that's the answer I'd like you know because of my background that makes a lot of sense to me thank you thank you councilmember retron we'll go to councilmember story yeah thank you mayor and thank you randy and lisa for bringing us this presentation we look forward to hearing more about it and hopefully having it before us in january 21 for adoption you know there's so many questions that can be asked about trying to solve or reduce the issue of homelessness in census county and throughout our society but I guess a couple I want to maybe focus on is under your second strategy if it was to increase the housing stock and I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about if you know well how you're going to approach that and whether you're going to rely on the private market to provide affordable housing or there's some public initiatives that may help facilitate and develop increased housing stock and also on the third strategy concerning prevention and and I was I wanted to ask whether what we're seeing what the you know the collapse of the economy people losing their jobs and the eviction moratorium fairly soon here maybe already starting to be eliminated whether you're anticipating an uptick and people losing their housing through eviction and whether there's a media plan to help those folks so those are my two questions for now thank you I'm Randy you want me to take a stab and then you want to add sure why don't you do the really simple one of housing stock and then I'll take the simple one of prevention but I think we could take advantage of Catherine too who does this nationally absolutely so in terms of our specific plan what we think we have stretch goals we think they're attainable goals and what we talk about in terms of housing exits and housing stock is a focus first and foremost increase of units of permanent supportive housing so that specialty niche housing for some of our most vulnerable folks that you don't you can't really rely on the market to develop those those are things that are heavily subsidized and financed from a public sector standpoint though you might be working very actively with a affordable housing developer to do that and that goal of 100 additional spots is a is a sizable one but one we think is attainable based on work or projects in the pipeline both in a number well in particularly in City of Santa Cruz but also work that we are doing as a county in the unincorporated areas so that particular piece of the housing puzzle is something we think is very important for the population we have here the other piece that's articulated is a significant increase in our rapid rehousing legal rental assistance program so a very particular type of intervention it's not new stock but it's it's new resources to get people on a supported path to housing and the increase there is 350 slots over the three year period we did not set an actual target around I would say you know extremely low income affordable housing that is something that is I would something that could be in this in this document if we get there and I want us to I hope everyone will take this that it does need to be a living breathing document and as we move forward that would be something we would want to talk about as a region it's how do we actually look at the significant gap with which I'm sure you all are well aware of in terms of of just just both the the backlogs you know our missed opportunity for that that type of of housing that's affordable for folks that are 30% or less than average medium income there's a significant significant backlog that we haven't met and then as we look at population it continues to grow but we're really focused on PSH and rapid rapid rehousing programs as sort of our key interventions for right now okay thank you for taking the tough one prevention is differently tough thank you for the question and you are clearly and absolutely right that we're bracing ourselves for possibly getting worse as a national issue and a California issue I want to answer that in two ways one is how important it is for us to continue to lobby for state and federal waivers and opportunities and just as one small example you may or may not have heard of this thing called whole person care it was actually California lobbied very hard and applied for a waiver of federal Medicaid money to have Medicaid money to be used to help people who are on Medi-Cal have some role in helping people with their housing that's a very creative example to help keep people housed who are on low income public programs but it took a lot of lobbying and it's active to federal government state government and then local governments can implement them and that's actually a waiver so there's going to have to be continued creativity and then there are a lot of good programs that we run in health and human services that do help people prevent them from dropping into homelessness and we just have to figure out ways to resource them and expand them so that we stop the flow so if you have a chance to look at the plan you'll see some details about what that looks like but it is something we're tracking closely and very anxious about because the recession is so serious I would add one other thing to that which is one of the things the county has done with our CARES Act dollars is a number of rental assistance programs that's not around homelessness but about folks who are housed but are not able to because of the economic impact of COVID pay their bills and so we're trying to do that I know other jurisdictions are doing that as well of course the challenge is much of that money you're supposed to spend by the end of December so it's a little bit of a challenge