 Welcome to the 10 a.m. Public Portion of the Closed Litigation session of the April 23rd 2019 meeting of the City Council. In this part of the meeting the council will receive public testimony. Thereafter, council members will move to the courtyard conference room for our closed session. I would like to ask our clerk to please call the roll. Thank you Mayor. Council Member it's Crone. Here. Glover. Here. Myers. Here. Brown. Here. Matthews. Here. Vice Mayor Cummings. Here. And Mayor Watkins. Here. At this time are there any members of the community who would like to speak on any of the items listed on closed session? Seeing one we have up to two minutes go ahead. And I would request the council give me three minutes because I'm the only person speaking and it's about the Cantero lawsuit. Could I ask for a council vote on that? Would one council member like to do that? Motion to extend the comment to three minutes. There's a motion by Council Member Glover. Second. Second by Council Member Crone. Any further discussion? All have a question. Okay. All those in favor please say aye. Aye. Opposed? No. That passes with Council Member Crone, Glover, Brown, Vice Mayor Cummings, voting in support. Myers, Matthews and myself voting against. You have three minutes. Thanks. Okay. Today you're going to be reviewing action on the Deserro Cantero lawsuit. This is the Ross Camp lawsuit. I'm also a plaintiff in this lawsuit since I have associational rights to be able to deal with folks at the camp and try to assist them matters, which will be made much more difficult once this camp is dispersed as I believe is the intention at least of two council members this afternoon. The aim of this lawsuit is to prevent the harm that would come from closing the Ross Camp without adequate indoor shelter alternatives, you'll be considering this shortly. Shelter alternatives which you do not have. Not even the pretense of outdoor shelter alternatives. Your city attorney's standard operating procedures don't meet constitutional muster and abusively require evictions without adequate shelter. This is actually acknowledged if you read over these operating procedures. People are protected from citations, but they're not protected in terms of having any shelter. So they can just be dumped on the street. Yesterday's back scratching decision at the court declaring the Ross Camp a public nuisance by Judge Burdick authorizes police force against the homeless tomorrow at 4 PM. It was done without evidence other than assertions by partisan city officials, beholden to the city manager for their positions. It will be challenged this morning in federal court over in San Jose. You have a chance to backtrack on this bad situation, both in closed session now and open session on item 13 later today. Instead of wasting city money on going to court, begin negotiations with the plaintiffs. Workout reasonable arrangements for a clean up involving the camp residents in place instead of forcing a relocation. It hasn't been authorized, abandoned the charade of the San Lorenzo Bench lands as a campground that has not been authorized here by either your body. Nor has it been gone to the public for public notice or input. In fact, it violates your own prior city council resolutions. Acknowledge honestly you don't have alternate outdoor alternatives now with the depot park gone. Don't use the homeless as an experiment to see how efficient or accountable the staff is. Re-examine the fanciful shelter alternatives by O'Hara and Shull before they are deconstructed publicly in court. Even if their thrice told tales were true, sheltering Ross would displace the large homeless population outside, beyond Ross. As tickets for trespass being in a closed area and public nuisance rise, as the chief has admitted they have, as slippery alternatives to camping ban tickets, you will be held to account in court. Forstall injuries in health and safety to the elderly, sick, and children in these groups. These are now more likely than ever to be documented and made a part of the lawsuit, which will proceed for damages even if the camp is leveled. And there's another paragraph to this which I'm not sure, do I have another minute or not? You've had your three minutes, do you have a set? So please look over the last paragraph. Thank you. All right, please. We'll go ahead and have three minutes for you as well. Good morning, Mayor Watkins and council members. I'm Bernie Escolani, president of Santa Cruz Police Management Association. All of you should have received the letter that I'm passing around already electronically yesterday, but I wanted to provide you with a hard copy. The Police Management Association would like to draw your attention to the upcoming labor negotiations we are preparing to enter with the city. Today we would like to highlight some of the significant issues that are in the letter that we are facing as an association and as an organization as a whole that need to be seriously considered during your conversations. These issues include recruitment, staffing, retention, and incentive to move up through the organization through compensation. All of these issues negatively affect employee morale. Without competitive compensation, recruiting qualified candidates has proven to be a significant challenge. In 2018, the average number of applicants during each hiring cycle was 74. So far today in 2019, the average number of applicants during each hiring cycle is down to 45 applicants. Today we are fielding 64 officers on the street out of a budgeted amount of 94 officers. We are on an emergency schedule. We are working 11 to 12 hours days and nights at a minimum. We used to train in excess of 80 hours every year, one of the most highly trained organizations in the entire state, which included valuable skills like de-escalation, crisis intervention, and cultural diversity. Now we are able to meet the minimum of 24 hours a year. We've had to suspend intervention and prevention youth programs, Spanish and English, citizen police academies, and our summer teen academy. Because we don't have the staff to make these programs run. Retaining the employees we have has proven to be even more difficult. Our staff is leaving at a pace that surpasses our ability to hire. Our compensation does not encourage anyone to stay. There was more incentive to go to a different police organization. Retire before maxing out of their years of service time, or go to the private sector. Okay, thank you. And you're welcome to, do you want to submit the comments and we'll take them into closed session with us? Sure. Okay, thank you. Yeah, we have them. As always, it's all in the letter. Yeah, it was just a summary. Thank you. Thank you very much. Good morning City Council, Mayor, Vice Mayor, good to see you again. My name's Carter Jones. You've probably seen me standing back here in most of your council meetings. I have been here for 17 years as I'm now a police supervisor, born and raised in Santa Cruz County. Unfortunately, over the last 17 years we've lost a significant amount of officers that no longer live in the county. No longer, we have a handful left that live within the city itself. But only about 29% of our officers actually live within the county of Santa Cruz. Most of them commute from over the hill, from Monterey County. We can't sustain having officers live in the county. You all know it's too expensive. So, I sent you each an individualized email earlier this week. There's a lot of statistics in that, in a lot of the letters that have been coming your way. I'm here to invite you out on a ride along. Not with another officer, with me. Come out and show you what progressive, compassionate policing is about in Santa Cruz, because we're different. We're different here than we are anywhere else. So, I'm extending that invitation. A few years ago, Drew Glover took me up on that. So, I invite you to come out, see what it's like, and take that time to really truly understand what we do here in the city of Santa Cruz and the police department, because we're losing people. We can't retain the people we have, we're at a critical, really critical spot. So, when we talk about emergencies and crisis within the city, this is an emergency. This is a crisis. I see people stand up here all the time during public comments saying, hey, my bike got stolen. My house got burglarized. My car got broken into. We don't have the staff to respond and to take the criminals into custody that are doing these things. So, we need to protect the people that we were hired and sworn to protect. So, open invitation, you got my email, you got my phone number. I'd love to hear from each and every one of you. Andrew, I'd love to take you out again. That's what I said, I want to come out again, yeah. Right on. All right, thank you. Thanks. Seeing no further interest in oral communications or public comment, excuse me. We'll go ahead and adjourn the meeting to our courtyard conference room where the council will go into its closed session. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to our 1130 AM session of the April 23rd, 2019 meeting of the city council. I would like to ask our clerk to please call the roll. Thank you, Mayor. Council Member Crone? Here. Whoever? Here. Meyers? Here. Brown? Here. Thank you, here. Vice Mayor Cummings is currently absent. Mayor Watkins? Here. At this time, could if the clerk please lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance. Okay, so now we have the introduction of new employees. And I believe we'll start with our regional manager of libraries, Heather Nordquist. I'm sorry if I mispronounced your last name. Please come up and introduce your new employee. My pleasure to introduce Julia Bernal. She's a new library assistant too, at the Live Oak branch. She started at the end of March. And she has worked for the library for two and a half years as a library aide. She was born and raised in Watsonville. She has a degree in sociology from UCF. And she often gets asked if she's related to Martine Bernal and she is not. Maybe I'm happy to have her. Welcome, you very much. All right, and if we could invite up our Public Works Director, Mr. Mark Dettel, to introduce his new employees. Good afternoon, good morning. Good afternoon, or good morning, Mayor and Council. Mark Dettel, Director of Public Works. On my far right is Chris Jimenez. He's a new solid waste worker and he was born and raised in Watsonville. He also grew up in Newark and Fremont and currently lives back in Watsonville. He has his wife and four kids and seven dogs. Has experience in construction with soils engineering. He does also work with First Alarm as well as in the sales with Macy's and Home Depot and Retail. And then also a driver for JW Farms and Speedolite Toeing. So he's got a lot of experience, has attended Cabrillo and when he's not working, what he likes to do for fun, anything outdoors, kayaking, biking, fishing, frisbee golf, so please join me in welcoming Chris. Welcome. And next to Chris is our new parking program manager, Brian Borguano. Brian comes to us from Alaska actually. He was born in New York City and grew up in Metro Detroit. He currently is relocating to Santa Cruz. He currently is temporary living in Aptos. His partner, Kimberly, and his 14 month daughter, Dylan. And they're expecting his son to arrive in August. And they also have a dog named Munchkin, so pretty active family going on there. Past work experience. Brian's, he most recently worked as the parking director for the Anchorage Community Development Authority in Anchorage, Alaska. And as the parking director, he oversaw both on-street and off-street parking operations similar to what we have in Santa Cruz. He was responsible for over 5,800 parking spaces at 16 locations. This included all the parking departments, consisting of facilities, maintenance, enforcement, customer service, security, administration, IT, and equipment maintenance. So very similar, very relevant experience. And previously, he's worked in parking operations in the city of Ann Arbor, Michigan, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and also parking consulting services for many communities across the US, including Boulder, Colorado, and Portland, Oregon. So we're really happy to have that experience. He has a bachelor's degree in communications and economics from the University of Michigan. And when he's not working, he enjoys spending time outdoors, hiking with his family, going to the park with his daughter, and also practicing Brazilian jiu-jitsu. And recently received his Blue Belt promotion prior to departing Alaska. So, and his favorite food is Thai food. So with that, please welcome Brian and welcome Brian to our team, so. Welcome to the city, thank you for the presentations. So at this time, we'll move on to a presentation from our Metro CEO General Manager, Mr. Alex Clifford. Please. Thank you, Mayor, Council Members. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for allowing me to make my annual journey to you to present the state of Metro. Thank you also for sending two of your members, Donna Myers and Cynthia Matthews to our board. They do great work. And Cynthia, thank you for dedicating all the time recently to our orientation. I hope we didn't overload you with bus stuff. We tend to be bus geeks and we like to throw all that information out there, but it's good information. I'd like to start off with just a couple of metro stats, if you will, just to bring you up to speed on our basic structure. Our operating budget in the current year is about $49 million. We employ about 319 people. We have 100 fixed route and commuter buses that operate on 26 routes. We have 41 paratransit vehicles. We operate under the Paracruz logo. And our service population is the entire county, about 264,000. We provide about 5 million fixed route trips. That's a lot of cars taken off the road and about 72,000 paratransit trips per year. Interesting nugget to always point out is about 50% of our ridership is composed of UCSC students, faculty, and Cabrillo College students. So that's really exciting for us. In the way of how do we fund it all? Well, we fund it through a combination of sources. Our passenger fares cover just under about 20% of the total cost to operate the system. About 46% of the costs are covered by two sales tax measures. One is the 1978 half-cent sales tax measure, which the voters approved in perpetuity for Metro to run its operations. And then we get about 60, 160% of the Measure D funds to help fund the service. And as you may recall, that assisted us in pulling ourselves out of a major structural deficit back in 2014 and 2015, in which we had about a $6.3 million structural deficit to resolve. So thank you to the voters for Measure D and helping us to get through that. About another 13% is operating funding from the state, including SB 1. I'll talk about SB 1 in a minute, because I know that's something important to you and important to us. And about 8.5% is federal assistance that comes to us from the federal government. About 11% is what we call capital eligible money. It's state and federal money that is sort of fungible, if you will. We could use it for operating, we can use it for capital because of our financial stresses, we use it all in the operating fund. And then just under 2% of the total cost of operating the service is covered by advertising revenues and some leases that we have on property that we own, particularly at Pacific Station. It is also interesting to note that now for the second consecutive year, because we have fixed that structural deficit, our board has been able to dedicate $3 million a year towards capital, primarily towards replacing buses. I'll talk about that in a minute. I do want to take this opportunity, while I'm before you and before the public, to thank the public for not passing Proposition 6 in November. As you know, that would have reversed SB 1, and SB 1 is important to you, it's important to us. Imagine if that had been reversed, how difficult it would be. How much more difficult it would be for you to keep up on local streets and roads, likewise for us in operating the bus service. So thank you to the voters for having such confidence in all of us, that they did not allow Prop 6 to pass. So I want to talk about some things that I call really great things that are happening at Metro here in 2019 and 2020. First, we started today, as we speak, we started today, our customer survey. We haven't had a survey in a very long time, so we started the on-board surveys today. That, we hope, will produce valuable information that will help us to make service changes that the public would like to see. But also, valuable information to help us understand how to attract and retain customers. Also, later this year, we'll start a one-year pilot project on Highway 17, in which we'll launch a smartphone application that will allow Highway 17 commuters to purchase and pay for their fare using their smartphone. If that is a success and proves out through a pilot project, we could be back to our board to talk about how to expand that across our system. Of course, as you're probably aware, doing things on a smartphone is ever-growing and transit too has found new and innovative ways to incorporate smartphones. Also, in sort of that vein, if you will, thank you to SB1 again. But Metro received a Caltrans State Transportation Improvement Grant last year to fund our first automatic vehicle location system. Now that's exciting for us too, because one, on the Metro business side of the equation, it'll produce just mounds and mounds of data for us to understand how our service functions in real time, and how we can tweak that system and make it better. On the customer-facing side of the business, that will allow the customer to use a smartphone application and to be able to look up when their bus is coming to that stop. So they can time their arrival at the stop based against what the real-time smartphone application is telling them is the arrival of that bus. And if that bus happens to be late, as sometimes happens in this county with all of our congestion, they will also see that and will be able to stay studying their books for class or stay at work a little bit longer because their bus might be running late. And again, time their arrival at the bus stop so that it arrives, so they get there when the bus gets there. We're also working to replace buses. We have about 50% of our fleet, our fleet of 98 buses, 50% of those have exceeded their useful life. As you may or may not be aware, we're still running 1998 diesel buses. We'd like to retire those diesel buses, but it's all about funding. And so as a result of the board committing $3 million a year for us to leverage against state and federal grants, we are presenting the board this Friday a plan that would have us out of that hole, if you will, by 2024. So we would have a fleet that is in state of good repair, and we would not have buses that we're operating beyond their useful life. So that is our goal, we present that to the board this Friday. Included in that are four Protera 100% zero emission buses that we receive various grants for. Those are on order, they will be here early next year, and we Metro, we the community will have our first zero emission buses in operation next year. That is really exciting. We're spending a lot of time designing something that here before we've known nothing about, which is how to charge those buses. We're designing our electric infrastructure for our yard. And then we got a chance to put our toe in the water late last year when VTA, Santa Clara VTA over the hill, whom we have a great partnership on Highway 17 with, gave us 10 diesel electric buses for $1 apiece. So that was exciting for us, allowed us to bring the bus count, replacement bus count down a little bit. And also more importantly, allows our maintenance folks to begin to learn how to maintain electric buses. Because the zero emissions are soon to arrive here next year. So thank you to Santa Clara VTA for that, that really helps us out in a big way. And then previously we received a federal grant for three zero emission over the road coaches that we would operate on Highway 17. That's an exciting adventure for us to be able to put over the road coaches on Highway 17 commuter service. That's on hold right now, while we wait for a couple of manufacturers to jump into the market. We hope that they will be producing their first zero emission over the road coaches sometime in the next year to two. And then the federal government will allow us to use that grant to buy those. And as you may or may not be aware, California Air Resources Board, what we call CARB, late last year adopted a regulation that will make it mandatory that all transit properties across the state of California operate zero emission buses by 2040. For us, under that mandate, that means by 2026 we have to start buying whatever we buy. 25% of those must be zero emission buses. And then for everybody in the state from 2029 forward, 100% of everything we buy must be zero emission buses. So the state of California is serious about zero emission buses, and we are doing our part. And as a matter of fact, as I told you earlier, we already got a jump on it. Before they even adopted that regulation, we had already received grants in order to buy our first electric buses. And then in sort of closing, I'd like to cover two really wonderful partnerships that we have with the city. One is, as you're well aware, the city has approved an EcoPass partnership with Santa Cruz Metro. Our staffs are working together. We hope soon, not too far down the line to be able to launch that. That will be excellent for you because it'll reduce car trips into the downtown. It'll be excellent for us because it'll grow ridership. So we're looking forward to that and putting an effort into joint marketing that and making it a success. So that at the end of the pilot project, hopefully we can report to you what a wonderful success it was, and maybe we'll be able to continue that partnership. And then finally, just this last week, the Metro Board Capital Projects Committee approved a request to the full board this Friday that we begin discussions and negotiations with the city about the potential and possibility of our current Pacific Station transit center being redeveloped into a new tarmac and a transit oriented development project along Pacific Avenue. And so if that's approved by our board this coming Friday, we'll be able to begin negotiations and discussions to see if that can become a reality. That concludes my presentation, I'm happy to answer any questions. And thank you again for the annual opportunity. Thank you for being here. I'll go ahead and turn it over to the council to see if there's any questions. Council Member Cron and then Council Member Luffer. And Mr. Clifford, thank you for joining us. Just wondering, UCSC 50%, you said of the Metro budget is dependent on the, what UCSC students pay in their fees on campus? They're 50% of our ridership. They do not compose 50% of the budget because similar to the entire operation, we're roughly 20% subsidized. So they come in at sort of what we call our bulk rate, just under 20% of the total cost of operating that. And the rest of it is subsidized by state, federal, and measure D and sales tax. So if you took 20% of rider fares, where would UCSC be in that, making up that 20% of the rider fare box capture? Yeah, they're at about, I want to say somewhere in the range of about 3.5 million, I think a year, that those fees cover. And that's a great partnership, we are the envy of a number of transit properties across the state. You may be aware that just last year we hosted in Santa Cruz County, the APTA Universities Conference in which we shared those partnerships that we have with UCSC and Cabrillo and others are looking at ways to emulate that across the nation. Any chance to ever get a voting member from UCSC on the transit board? We do have, we did make a move in a positive direction, that positive direction recently, in which we added ex-officio member from UCSC and ex-officio from Cabrillo. They can't vote though. They can't vote, they're ex-officio. And do you ever think that, is there a reason why a student couldn't vote on the, we couldn't have that? Yeah, I'm not real heavily involved in that. I think it would be up to the board to see if they wanted to do that. I think doing so might also require a legislative change because of the way that we're created in legislation. The legislation actually reflects the composition of the board and it doesn't include ex-officios, but the board is allowed to add ex-officios. Thanks, and did you ever read City on a Hill Press? I do. Did you read the last City on a Hill Press where the students spoke out about bus service? I have not seen that. You should take a look at it. They're not too happy, a lot of them avoid the bus. They said because it's either too crowded or it doesn't follow the schedule that they can understand. It's last week's City on a Hill. Okay, I'll go back and look at that. I think it comes out on Thursday. The last question is, do you have a date for the eco pass when that's going to be rolled out and what's taking time to do that? It's just taking time to figure out a lot of little nuances associated with that. What kind of fair media will be used? How will it be distributed? How do you prevent fraud associated with that? So the staffs are trying to work that out before we launch it. We really jointly want it to be 100% success, so we want to get it