but that's something else we're going to all have to be looking at is what kind of prevention rental assistance program can we continue to offer and hopefully expand thank you for those answers I appreciate it all right I see a couple more hands up I think I can't was it Ed were you next Councilmember Botchorf I believe so you're still muted there you go ahead go ahead and let the Vice Mayor first go all right Vice Mayor Botch you're up thank you Councilmember Botchorf hopefully this is just real quick what was the the plan modeled after was it did you use another city you might have said this already but I was just curious where this came from what do I want to say well actually that's probably a good Catherine question what was modeled after is really best practice as the focus shared with us around the systems approach and you know looking at the different kinds of interventions focus has brought this framework this let's look at how things are working in your community and like I said we were fortunate enough to have many of the pieces just not quite harnessed and honed and integrated I mean we weren't missing something big it was just like let's look at what you have how they're actually functioning and what you can do better so it's we've we've been working at this a long time but we have not been able to do it sort of with the fidelity and the linkage of systems of care not to sound too jargony but like just whether it's behavioral health physical health Randy's programs and human services you know we were looking at it and sort of like a shelter system now that has to exist within a whole bunch of other services and I think one of the incredible moments we're at right now between our boss and our board saying we need to step into this void and help provide more guidance and a backbone of administration to support the region stepping in and stepping up but also bringing more of our I want to do leveraging our health and human service resources that serve these same people from a different perspective and integrating it with that question of how do we get you to help thank you Lisa I guess I was just being a little bit more specific if there was something that we could look to to see how this plan has been implemented in other cities if this idea was borrowed or as we move forward I think I think Randy's right we should ask Catherine who has worked in a lot of other cities about about what what she would say about what what we are what we're coughing and we think we're so unique thank you Lisa hi everyone I'm Catherine Gale I'm principal associate with focus strategies we are a wet co-space but nationally operating focus on helping local communities use their own data and their own experience to create programs of plans to address homelessness particularly coming from a data-driven perspective so I think if I'm understanding Vice Mayor Burke's question and the plan is not cookie cutter so I we don't come in and say look we'll just take your data and fill it in and here's your pre-written plan part of the reason it's engagement has been now nearly 18 months some of that with COVID it would have been a little bit shorter otherwise with that we took the time to do a baseline assessment of what was going on here to work with the folks at the county and the cities I met with some of the folks in Capitol back in I'm going to say maybe April of 2019 along with other stakeholders we did as at least to describe this base year calculation which is what are you getting now so what are you buying essentially as a community what are you investing and what are you getting from that so we get all the data from all the providers about what their programs are and how much they cost and we get all the data from the information system about what kind of outcome and then we come back and say based on your situation and based on what we know about best practices we think you can get further with what you have and we also think that you need to add more capacity to get the goal so to to Elise's point modeling starts from what's actually happening in the community and what the resources are and then it takes scenarios and says if you wanted to end it what would it take and that might be beyond your grasp if you just keep doing what you're doing where will you get and the modeling tends to show that it will actually continue to go up if you don't do something different and then what the what's a reasonable approach that you can take over the time frame that you're interested in within that it's been formed by what we know about best practices so some of what was in the slide that shows that you can address you can have very good individual programs and address some homelessness but if you don't have a strategy and a system that works together it's really hard to actually turn the curve and bring the needle down and so when we look at other places in the country that either we've worked with or other folks have worked with this set of strategies of sort of having your emergency system be focused on getting people into housing looking at your outcomes and your your race of progress and holding yourself accountable for that investing in the kinds of housing that Elisa talked about and to the prevention point making sure that you're not using your homelessness done to temporarily shelter or house people who actually don't need that so one of the things that are now found was that there were actually people going into shelter who had a place to stay the night before but if they had had appropriate prevention services they wouldn't have needed to take that shelter bed and that bed could have been made available then to someone else who could use it so we take all that and then so is the plan like based on somebody else's we looked at some other ones around the the state that have come out recently and we're modeling some things like our idea that Randy talked about to have it be more graphically pleasing on certain things we've seen but I would say this is very much a plan that was created in Santa Cruz informed by your local data and what we know nationally I hope that answers your question great thank you and see Council Member Bauchor if it's how to stand up thank you mayor I just so I want to thank you all for your presentation and the first thing I noticed is a tremendous amount of enthusiasm and confidence that you're portraying and I think that's what's necessary here we all know and you know this more than I do that this has been tried many times to be dissolved and it's going to take a great effort I think my disclosure that I want to make to you now is that I'm going to be turned out in this position and there'll be a new face in this box when you come back next time and I just want you to know that as I'm leaving I appreciate the efforts they're all making I know this council is going to work hard with you to do whatever it takes to play our part in trying to find a solution and then I just want to wish you the best of luck in everything you're doing and keep up that level of enthusiasm that I saw tonight and I appreciate all your efforts thank you thank you and tell us about Rich Khan yeah it's sort of a general question but I often wonder about the people who are giving the services and will be participating in the various programs the level of involvement they have with the people on the streets and the people who need help to the extent that they know their names and they know their individual stories and it's not just you know come in for an appointment they get a program plan and then they're sent out the door how much emphasis is there on actually knowing the individual people to the extent that they're well aware of their situations I'm trying to Randy you where are you so I want to I would say two things one of the well if we if you just go to the plan and you look at the value um it is about being person-centered it is about understanding someone's individual story and I think what's really important is us understanding the experience of homelessness in South County is different than the experience of homelessness in North County and there's a whole lot of people who are not street homeless they're they are working very very hard to be invisible and how do we do a better job making the right point of contact with those folks and trying to figure out how can we whether it's through the homeless system or these other systems of support help them get what they need so I would first say with the values but there's another piece that I think is really important and this is actually in the that force bucket that that Randy talked about around improved administration and there are I think if I remember it correctly so we have four sub strategies in that area and I think there are 17 objectives across those four sub strategies and one of those sub strategies is authentically engaging people with lived experience of homelessness in as that voice of our clients of what's working what's not so not just in terms of that that one-for-one service relationship but we need to know you know we're looking at this one as housed people more often than not not not really understanding the experience directly how do we bring that voice into design into evaluation and that is one of the things it's hard to do it's very hard to do and Randy has a lot of experience in other human services area with the difficulty of bringing that that consumer perspective in but I think that's a piece I would also highlight to honor what you're talking about that these are people we try not to use what the homeless this is these are people who are homeless so I guess that would just be my response to your question councilmember I'm going to add something quickly Elisa sure I also just want to add and I really appreciate the question that I spoke a lot about the work that we do being data driven but it's actually information driven and that information isn't always numbered and it involves people with lived experience and as part of this process twice in the engagement we did a number of focus groups around the county I went to the Salvation Army both in Santa Cruz and in Watsonville I went to a program family program in Watsonville I met with folks at one of the rotating shelters and we asked people what was most important to them and I think the plan really reflects that in a number of ways I mean the thing of course most people say if they need a place to live many people would like a job a lot of folks want some kind of human connection and one of the things that they said was it was really important to have a consistent person that they could connect with and that that was very variable across the county so that there are some programs and places where people really feel like I've got this great advocate they work with me and that's what I need and other places that people said I can't get that and that is really reflected in actually some of the stuff that's both in the plan and I think it's part of the immediate work plan right now to try and make that available to more people because it absolutely came from the mouths of people who were experiencing homelessness but that was the thing that they needed I couldn't agree with more obviously I mean they have to have that connection and I will keep them in the program they'll keep you coming back that will keep you connecting with them so you could