right on the launch. By summer or? I think that's a target that they're shooting for next couple of months or so, yeah. Thanks a lot, I really appreciate it. And if I might, I just don't, in any way mean to be argumentative, but I do want to acknowledge that we appreciate the student's feedback. And as a result of the students providing us feedback about overcrowded buses, we entered into a pilot project a couple of years ago with the university to fund this agency's first articulated buses. So with the same bus driver, we achieved double the capacity. That pilot project proved out so well that we bought, again from Santa Clara VTA, four articulated buses to permanently have on our property. So we're trying to address those issues. We do have some crushed loads, particularly in the morning when they're all coming from the downtown areas and trying to get to campus. We're not turning our back to that issue, we're going to keep addressing it. We do want the students to be happy, and we want them to feel like they're getting value from that fee that they're paying that goes towards the past. Yeah, thank you. Okay, Council Member Glover and then Council Member Brown. Thank you, so yeah, just to kind of go along with something that Council Member Cromes just mentioned, the issue of bus availability and bus access, I know that's a big concern with community residents that choose not to take the bus. Even our transportation department says that people choose not to take the bus because of its ineffectiveness and the time that it takes to take the actual bus. Plus we've seen the reduction of bus routes for the last couple of years. And then like you mentioned there was that massive $6 million deficit. So what is the likelihood that we'll see an expansion of bus services? What are the things that are hindering or stopping buses from being able to expand? So we actually have an effective bus system here in Santa Cruz. And do you think that it has to do with, I mean, money is always an issue, but do you feel like the money and the budget is being used as effectively as possible to maximize the availability of bus frequency? A lot of good questions there. If I miss any of them, let me know. I think the board has done a fantastic job of working their way through a very difficult situation. Remember, when I came aboard in 2014, we were faced with just one year left of reserves. The previous boards had relied on reserves to bridge the gap and deliver the service. And then we were going to be bankrupt and the board made some tough decisions. And they worked their way through a $6.3 million structural deficit. Now what that meant is that we had to contract a little bit. So we had to come in and we had to cut some service on evenings and weekends and whatnot. So we're in a good stable place. We have a five year projected stable budget. The board made some hard decisions and other things happened like measure DNSB1. And even our bus operators made some concessions. All those things came together to work that out. Now, if money finds its way to us, money's always the thing, that helps us get there or it creates difficulty for us. So if money finds its way to us, will we grow the system? We may not. What we know we need to do is take the existing structure and make it more appealing to the customers and potential customers by increasing frequency of service. Somebody who's thinking about writing our service is not necessarily attracted to it. If the bus only comes every 45 minutes to an hour, that's not a good system. So any resources we get in the coming years likely will propose to the board that we add frequency of service to the existing model. We keep that model the way it is. Now, there are other new and novel things happening. As you're probably aware and you've read about, transit ridership across the nation is being reduced. We're losing riders across the nation. And we need to figure out what that is. Some people say it's Uber, I don't think it's really Uber. Some people say it's jump bike kind of things, I don't believe that at all. I think those are complementary to us and they help with that last mile problem. I think we really can attract more riders if we become more valuable to people. Frequency of service is one, the other is what you're seeing across the nation is a trend towards on demand types of services. New and novel services that go beyond just the major thoroughfares and fixed routes that we operate on. We're today studying that type of a concept and we might within the next six months propose something to the board. If we can flush it out a little bit and figure out how financially it can be viable, we might have a pilot project on demand. Again, with the target of trying to address exactly what you're saying. How do we attract and retain people in a very difficult environment in which needs and desires are shifting for transit? Thank you for that. That's a lot of great information and then if you, I mean, I know you don't have a budget in front of you right now, but if you had to say an amount of money that would allow you to reach that level of increased frequency. So that it can become more attractive for riders. If you had to ballpark it, how much would the metro need? Tough question, wish I had a day or two to study that one. Just ballpark, it's okay. It would be easy for me to say to double our budget that would be a phenomenal amount. And you have a current operating budget of how much now? 49 million. 49 million, okay. So if we could strategically even take a quarter of what we spend today, an additional quarter of that, we could do some really good things. There's routes again that operate on one hour frequency. That's borderline, why are you even running the route when it's on one hour frequency? Those need to be changed. Did you have a question, sir? Thank you for the overview. And it's good to hear that the snapshot represents or reflects a stabilized picture for a metro. I absolutely understand that any expansion of services and getting at some of these questions related to ridership will require expansion of resources. And so I'm not going to ask you about that right now, but since we have you here, I have two questions. One is kind of a bigger picture question. What's your outlook with respect to potential expansion of paratransant services? I know those are really critical to some of the most marginalized people in our community. And so I'd be interested in hearing a little bit more about that. And then two, which is kind of a very different question. Can you tell us why bus benches have been disappearing at bus stops? Absolutely, can handle both of those. So in the area of the paratransant service, we're not likely to put a lot of effort into figuring out how to expand that. Under federal law, we have to provide what's called complimentary service. Now that's not free service. That means complimentary in the sense that wherever the fixed route bus runs, we have to provide complimentary service. We have to provide service to paratransant qualified individuals within three quarter mile either side of that fixed route. So for now and into the indefinite future, we'll continue to work under that federally mandated model. The other thing that we really want to continue to put effort into is to attract people who have a choice. They qualify for paratransant, but they can also ride fixed route. To track them off of the paratransant onto the fixed route. Here's why we want to do that. Paratransant is a very expensive operation. It's $60 per trip for us to run. In contrast, somebody riding on a bus is about $10 per trip. So we really want to attract them. Now here's the other reason why they probably want to do that is today your trip on paratransant could be about $6 if it's the equivalent of two or more buses. If you ride fixed route, you get it for half of the base fare. You get it for a dollar. For a dollar versus $6, we'd rather get them on to the fixed route. And that's an area of weakness for us. We have to figure out how to dedicate some of our personnel resources to helping people understand where maybe they don't understand how to ride a fixed route bus and attract them off of a door-to-door service onto that fixed route. So moving on to the bus benches, so I know there was an article and a series of media coverages on that. I want to assure you that we're not going through wholesale removal of bus benches across this county. That's just not happening. We're very surgical and very strategic about what we've done. And in fact, over the last two years as a result of that, we've removed only six bus benches across the county. We hope that if the problem, the reason why we had to remove those is resolved, that we'll be able to go back and put those in, but we may not necessarily put in a bus bench. We may put in what we call a semi-seat. And a semi-seat is a pole with two seats that somebody can sit on. You've seen those around the community. We may put in lean bars that you'll see those up in San Francisco in some of the bus shelters where people can lean and take a little bit of load off as opposed to sit down. It's just another strategy to look at. Here's what the problem is. We've had some folks that moved into some of these bus shelters and have established residency there. That is not good for our customers and our customers complain. It's not good for my employees, the facilities maintenance folks, who have to clean those bus stops and they have to go out on a regular basis and deal with urine and feces and hypodermic needles. That's just not acceptable. And for our customers having to deal with the same thing that is also not acceptable, we're in the business of providing quality safe transit to our customers who choose to ride our system. And I need to deliver them a good safe bus stop. And some folks have said, well, your customers suffer because you took that bench away. Guess what? Our customers couldn't sit on that bench because we had somebody living there the entire time. I'll tell you a short story. One of my employees boarding a stop at Dominican couldn't sit at the bus bench because there was a person laying there sleeping there. As she waited for the bus, the individual rolled over, unzipped himself, and urinated, and then rolled back over. Right in front of her, right in front of the public, just took over the stop, soiled the stop. That's just not acceptable. Doesn't matter if it's my employee or not, it's not acceptable. People deserve a clean stop and that's what I plan to deliver to them. This whole issue of why people are living in a bus shelter or a bus stop on a bus bench. That's not the business that I'm in. I realize there is a bigger social issue here and I'm empathetic to that. I truly am and you're dealing with it and I think you're dealing with it today. And God bless you, you have some challenges ahead of you. But that's not the business I'm in. I'm in the business of delivering quality service to individuals who oftentimes are the poorest of the poor. And we are their only way to get to work and to get to their doctor's appointments. And it's not acceptable when somebody calls me and says, that stop nearest my home, I can't use. And I'm not going to stand 10 feet away from that stop waiting for a bus on a rainy day or a really hot day. But I'll find another way to get to work. That's not the way we want to do our business. Well, thank you for being here and for the presentation. A last comment here, Councilman. I'm going to throw you a softball. Okay, thank you. Is Metro hiring? Metro is hiring, thank you for that softball. I had to send out an apology letter yesterday to our writers because over the last two weeks, we didn't have enough bus drivers to deliver all the service we promised. And the one thing that we're in the business of is delivering quality on time service. We produce a timetable that says what time your bus is going to be there. It hurts us all to not have enough bus drivers and have to cancel service. And a bus that runs on one hour headway now has a two hour headway. That's just not acceptable. And so we're going to work hard to hire more people. We just launched a recruitment for bus operators. If you're watching, if you want to be a bus operator, please go to our website. Thank you for the softball. Thank you, and I'm sure if you have any council members here that want to reach out, we can have that line of communication open as well for additional questions at a future date. I would encourage it. We have a great relationship, and I know there's some newer council members here. Love to meet with you if you'd like to. Great, thank you very much. Thank you for being here. Thank you again. Okay, so now we'll go ahead and move on to our master recycling program. And we will have Leslie O'Malley come up. So I'll just briefly introduce the program. In February of 2018, the city of Santa Cruz launched its inaugural annual master recycler volunteer training program. The new free of charge program is a response to the record number of attendees at recycling center tours who've expressed interest in helping to mitigate the largest Santa Cruz and nationwide recycling problem of contamination. The master recycler volunteer training program follows successful templates created by the city of Burbank and municipalities in Oregon, Colorado and Ohio. Throughout six Tuesday evening sessions, participants receive hands on training from city of Santa Cruz resource recovery staff and other local waste professionals and experts. Last topics include waste prevention, recycling processes and markets, zero waste concepts, extended producer responsibility, household hazardous waste, repairing and repurposing items, and green consumer tips. And two Saturday morning field trips provide a behind the scenes look at sorted, involved recyclable material, large and small scale composting systems, and electronic waste management. We welcome the new city of Santa Cruz master recycler volunteer class of 2019, which I believe is 26 members in the community who've received and completed this seven week training and now embark on their 20 hours of volunteer service to achieve the level of certified master recycler. Finally, we would like to recognize 10 community members from the inaugural class of 2018, who have fulfilled their volunteer commitment and now have become recognized as certified master recyclers. So community champions who have proven their ability to educate and empower friends, neighbors, schools, businesses, local groups and special events to waste, less and recycle, right. So thank you for being here Leslie, and congratulations to all of our volunteers. Did you want to say a few words? Thank you for the support that the city and the council has provided over the last two years. It's proven to be a really successful model, and I think we're seeing a difference out there. We have some certificates here. Great, there's some people, there are a few people who were not able to attend today, and we'd like to recognize the contributions. Alyssa Barnes, John Boest, Rachel McKay, and Jonah Pace. And now, will the following people please step forward to be recognized and accept your certificate? John Benito, John here, Henry Carter, Lee Connolly-Soon, Terry Grove, Michelle Replogel, and Glenn Smith. Thank you so much. Martin, quick comment please. I'd just like to say I have a couple of friends that recently went through this. They were devoted recyclers before, and they are positively evangelical. Good work. It's a great program, so yeah, thanks to Leslie and to Public Works. Absolutely. Here, here, thank you. Okay, so at this time I just have one other mention I'd like to add, which is that we won't be presenting today a mayor's proclamation in support of the May 4th Wildfire Community Preparedness Day. But I wanted to mention that it will be taking place on May 4th, and Wildfire Community Preparedness Day is a national campaign that encourages people to come together on a single day to take action to reduce their risk of wildfire. And I think we know now more than ever that is incredibly important, and a proclamation will be forthcoming, we haven't been able to get that together for this meeting today. So we'll go ahead and move along to our few announcements. So a few announcements before we head on to our regular meeting. I want to let you know that today's meeting is being broadcast live on Community Television, channel 25, and is streaming on the city's website at cityofsantacruz.com. Mike Oliphant is our technician for both this afternoon and evening sessions, and morning actually. And I would like to thank him for his work. All city council members can be emailed at citycouncil at cityofsantacruz.com. If you would like to communicate with us before or about any agenda item, we'd like to receive your email by Monday at 5 PM before our council meeting. This provides us an opportunity to review your email and include it with the rest of our agenda packet. Please do bear in mind that all items of correspondence with the city and city council constitute a public record and are generally subject to disclosure upon request by any member of the public. Accordingly, if you have sensitive or private information that you do not wish to be made public, you should not include that information in your correspondence. Our rules of decorum are on the window ledge to my left. It is my job to keep our meeting running without disruption. And I ask that you respect your fellow citizens when you are inside and outside of the chambers. And I'll just remind those in attendance and watching we have a framework that we use, which is to treat each other and engage in interactions that are to be respectful. And open and honest communication, honest and truthful to address difficult issues, define areas of common ground to be open to different perspectives, to give the benefit of the doubt, role model good leadership and be considerate of each other's time. And it's the job of the mayor to ensure that takes place on this side of the dais as well there so everyone can participate in our local government and engage in a meeting that is without disruption. But at this point, I'll go ahead and move on to see if we have any statements of disqualification. So I'd like to ask if any council members have any statements of disqualification today. Seeing none, with Vice Mayor Cummings, any statements of disqualification today. I will go ahead and ask our city clerk to announce if there are any additions or deletions to today's agenda. I'll make a brief announcement about oral communications. Oral communications is an opportunity for members of the communities to speak to us on items that are not on the agenda. Oral communications will occur at or around 7 PM. I'll go ahead and turn it over to our city attorney to report on our closed session. Thank you, Mayor Watkins, members of the city council. Items discussed this morning in closed session are as follows. Liability claims, item A, the claims of Joyce Fen, Sander Middor, Sunset Farms, Inc., and Robert and M, Radonian Company, and the claim of Moss Caleb Caballero. Those claims are also item seven on your consent calendar this afternoon. It was a conference with labor negotiators involving mid-managers, supervisors, OE3, fire management, fire IAFF, police management, police officers association, and executives. City met with its negotiator and gave instructions, no reportable action was taken. It was a conference with legal counsel on existing litigation. Item C was a case of Desiree Quintero et al. Versus the city of Santa Cruz, a case pending in the U.S. District Court, and lastly, there was one item of anticipated litigation. There was no reportable action on those two items. Thank you, City Attorney Condati. Okay, we'll go ahead and now move over onto our opportunity for council members to report on any actions or any updates from membership on external boards, committees, and joint powers authorities. I'll go ahead and start to my right, Council Member Cron, and then we'll make our way this way, and then we'll move from Council Member Brown into myself. So, Council Member Cron. Thank you, Mayor. I have a report back on the community advisory group that is made up of, I think, about 22 elected and community members and working with UCSC, advising UCSC on its long range development plan process for 2020. And I would like to offer this update as the process moves forward in the current LRDP, that the position of 20 plus members of the community advisory group is virtually unanimous. The group strongly opposes any plan for the UCSC growth at this time until the community of Santa Cruz is acceptably absorbed. UCSC's last round of growth, and this sentiment has been expressed on more than one occasion by the community advisory group members to both Chancellor Blumenthal and his staff at these numerous meetings. Opposing university growth also carries the message expressed by the electorate. When Measure U was passed by an almost 80% of voters in 2016. I'm going to pass out this really unprecedented action on the part of this group yesterday vis-a-vis the university, there was a vote taken, it was unanimous. And I just want to point out a couple of issues here and I hope that council member Matthews who shares that committee also for the council representation with me, it was a pretty cordial conversation. And if you look at number three, the last sentence, ideally prior to that growth occurring, the local campus will not support additional enrollment growth when the needed infrastructure is not provided. The other one I want to point out is number six on the back, our planning director was part of this group as well. And the trip level 10% or more, I think Lee was responsible for that or more. And I was fully supportive of that, I thought it should have been higher than 10% as well. And I'm glad that he got that language put in there. Number seven, which was quite a discussion amongst members of this group. And you can see at the bottom who makes up this group where the asterisk is fully mitigating adverse off-campus impacts of university growth authorized by the LRDP and recognizing the profound effects of this growth on the almost fully built out Santa Cruz community is a critical outcome of the LRDP process. So in principle right now, they're going to take this statement up the ranks. But there was a unanimous support of the members of the committee that were there yesterday. I believe there was about 15 or so of us present. And it was a good conversation. And I think that we're going to see a change at the top of the university. George Blumenthal is moving on. They kept referring to the new chancellor, which will not be unveiled until in the middle of May, I guess, at the Regents meeting. We'll know who the new chancellor of the University of California at Santa Cruz is. So the group feels good about moving forward with this draft of principles. And it was originated by the university. So there were some changes made by the group. And hopefully we will move forward harmoniously. And that development will not take place in Santa Cruz without resources appearing. And in fact, we would like to see backfill some resources that haven't been here for a while and they keep sending students. So thank you, Mayor. I don't know if Ms. Matthews, Council Member Matthews wants to add something. Thank you, Council Member Cronin. Did you want to add it this way? Very briefly. This statement was a massaging of a draft that was previously presented to the group. And it's intended to be a statement that reflects shared principles by both the Santa Cruz campus and the community advisory groups. And we came remarkably close. And they did emphasize that with the announcement of the new chancellor in the near future, there'll be some onboarding time and some ramp up. And that will necessarily slow down the LRDP process. But there was very close agreement on the principles that you see here. And from the university's point of view, it was just as much driven by the student experience as from the community's point of view, it's driven by impact. So, remarkable progress. Great job. Thank you for that update. Sorry, it felt long report, but it was kind of a remarkable meeting. Thank you for sharing. Yeah. Is there any other updates you'd like to share at the same Council Member? Okay, Council Member Clifford. Any updates from the Community Safety's Committee, the Integrated West Management Committee, or the Youth Violence Prevention Task Force Steering Committee? Council Member Myers. Just a brief, the Cal Working Group is scheduled to meet next week, so I don't have any other reports. I did attend, as mentioned by Mr. Clifford, the onboarding for, as a new board member for the Metro and got a half-day orientation. So that was very helpful to understand, especially our Pacific Station goals in cooperation with Metro. That's my report. Thank you, Council Member Myers. Council Member Brown. So, of the various inter-agency commissions and boards I'm on, I only have one report from the Area Agency on Aging, and that'll be brief. May is older Americans month, so look forward to a proclamation or declaration from the city. I'll be working with the mayor to make this FYI, to bring that back at a May meeting. And we also looked at, so some of the other things that the Area Agency on Aging is working on right now, I think are going to actually be very beneficial to the seniors in our community and the broader community. Revisions to some surveys that go out into the community to kind of get a better handle