follow in all sorts of good benefits so you have to have those connections and yep I'm only familiar with big programs in San Francisco a lot of friends that work in this area and one friend of mine who's been involved for many years when he died there was about 300 people all homeless by and large that came to his wake and that was someone who truly had a connection and he did a lot of good I wish it was more of them all right thank you so much Council Member Bertrand for your comments thank you all for your presentation really appreciate you being here tonight at almost nine o'clock this evening to share this important information with us we really appreciate it thank you so much thank you for having us yeah thank you all right we are going to move on now to item 9b and receive an update on the city's pandemic response and I will turn it over to staff well Madam Mayor my battery started to interrupt my battery's just about to die so if I leave the meeting that's the reason why okay thank you for letting us know we're going to pull up presentation here that didn't go as planned my apologies try again okay so we haven't put one of these items on an agenda on a general government agenda for discussion in a while and we thought it was probably a good opportunity for us to do that again for a number of reasons number one is obviously in the media and as Mayor Peterson I believe announced the beginning of the meeting we've had a national rise in the coronavirus cases here this fall really since beginning of October we've seen pretty steady and increasing caseloads throughout the country particularly in the Midwest however in the last half of the month last week or so of October and now into November we've started to see those increases still out into California as well and further over the last week or so we've started to see maybe two weeks we started to see increasing cases here in Santa Cruz County so this is showing our caseloads for Santa Cruz County we'll see relatively small numbers through March April May we saw the summer spike in cases caseloads dropped off we saw things pick up again I believe it was after Labor Day case numbers came back down and now we're starting to see in this beginning of November a rise coming as well we've had 80 cases in the city of Capitola asked our clerk who was pulling this information together how that compared to the increases we've seen county route wide and what we realized was that about a week ago when we were preparing the agenda report the countywide number was about 10% lower it was about 3,000 and today it's 3,300 and the Capitola number was about 73 so it increased at about 10% as well so right now at least the change over the last week countywide and in the city of Capitola seemed to be pretty close to mirror mirroring each other which is which is interesting because during the summer peak Capitola definitely experienced fewer cases per capita than other portions of the county including the south county I also wanted to talk a little bit about the blueprint for safer economy we've been operating under this new system for the state of California since the end of August it's a four tiered system you'll often hear people talk about the colors the different colors that correspond with the different tiers each one of those different tiers has explicit guidance in terms of both the number of the triggers to move between the different tiers which are the average number of cases over the last week and in addition the positivity rate of the tests that you do and then within the tiers there's explicit guidance for how much activity business activity and commercial activities allowed when you're in one of those different tiers and then every Tuesday council members have probably gotten used to this frequently I'm sending out emails to council on Tuesday announcing the changes in the tiers because that's in the state of California announces the changes there are four tiers purple is the worst white spread which is where we started when the system rolled out in August substantial red is the second tier and then orange and then yellow the metrics as you can see here are if you have more than seven cases daily new cases per hundred thousand that's a trigger to move it to the purple tier but between four and six that's the red tier and one to four is the moderate tier and then less than one is the minimal tier we as a county started out in the purple tier as I mentioned we spent two weeks there at the end of August early September moved into the red tier we were there for seven weeks moved into the orange tier we were there for only two weeks and just this week we moved back into the red tier so unfortunately we've had a good run of it and it's looking like at least based on the numbers that we've moved into the worst direction fingers crossed doesn't get worse next Tuesday or the following week this shows the state of California the map of all the counties around the state you can see we are in that sorry the red tier as the colors kind of blur together bizarre sometimes moderate counties our south has remained in purple they've had a difficult time getting their case numbers down large portions of Southern California are in purple the trend around the state this week was for counties to be moving backwards rather than forwards unfortunately I think I mentioned previously and most people are familiar that under the red tier there's explicit guidance about what can can and can't happen I think the most important changes that we all notice are the retail is supposed to operate at 50% of their typical capacity the restaurants only 25% of their seating capacity indoors they can still seat outdoors gyms at 10% and bars that don't serve food are closed I'm going to be reiterating again the message the mayor related at the beginning about that many of the outbreaks have been traced traced back to family gatherings gatherings of individuals at this point the best guidance for the holidays and the winter break is to stay home and stay with your family if you do do a gathering the public health guidance is to do your best to do it outdoors keep it to no more than three separate households keep it shorter in time and try to minimize your interactions with different households try to stay within your bubble if you can so with that that's really all I had if there's any explicit questions about this update I'd be happy to answer them thank you are there any council members that have questions on this item council member starry yeah thank you mayor can we just another thing to snap it forward it says that the museum director was considering developing a plan to reopen but since we're back in the red tier is that still the plan you know my assumption is that the red tier we probably can't reopen I will defer to our moderator actually at this point to supervisors museum and larry have you talked to frank about the tier change and what the implications are for the museum yes thank you council member starry I actually spoke with the museum curator Frank Perry this morning and he is getting everything ready but they're not now that we're back in the red they are not going to reopen he's still working on the plans that he was working on if we get back to when we get back to the orange but at this point in the red tier there there are no plans to open during this at this time thank you that that makes that sounds pretty good all right any other questions from council members saying none we will go to the public is there any public comment oh council member vice mayor brooks do you have a question or comment I had a question I'm so sorry that my button wasn't working has the change in peers affected our out of school program at all or will it that was a good question the biggest change my understanding is we set this thing up when the schools were closed and we were in purple is my understanding so this was designed to operate within the public health public health director's guidance for for the limited interactions between students keeping them stable groups of 12 so my understanding is that the way we have it set up it can operate in any of the tiers unless we revert back to a shelter in place order where people aren't aren't allowed to leave their homes if we end up with something like that we may have to be evaluated but my understanding is is our program can continue to operate in the red tier and if we if the program decided to expand to other residents in the county and not just for so called union would that be an option in the tier we're in I think technically it would be an option in the tier we're in and and I don't know if Nikki is on the call so Nikki if you're here you feel free to wave and it can make sure that I'm answering these questions correctly I think our challenge quite frankly is staffing the program and having the available space so in terms of an expansion I don't know that that's in the cards in the near term I know that we have had to actually contract one of the pods because of staffing challenges so I don't think at this point where we are today that we have the capacity to grow it we could look at that in the future maybe as we move into the winter but between now and Christmas I don't think we can grow it okay so the need for child care for the program is still there however we don't we can't staff it is that what I'm hearing you say so Nikki are you here yeah I'm here why don't you just have it just because I will probably screw it up thank you mayor council members so yeah the we we could potentially with available staffing resources we do have the space in order to expand again currently with the exception of one group which is our middle school group we're full and our partnership with the county at the moment has asked us to reserve those spaces for participants in CalWORK as they're getting a lot of CalWORK referrals at the moment and with those CalWORK referrals we could potentially accept individuals out of the school district however we have made it clear that our preference would be to stay within the school district and otherwise as far as any other expansion it will depend upon expanding our available staff resources and have the challenge of the holidays preventing that at the moment thank you that answers my questions all right any other council questions seeing none we will bring it to public comment and I will turn it over to our moderator to see if there's any comments on this item Mayor Peterson I do not see any attendees with comments and I do not see any emails all right thank you without we will go to our final item this evening consider I excuse me item 9c consider a resolution establishing holidays and city hall closures for 2021 and I will turn it over to staff I want do we need to take action on the previous item my apologies I just wanted to check make sure we're moving on yeah we do we need to make a determination correct yes this is Chloe um that is correct so that is technically a vote thank you all right we have a motion by council member story and a second by council member bosser uh can I have a roll call vote please yes council member pertrand I agree council member vator I council member story I vice mayor Brooks I and mayor Peterson I motion carries unanimously thank you council member story I was trying to jump the gun there and get get through the agenda before it was time so let's