on what services are needed. Again, I've mentioned before, age-friendly cities. And so some of those things are in the works, and I want to invite others to be involved in the process. So I'll bring more information back, and we declare it older Americans month in May. I look forward to seeing that. Councilmember Matthews. Yes, we just heard from the Metro Director, Alex Clifford. He mentioned Pacific Station, but I do serve on the Metro's Capital Committee. And we had a really productive committee meeting this week. Our Economic Development Director, Bonnie Lipscomb, was there. Claire Fleece there from Transportation Planning. And we are, as you may remember, the city has co-funded with Metro a couple of studies that help inform our discussion about whether it is possible to do a combined collaborative Pacific Station project. It's an idea that's been in the works for easily a decade, if not more. Ran into delays due to the very severe economic crisis that Metro was in. That has definitely stabilized, as you heard. And there's particularly the opportunity to do some exciting projects that bring at that site with a realignment affordable housing location for two of our well respected community clinics with state money available for affordable housing connected to transit and services. It seems as though the stars are genuinely aligning on this. It's encouraging. And so we will be bringing our recommendation to actively pursue that possibility at our meeting on Friday. It's a realization of a long held goal. So I just want you all to know that I'm feeling progress on that. Just very briefly, at Vision Santa Cruz, every single meeting we get examples of the coverage that's been given to Santa Cruz County in media. Print, online media, all different sorts and that gets passed around to board members. And it's really impressive. Part of what Vision Santa Cruz does is not just to provide visitor services for those who are here. But a promotion of Santa Cruz County to a wide variety of interests and constituencies. And so I just brought one magazine out of, we probably get a half a dozen examples at every meeting, but just to show you. I saw it. It's, yeah, yeah, yeah, just one example among many. Thank you. Thank you. Matthews? Okay, vice mayor Cummings. So the Association of the Moderate Bay Area Governments, neither myself nor alternate Chris Crown can make that meeting of the last meeting. So there's nothing to report back on that. The LAFCO meeting was postponed until the first week of May. So there's nothing to report back on that. From the homeless two by two committee meeting, we met and at the last meeting, there was concern from the county with the timing of when the gateway encampment was going to close. Given the fact that there's been varied opinions on the closure date. And we've pushed that due to concerns around being able to have alternatives open in time. And the one concern that came out was that if we weren't going to open it within a timely manner that it wouldn't be effective to open it, given the fact that the site at 1220 is going to have to close at the end of June. And so that was mainly what was discussed at that meeting. And the only other sort of report back I have is on behalf I think of Councilmember Brown and Vice Mayor Cummings and myself, we had a city school's city committee meeting yesterday. And topics covered the Cannabis Children's Fund, work with their efforts around workforce housing. Some efforts for potential moving forward in terms of really looking at how we can have an opportunity to sort of pause and reflect and plan as a committee. Moving forward in terms of our policy alignment and support for one another. As well as some potential ideas and innovations that we could look at from other jurisdictions in terms of shared agreements around use in space. So lots of things happening there and a great meeting, I would say. And it was nice to finally make that happen. So I think that about covers all of the external report backs, Councilmember Crone. Just I wanted to mention what a great promo it was. I usually read my New Yorker magazine on Fridays when I get home at the end of the week. And Santa Cruz appeared twice in a movie review for the Us Movie. And I just thought you can't pay for that kind of advertising or promotion. So I just thought it was a wonderful, and they didn't say Santa Cruz, California. They said Santa Cruz. Like everybody knows where that is, it was really interesting. Thanks for bringing that up. Thank you. Martin, I'd like to make a brief comment. It came up at Visit Santa Cruz when the movie first came out. There was this buzz online for about one day, it's scaring people away from Santa Cruz. And the word we got was that attendance went up. So FYI, it's actually drawing more people than that. Okay, thank you. Okay, thank you for your work out in the community on behalf of our city council. So we'll go ahead and move on to our city manager report, which I understand is not necessarily happening today. Yes, I don't have a record. So that takes us to our consent agenda. And so first up is the consent agenda and these are items four through 12 on our agenda. All items will be acted upon in one motion unless an item is pulled by a council member for further discussion. Are there any council members who wish to pull a item? Council member Glover? Item 10, please. Any other council members wishing to pull an item? Okay, seeing none. If there are any members of the public that would like to acknowledge or request an item be pulled, you're welcome to do so. Or speak on an item. Or speak on an item. I'm sorry, yes. Or speak to any item on our consent agenda with the exception of items by council members already pulled, which is item number 10. So now would be the time to do so, and you would have up to two minutes. So this is an every item on our consent agenda other than item 10. And that's items four through 12, thank you. Okay, Councilor McBride? I just want to reiterate that I am willing to pull items upon request from members of the public. It doesn't seem like that's an issue today. So we'll go ahead and return back to council. If there is a motion to move the consent agenda. So moved. Okay, motion by council member Glover, seconded by council member Matthews. All those in favor please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That passes unanimously. Councilor Matthews. And I would like to just speak to item six, which is the city of Santa Cruz weighing in on what seems like arcane inside baseball regarding federal regulations on offshore oil drilling. But this is taking a stand that the city opposes any weakening of the state's ability to comment on proposed federal changes. It represents part of a 30 plus 40 year record of activism protecting our coast. So thank you. Thank you all. And thank you council members for bringing that item forward. Council member Crown. Yeah, I just want to reiterate that and really appreciate Vice Mayor Cummings and Council Member Myers and Council Member Matthews. This is super important. It's a beautiful thing when I think we have 110% unanimity up here on this issue and protecting our offshore resources. Thank you. Agreed. Okay, all those in favor please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That passes unanimously. So we'll go ahead and move on to our polled item, which is item number 10 on our consent agenda. And council member Glover. Yes, so just so people know what consent agenda item 10 is, it is the landfill east perimeter road extension projects. And I was just curious, because I notice in the hello, I notice in the report, it says that we can wait for up to three to four years before the need to use that additional cell 3B. Because there's a ticket value there, about $600,000 which would come from the capital investment program. But during our budget hearings with the public works department, there was a concern about facilities or capital projects that have been deferred or were in need of focus. So with the possibility of this project taking place next year or even the year after that based off of the estimations, just wondering from the public works department why it's being prioritized right now. And if it is in fact possible for us to delay that. Okay, good afternoon, Mayor Watkins and members of the council. I'm Hoy Yu, I'm the engineer for this project. So the reason why we wanted to do this project is because for a long time for cell development, we do a lot in-house excavation and that has helped us reduce the cost of having a contractor coming to excavate. Because we need the soil for our daily cover and just normal use. And that's the reason why we wanted to jumpstart on this project. And because we also wanted to, because there's so much soil that we have to move about 420,000 cubic yards. If we can get rid of 75,000 cubic yards, which this project will excavate, then we can figure out where to stockpile it and have it put in a place where we can either expand a deck for some other operations. Or we can also use it for, again, our daily cover. So that is the reason why, because we want to make sure that we have a boundary for in-house excavation. And we can expand some of the deck area that we sorely need at the landfill. Just addressing your question, this is an enterprise fund, so it really can't be used for the general fund. Capital improvement, it's really only limited to enterprise, so. And with that enterprise, though, that can also be anything within like waste management and refuse disposal, right? As a refuse, that's correct. Right, but my question was, because I noticed that in the presentation that there were other capital needs to be done. Potentially in waste management or other kinds of facility improvements. Maybe the recycling systems, maybe other kinds of stuff like that that could be invested in as opposed to. Yeah, I think those are all fully funded by the rate study. So there really isn't an issue with unfunded capital at that point. Those are all funded by rate. So it's all planned out. This is the appropriate use of the funds at this time. The deferred maintenance is around the general fund capital needs, not the solid waste program. Okay. Okay, Council Member Cron. Another question for Director Dettel. We heard from Bob Nelson last week about the crisis really in recycling. And I'm just wondering if putting forward this particular project at this particular time, are we feeling pressure that we have to landfill more garbage because the recycling system is breaking down so badly? I wouldn't say that. The markets for it, the people aren't, but the markets where- I wouldn't say that. I think this is a planned expansion as we originally are into cell three. We divided that cell into two phases. This is the second phase. It's just scheduled preparation so that when we're ready to fill that cell, the cell will be ready. There is obviously pressure on getting rid of the recycling and we're working on making sure everyone understands how to clean their recycling when they place it in their bin. So there's added attention on what can we do to make sure we have a clean product that when there's competition for that market that we have a product that people want to buy. So yes, that is a global competition that we're there, but it doesn't really affect this project. This project is scheduled and so that we're ready for the amount of ref. So are we under any legal requirement to do this right now? I wouldn't say it's a legal requirement. It just makes smart planning so that we're ready to go when we have the place to put the ref use when we need it. And the first discards will be entering that landfill cell three or four years from now. Is this the schedule? Yeah, most likely, but I think it's that there's so much excavation and material that we need to prepare for that. We can do it within house and save the contracting costs. Thank you. Council Member Matthews. If there are no further questions, I appreciate the explanation there. Both stages of the work appropriately, we can use the fill for cover and save us money in operations long term. So I'm going to go ahead and move the item number 10. So we have a motion by Council Member Matthews, seconded by Council Member Meyers. Is there any member of the public who would like to address the council on this item? Seeing none, we'll go ahead and return back to council for any action and deliberation. So any further discussion? Council Member Gover and then Vice, did you have? I'm sorry, I was just wondering what the downside would be if we waited until May during the budget conversations to identify exactly what other projects. Because one of the things that we're dealing with, especially in California in general, we heard from the Metro, is the intentional transition over into more electric based service materials vehicles. So I don't know if there's been any research by the Public Works Department into electric refuse vehicles or things like that to cut down on carbon emissions. But if that's a potential purchase outside of a additional road, which we can not have for a couple of years and start replacing our fleet as a potentiality, I'd love to explore that option instead of making a decision now so far ahead of the game. So that's the reason why I brought it up and why I think that it would be valuable for us to take that time to do the research. But Director Dettel, has there has been any research in fleet transitioning from diesel fuel? We are watching that closely. I would say they're probably a couple of years away till production, but we are watching that. And that will be our next move is towards electric refuse trucks. Okay, thanks. No, it's not, it's a question. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That passes unanimously. Okay, so that concludes all items on our consent agenda. Go ahead and move forward to general business item number 13 on our agenda. Mayor, point of order, just for the record, I would like to state that given the interest in this item in this community, and this is a reasonable number of people here, there would probably be double or triple if this was an evening agenda item. Tonight we're speaking, we're talking about our budget, which is a great thing to be talking about. There would be less interest in the general public when we're talking about the economic development and planning budgets. And I just want to state for the record that I think that we should be agendizing items such as number 13, the gateway encampment closure at a time when the most number of people who would be interested in that item could come to the meeting. Thank you. Move to post follow. You can, we, okay, okay. So, okay, okay, I'm going to go ahead and make a brief statement and we'll go ahead and move on to the item. This is an item that's brought forward by Vice Mayor Cummings and myself. In terms of response to having the agenda set the way it is, I just want to briefly kind of bring the community and the council in context of the amount of time our council has heard this item. So on February 12th, we had a item related to homelessness and we had a four hour time slot allotted to that item at that time. On February 26th, we also heard the item return to us with five hours spent on that item. On March 12th, again, hearing an item on homelessness and another five hours were heard at that time. March 26th, we had an hour of oral communications. Majority of the community was there to speak about the topic of homelessness. And in just last meeting on April 9th, we spent six hours and 40 minutes on this topic. The city council meets twice a month and we have a number of responsibilities to oversee and administer governance in our city. And so, at a certain point, we have to also balance that when considering the agenda. And although I do just mention the hours we've had spent at discussing this item, this has also really consumed our city manager's office and other divisions as well for the past several months. This is a very specific action being proposed by the vice mayor and myself. And in the interest of being able to conduct city business and a number of items on our agenda, I decided to agendize it at this time and feel that was the right decision. So at this point, I will go ahead and let Vice Mayor or say a few words, I had a hand from a first council member. Myers indicated that she wanted to speak and then I'll turn it over to Vice Mayor as the co-signer of the item. And then if there's a comment by council member Glover. That's right. Yeah, I just, I'm ready to move on this item and would like to put a motion out following when we're ready. Okay, after the vice, Vice Mayor. Okay, public comment. Thank you. Okay, Vice Mayor, come in. This has been an item that's received a lot of attention. And I've been receiving a lot of feedback from members of the community. Additionally, as we've been working with the county supervisors, we've been trying to figure out a way that we can move forward to best accommodate people within our homeless community. And also provide added support to the people within our community. Given the fact that we've been presented with the Boise decision this year, which is something different from what we've had in the past, it's been a bit difficult for members of the city council to understand how to best move forward with trying to mitigate some of the impacts that we've been seeing at the camp. And also provide shelter to the people in our community who are facing homelessness. I brought this forward with the intention of hoping that we can find alternative solutions to all of the people who are sleeping at the camp. And I've received, I've been in many conversations with people on staff and members of the community. And I think I share a bit of skepticism moving into today's meeting around whether or not we're going to have enough shelter, but really want to have this as an opportunity for us to ask questions of the staff and hear from the community. Because I think that there's a lot of concern with how the city is moving forward. Especially given the fact that we were not supposed to be opening up camps and parks. And now there's been a proposal to open up a temporary camp in the Benchland. So I think this is a good time to hear from the community and to ask questions as we move forward. And then just for clarification for the point of order. The point of order is to provide an opportunity if there's a violation. And I don't rule that there was a violation, that the mayor has the responsibility to design the agenda. And the port of order was that it was not in compliance with that process. So I wouldn't rule that that was compliant. Is that correct, City Attorney Ken Naughty? A point of order is to point out a mistake procedurally or in the application of the rules or in an action that the council has taken. So that is correct. Great, okay, thank you. Council Member Glover. Thank you, so just because it came up with the issue of the meeting time today. I appreciate what I heard, which I appreciate what I heard was the 30 hours that we've spent approximately since February discussion issue of homelessness. And then the reason that it was agendized in the afternoon was to be able to talk about other issues. But what was concerning about that statement was that it sounded to me or it seemed like it was being inferred that it was scheduled early in the day intentionally to make it so that people can participate, which would then shorten the time of the meeting. So that really concerns me if we're scheduling things intentionally during the middle of the day so that we have a shorter meeting and have less people have the opportunity to participate. I think that's dangerously undemocratic. And then at the same time, it was wonderful to hear Vice Mayor Cummings right now say that this is a great opportunity to discuss and hear from the community. But unfortunately, the community isn't able to be here because of work or school. And something else that I noticed is that this, if you look at the flyers that were distributed by our staff. It says that the removal or the vacating of the Ross camp, as per the notices posted over Easter weekend, would start today as of 10 AM. So you have people that are making the decision now cognitively, are they going to stay and protect their things, especially during an ex parte action that we took yesterday, which sent ripples of fear through the camp already. And then making them choose between whether they're going to protect their things or come here to speak in defense of their ability to stay where they're at and the protection of their constitutional rights. There's so much that is wrong with the scheduling of this. Especially because it was scheduled with budget presentations in the evening, as Council Member Crohn mentioned, which are completely possible for us to do right now. Even if we scheduled them before this hearing of this item into the afternoon, then we could have at least provided the opportunity for more people to come and participate. So this is a really troubling pattern that I've seen with regards to the scheduling and the building of the agendas, and I am just going to go on the record and say that I feel like it's inappropriate to be scheduling such an important issue so far down in the agenda just in general. I don't know, I understand it's legal. I understand it's around the protocols, but it's just wrong, right? So I'll go ahead and just briefly, I'll briefly respond, and then we'll go ahead and open it up to public comment. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, and then we'll have Council Member Brown. I'm not going to reiterate the comments that have already been made. I'm in agreement about it being troubling the timing of this and in particular on this day when there are folks who are actually right now needing to make that decision about moving and how they're going to protect their stuff, what choices they're going to make to stabilize their already very unstable living, their environment, they can't be here. I mean, I was at the camp yesterday and I talked with people who said they wanted to come down. And while there may be other reasons that they're not here, they're not here. And so the coincidence of the timing there is particularly troubling, so I just really wanted to underscore that. Okay, I'll just go ahead and respond that it is the coincidence that that was not taken into consideration. I will say, yeah, this is an opportunity for the Council to have discussion. We'll have an opportunity for public comment. Please keep your voices down while we have our discussion up here. If I notice one person specifically speaking out, I will give you a verbal warning if it happens again, I will ask you to leave. It is the job to ensure that we are able to ensure decorum and an ability for us to govern. I'll just say that I believe that it's been undemocratic to hear this item well into the late hours of the evening. And the study sessions have been changed on numerous, numerous occasions. And they were scheduled at time certain for this evening. So I followed through with that in this regard. Vice Mayor Cummings and I discussed bringing this item forward, given the information that what he felt was, I believe, necessary to present this as a direction, and that was taken into consideration when adjusting the agenda at the very kind of end of the process right before agenda review. As I mentioned, there's a lot that we have to get to as a city. And I think the description on the amount of hours spent on this item covers how we have to also try to balance that with other city business. So at this point, I'm going to go ahead and move over to public comment. We'll allow anybody who's interested in addressing the council on this topic for one minute to speak first, they can self-select. And then at that time, we'll go ahead and open it up for two minutes. So anybody interested in addressing the council for one minute briefly? Excuse me, we have no group presentations this afternoon. We have one minute if you're interested. We have three minutes, rather than two minutes during the meeting. This is an opportunity for anybody to self-select for one minute. And if you're interested in staying for two minutes, then you could have two minutes, and that's how we'll go with public comment today. If you'd like to address the council for one minute, you could do so now. I have a motion. It's one or the other. Council member Matthews, it'll be one or the other. That's right, council member Glover. Motion to extend the public comment from two minutes to three minutes. Okay, we have a motion by council member Glover to extend public comment from two minutes to three minutes. Is there a second? Second. And a second by council member Cron, do you have further discussion? Yeah, I just want to say that I do respect everybody's ask for a longer period of time. Last week, we extended public comment for three minutes. And that resulted in six and a half hours, or six hours and 40 minutes. In addition to all of the other five-hour meetings that we had. And so I'm not going to support this because I know we have a lot to get through. I would encourage though that if you'd like more time, since this is the one minute, I would suggest waiting for the two minute comment portion. Thank you, Vice Mayor. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? No. So that fails with council member Cron, Glover, and Brown voting against. Okay, so that fails with council member Cron and Glover voting in support. Council member Brown, Matthews, Vice Mayor Cummings, Meyers, and myself voting against. Okay, so you'll be given one minute, or you can wait for two minutes. My name's Ralph Hale, I'm with Friends of Depot Park. And I'm just here today because the city has a credibility problem. There's a lot of distrust in the community, both from the housed and the unhoused about the direction that the city is moving forward in. And we feel like the city has a responsibility to ensure that there is adequate shelter. Not just for the next week, but for the foreseeable future. There are people who are moving from the Ross camp to a temporary site. And then we don't really know what the plan is after that. So we're asking you to clarify what the plan is today about where people are going to go. And also to ensure that there is some sort of community engagement process to ensure that the community's needs are heard whenever there is sighting of a shelter location. The way that the fact that, I'll finish there. Okay, thank you. Is there anybody else who's interested in addressing the council for one minute? Please come forward and you can line up on my left. If you'd like. Thank you. Thank you. Hi, this is Carol Walker from Felker Street. I present to you 140 signatures in support of a permanent closure of the gateway encampment. At last night's River Neighbors Beating, we initiated an online survey that was intended to include only Felker Price and Tannery campuses. I learned this morning that the survey has been shared with a few surrounding neighborhoods, neighboring businesses, and their employees. So I'm not here to speak on behalf of River Neighbors, but to present to you the voices of those who shared their wishes to disband the gateway campus. The thefts, vandalism, break-ins, and drugs that have accompanied this camp have pretty much destroyed our neighborhoods. This activity that accompanies camps such as this should never be allowed in a residential neighborhood. We therefore support city council's efforts to seek appropriate and suitable housing for our city's homeless population as well as giving the neighborhoods back to us by asking for a yes vote on item 13. Thank you. And this is for folks who are interested in the one minute time frame. I live at the Tannery. My name is Joan Staffin. I've been there for ten years. This camp is destroying the Tannery. We are no longer our children and myself no longer walk to downtown. It is frightening. We have crazy people late at night screaming in our neighborhoods. We know that there's been deaths. We know this is more of a drug problem than a homeless problem. I would urge the city to deal with the drug problem. I would love to have the camp closed and for everyone in Santa Cruz to have housing. Not against people having housing, but this is an illegal camp. It's destroying the Tannery, the neighborhood and businesses. Thank you. Good afternoon. Mike Paul Hamas, I'm a teacher at Santa Cruz High School. I actually have to go back and teach a class in here. I just want to voice my support both for item 13 and also Martin and Justin for putting it on the agenda. I think the community deserves that. And just I want to address the idea that we somehow have not had exhaustive public comment on this issue. We have gone over this and over this and over this. And I think that we need to get behind this and now that we have a court order, there needs to be some action. And we need to stop crying about how the agenda is made and why the agenda is made this way or that way. And put forth some decisions so that we can move forward for these people and for the city who have both voiced a lot of support in both directions. And let's just do it. Let's get it over with and move forward. Thank you. Okay, is there any other member of the community who is interested in speaking to us for one minute? I want to remind those that are in the community, Mr. Norris, that if you could please keep your voices down. Everybody has a right to come here and to speak to us and to address us without antagonizing or fear. And I want to let you know that that is a warning. And if I see that again, I will ask you to please leave. Okay, so now you'll be given two minutes. Hello, Drew Glover is my friend, but I do not support him on this. And Martine Walkins, I just want to honor you as a woman of color being up there and taking the heat that you are taking. I just want to honor all of you who are working on this. I'm here really to speak for the children, all the children, not just at the tannery but that are affected by the Ross camp. Nobody should be living in that squalor. My friend, Michael Sweatt, lives in that camp. Nobody should be living in that squalor. People have lowered their standards because they've been treated like crap for a long time. They shouldn't be there. It is disgusting. It is despicable and disgusting and they deserve to have housing, those who want it. And I'm going to say it even if people attack me. Many people in the camp, they don't actually want housing. They want freedom. They don't want to follow rules and they just want to be able to be somewhere where they don't have to follow rules. And they've told me that specifically. People who want housing and people who want rehab. The county and the city needs to work to provide them housing and to provide them with rehab and mental health services that humans all deserve, but not everybody wants that. And you can't force them to. So we need to close the camp. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker and you'll have two minutes. Good afternoon. I'm not a public speaker. I'm going to keep it very short. I feel that I have to be here to say that myself and my partner as well as my neighbors are very concerned about protecting our things as homeowners. And that we feel moving the encampment to the center of the park where they were moved away from before would endanger us once again. And that we even entertained having to pay for private security just for our neighborhood. That is like $7,000 a month. Extremely concerning. Of course, I've got empathy for the homeless in terrible conditions and I would like to see that they have what they need, but not in the center of our parks. Please and thank you, thanks. Thank you, okay. Next speaker and you'll have up to two minutes. Yeah, so the first thing I'd like to note is that it's important to suspend the enforcement since we have a hearing in federal court on Friday at 9 AM in San Jose. That will be a TRO against the eviction of people in Ross. I find that it's, when it was raining, I was able to secure, I was able to secure hundreds of raincoats and rain boots and socks. And then all of a sudden the city, and a cynical move, is able to come up with tents and gear and give out vouchers to make sure that only people at Ross can't move to the Benchlands for five days. And that this, you're being completely dishonest. So obviously, schedule this meeting today at noon and schedule the clearing of the camp at 10, so that none of the people that the camp could come here and speak out on their behalf. The entire thing, and if you follow, as I do, other cities who are attacking the homeless, they're using the same vicious, inhumane, ugly attempts to drive the homeless out of sight. They're not going to evaporate. We've been here for 30 years. I've spent hundreds of hours before this city council, Martin Watkins, talking about homeless issues, hundreds of hours, hundreds of hours. I've been here since 1988 talking about how we could solve the homeless problem, but the city never does it. It's just another cynical, cruel, ugly attack against the disenfranchised in this city. These people are my friends. I enjoyed playing with children from the tannery at Ross camp. This is a bunch of bumps. Your time is up. So I'm actually getting 10 minutes apparently. So now I wrote to get 10 minutes. I'm going to go ahead and ask you to leave if you can't stop. So I'm asking you to leave. You've been working. I'm asking you to leave. Why don't you leave? Go ahead and have our stars and our arms go ahead and remove this member of the public who is not adhering to it. Thank you very much. Go ahead and you can go ahead and go. Yep. You're out. All right. Okay. We have our next speaker and I'm going to go ahead and remind the community one more time that when everybody can come out me. Okay. Hi, you'll have your two minutes. Thank you. My name is Kate Garrett. And before I read what I wrote down, I would just like to say that I appreciate Council Member Krohn and other council members for bringing up the timing issue. I'm here on my lunch break. I'm now over time and I've had to contact my employer so that I can stand here and speak about this. And I've been here for an hour like listening about the Metro and all that stuff. And maybe you can say it's coincidental and that's the official position. But I think it's pretty realistic that you guys know that there would be way more people here turning out if it were an evening issue. And not just people who live at the camp but also community members who care about our community and would like to be here in support of other community members. And I would just like to say that you're trying to vacate people by 4 p.m. tomorrow under threat of forcible removal. But as I understand it, the Benchlands won't even be open until Tuesday morning. And also you're talking about closing the camp, the 2012 20 River Street camp by the end of June. So where are you going to put people? And there are a lot of people who can't be in traditional housing. But does that mean that they should have no support? That they should have to fend for themselves and maybe die on the streets? Like you're talking about, well, the drug addicts, they shouldn't have any help. Where's the drug treatment in Santa Cruz? It's very, very, very under available. And people are then not able to be housed after going to treatment, which is the most successful way to stay sober. You can't just put someone in drug treatment and then turn them back to the streets and expect them to be sober long enough for the months and months and months that it takes to secure housing in Santa Cruz. It's just really not a workable system. So please have compassion for people who are drug users. They're people too, and they deserve to have services provided to them. And not just say, well, you can't stay in a traditional shelter. So go die on the streets and find your own place to live. People are protected in the camp and they have a community. Thank you. Okay, so next speaker you'll have. My name is Albert Gann and I've been involved with secondary needle exchange since January. We regularly go into the Ross camp on Thursdays and Sundays to collect dirty needles and distribute clean needles, naloxone, condoms, toiletries, among other things, and information about the county needle exchange. I have some serious, serious concerns regarding a permanent closure of the Ross camps effect on the health and safety of its residents. The Ross camp provides a centralized location for the distribution of clean needles and life saving naloxone. If folks experiencing homelessness who also use drugs are released into dispersed camps throughout the city of Santa Cruz, this reduces their access to clean needles and naloxone and subsequently increases the likelihood of death by overdose. And the transmission of injection related diseases, including hepatitis C and HIV. So I urge you to vote no on the closure of the Ross camp. Thanks. Good afternoon, Senator Cruz. I am currently homeless in your city, me. It's not about my choice, I was just driving through on vacation. It's on my car. My wife and I are currently homeless on your streets. I'm not a drug user, I don't need to do any of that. I'm not around any of that. I won't allow myself to be around that. Got a job. I work for what I have, but I am still homeless because they took my car. Right now I've drove through other cities on my way out here. They do not have a consolidated hub or anything like that like the camp. You go into McDonald's parking lot, there's six needles in every parking lot. I could not believe it. You have to watch what kind of shoes you wear, what you're going to step on on the sidewalk of your city streets. No, the camp is not a good idea. It's not the best. I don't like it myself. I don't want it myself. But to turn this out onto your streets, onto the other homeless here, it's kind of, you can avoid that element. You're going to put that element on everybody in this entire city. I don't know, but I'm going to get to work now. Thank you. My name is John Hall. I'm a citizen of Santa Cruz. I must say that item 13 is very complicated to understand, even for someone with an advanced collegiate degree. But I also recognize that the homeless problem is extremely complex. It's connected to housing issues, drug addiction, people who lack adequate psychological support, a number of issues, and it's a national, regional, state, local problem. In that, it seems to me that Santa Cruz has to stand up for decency and has to face a humanitarian crisis. And it has to do it with its own dignity as a city and in a way that offers the homeless a certain amount of dignity as much as we can provide. I am not clear that the motion as stated provides that. It seems to me, as far as I can tell, that it ejects people from the camp without necessarily having adequate alternative solutions for them to be housed in some transitional way and without social services. That to me is itself a humanitarian disaster in the making. And it is also a disaster for the city's business community. It's a disaster for people who own homes, people who like to visit the downtown area, who will find a number of distressed people who have no place else to go wandering around in the evening hours. So it's not a whack-a-mole situation. You can't just wish it away. You have to find solutions that work before you simply end a solution that is not an optimal solution. So I urge you to arrange for transitional housing for all who need it before you close this camp. It's simple human decency. Thank you. Thank you. Hi, I'm Michael Viser. I don't want to repeat what the previous speaker said. I agree with everything he said. I'm one of the relatively extremely privileged Santa Cruzans. I'm a homeowner. That means my privilege allows me to come here whenever the issues are being discussed for public comment, unlike the residents of the camp. It also gives me the time on Sunday mornings to go and visit the camp, where I've been along with other DSA members on eight Sundays. And so I've gotten to know some of the people there. It's a very complex community. All sorts of people are there. People with the drug issues and people without drug issues. No one likes the camp, right? The residents see it as the best of possibly a huge number of other evils. The camp, obviously, is not something permanent. But to close the camp now, when there aren't other alternatives, is simply not the compassionate way to go. Yes, there's the threat of going against Boise versus Martin. But let's think about the people there first, and then maybe about the legal issues, right? So there are lots of ways to solve this problem that other cities have tried. They are not being tried here. There are transitional camps that are being proposed by Councilman Glover and others in the community. You need long-term issues and simply moving people around as is happening again is obviously just a way to make life miserable for people in the hopes that they will leave and move somewhere else. That is no solution to the problem of homelessness. Please vote against this move to empty the camp in a week. Thank you. And I again want to remind those that are in the audience that when the person who is speaking, they have their two minutes, you can stand in line and also have two minutes to address this, but to not make any interruptions. Please, you'll have two minutes. Mayor Watkins and members of the City Council, thank you for the opportunity to speak. My name is Jim Brown and I'm the Arts Council's tannery director. I've been asked to speak on behalf of the tannery community as most of those hard-working people are at their jobs and unable to be here at this time of day. My mandate at the Arts Council is to work towards the success of the tannery art center as a vibrant and safe home for the arts in Santa Cruz. And there's no question that the establishment of the Ross camp sits as an obstacle to that mission. I know that you have received many communications from tannery residents and businesses outlining the ways that the camp has impacted our campus. And I will not reiterate them today. I'd prefer to focus on the way in which every community in Santa Cruz has been given an opportunity to prevent a homeless camp in their neighborhood but ours. Each time a camp location has been proposed, the council has listened to the neighbors and chosen not to create it. Tannery tenants were given no choice in the establishment of this camp. The tannery and the surrounding neighborhoods are predominantly low income, working class with many families of color. Essentially those with some of the least power in our community have once again not been given a voice. I urge the council to vote in favor of closing the camp and continuing to move forward in a deliberate and thoughtful way to address our homeless challenges with compassion for all Santa Cruz citizens. Thank you. Okay, next speaker. I wish Martin was here to hear this. I'm so angry at the multi-level injustices that are about to be perpetrated that I can hardly speak. My heart is beating. I am shocked that this proposal even came to you and I can't imagine what you're doing. I'm holding a copy of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I want to remind people what that is about. Human rights means the recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family as the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world. It says nothing about drug addicts not being members of the human community, of ex felons being members of the community, of the unemployed not being members of the community. They're all members of the community and we have to come up with a solution that recognizes the inherent dignity. And that is what the people of the Ross camp are asking for. And many of the alternatives that you're about to provide in place of the Ross camp do not provide them dignity. And no wonder they're willing to put up with rats and mud in order to have some level of security. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights also says everyone has the right to liberty, life, liberty, and security. One woman said, they just want freedom, that's what the American revolution was thought about. And those people at Ross camp, they want that for themselves and they're not willing to sell out their freedom for being put behind chain fences or kicked out during the whole day. It also says in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, they have a right to privacy and family. That's their family, that's the only family that they've gotten. And actually, I am going to scream. I'm Tony Boardman, I'm a grad student at UCSC, I'm very nervous. But I wanted to add my voice to the people who are opposing the closure of the Ross camp. And to ask if a belief in something that is any better is really the thing that is overriding the problems with the camp, because that's not what I've heard. It seems that the 1220 River Street will not have sufficient beds. And what will happen is that this is a community who will be dispersed throughout the city. I wanted to respond to a few things that were said. The second and third speakers, the second speaker said, this is destroying our neighbourhoods without any recognition that this is a neighbourhood that is being destroyed. Same for the third person who said this is destroying the tannery. Someone after said nobody should be living in that squalor. There's no consideration that the thing that they will be passed on to will be any better than that. They just don't imagine any sort of like alternative at all. And I also want to fight this kind of language. Someone was saying about like, not everybody wants housing, not everybody wants to be a community member. And I think this is a logic we have to resist at every step, because we're providing the minimum levels of existence for these people. And kind of a moralistic outlook on whether they deserve this stuff is really unethical and bad. Yeah, so that's all. I want to talk about freedom and the cabal that's been running Santa Cruz for a long time. I could name names, but I'm going to hold short for now. This cabal are homeless haters. They hate the homeless. That is people who are experiencing homelessness, who have to hide behind bushes to go to the bathroom, because they do not have any bathrooms. People who often have mobility issues. I helped serve lunch to a man who could barely walk. He had to negotiate on level ground, get over a cement curb, and sit down on it and eat his lunch with his walker next to him. This is ridiculous, as Elliot said a few meetings ago, worthy of ridicule. Our council members are being hamstrung. They can't get stuff on the agenda when they put their things on their list and submit them legally and lawfully according to a legal procedure. Things are mysteriously disappeared off lists by city staff. We don't know who this is ridiculous. We have a fascist government here and a pretense of a city council procedure. So this thing, this injunction that we filed, that is the people who are advocating for rights and freedoms of the homeless, advocated to stop the destruction of Ross Camp until we could at least have dignified, viable housing that will actually provide for these people that they can access. What happened is this item came before the council and now we are struggling because the timing of this item is directly to intervene with the injunction that we filed. We are dealing with fascism, Americans need to wake up and if people don't understand that they need to look up the definition, cuz we got it here. Time is up, okay, next speaker you'll have two minutes. Hi, thank you so much for listening to everyone, my name is Rachel O'Malley. I just want to remind us that it's not only Santa Cruz. I work in San Jose, I grew up in the Bay Area. Our problem is national, we have a national opioid problem. We have a national economic problem, we have a national homeless problem. As a city, I see a lot of people looking at the things happening behind me, so I'll just wait a second. As a city, we can act. We are not dependent on our county, we are the wealthiest part of the county, we can act. Go ahead and pause the time. So curious what's going on. I'm just going to remind folks if you could keep your voices down and allow the speaker their time to address the council without disruption. Okay, I wanted to point out the New York Times Sunday magazine was mostly about rats in New York City and in the whole country and in my house, I'm sorry to say. I want to remind us that the people who live in our streets are people. I walked the whole camp yesterday and I sent you a photograph of one of the women there she gave me permission to send it to you. She's reading her paper on her front step just like I do, they're people. They're human beings who aren't going to go away when we close the camp and they're going to still be on the street. And they're going to be in much more ecologically sensitive areas. We have the opportunity right now to bring services and bring order and structure and stability to the weakest people's lives in the spot that they're in right now. As soon as we disperse them, it will be that much harder, that much harder to find them and help them. The woman who I sent you the photo said is, I'd be really easy to help, she said. I had my bank account cleaned out by someone I know and so I lost my HUD housing. I'd be really easy to help. I wish that someone were helping. The county outreach person who we saw when I walked up to the camp, she said, I'm afraid. I don't know what to do, I have nothing to offer people, I can't offer them housing. Thank you. So I just want to remind us, you're their people. Thank you. Okay. Good afternoon, mayor and city council persons. Yesterday I visited the camp Ross for the first time, not knowing what to expect. I counted 130 tents at nine o'clock in the morning and did not see, I know it's point in time, any needles, feces, human or otherwise, or rats. Yet the living conditions were very dense. I talked to Taylor and his fellow officer from the Santa Cruz Police Department and asked how many people reside in the tents and he said usually two per tent, but sometimes three if it's a larger tent. So I'm estimating around 300 people given that information. If we are providing what, I don't know, 100 to 160 spots, we don't think we have enough space, we have work to do. Under estimating the numbers will be a disaster to neighborhoods, parks, open space and beaches. When the city cleared the homeless before, it was a disaster for the east side. I'm asking for your moral courage to do the right thing and provide a plan for all the campers. And let's start saying yes. Let's say yes to the camp cleanup. Yes to an accurate population count. Yes, a place for them to go and a plan for all of them. Let's pledge to mitigate the impacts, if any, to neighborhoods, parks, etc. And let's track our success and always remember how blessed we housed are. May you and your loved ones never experience the pain of addiction, the burden