now is the appropriate time to move on to to our next item let me get back to the agenda here item 9c consider a resolution establishing holidays and city hall closures for 2021 yes thank you mayor Peterson I have a very brief presentation can you all hear me okay it's nice to see all of you now that I am joining on zoom just wanted to say that as well so let me share my screen a couple different hats here so thank you for being patient okay thank you so 2021 holidays and city hall closures I don't think I have to belabor the point that we could all use a vacation from 2020 so we're looking forward to 2021 this is pretty basic it's to my understanding what what is done mostly every year the holidays that the city of Capitola follows is designated in our MOUs are with agreements with employees and it designates that the names and days of the holiday and aligns our holidays with the federal holidays coming down from the United States government the one specific point is that if a holiday falls on a Saturday we observe that on the Friday before whereas if a holiday falls on a Sunday we observe it the Monday after so you'll see here this list of the this is an example in the MOU and here is a list of the 2021 holiday closures for city hall in red you'll see just two quick changes than what was in your packet I apologize there's a typo Monday July 5th will be our observed Independence Day holiday and you'll notice because New Year's Day falls on a Saturday in 2021 we will be observing it the Friday before on New Year's Eve December 31st so with that I'm available for any questions all right there are any questions from Council no questions all right with that we'll bring it to public comment are there any comments on this item I don't see any comment Larry can you confirm we didn't receive any email comment or anything like that I'm sorry Mayor Peterson I do not see any hands up and I do not see any emails on this item all right great we will come back to Council I see Councilman the story of this hand up yeah thank you Mayor I don't have the issue with the particular list of holidays but I did want to maybe bring up a discussion about Columbus Day you know I remember many years ago Councilman Morton used to every every year bring up the issue that that was referred to as Columbus Day and he felt and I think he was a man ahead of his time he never really got any attraction with that request and it has perished you know and it's continued to be recognized as Columbus Day we're in a different time now and I'll just you know just this past October Governor Newsom passed an order and recognized that day as Indigenous person today and I would like to at least initiate the discussion on this Council about now officially changing that holiday within the city of Capitola as Indigenous person today instead of Columbus Day I don't you know I didn't necessarily want to start a debate about all the reasons why I think if they know it in our hearts we can do so and but I would like to put that forth and in moving to accept this list of holidays that we include change to recognize October 11th as Indigenous person today instead of Columbus Day so I would like to make that motion I'll second that and that was going to be my comment too you know what I was looking over the agenda and if he that seconded before me I have no problem with that but that was definitely going to be my position too I'll accept that being the second on that who knows thank you for your comments yes Councilmember story beat me to it also so I think it's a great idea so we have a motion by Councilmember story in the second by Vice Mayor Brooks I see Councilmember Vauthorst also has his hand raised on this item thank you mayor well I wasn't going to try to beat any of you to that question just in case you were wondering and I'd like to have a you know to me I understand the point that that Councilmember story makes there's a lot of discussion on this topic and here's my take on this you know we there's a list of a finite list of holidays that we celebrate every year and and where I can see that there might be a problem acknowledging Christopher Columbus and there is no dispute about his qualifications to it's a merit of holiday I'm kind of a conservative when it comes to our history and how we camp with that I think that my main concern here is is I don't feel so moved by acknowledging even though the Governor Newsom has already done it I I don't want to belittle his authority but I don't know that this is the right title for what we should be seeking I feel that if we're going to have a holiday first of all I want to preface this by I've always admired it for eight years I've never had to make a vote on what I consider a nationwide issue okay we've never taken a vote to be a nuclear free city and we did not vote I believe on the Paris climate accord we've avoided a lot of controversy and I do appreciate that but you know I think that the mayor mentioned views are changing time my concern here is that where I can see that that maybe Christopher Columbus is not wanted to have a holiday I want to look at this I look back at the last holiday change that I'm aware of and I somebody could correct me if I'm wrong but I believe the last one that we've changed was Martin Luther King Day and I believe that that was an excellent choice I think one of the biggest problems that I think we face in our nation is racism and the acknowledgement of Martin Luther King Day as a holiday to me symbolized a person that was making a genuine peaceful effort to stop racism and acknowledging that sends a message that I think rings true with all of us I in this case here I'm not sure that that the business