of mental illness, the despair of poverty, the isolation of not having a family. May we count our blessings and bring this gratitude to the council. Thank you very much. Thank you. And you'll have two minutes in mind. Thank you. Buenas tardes, miembros del concilio, my name is Ernestina Saldana and I'm here one more time to speak to you about what is- Sorry, just excuse me for one second. Okay, go ahead. What is the life of a homeless people? Because I can see very clearly that none of you have ever been homeless. And this is very difficult to be homeless. It's not easy for the people who is on the street. And as you can hear, it's not easy for the people who lives in houses, where the people who doesn't have house has to hang. But if I had to say something to the gentleman who spoke on behalf of the detainee, the only thing I can say is that they were there before them. I believe in the camp that was around the early 90s, but why is now known as the detainee? It was not the apartment complex that is now. It was the building of the detainee. So we have to say that they were there before the people who have houses now. So when you have to be on the streets, you have no place to put your belongings and you have to have them with you. That's why you walk in the camp right now. You're going to find that there's a lot of stuff in there. But it's not really trash. It's the belongings of that people. When you are on the street, you need to have water. So you collect the jugs to be able to carry water with you. And you will find jugs around the tents. I was speaking this morning with the people from the city who is there, Megan and Kerry, I believe. And they were telling me that they are ready to start giving vouchers to the people who live in the camp. And when I asked what's going to happen to the property, and she said whatever can fit in the bags that we are going to provide it, they can take it with them. And whatever don't, they had to leave it behind or they can put it on the storage for rent. She also told me that everyone would be getting a new tent. And I wonder why. Your time is up. Just to excuse the amount of money wasted on that. Your time is up. Thank you very much. Okay, you all have two minutes. I just to be able to speak to the people and council, that's my right. This is dividing everyone and every one of these communities. This is not good. We have to get the business owners, everyone together on the same page with us. This can't have to stay. Have you been there? I've been there every day for the last week, night and day, all different times. Drew and I did another, people put an Easter party together with kids. We had a great time. What about Maddie? She was killed by the people at the staff place. Who looked for her? Homeless people. Who saved the guy in the car that was burning along the road? Rock camp people. No other people, the guy in the car that didn't even step in and help. I met the guy who had his hair burned off. They were trying to cut the seat belts, they only had an exacto blade. This is wrong. What we've got to do with Rock Camp is let those people be there. They've developed their own community to have self-government. We need to make it cleaner. We need to have restrooms, real restrooms, running water. We need to have clock boxes where they can have their stuff in safety. They can go out for the day, find jobs, they'll be clean, they'll have dignity. They're tired of being rejected from this community and whatever other community they're coming from, I don't care where they're coming from. There are people who have a right to be on this planet, to be with us. We need to love them and take care of them. It's just not fair. We got a lot of solutions to help them and you're just ramrodding it down these people's throats. And you're not even giving them time. What would happen to you if somebody told you you've got two days to move? They got a lot of stuff. Stuff to them is important. When you're in that situation, it becomes a spiritual thing to have stuff. You don't have other people sometimes, or maybe they do, but if they don't, those things help fulfill their heart in a way that's spiritual. Like if they have a friend, okay, it becomes super important. And all that stuff is important to them. Let them organize it. Make it safe, yeah, for fire safety. Make the lanes. Your time is up. Hello, my name is Dreamcatcher. I think the plan is good. I've never seen such a city so friendly to homeless people. I know a lot of your city workers and I'm very polite to them and I like doing that. I think your plan is good. A place to go before you close down another one. It's appropriate. The boards, I have one myself. I'm going to make good use of it. I had a lot of experience with the occupy we had in the same location last year. And carry on. I think nobody should have anything more than they can carry in one trip. Everything should go inside the tents and the self-governing thing. That'll happen. Thank you for being our city government. Hello, my name is Shantanu Pukhan and I walk along the river two or three times a week. I'm a birder and I want to bring the perspective of a birder and someone who's interested in nature to this discussion. What alarms me most is the opening or the allegedly temporary opening of the benchlands encampment. And especially at this time of year because that particular stretch of the river at the benchlands is probably the richest stretch of river in terms of birds and bird breeding. And that has to do with the row of 10 or 12 cottonwoods that grow along that stretch and only there along the river. And also the island that is just north of the footbridge. This right now is the height of the breeding season from early April to about the end of June. So this would be a major disruption to the breeding birds along that stretch of the river. So that is one concern that I have. I'm aware that there are probably many people here who would think that it's extremely frivolous to even pit the needs of people against those of birds. But nonetheless, as a birder, I want to make sure that at least as we contemplate this issue, the environment and nature and wildlife are in the mix. The second issue that I have is that when the benchlands camp was open before, it was really unpleasant and sometimes downright unsafe to walk along the footbridge. About three or four times I was confronted by people standing. This man actually had a stout stick in his hand, daring me to cross the bridge. I thought about whether I should or should not cross and I went around him anyway. And as I did so, he made some racial comments. This used to happen for pretty regularly in the benchlands camp. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker and you'll have up to two minutes. Mayor, council, I'm impressed at where we're at. 2012 and 13, we brought a transitional encampment proposal to the city. We met with Susie O'Hara at that time and sat down. We were trying to bring this to many of you. There's a lot of these homeless activists have been at this game for a long time. So it just feels like we've been busy. But at some point, what is our forward vision? Now there is millions at play. We're going to build a large shelter. But to what end? Who are the people in control of these money? Who they've been the same people in control of this money all along. We are not actually ending homelessness through the dignity of work with the downtown streets team. We're not actually ending homelessness with 20 project 180 180. It's all just hype, feel good, pat ourselves on the back. Where are we now? We have an opportunity years. I've been trying to invest in getting transitional encampments. I went from San Diego. I tried to meet a couple of years ago. Every single homeless person in the state of California. And I think I was successful. It took me seven months and I went from to 40 cities. And I finally got to Eugene and Seattle and Portland. And it was like a mecca, an amazing thing. I went to Marysville. I went to Fresno. I went to also Ventura. These are where transitional encampments have taken a foothold. They're not self governed. They're operated by a nonprofit certified by a city that we empower the people with inside, they have volunteer, they voluntarily keep this safe space. Here we are now, my program, the storage program across the river. We were there predating this large encampment. I watched it grow. I'm there every day. We can talk about anecdotal stories about the nature of homelessness. But really has occurred is the city has allowed this to happen. The city has allowed this to become, and I'll say the word, a festering drug mud heap because we have no intentionality. And even with its transitional encampments, you couldn't even get together the four council people to really put a stake in the ground and make this happen. So where are we always playing lowest common denominator, taking the lowest path? But I actually have been to this thing in the Benchlands and it doesn't look so terrible. OK, next speaker and you'll have two minutes. This is a really sad day for the Santa Cruz community. Once again, for the 30 over 30 years that I've lived here, I've watched the city and county government fail to come up with really holistic solutions to provide affordable housing, proper medical care, proper mental health treatment, drug treatment options locally. And I just want to encourage you all to the data is already there. We don't need to form another homeless council to study the issue. There are many of us working in the trenches every day with these populations. And we have a firm grasp on why these issues exist. And you need to separate the different groups of people. You cannot lump everybody under the category of homeless and then think that you're going to solve this issue. So some of the solutions I suggest is that you look into how many mental health treatment beds we have locally, 16, none for juveniles, OK? Where does homelessness begin? It starts with foster care youth who are let out at age 18 with no opportunity and no guidance where to go. Your local jail, there's a for profit corporation running the medical care. That's a problem, that's cruel and unusual punishment and we need to switch that back to the county. The county can provide wraparound services and the city should hold them accountable as most of the homeless people are criminally dumped from other local counties, local cities into the city of Santa Cruz. So it's a very complex issue and it's going to take a lot of partnerships. And I haven't seen anyone on this council necessarily reach out and build that coalition of actual people who do this work, day in and day out. You don't need to study this, you just need to get us all in the same room and we will help you, we're here. Hello, my name is Satya. And I want to say something I haven't heard yet. I just want to really honor the members of the Ross camp for their courage and taking matters into their own hands to create safety and privacy and something that basic needs for themselves that most of us just take for granted. I agree that it's not an ideal situation but I really like the ideas I've heard many different places. I like what Bryn Adams is doing, I like what other cities are doing. That there's no way a lot of these people are ever going to get into regular housing. I know how hard it is to get into regular housing and I have money. I've almost been, not a lot, I've almost been homeless myself and I know how scary that is. And I know what it would feel like just to have nowhere to go during the day, just that simple thing that you have to take everything you have with you or put it in a box somewhere and have nowhere just to be. You have to go to the library, you can sit on the sidewalk and then you're not welcome there either and where do you go? So I would like to see the city see us work with them. They've started something, they've said what they need, they've tried. They need our help. They need us to set up some kind of a temporary encampment for them. I like the idea of moving them out to the bench lands and then bringing them back there where it's already set up, where they're there, where they have their community, work with them. They need our help, really need our help, so please help them. Don't just send them out to wander aimlessly looking, hoping for somewhere to be where there isn't anywhere to be, waiting for some neighborhood to welcome them. They're not going to, we need to ask their hearts, what can we do to help them? We need to help them. Thank you for everyone who spoke, I've been crying a lot today, it's beautiful. Thank you, thank you. Hello, I'm John Gundersgaard. Just a quick comment, I know a girl, a friend of mine who goes to Cabrillo. When she's done at classes, she takes the bus downtown. She only lives about a ten minute walk from downtown. She lives at the tannery, but she doesn't walk there. She sits there and waits for somebody to come and take her. Because she's terrified to walk past that camp. There are a number of other kids who are asking their parents to move because they're afraid of that camp. Now, I think you've gotta do something with it and fix it. But it can't stay there because there is really, really dangerous. And I hope you're looking at other alternatives. Thank you. Born and raised in Santa Cruz, lived here my whole life. I want to say that first, thank you guys for dealing with this again and again. I think that there's as long as it takes to figure this out, it's worth the time. Again, and I want to thank everyone for participating in this conversation. I've been at a lot of these meetings and I've watched the rest over my phone, thanks to technology, what not. And I want to say that I agree with most everything that's said on all sides of this issue. I also think that there's something that's been missing here for the most part except for a motion that I believe was voted on by a majority, by Council President Glover, to look at local ordinances and how they're being enforced that disproportionately affect people without houses. And I think that's really, really essential to this process. Because in order to get everyone affected by this at the same table, we need to start with the trust issue on all sides. But I think that you guys have the particular power to stop the cycle of criminalization that's over complicating and ruining from the start any sort of trust on both sides that's going to come to this table. I'm here also for the next issue, which is about cannabis. And it's always ironic to me that we've had the strength to stop criminalizing cannabis. But a lot of the time we find it hard to have the same strength when it comes to people in our community. Particularly people that when we look at the numbers, there is cycles of trauma, cycles of addiction, mental health issues, et cetera, et cetera. Not to mention the economic circumstances that I think everyone in this room, no matter where you're at, are having a hard time with in this community. So I think it stops with, or it starts with stopping to criminalize people who are experiencing homelessness. And I believe a motion was made, and I just want staff to come back with those things. So that we can take further action. Thank you. Is there any other members of the community that are interested in speaking to this item? Okay, you'll go ahead and line up to my left. Please do hop up to two minutes. Hi, my name is Sunny, and I've been a member of this community for at least 10 plus years. Okay, now I've been already over to the bench lands before, checked in that. I've been over there into the River Street 1220 encampment, went into there. Each one, out of six months, been getting kicked out, carrying our stuff, moving on to another location. Trying to set up for another location and carrying all of our stuff. Now we've actually created a community right over there behind Ross encampment. And for several years, you guys haven't done anything within that property for 15 or 20 plus years since it's been built, until homeless folks actually put a tent there. And now we have actually our community who actually does care, thank you very much. And for the one individuals who actually do care about human lives, children's lives, family lives, I mean, I've seen a lot of deaths either at the bench lands or the River Street encampment at 1220. And same thing, why are we gonna be opening that one up again and kicking them out? They shouldn't have moved in the first place. And after all, they're in encampment behind Ross. With $10 million that you guys actually heard about already, couldn't we build a condo for homeless folks, other than building a condo in town already? How many condos can it fit for families? Now we've actually housed not just 1,750 men, but we've actually housed 3,740 people. And families and kids. If we could buy some property and build a condo and do the structure just like that, because look at our community right now and look at AHSC. I've only had the permission to actually get called for Janice or Paige Smith today, you mean? And that's an interview today for me to get in. That's something exceptional, if it's something to actually get my kids back. Thank you. But the bench lands is not. Your time is up, thank you very much. Okay, next speaker. Hi, my name is Serge, stepping up Santa Cruz. I think a lot of people on both sides of, well, there's probably a lot of sides of this whole discussion. A lot of people are scared. A lot of people don't really understand the details of the thing. I think it's a communication issue. I really like the idea of the community advisory committee on homelessness. I have four suggestions for that, to be able to, in the future, to have input on this kind of discussion so that there's more transparency. Have weekly, for four recommendations for that, have weekly committee meetings with the city manager staff available for transparent conversations to make sure the committee understands what's being done presently, what's planned for the future to inform final recommendations that the committee may make. But also to give input on stuff like this on present decision making. Number two, include law enforcement and fire department representation on the committee because as we've seen from this discussion, it's valid and it's necessary to understand. Three, modify objectives and timelines to have the committee have time to create some expert draft recommendations, which would be offered at the community meetings, the five community meetings you suggest. Doesn't really help to have the community meetings without the experts really having something set up to offer. And then the fourth recommendation, move the time of the final recommendations for this October so that those recommendations can be part of winter shelter planning to have them be, February doesn't really help what we're going to do for this winter. That's it, thank you. Hi there, sorry I'm a little sweaty. We're doing park trips across the street of my property. First of all, hats off to Drew, who had a invite for Easter at the pink camp, which I took advantage of and my apologies, Drew in advance. I don't want to look like I'm knocking on what I saw, but let me just explain. My friend and I went there, we talked to six random folks, five of those six. We're not from Santa Cruz. One was from Seattle, via Milwaukee, where he's originally from and has a degree in IT, but he had a needle in one hand and a foil in the other and explain how he shoots his ass with hair or with meth. Then another one was from San Francisco, she'd been there several months. Another one, a young couple that did not appear to be on drugs or using drugs. They had the car impounded after parking in front of Lord Rock for five days with a broken alternator, and they're from Sacramento. And there was one, and next to them was a guy openly lighting a glass, a meth pipe, right there. At Beth, I would describe the place as organized clutter. At worst, it really is. I'm surprised with the open pit barbecues, lighters. That place is not caught on fire with the tents just crammed together and so forth. I mean, it has to move, it needs cleaned up, there's no doubt. But here's the good news, you have a very unique opportunity with moving to the benchlands with an organized tents, all of the same kind, to actually be a model even for the West Coast, how to run an encampment. And you let the folks that are okay with rules come to the camp and stay. But the key is you need rules, there has to be a moderate barrier of entry. And we'll find out, we'll smoke out who doesn't really want to, who just wants to exist on the streets doing whatever they want to do. And I'll be very interested to see how many actually migrate to the camp. And I don't think it's a hardship. By virtue of bored homeless, they can pick up and leave, they are very mobile. Thank you. I live and I work right next to the Ross encampment. And I feel safe walking by. I actually feel like people are, there's a community and people are helping solve needs together. There's really not the mental health crisis resources in Santa Cruz. Same with drug abuse problems. We just don't have the resources and we need to have them for people. Like what the woman said before that there's only 16 beds. That's just really unacceptable and really sad. And I mean, I just agree with what most people have said on my favor. Sorry. I'm here with a hona to talk to you about freedom, empathy and compassion. This dog can in this city go to two or three parts that are reserved for her. She has the freedom to run free and enjoy life and not suffer. Now, those of you who know me know that I love my dog. But I want to tell you something. I love human beings more. And it concerns me that you're possibly going to vote on 13, which will affect the suffering of fellow human beings. I'm not here to accuse you. I feel empathy for the difficulty of the decision you have to make. But empathy suggests that you feel the suffering of human beings and act in a way to make their lives as best as possible. And that means making sure that if you close that camp, that you have securely, conscientiously provided alternatives so that just as my dog can run free, fellow human beings can run free without suffering because of your empathy and your goodness to make the right decision. Lastly, I do appeal to the community to show empathy for each other. I feel empathy for the business people. I feel empathy for the homeless. I feel empathy for you. We can make a difference if we consult with each other and allow Alicia and her core group to work inside the Ross camp or the bench lands or whatever to work with the people to help solve the problems that exist in our community. Thank you. And then you'll be our last speaker. Go ahead. You're speaking? Okay. You'll be our last speaker. Will you please? Okay. Members of the community and city council, this is a lawsuit that was given half an hour ago to the city attorney. There's going to be a hearing on Friday at 9 a.m. in federal court on the issue of the Ross camp. So really what this means to be fair, and I'm appealing to the majority that can make this fair, is to at least wait until after that date before suggesting there's any final closing of this camp. It also might be protect you from legal liability. That's to be considered too. Now we heard that vice mayor come and say that it was not economical to open 12.20 because that was the main discussion at the two by two committee, which I understand is what pressured him and Watkins into demanding a closing on August 30th, which again is the third date and a change in the whole procedure. Plus we have this city manager edict off to the side, which is to move people to a park where the council has previously decided people should not go without any kind of council vote without any kind of council discussion about a kind of public output. So this is all being done sub rose. It needs to be suspended. Enforcement needs to be suspended on these issues until at least 9 a.m. Friday in the court hearing in in San Francisco. I'm in San Francisco in San Jose. Thank you. But more important than that, what we have here is a problem with, as I've said many times and as other speakers have also said, there is no adequate shelter, particularly with the closing of the depot park and no one's pretending there is. Instead, it's just a bald resolution ignoring that issue. Now, those of you are concerned about it, and I see the swing vote isn't here in the room when this is being mentioned. But I hope he hears it, need to address this issue, and they are going to be held accountable if they don't. And I ask the community to show up at 4 p.m. Tomorrow to make sure that they are not driven away. Thank you. Go ahead. Good afternoon. I'm Scott Graham. Given that you got this court order yesterday to clean out the camp, this issue before you may be a moot issue. I think you have to be honest with the community here. If the camp gets cleaned out tomorrow by four o'clock, are you going to let the people back in afterwards? I would say no, that's never going to happen. You're never going to allow them to go back. So you folks need to be honest with the community and with the people in the camp and let them know. Once you take them out of there to clean the camp, they're not coming back. And then you also have to tell the people that have been clamoring to close the camp that after the five or seven days on the benchlands, the homeless people are going to be scattered throughout the community and into the neighborhoods where the people don't want them. So you need to do something. This whole process right now lacks any kind of real planning. It's just like, okay, we've got the county supervisors pushing this matter, saying, well, we've got this $10 million. If you want any of it, you have to bend to our will. And that's exactly what's going on here. So in the future, please vote out Ryan Coonerty and Bruce McPherson. Because they don't work for the people. They work for the corporate interest who they have always taken money from. So with lacking a plan, I don't think you can move forward with this. And like I said, be honest with people, what's really going on here? Hi, Ms. M. Okay, so that concludes the public comment for this item, item number 13. We're going to go ahead and return back to the council for action and deliberation. I will just briefly say that I want to acknowledge that all the hours that I mentioned that we've spent on this item has not been for a lack of interest in wanting to seek solutions by everyone in this room, by everybody in the community, and I'm sure with my colleagues here up on the dais. We've had a lot of discussions in regards to moving forward in this way. There's clearly, this is an incredibly complex issue that I think no matter the amount of time would take hours and hours and hours, years and months, et cetera, to try to actually make movement on. And so we are dealing with a really tight constrained option. We've heard multiple times from our public health department, as well as our fire department, that the conditions there at the gateway encampment are truly not humane for those that are residing there and have impacts not only for them, but for the surrounding area. And it's also our responsibility to ensure that their safety is kept in mind as well as the others. So Vice Mayor Cummings and I co-authored the item before us, which is essentially saying, we acknowledge these constraints. What we're proposing is as opposed to the previous direction to have folks move back into that area, to have our existing shelter services, as well as the coming online 1220 River Street option, become available to provide more humane conditions for those that are experiencing homelessness in our community. So that is the item before us. It was an item that was discussed at length in terms of options when we met last time, which was April 9th. And in the interest of clarity in terms of some of the questions I think that were brought up by the community members. And for those to kind of understand where we're at today, I'll go ahead and ask our city staff at this time to come up and share a little bit about where we're at in regards to our current situation today. Thank you. Good afternoon, Mayor and Council. Sorry, hold on. I have a tripping hazard here. So I did want to provide the council, I'm sorry, I'm Suzy O'Hara, assistant city manager. I did want to provide a real time update as to the operations that are in place out at the bench lands at the gateway in Kampman as well. So as of about 15 minutes ago, 88 people have signed up for the bench lands. The bench lands is currently open, about 15% of those people have requested to be in a tent with somebody else. We have Salvation Army staff poised to open the bench lands currently right now. I think we're taking in the first person right now. In addition to that, we have multiple people out at the gateway in Kampman providing totes. This is across city departments transporting people over to the bench lands. I do want to give some context to what we've learned. So we've been out there for about four hours for the last two days. We have had incredible interest on behalf of the campers to move out of the gateway in Kampman. The first two people that signed up for the vouchers were the two men who pulled the people out of the car that was on fire on the highway. And what we heard from them was a significant interest in leaving the gateway in Kampman. Not interest in staying, fear, quite frankly, around the conditions at the camp. You know, a lack of interest in continuing on with that type of conditions in terms of their housing. In addition to that, I was out there for two hours yesterday taking information from people. We now have a list of 88 people. We have their names. We have their date of births. We have whether they have pets, partners, possessions. We understand their needs. We understand if they are interested in going to 1220 or other programs. We have emergency contact information for those people. We have gathered more information in the last four hours than we've been able to gather for the last four months. So I just really wanted to provide that context. Captain Harold will be here. Hopefully he'll be here any second to answer any questions that you have about the Salvation Army programs. You know, we do believe that we have adequate capacity. We have an amazing partner in the Salvation Army. They remain flexible and ready to serve the city. With our needs. So he will be here hopefully any minute as you guys deliberate and have an opportunity to ask questions between River Street, Laurel Street, VFW and all the other shelter options we have in this community. I am confident that we have enough resources to place people. Thank you, Susie. Council Member Myers, maybe just Susie before you go. I do have a question regarding a number of speakers today who mentioned they are here in Santa Cruz because their vehicle has been taken or they're not able to get home is sort of what I'm learning for a few people. Along with all of these, the shelter beds that are available as well as the bench lens. Are we also able to provide people who need the resource, whether that's a bus ticket or other financial assistance to help people move out of Santa Cruz if they're not able to do that on their own. Is there a way that we can do that right now as well if people need that? So we have resources with Homeward Bound. We have our Homeward Bound staff out there today that are working to provide Homeward Bound tickets to anybody who's interested in taking us up on that. In addition to just the sheer number of people that have signed up for vouchers for the bench lands. What we also really have learned is it's across the spectrum from folks that are in their 20s to older women in their 60s and 70s. I think for the most part, the people that we have engaged with are just simply ready to move on. Are happy to have a different set of resources available to them. What we intend to do once people get to the gateway, I'm sorry, to the bench lands is to immediately engage with them on other sheltering options, other resource options, other service options. So it really is a unique period of time where we can provide wraparound services for individuals as they move in really get a better feeling as to what resources they need in order to make a transition to housing or whatever benefits they may be eligible for. Thank you. I'm ready to make a motion now to direct the city manager to implement the city council approved standard operating procedures for a permanent closure of the gateway encampment with a target closure date of April 30th, 2019 and coinciding with the opening of the 1220 River Street camp. And to convert the temporary relocation of the gateway encampment at the bench lands under existing council directed site management plan to a permanent closure and direct bench land occupants to alternate shelter sites at 1220 River Street, VFW, Laurel Street and any other available shelter beds in the county at the earliest possible time to ensure full access of the bench lands for upcoming community events. And I just want to just make one very short comment. To me this is about restoring dignity to a group of people who have been struggling right in front of our community's eyes for four months and the city is, this is the right step. We need to provide opportunity for these people to find a better place. And so that's why I'm making the motion. Thank you. I'll second the motion. Okay. Is there any further discussion at this time, Council Member Glover, Crohn and Brown and Vice Mayor Coving? Thank you. So question for Suzy, thank you for that update. What's planned to happen after the five to seven days? Let's just say that the council votes tonight to close the camp. What's going to happen after five to seven days when the bench lands closes? So that really, so if you vote to close the gateway encampment, we will be working with every individual in the bench lands on alternative shelter options, Homer Bown, other resources that they may have at their disposal. So the intention is to ensure that everybody at the bench lands has another shelter bed that they can transition to when the bench lands closes. Thank you. And then at this current time, knowing our current resources available for shelter beds and assuming that there is let's just say 150 to 200 people, high-ballot and say 200 people just in case at the bench lands that doesn't get established, will we have enough shelter space should the bench lands close in five to seven days to transition those 150, but let's say 200 people into alternative shelter structures, say, assuming that none of them take or even a 10% of them take the Homeward Bown program. Yes, I do believe that we have enough resources to ensure that everybody has an alternative place to go. Okay, thank you. And then for the police chief. Wonderful. Good afternoon. If you could, would you please update us on the enforcement plan once the bench lands is established? We have certainly in the process of planning to make sure that the court order is enforced and to move everybody along to a better location where there is not the systemic problems that are currently there. So between fire and police personnel, we will go out and help people to transition to the next location. Thank you. I was apologize for not being more clear. I was more the enforcement of, say, camping, sleeping, trespassing, all that kind of stuff. Will that still be an effect in the city or will there be certain codes and ordinances that won't be enforced? Well, we have not written a camping ticket and things associated with that in some time because that has been invalidated. Right, and then, but have you seen an increase in trespassing citations? We are writing trespassing citations on private property, yes. And so I know that there was counsel direction or rather somewhere there were not going to be enforcing the camping ban or camping and sleeping ordinances, but that means that you will still be enforcing trespassing ordinances or trespassing citations. Yes, people have the right to have control of their own personal properties. And because there have been reports of people getting citations on properties that don't have no trespassing in public spaces or even in private spaces. So can you speak to that? Are your officers citing people that are inhabiting or occupying places that are not posted with no trespassing? I sure can. If someone is camping on somebody else's property, our normal practice is to warn them to leave. If they don't leave or if they come back, then we can issue a citation as long as there's a letter of authority on file. That letter of authority is on file that gives us the right on behalf of that property owner to cite that person. And does that also pertain to public property? Do you cite trespassing citations on public property? Other than the railroad tracks, which can be pretty hazardous, as you might guess, the train's going through, no. No. So no citations in parks for trespassing? Not that I'm aware of. I could research that for you. OK, I would really appreciate it if you could find that information and bring it back to me. But thank you. I appreciate that. There were some notes here from the public comment. It is concerning. I appreciate the community member, Shantanu, coming to talk about the impact on birds. I do think it's interesting to have it set up at the benchlands without there being council green light on that and without public inputs. And I also want to emphasize it was interesting. I appreciate the mention or the suggestion from Rafa with regards to doing as much community outreach as possible. I also find it interesting that there was another community member who said that we need to stop because I know people have put their input in already. I think I'd rather err on the side of too much public comment than not enough public comment, which would explain my motion earlier to extend it. Also, I was a little dismayed and concerned with a statement about it. It's time to stop crying about the agenda. This is about protecting democracy. And I want to make sure that we're putting that out there. And I can't talk too much about it, but I just want to clarify with the city manager, you were present at the agenda review when this was being made. Yeah, but your staff is the one that went and handed out the flyers. It stipulated that at 10 a.m. today was when the beginning of the relocation of the people at the camp would start. Well, there was a variety of staff from the city manager's office, police and others. Susie can tell you specifically who was out there. Thank you. I want to be really careful about how we talk about this because we reposted every single tent yesterday with a 4 p.m. on Wednesday vacation, not today at 10 a.m. So I think we have been really clear with the folks that we have engaged with out there. Every single tent has been posted. But with regard to the intersection of today's council meeting with the 10 a.m. posting from last week, that was staff from FIRE, the parks department, SCPD and the city manager's office. And at that time, when we had moved forward with posting both the order to vacate per our SOPs and the experts hearing, that was on request of the judge to move forward in that direction. So that was not direction on behalf of the city manager's office. Absolutely. My question was the 10 a.m. Tuesday poster that was put up over Easter weekend. And were you aware that it was a 10 a.m. Tuesday timeline that was posted on that document? I'm not sure if I understand your question, but with respect to the posting, it was not at all related to the timing of the agenda. I'm just asking you a question. Were you aware that the removal of people was going to begin or was posted to begin over the weekend on Tuesday at 10 a.m.? Were you aware of it? Yeah, and it said honor after, so it didn't give that as a deadline. It actually said honor after Tuesday at 10 a.m. So that's where my understanding was that we were proposing to meet our SOP requirements and that would be, but it would be an ongoing process. I understand the logic. I'm not asking the logic or why you did it. I asked if you were aware of it because that gets back into our conversation about the scheduling and where I really find it hard to believe this was a coincidence and I want to address this because it was brought it up. It was responded to by a community member and I want to provide clarity because this is a really important issue. If you're in the agenda review and you're building the agenda and you know that your staff has put out documents that say 10 a.m. on or after 10 a.m., then I do feel that it is less of a coincidence for this change to happen and it becomes really hard for me to see this as like, oh, it just happened to be on there. This is not what we're talking about today. So I'll move past it, but I want to make sure that I emphasize that we have responsibilities as people that are building these meetings and we don't have as council members access to the agenda review because of policy. So if we are putting our faith in you both to schedule meetings so that we A, have enough time and B, the maximum amount of people can participate in the democratic process, I think we need to be able to hold each other accountable to maximizing public engagement in this really important issue. Mayor, if I may, nobody in agenda review council members that were there nor staff was aware of the 10 a.m. time during the agenda review that came after. So then you built the agenda before you put the documents out? So the implementation of the SOPs, that process happened in terms of when we would move forward with the postings after agenda review. So you had the agenda built and then put out the flyers saying 10 a.m. or two, so it doesn't matter. Either one did, whichever one came first. I just want to make sure we're really careful about what we're suggesting. Whichever way you want to frame it. So back to the point and it's a comment to put on the record and share with my colleagues to try and help them to understand the issue that we face right now. So I want to preface these next comments, which I need to make sure are on the record with a statement that anybody in this room right now and anybody watching can come homeless at any moment. That's because a recent study was put out by prosperitynow.org citing that 40% of people in the United States are one paycheck away from poverty. I'm dismayed by the way that certain members of the public and even some of these chambers treat and refer to the people experiencing homelessness. And in my opinion, it's downright uncivil. I say this for two reasons. The first is because as soon as we stop treating people like people, the next step is to lose all compassion and sympathy for them. That recognition, that validation, as simple as it may seem is something that every one of us needs. Second, due to the observations made by myself and those experiencing homelessness about the violent ways in which the city interacts with the camp, there is no real physical violence with regards to what's going on. But there is psychological violence, both in the consistent back and forth of the decisions, the movement with the court decision at such a quick pace, but also in the way that we're engaging with the camp in general. We're treating them like they're dangerous criminals and this is a reality that makes it almost impossible to build relationships of trust between people experiencing homelessness and the city. Now it's great to hear that there are 88 people that have signed up to move into vouchers. That's fantastic. But if I was someone who was experiencing homelessness and was faced with the threat of a court order and potential arrest if I don't move my stuff, I'm going to move my things and be much more amenable to be doing it. So I just wanna say that. The other issue is during the ex parte application, the timings associated with it and all of this that comes together makes it really difficult for people to engage, especially this idea of criminality because there are people in there that I personally believe do not and have not broken the law. Would you mind putting those images up on the screen for me, Bonnie? So I wanna share a couple images as well. The first one is, the first two I should say, I think, should put them up. Oh, wonderful, thank you. The first two are images that pertain to the posting of the original documents, letting people know about what's going on. We go to the next slide, it's a little bit better. Oh, thank you. So this is an issue of the relationship and the optics that go along with the great work that the staff has done with trying to engage and participate with people, but the message that we're sending while we're doing it. If I could just for clarification, is this something you're using as a visual to have a point be made or is this a proposal? I wasn't aware that there was gonna be a presentation of this. Instead of me printing out documents because I really don't like printing out and wasting paper, I figured I would just share the images. A few images for your observations. Yeah, and then also to share my perspective with my colleagues. And then, Council Member Cron, and then Council Member Brown, you'll go next. Thank you, thank you very much. Next, next, can you just press next for me? Because this isn't working. It fell early. There we go, excellent. Okay, so here's a better picture. Just the sheer volume of police and ranger representatives to deliver and put together the postings of the notices, I think it was for the ex parte actions as well as the planned removal of people starting on Tuesday at 10. Just there in that image, if you're someone experiencing homelessness and already have an aversion to police and or fire for whatever reasons, whether it be trauma-based or whether it be from previous experiences, that in itself is gonna send a message. If you go to the next slide, please. On the contrary, this last Sunday, I coordinated a gathering with people in the community to be able to meet and engage with people in the camp. This is a picture of egg dying, next slide, please. With people from all different ages, next slide, please. We served food, we had intergenerational people. It was a great opportunity. People that came to differing political views but left appreciative of the opportunity, next slide, please. And we were able to die over 100 and some odd eggs sharing and engaging and talking and having fun. It was a great opportunity and I bet you that if we were taking these kinds of approaches towards addressing the issue of homelessness and city engagement, we would have a lot more of a possibility of engaging positively with people instead of criminalizing them and making them feel bad. Two more slides, I believe. Oh, so here's a shot from the behind. And then next, please. And then next, please. And then next, please. That's my favorite shot right there. Next, please. Okay, so and every time I go to the camp, and this is where I'm always really confused about this whole process and cleanup and the statements that things aren't happening and they're planning on happening, is it every time I go to the camp, or most times I go to the camp, people are there to greet me with these kinds of suggestions, their acknowledgments about the issues that are going on in the camp and their clear ideas of how they can make it so it's better. Next slide, please. They even draw me schematics of how the camp can be structured and how it can be set up. So I find it really, really hard to believe that it's been impossible for us to be working with the people of the camp to do a joint solution to figure out what's going on. When I have these kinds of interactions with them whenever I'm down there. So I wanna emphasize that when we're talking about the relocation of the people in the camp and the potential closure because if we close it, the people that have thought about this, that have lived there, that are experiencing it, they are going to be, as has been mentioned before, displaced or forced to go into other locations. What's being proposed today, the permanent closure of the camp has been done over and over again over the last decade in Santa Cruz. And I think we've found that it doesn't work. We need to be innovative instead of being stuck in past models of criminalization and shooing people away from one place to another. So I was just doing, because we're all required to as council members, participate in an ethics training, which is great. I did it for- Okay, this is the chance for council to deliberate. We've heard from the community. Thank you. Okay, that's all right. Go ahead. The issue of not working ethics training, right? So I recently went through an ethics training, which I also had to do for the commission for the prevention of violence against women. And I mean, in reality, all of us have gone through this training supposedly, or we're all have supposed to have gone through this training. And something that is consistent among all ethics trainings and literary scholars that study ethics is that just because something is legal, does not make it morally or ethically defensible with regards to what you're doing. What we're talking about right now is not only morally wrong, it's legally ambitious or ambiguous. Yes, we have our judge order thing, but the plaintiffs have submitted the TRO in federal court for Friday. So why are we not going to at least wait until the federal courts have an opportunity to make their decision before we move ahead with forceful removal of people from the facility? Especially if we minus 88 people and their belongings and their tents from that area, that should loosen up the density and allow us to start looking at fire code safeties and other kinds of things. I'll remind my colleagues that the Holocaust was legal, slavery was legal, Jim Crow was legal, segregation was legal, and concentration camps for the Japanese Americans were legal, apartheid was legal in South Africa. So not even referring, and this gets back to my first point about dehumanization, not even referring to the gateway participants as people. People have, we've adopted this term campers, which is in my opinion rather derogatory. They are people that are living in the Ross camp. And the more that we start to come up with these nicknames and these terms, drives us farther and farther away from acknowledging their people. We need to be focusing on their dignity, we need to be focusing on their human rights. And there are other people like Jordana, I can't even pronounce her last name, Jordana G. She's the founder of the Nylon Project. And it started as a college project of figuring out how you can have a coat that turns into a sleeping bag to provide shelter. Why are we not working with the university filled with new innovative minds and energy up there to partner with the city to come up with solutions instead of trying to push people around and criminalize those experiencing homelessness. We need to spend time