people is the direction that a holiday should go like I I don't feel strongly enough about it to say that that's what I want to commit to one point of contention I could make here is if I look at our nation and I look at the people that have changed the direction of our nation I could simply say on one hand I don't think we've ever acknowledged the role of a female in changing our nation and if I was going to be looking at someone to dedicate a holiday to I would prefer to look down that path or some of the path that I felt resonated with what I consider most of America and I know that personally I've had conversations with American Indians that don't feel that indigenous is a day that they actually connect with so it's hard for me as a single person in a small town to go against a trend of holiday change across the state especially when our governor has dedicated this but I just want you to know that my feeling here is I think it's a big deal I wish that there was more effort put into to making I wish I felt that the date resonated as much as I did feel when we changed Martin's and King Day so if I don't vote unanimous with you I just want you to understand that there's a little reason behind that so thank you for allowing me to speak. Thank you Council Member Botsworth Council Member Bertrand is that my apologies did you have your hand up previously or is this new? No this is not new the reason why I thought about bringing this subject up is that to me it's a recognition of the importance that the indigenous people have to the history of this country I think it's also to me a recognition to the fact that we're looking more and more towards indigenous people for guidance on many different issues one that's recently come up is how to manage force but in many discussions that I've had and you know online now it's amazing how often the Indian community is now being sought after for their input and so I would like to vote for this because I appreciate the fact that we still have an indigenous community in United States and I think their importance is going to be greater as years go by Thank you Council Member Bertrand Council Member Story Thank you Mayor I just wanted to respond to Ed and and thank him for his comment this point of view I respected fully you know there were many years on the Council when Council Member Martin brought up this question and I didn't support it and and I haven't you know I think until this point and and I think that that's wonderful if we want to maybe consider some other appropriate group of people that maybe have had an impact on our society but you know this one this particular date I think is closely connected to you know the indigenous people and it's one that I think is then already officially acknowledged on a state level and and I don't know that we should always wait until our national leaders take action before we feel that we can move forward sometimes it takes communities and people at the local level to make the national changes so I just wanted but I wanted to acknowledge Ed's point of view I shared it I think for all my life until this point um and and I respect it so thank you Ed Thank you councilmember story I also acknowledge and appreciate councilmember Bob's comments on this especially you know mentioning that that there is a need for for the representation of women in the holidays that we celebrate I very much appreciate that with that we do have a motion and I'm sorry councilmember Bertrand did you have additional comments oh no trying to get off of here no more comments for me okay well with that we have a um no I'm sorry did we take this to public comment and I don't think we have no not yet okay thank you it's it's after nine past my I'm in my 30s now so it's past my bedtime um I will bring this now to the public comment is there any member of the public that would like to address the council on this item I do not see anyone with their hands up and any attendees and I do not see any emails all right and with that we will bring it back to council um and we have a motion and a second can we have a roll call vote please excuse me councilmember Bertrand I agree councilmember Bahthorpe no councilmember story aye vice mayor brooks aye and mayor peterson aye thank you someone should phone Dennis Norton tell him what happened we'll make sure he knows Monkman carries four to one thank you that brings us to the end of tonight's agenda it's been an interesting meeting thank you all so much for your for your time this evening it is my last time closing out a meeting as your as your mayor I have one more to start the meeting this is my last time closing out a meeting as as mayor because the next meeting we're going to have a transition of our of our council and a new council members and and a new mayor and right am I wrong November wrong I think we have a meeting on the point point second yes oh we do you're not done oh boy I thought we were done pass it off to you is that that soon the point is I think it's going to be a date you're trying to get rid of me a meeting early okay so I can you said something yet earlier so I thought that what what what what what meeting what more full full meeting what more full meeting call the order here at the 20 second is a Sunday correct what is the date may I interrupt just briefly it's a 24 that's right that's right okay well sorry you guys you're stuck with me for another meeting so mayor better cancel your your appointments that date then mayor peterson we'll have to wear the matching jackets then at that other meeting I'll give you a call all right all right see y'all on the 24th then take care of yourself take care of each other and meeting is adjourned