designing with the people of the camp, of the people experiencing homelessness because they know what they need. And what I really think we need to understand is the importance of understanding their thoughts and feelings, not just where they're from, their birth dates and whether they have pets or animals or partners, but who are they? Why are they here? What are they doing? How are they needing support? And what can we do to support them? As was mentioned by the other person whose bank account was emptied from HUD and lost their housing and it was a really easy person to help. So I encourage us to partner with local businesses, I encourage us to think outside the box. I'm gonna be voting against this motion today and I'm actually going to be putting together a substitute motion which would delay the closure of the Ross camp until the federal hearing this Friday at 9 a.m. Okay. Yeah. Council member come. So with that and knowing that I'm not gonna do it, I'm just gonna pause for a moment and then officially put that forward as a motion to delay the closure of the Ross camp until after the federal hearing this Friday at 9 a.m. So we have a motion by council member Glover to delay the closure of the Ross camp until after Friday's hearing. Is there a second? Second. Mr. Condati? No. We have a substitute motion made by council member Glover a seconded by council member Cron. Further discussion? Question for clarification. Council member Brown. Multiple motions on the floor. Do we just? We have up to three motions on the floor at one time. Thank you. I believe and we can vote on the substitute motion prior to returning back to the original motion is my understanding. We'll go ahead and pause and let our city attorney clarify for us if that's appropriate. And my understanding is that this is a motion. What we are voting on is whether or not to consider the motion, not on the substance of the motion itself. That's correct. Okay. You're voting on whether to accept the substitute motion. Okay, so there's a motion and a second. And if I might reword that motion, mayor. Council member Glover, you can restate your motion. Thank you. I'd like to just clarify for the record. The motion is to delay the decision on whether or not to close the Ross camp until after the federal hearing this Friday at 9 a.m. Okay, there's a motion by council member Glover, seconded by council member Cron. The vote on the substitute motion, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? No. So that fails with council member Brown, council member Cron, council member Glover, voting in support, council member Matthews, vice mayor Cummings, Myers and myself voting against. So we'll go now back to the original motion on the floor made by council member Matthew, sorry, council member Myers and myself as the question for debate at this time. And I'll remind council members that the issue before us is regarding the closure of the camp and to confine if, as appropriate, the consideration of that at this time. Council member Cron and then council member Brown. Thank you. A couple of questions for Ms. O'Hara. I'm just wondering, I'm kudos for ADA people signing up. That's wonderful because I don't think, just in response to some people who said, what's going on in the camp as far as cleaning it, I think there's a lot of recognition that yes, the camp needs to be clean, but some people wanted the folks who lived there to join in that effort versus the city just coming in wholesale. I wanted to go over the numbers when you said the resources like VFW, how many people can stay there? Laurel Street and 1220 River Street. Yeah, so our forecast for River Street camp is 80 sites, sorry, 60 sites. We are in the process of determining how many double occupancy tents we will have at that site. We are finding a large portion of the folks that are moving to the benchlands are interested in doubling up. That actually may increase our numbers over there up to say 20 double occupancy sites. So now we're looking at 80, even maybe more than that, 80 to 90 people at 1220. In terms of the capacity at the VFW and Laurel, that does change daily, but I know that we do have additional capacity even from a week ago. If you're interested, Captain Harold did make his way over here so he can talk a little bit more about those resources and really the commitment that Salvation Army has to being flexible and really meeting the needs of those individuals that are at the camp through across these programs. Both of those, the VFW and Laurel, the VFW has a capacity of 60. That is not the open capacity at this time. I'll have Captain Harold talk about that. And Laurel has a capacity of 40 to 50. That is, again, not the open. My understanding from our conversation with Captain Harold last week that there are about 40 to 50 beds that are available between those two programs. So if you count 1220, VFW and Laurel, we're anywhere from between 120 and 130 people that we can accommodate. We've had previous discussions at the council as to the potential of using hotel vouchers. We have a hotel here in Santa Cruz who is equally committed to helping the city out, very flexible in really delivering what we need. So really when it comes down to ensuring that we have those individualized conversations with the people at the Benchlands, we'll have a better understanding of what the appropriate next steps are for each of them. A woman came to the podium and did a count yesterday. She got up to 280 to 300 people, she thinks could be in that camp. Is that no way? That's inaccurate. Okay, how many would you say? I'm still say 150 at the max. Okay, so just what would be plan B if there's an excess number of persons and that don't fit into VFW, Laurel Street and 1220? Also knowing that VFW and Laurel Street are not really day centers either. They're just like you sleep there overnight, right? And then you have to leave. You have to be there by a certain hour. Whereas I'm assuming 1220 would be more of a place where people could a day center. Yeah, so the resources that we have that we talk about all the time are not the only resources that are available for our residents of the Gateway encampment. Sunny who is up here has been searching for housing for months. He just has an interview for Page Smith today or tomorrow. Those are resources that are coming online for individuals at any given minute. So what we really are committed to doing, as I mentioned a couple minutes ago, is ensuring that we have a full case kind of wrap around services for folks at the Benchlands. The county has committed to bringing in HPHP to help us with this. People will be eligible for things that we are not talking about today. There is mental health beds. There are SUD, so we're living environment beds. Really the intention is to meet everybody's individual needs as we understand them. So the bed count that we're talking about with regard to the Salvation Army programs, quite frankly is really just the tip of the iceberg. And so the plan B is really looking across that spectrum of resources and then also deploying those hotel vouchers if those Salvation Army beds and every other bed that we have available in our county is fully exhausted. I was at the camp with six other people yesterday and we interviewed folks and did various counts, three different counts. We got anywhere between 147 to 179 tent structures. And as somebody said, the officer mentioned there was probably two in the tents that are occupied and maybe three in the larger tents. It's kind of, people told us that they were told that they would move to the bench lands and then be allowed to move back. And that was the word that was going out amongst folks from the city. I'm sorry, move to the bench lands and then move back to Camp Ross, Gateway Camp. Is that information that our staff is giving out or where did people get this information from? Absolutely, that is information that we have been giving out because we were not in a position to talk about what this council would be deliberating on today. Okay, so if you thought reasonably, how many people would be able to fit at the Gateway Camp if it was cleaned up and fire protected and within the parameters that we've been thinking about? So the fire chief has also laid out the Gateway encampment and the intentionality is to create as many spaces there as we currently have and really ensuring that we have that 12 foot separation and plotting it out in the way that creates those health and safety standards that we need. How many spaces was that? I don't have the piece of paper in front of me, but I think we have counted as of yesterday about 140 tents out there. So that would be the intention. And I just wanna say that with the folks doing everybody with advanced college degrees counting and nobody came up with a number that they thought conservatively 200 people were out there. And that's just what we came up with. And I just wanna put that out there because I think that we're not, I share the vice mayor's skepticism he said at the beginning of whether we will be able to house everybody. I was extremely touched by folks who came to the microphone today as I also noticed and that's why I supported Council Member Glover on a three minutes that the quality of remarks last time we did that was unbelievable. I was really surprised at how much, how thoughtful folks were and the people who wanted to speak in one minute spoke. The woman who spoke from the tannery today, I don't think there's anyone up here that does not share wanting to clean the Ross camp and I thought I was telling the guy from Five Guys Burger who lives in his car who also has been through a lot and shares our skepticism of having a camp but said that you are going to put that element on everybody and that's what I've been hearing from a lot of neighbors on the west side and the east side. Mr. Hall said you face a humanitarian crisis and that you wanna eject people from a camp without having adequate transitional housing. That's my greatest fear here, although I do support moving folks to the bench lands. Mr. Gusser wanted us to make sure we keep the eye on the prize, the people and not the Martin versus Boise, that maybe should be second. And I think Mr. Brown summed it up about the time here about many hardworking people from the tannery not being able to be here because they're at their jobs and I think the whole thing about inherent dignity and inalienable rights from the UN Declaration of Human Rights and we're not willing to be kicked out during the day. That's the problem is day center. That's what I hear missing from a lot of our conversations that we have enough bed spaces but where will people be during the day? They won't necessarily be where they want to be but they will be on Pacific Avenue, they'll be in various neighborhoods that they don't necessarily want to be. I thought what we need to come out of this and I think should be part of maybe a substitute motion is that we actually clean the camp and have an accurate population count and a census and that we track our success. I was overjoyed to hear Ms. O'Hara talk about the data that's been collected. I think that is key to any process moving forward to actually get a grip on who is homeless, why are they homeless and how we can direct them to services. Somebody said that there are only 16 mental health beds. Is that accurate, Susie? 16? So that's detox beds. Detox, so how many mental health programs do you say we have in the county now? I mean, maybe that's too much. So mental health or behavior like substance abuse or mental health or both? I don't have that figure but I know that between the resources that we have at Encompass, Janice and the other SUD programs, there is a significant shortage of beds in our community and the detox beds is quite frankly where we have that funnel. Because people that are either abusing alcohol or particularly heroin, they need detox in order to move on to residential programs. So I do think that's an important conversation for this council to have and I know that there's other council members who would be interested in engaging on that. Thank you and I know we're always thinking about well, people tell us what not to do, tell us what to do. A lot of folks leave that part out, just tell us what not to do. I really was impressed by Serge talking about having transparent conversations and including law enforcement in the fire department on a committee, any committee that we're gonna have to set up with the committee of experts, create an expert draft of recommendation and then go out to the community and say what do you think? I think that was an excellent suggestion and move the determination to October. I think that's what he said before the winter shelter is needed and before the winter begins. I wanna thank Rabbi Posner too and pointing out our dog parks because I really like those dog parks but he made a very poignant statement about having, we're letting the dog, we have a lot of good dog parks and Mr. Graham said about being honest with campers and that's what I'm really focused on too and that's why I brought it up to Ms. O'Hara's attention that people have been told they will be able to move back and I wanna be honest to what our staff has been maybe telling folks and what I got from people yesterday as well. I wanna, last two comments are I really want to hand it to my colleague, Drew Glover. It took me a couple of years to figure out what I will call deceptive nature of agenda review and how agendas are put together and he has figured it out and continues to articulate that. I'm really proud of you, Drew and also the power dynamics over that and the stuff that he's putting out and for solution oriented and protecting rights and the power dynamics that exists. I mean, showing a slide, it is really hard when you are the most vulnerable and you're confronting these amazing resources that the community has but they're using those resources with what appears to be using them against you and I just wanna point that out. I think that if we, I'm gonna support folks moving to the bench lands, cleaning up the camp and if we don't do that, we're gonna create insecurity for people. We're gonna cause homeless people to go to places that they were before. The one that I always jog by alongside Holy Cross used to be up to 30 tents there at any given time last year. Since the Ross camp, it's been cleaned up and I'm assuming people have either moved on or gone to the Ross camp and I don't wanna, I think having a camp actually also concentrates folks into a place you can get them services and you want them to be near the homeless services center, for example. That's why I think it's important that we maintain some sort of overflow capacity that we're saying I think if there's 150 to 200, we should be preparing for that many, at least 200 to 250 and I think keeping the 1220, the Ross camp and the other venues at VFW and Laurel Street open, that would provide us with some time to continue to work these things out. Thank you very much, Mayor. Councilor Brown. So I have a question. I would like to hear a little bit about the plans for the operations at the River Street camp because one of the major issues of concern to me is related to obviously access and particularly with respect to ingress and egress for people who work odd hours, need to come and go. I do wanna hear more about that. While we have the opportunity, it would be helpful and then I do have some comments after that. Yeah, so the transportation at River Street camp 2.0 will be the same as the previous program. So between the hours of 7 a.m. and 9 p.m., there will be nearly hourly shuttle service. What we found during the last iteration of the River Street camp is there are plenty of people who have jobs that fall outside of those hours. We made accommodations for every single person. So while walk-on walk-offs on mass is challenging for the neighborhood, once the community is established and we understand people's schedules, there's absolutely flexibility to ensure that people can access those services. While we're in charge, the city's doing the transportation but you should hear from Captain Harold because he's here and he's really amazing. I would like to hear Captain Harold if you don't mind just coming up and telling us a little bit about the plans. And thank you for taking this on. Don't thank me yet. Oh my, okay. So concerning River Street and transportation on and off. So as Suzy noted, we do our staff in all of our locations do go essentially on a case-by-case basis when it comes to families, whether it be taking children to school, picking children up, going to people going to employment. Some have vehicles, some do not. So in every case, all we assure is that whatever the need is, is documented. So if they have what we simply ask, if they have a work schedule, we ask them for the work schedule when they get it. They tell when they get it so we realize what hours they're going to come or go on or off the property. Completely doable, that's no problem whatsoever. River Street will operate the same way. So we don't come up against many issues when it comes to transportation. We do see the inherent risk of walk-ons and walk-offs in all of our locations. And therefore the programs that we put in place so far with both with having external security and with providing a bussing on and off every property every morning and every afternoon. We have negated just about every community concern so far when it comes to people hanging out in other someone's neighborhood or neighborhood whatever, car theft, things like that that tend to increase when you have a large population just hanging around somebody's front yard. So that doesn't happen around any of our properties. It doesn't happen at the VFW. It doesn't happen at 721 Laurel Street. And so I think with the different security, the security precautions that we've taken so far, we've addressed most of those issues. And because of the flexibility with our staff and timing, we've addressed most of the issues when it comes to employment and schooling of children and things like that as well. What about the, excuse me, Mr. Mayor? What about the bench lands? What kind of security or issues do you think going on there? Are you gonna proceed in the same way you are going to at 1220 or is it a different plan? Similar, very similar. So it's be a fence property that does not allow walk-ons and walk-offs except through a controlled entry point. So we can monitor who comes on, who comes off. We can monitor whether it be medical emergencies, law enforcement calls, things like that. So yes, those things can be monitored. At the same time, all of the same services that we currently use or utilize in all of our other things whether it be the partnership with HPHP and for medical, for wound care or for medical referrals for vaccinations, all those things like that. We utilize HPHP in every shelter that we have here in the county, which is three currently, and not just them. We utilize services from Wings and Encompass and HSC and we have relationships ongoing every day with Paulie Loft and the Rebelly Family Center and I believe I shared with them, Councilman Cummings the other day, we have a partner list of 23 different agencies that we work with weekly just here in the county. The last question is if you were called upon to manage both the 1220 and a future encampment behind Ross, would you be able to do that? At current staffing levels, no. I would need at least, I'm gonna say 60 days to acquire enough staff to operate two camps at one time. Thank you, thank you, Mayor. I seated the floor to allow for questions, but I do wanna make my comments. Is there a round? Okay, so I really try not to use this space to hold forth about my broader views on issues related to the agenda items we consider here. Sorry, so I really try not to use this space to hold forth about my broader perspectives on the issues related, broader issues related to agenda items that we consider here. I try to be very specific to the agenda item at hand, but I'm gonna make an exception today because I really feel the need to respond more broadly to some of the assertions being made by members of the public and kind of the broader constellation of challenges that we are facing here. I am sad, I am frustrated, I wanna scream. Thank you, Barbara River Woman, for screaming on my behalf. I'm not gonna do that, but it's that kind of day. So I'm dismayed by the assertions and implications that we, from members of the public, that we on the council who support safe spaces for people to sleep, and those of us who are defending human and constitutional rights of unhoused people that we're somehow enabling them. I just disagree, and I have all kinds of reasons why. I'm happy to talk with anybody about that and debate that, but I just do not think that evidence suggests that, you know, supporting people's basic human rights and constitutional rights and wanting to work in solidarity with them and support of them is enabling. I'm dismayed by the conflation of the presence of unhoused people in our neighborhoods with increased dangers. I understand there are concerns, and I don't wanna disrespect people who come forward with legitimate concerns, but there's kind of this implication that anywhere that unhoused people go, danger and crime ensues, and I just don't think that the data I've reviewed, the evidence I've reviewed, particularly with respect to transitional camps, supports that. So I just disagree, I'm gonna agree to disagree with you all who, but I'm dismayed about that contention. I'm dismayed that this has become such a contentious issue in our community among people who I believe are all are mostly very well-meaning. And I look forward to working with members of the community moving forward because this is not the final action that we will take on this matter. I'm also dismayed by the, really dismayed by what I consider to be strong armed tactics of the county, the agency, the entity, the jurisdiction that has control over the kinds of resources that we need, that we so critically need to provide critical shelter space and supportive services, that if we don't vote for a permanent camp closure today, we will lose access to other resources. I'm just very dismayed about that, and I wanna acknowledge that that's happening. Others may view it differently, but that's what I see when I look at the balance of evidence here. You know, there is an optics question here. And we hear from people who visit the camp or have ideas about what the camp is like that may be exaggerated on all sides. The reality is people see what they wanna see. Some people see rats and needles and despair and scary activities, scary people. That's not what I see. I don't see needles. Well, I've seen a few needles, but I don't see needles just like everywhere when I visit the camp. I don't see rampant, dangerous activity. I'm sure it's there. That's not to disrespect those who have those concerns and are trying to do their best to address them. What I see is guys like Kevin who calls himself one of the original Levy dwellers. He started living on the Levy in 1973 when his house burned down when he was eight years old. And he's had a lot of practice at living outside, on the margins in our community and in mutual aid situations with other people. That's what people really expressed. When I go there, that's what they expressed. They want is they wanna be able to be in a space where they can support each other. There are some people who are not there for that reason, but that is a huge factor. Many people that I've spoken with, the vast majority of people that I have spoken with, that's what they want. A space where they can identify each other, they can find each other, they can be, I mean, Kevin, who while we were talking yesterday, gave the shoes off of his feet to another camp resident to run down to the county building. So a guy who had to go to court on another matter had shoes to enter the courtroom. It's an anecdotal experience, but I don't think it's unique. These are the kinds of things that people do for each other when they can be together in a safe space. I could say a lot more about Kevin and some of the other people that I've met and the myths and facts that a member of our community who was out there with me yesterday, Barbara, a river woman who was here today, put together about the camp, but I won't. I do think that we have our heads in the sand about the lack of adequate shelter alternatives. I think it's disingenuous to say that we take this, we need to take this action because no one should have to live this way. When the alternatives we are giving them are constrained with respect to the spaces that they can go to, limited in numbers, limited in terms of ingress and egress and other factors, I appreciate Sergeant Harold that you've said, Sergeant Harold? Captain Harold, I'm sorry, I knew I was gonna get that wrong. Captain Harold, that you wanna work with folks and I really appreciate that, so I don't wanna discount that, but I do think that there are still challenges and I've heard about many of them over the years. The other option being dispersal back into the neighborhoods, into the streets, where people are hard to find, they're atomized, they can't protect each other, they can't support each other and that is the reality of what is going to happen. I just, and with all due respect to, and really kudos to our staff who have worked really, really, really hard and with really good intention to come up with viable solutions, alternatives, we, to an intractable problem, we just don't have alternatives and for that reason, I cannot support the action today to permanently close the Ross camp. Vice Mayor Cummings, Council Member Myers and then City Attorney Condati, okay. There's been a lot of information and sentiment from all members of our community on this issue and I wanna thank all the members of the community for reaching out and expressing how they feel about this. Before I actually say anything, I actually had another question for Susie, if you had an opportunity. I was just curious what some, there was a mention of other alternatives and I was just curious what those other alternatives are in addition to 1220 and the VFW Hall and the Laurel Street Shelter. Yeah, so the Polly Loft has 40 beds. We had, for instance, a woman that showed up to the Gateway Encampment yesterday who currently has a bed at the loft who wanted to move to the benchlands. So there is just a lot of movement day by day with our shelter beds. There are substance use disorder programs that have beds. There are mental health beds as well. There is the AFC Rotating Shelter that has beds. The Salvation Army has a free substance use disorder program in San Jose. I don't know how many beds are there. Seven open beds over the hill. We have, when I was managing the PACT program, we had a number of people that elected to move into that. That's a six month program that provides free substance use disorder treatment and housing. So in addition to that, there are homework bound options for folks. Somebody on the camp council who has spoken many times to this council was expressing interest in homework bound to Sacramento last Friday when we were there doing outreach. I think when people are at a place where they must make a decision, those decisions become very diverse and vary depending on not only the resources that people have in front of them, but their individualized needs at that time. And so, you know, across the spectrum of shelter opportunities, in addition to that we have about 50 hotel vouchers in our hands right now. I think we could double that number easily. So we do really have a number of different opportunities for people and it really does get down to what are those individualized needs and how can we best meet those needs? I guess to follow up, I think I have the same question that some other folks are kind of murmuring in the background, which is how many days would those vouchers be for? They can be for as many days as this council is interested in providing. I might have a couple of questions. Thank you very much. I might have a couple of questions for Captain Harold. I was just wondering if you could comment on barriers to entry because I think some folks are concerned with Salvation Army shelters in other states restricting people based on their gender, based on their sexual orientation. And so I wonder if you could speak to that a little bit. And also some folks are concerned about pets as well as barriers. Pets. Pets. Okay. So first, I'd start off by saying don't believe everything you read on the internet, right? So, and I won't say that there's, that no Salvation Army unit has any employees that may have biases or racist issues. I don't know of any organization, including government, that could guarantee that none of their employees ever do anything wrong or whatever. That said, the Salvation Army, specifically in the United States and more specifically in Central California, has for the last few years done a remarkable job putting out both press releases and personal accounts of people from the LGBTQ community both being employed by our agency and participating in our adult rehabilitation centers, which are the drug and alcohol treatment centers, as well as our different housing programs, transitional housing programs from everywhere, from LA to Eureka and every place in between. So that said, again, the bad things that hit the media and the internet are not always believable. We all know that, right? We're adults. At the same time, many, many years ago when there was a very large public issue in another country that made it to our internet issues here about the behavior of one person in another country that did something like that, again, what we forget is it was in another country and it was one time 10 years ago and sure enough, I still get reminded annually on my internet media about that. People, they drag it up, they forward me things. Is this true? Our public relations department have put out videos and different things like that on what our stance is. There is no discrimination and or bias in any program that I operate or that I am currently aware of in California for anyone based on gender orientation, on income or disability or anything like that. So while we are a faith-based organization and we refuse to back away from that, the services that we offer are, generally speaking, not faith-based and we receive many contracts from different local cities, counties, state agencies that would immediately stop if we were ever found to be in violation of any of those discrimination policies. I can say it doesn't happen here, it doesn't happen as far as I know of. In the off-case that it does happen, the employees are dealt with in the legal way that you deal with employee disciplinary issues. And could you also refer to pets? Oh, pets, yeah. So generally speaking, in all of our shelters currently, our pet guidelines are that the pet has to stay leashed inside while you're inside the building. That, of course, obviously for the legal reasons, we accept service animals, but even we accept support animals as well. So as long as it's leashed and it's not combative and biting things like that, I don't have a problem with pets. We have right now in our at-risk shelter down in 721, at least three of our residents bring their pets with them nightly. So not a problem with that. And then thank you very much. Any time. And I have one more question for Suzy. I think a number of folks have been concerned with what comes next, because 1220 is only gonna be open till the end of June. And I think it's something that folks are concerned about with what's gonna happen once June has, and I was wondering if you could speak to that at all. So we are in the process. This is homeless action partnership, really, that is coordinated through the county on working with the Salvation Army on the extension of VFW as well as Laurel. At this point, I think there is interest and readiness to move forward in that direction. There's a lot of different players that are involved in that, and we don't have that fully silo fight at this point. In terms of 1220 River Street, it really has been the intention of the homeless action partnership through the funding through HEAP and CESH to ensure that we have a transitional shelter or an interim shelter as quickly as we possibly can. That is part of the city and the county joint action plan is to move forward with that. Our intention is to, as soon as we have this issue managed and dealt with is to move as quickly as we can to ensure that those beds are available and ready to go. I think we're in a position to say that we need to ensure that- Sorry to interrupt. Oops. Yeah. Mr. Kundadi. Susie and Mayor, but I have some important information I want to share with the council at this time. We were just served with an order from the US District Court in the Quintero case. I'll just read it or at least the holding of it. I'll read it out for you. Okay. It states, given the urgency of this matter, the city of Santa Cruz, its officers, agents, and employees are hereby restrained from taking any action whatsoever since we're seized or destroyed personal property belonging to the homeless persons currently resigning at the Ross camp until further action of the court. Yeah. A hearing on this matter is scheduled for 9 a.m. on April 26th, 2019. We were aware of the hearing this morning that was scheduled for the Friday, but we were not aware of the TRO until it was just issued by the court a few minutes ago. And so I want to make sure that whatever course of action the council directs this afternoon, Hey. This is a picture there. It will not. A motion that's. There's a few other folks that have been acknowledged before. Should the council move forward with the direction to close the encampment? It will not be implemented. Or at least the order that was issued by Judge Burtick yesterday will not be implemented until after the court hearing on Friday morning. For clarification, the delay would be essentially till after Friday to move forward with the plan that was already previously set into place, but not necessarily changing any of the recommendation to upon, if approved on Friday to move forward with a new location at 1220 River Street as opposed to returning back to the gateway camp. It doesn't impact that. It would not unless the judge extends the order beyond the Friday hearing date, but that's right. Okay. The motions would still apply. Okay. Council member Myers. I'd like to call a question then on the motion on the floor. Okay. Sweet. Councilor Matthews. I have not spoken yet. I'm going to be very brief. I think the campsite as it has evolved and before you do, we have a motion to call the question. Oh, excuse me. We have a motion to call the question. So we'll go ahead and take a vote on the motion on the floor. Is there a second? Oh, second. I'll second that. Second. Okay. So we'll go ahead and take the, we'll take the motion that we have currently existing at this time. Okay. Let's call the question. Yep. All those in favor of the motion and would you like to repeat the motion for clarification? The motion is to direct the city manager to implement the city council approved standard operating procedures for a permanent closure of the gateway encampment with a target closure date of April 30th, 2019, and coinciding with the opening of the 1220 River Street camp and convert the temporary relocation of the gateway encampment at the Benchlands under the existing council directed site management plan to a permanent closure and direct Benchland occupants to alternate shelter sites at 1220 River Street, BFW Laurel Street, and any other available shelter beds in the county at the earliest possible time to ensure full access of the Benchlands for upcoming scheduled events. And this will be dependent on any outcomes that happen with the court proceedings on Friday. Correct. Should the motion carry then? Yes, it would be, it would not be implemented until at least after the hearing on Friday morning. That makes sense. Okay. Okay. So we have the motion stated. Councilor Brown. Calling the question. Calling the question. Yep. But that's the motion that we're voting on is not the motion that was just stated. Yes. The motion is to call the motion. Yes. I'd like to let my council colleague, council member Matthews speak before I vote. But just call the question. Do you want to resend the motion to call the question and allow council member Matthews? I'm fine. Okay, so we have a motion on the floor. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? No. So that fails with council member Brown, vice mayor Cummings, council member Crone and council member Glover voting against. Council member Matthews, Myers and myself voting in support. Council member Matthews, Myers and myself voting in support. Okay. All right. Susie. So we need some clarity on what to do with the, now about 95 people that are moving to the bench lands. I just want to make sure that the council has some understanding as to next steps with that. So I think you should have a discussion. I mean, I think we're in a position of, we're in a position of making distinction between a voluntary exit, of which we are now nearly up to 100 people who are voluntarily exiting to the bench lands versus what I understand the council is considering with the court order or the TRO is a question around involuntary removal. So I just would ask for some clarity around that. I'll go ahead and have council member Matthews and then we will return to council member Glover for comments if you'd like at this time. And then we'll go ahead and I just want to say very briefly, I think the campsite. Really? Am I not on? Okay. The campsite as it has evolved and now exists is currently not tenable. It is, I think demonstrably unsafe. The impacts on the surrounding neighborhoods and businesses are also unacceptable. They're demonstrable and unacceptable. We are all, I think wherever you are on the spectrum, searching for solutions that work. These take time. Right now we're dealing with emergency situations. We are committed to longer term solutions as well. We recognize the complexity of populations involved in this broader issue and the scarcity of resources. I want to particularly acknowledge the extremely diligent work of our staff and the good faith of our partners, particularly impressed with how the Salvation Army has stepped up to this. I am supportive of the motion that was previously on the floor for consideration. I am concerned that we are being left in an absolute limbo right now. I understand that council member Cummings has additional questions. I understand the staff truly needs direction. And I might even suggest if we are at some kind of an impasse, if it would help to go back into closed session for consideration as well. Vice Mayor. I just wanted to note that. I'm sorry, let me forgive me. Thank you. Council Member Gleber, reminding that we, you had a significant amount of time. So council member Matthews had not spoken at that point. Oh, that's fine, no, yeah, totally. Absolutely. So I'd like to make a motion to, just to provide some clarity and direction for the staff to continue offering voluntary temporary relocation to the benchlands while conducting a coordinated site cleanup with the remaining residents of the Ross camp and approach the association of faith communities as a potential partner for the implementation of a transitional cabinet at the existing Ross site. I'll second that. Can you email that or restate it slower? So we can capture. Oh yeah, absolutely. When should we state your motion? A motion to continue offering voluntary temporary relocation to the benchlands while conducting a coordinated site cleanup with the remaining residents of the Ross camp and approach the association of faith communities as a partner for the potential implementation of a transitional encampment at the Ross site. So we have a motion by council member Gleber. Was there a second? Council Member Cron. Seconded. Seconded by council member Cron. Any further discussion? Council Member Matthews. Speaking against it, two main things. This does not resolve the issue longterm of the gateway encampment. I think it's been very clear that that is not, it's I should say clear to me that that is not a site that's appropriate for a longterm encampment. And also we have no idea of the capacity of the association or willingness to appropriately manage that. So I'm not at this point prepared to give that direction. Vice mayor. I just want to state that I wasn't really done making comments and asking questions. And this is a big decision that I wanted to weigh in on. And so that is what, and especially given the information that we just received from the city attorney, I wasn't at that point in time ready to move forward with this because I feel like it changes a lot of what I think we should be doing with regards to the closure of the camp. So I would like to recommend that we take this back into closed session and discuss this before making any final decisions at this point in time. So do you want to make that motion? I'll make, yes. The motion that we, we go and adjourn into closed session to discuss the motion, the information that's brought for us from the city attorney and how it relates to the recommendations to staff on camp management. So we have a motion by vice mayor coming seconded. Okay, seconded by council member Brown. Council member, so we have two motions on the floor. One is a, so we can have two motions without taking a vote on them. Okay, council member Cronin, then council member Geller. Are you suggesting vice mayor that we go into closed session right now or maybe we finish our agenda for the afternoon since a lot of people are waiting for other items? I think we should go now. I think this is very important. Okay, council member Geller. If you could just clarify vice mayor Cummings. Why is it that you want to have the conversation outside of the public eye? I would just say that I was ready to continue our conversation until we took a vote. And so I wouldn't mind going into closed session since this regards legal issues and implications for the city that it might be in our best interest to speak about this. Mr. Gondadi, do you have further interest in that input? Given that there is pending litigation counts, it's certainly within the council's prerogative to discuss it in closed session. I do think it's appropriate under the circumstances as well. Okay, we'll go ahead and take a vote then on that. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Nay. So that passes with council member Cronin and Glover voting against council member Brown, Matthews, vice mayor Cummings and myself and Myers voting in support. So we'll now adjourn into closed session to discuss this item and return back. To our council meeting. So we have a opportunity for a special presentation and I want to now let those that were waiting response from the earlier item know that we'll go ahead and take a pause, have our special item before us at this time and then we'll return to the item upon completion of that. So we have a presentation of the Santa Cruz sister cities committee Hans Christian Anderson writing awards. This is a wonderful writing competition for children, teens and adults sponsored by the sister cities committee. And I'm pleased to introduce Linda Snook to please come forward as our chair of our Santa Cruz sister cities committee. Hi, Linda. Thank you. Our sister cities, Hans Christian Anderson essay competition is presented as part of the Hans Christian Anderson Tables Bay competition held in our beautiful sister city of Cestri, Levante, Italy. Hans Christian Anderson lived for a short time there and considered is considered a favorite son. This is the 52nd year of the Cestri competition. The competition in Santa Cruz is open to writers in four age categories from three years old through adult. The essays must be an original folk or fairy tale and the first through third place winners of the Santa Cruz competition in each age group are submitted to the Cestri competition. Without further ado, I would like to invite mayor Watkins to join me at the podium to congratulate the participants and winners of the contest. Thank you. And before I do, I will just say that it gives me such pleasure to acknowledge these creative talented writers and winners of the Santa Cruz sister cities committee Hans Christian writing awards. Each of the council members has had the privilege of reading your work. And so we are so proud of your efforts and we wish you the best of luck in Cestri competition. And so I'll come now and we'll announce the winners. I understand that we have some of these participants who are able to attend. If you could please hold your applause until the end. We would. Is it our third? Third place winner is six to 10. Eight. Hold to the end. Here, break the rule. Where do we leave? Here, break. Here, break. Taylor, there, break. Taylor, please. Taylor, please. No, we're gonna leave you. I'm sorry, I'm dressed up. Unseen map. The age of 11 to 16 category. Second place is Isabel Cresenberg. First place is Ella Rose Boulosny, the maple tree. Second place for the resume. Long Krabelich. First place is Diana Simonis. Long lived the queen. Easy. Each stand between us. I'll stand behind you. I stand behind you. Wait, we have a couple more. There's one here. It hurts, way. Right here. How does she do it? Look forward. Smile. One, two, three, tease. Of course, thank you. Thank you all for being here and congratulations. Thank you for your work and thank you Linda and the Sisters Committee for all your work as well. Okay, thank you Rachel. Yeah, great. So at this time, we have to reorient those who are in the audience. We adjourned our meeting to a closed session in light of some information that came forward to us by our city attorney in regards to a legal action that was taken today. So we'll go ahead and return back to our item, which is item number 13 on our agenda for action and deliberation. I'll also notify folks that we have a motion that is on the floor at this time that was made by Council Member Glover and seconded by Council Member Crone. So that is still pending. But we were able to discuss a little bit more about some of the legal constraints given this new information in closed session. We'll return back. Council Member Matthews and then Council Member Glover. Yeah, I would like to propose an alternate motion because it's on the same topic. I'd like people to know what's out there as a possibility. So I would like to move the following that the city move forward with opening of the temporary managed campsite at the Benchlands. That the city move forward with the preparation of a managed campsite at 1220 North River. The city move forward with a voluntary relocation of Ross campers to the Benchlands. And I will say parenthetically, there's apparently significant interest in that already. That upon the closure of the Benchlands temporary site on May 1st, the city assist and facilitate Benchlands campers to new shelter facilities such as 1220 North River, the Salvation Army locations and other resources. During the Ross camp closure, the site be secured and an accurate census be taken of those remaining. That there be no new occupants at the Ross site during this closure period. And that the intent is that campers not return to the Ross camp once it's closed. Okay, so we have a motion by Council Member Matthews. Is there a second to that motion? I'll second it. Okay, second by Council Member Myers. Council Member Glover. So we have two motions on the floor. Yeah, so this is my concern like I mentioned before about the weird power, that there's a really weird power dynamic on this body. We were all in the closed session. We all were privy to the new information and all talking about the things we can be on board with and instead of giving me knowing that I have a motion on the floor to give me the option to either maintain the motion or to change it because of the new information that we're brought in, you immediately called on Council Member Matthews who I saw you back in the room calculating and coming up with this new motion. So it just seems again, it's just, I have to say, I'm consistently disappointed by the structure and the way that this body operates. It just seems so orchestrated with regards to the way that things are handled and the way that people are prioritized in the speaking order. That's really discerning. Disconcerting in general. I don't think that the, as Council Member Matthews just suggested in her motion to not be relocating people back to the Ross Camp or taking that totally off the table as we were told by our staff that that's what they've been telling people that they're going to have the option to do once they get a chance to renovate the Ross Camp location. In addition to that, the police, the fire chief, rather, who is the one that has expressed the deep concern for the situation of the Ross Camp openly admitted that there are the potential of there being a hundred beds locations that would be viable and safe at the Ross Camp if it is cleared and then restructured in a way that is congruent to safe fire safety standards. So there's, and what I really dislike also is that we had that conversation in closed session because there was nothing in that conversation that people out here, in my opinion, should not have been able to hear and it makes it so that I can't reference things that just happened in that conversation to give you context about the thoughts and opinions that are represented on this body. So again, I will express my disappointment with the decision to move it into closed session to have a conversation which I think should have been in the public eye and I will express my frustration and concern with the power dynamic on this body and the relationship between some of the members. I'm just gonna leave it there. Yeah. So there are two motions on the floor at this time. Is there any other discussion or shall we take each motion? First motion is, or the first vote is whether to accept the substitute motion. There wasn't a substitute motion. I think it's just a different motion. There was a substitute motion. That was, I interpreted that as a substitute motion. As you wish. Okay. I mean, assuming that there was a motion and a second on the floor and there was a subsequent motion. My understanding is that there can be three motions on the floor at any time. But it is a substitute motion. Okay. It wasn't specified as a substitute motion. I will put it on as a substitute motion and ask that people support a vote on that motion. Okay. We'll go ahead and accept it and then vote to approve it. Okay. And within your motion, there is an element to close the Ross camp, the Gateway camp through this process, but to not have folks return at a certain point. Yes. Okay. I can go ahead and support that. Is there any further discussion? One, I can do reread the motion, please. Yeah, sure. I totally appreciate wanting to know what the motion is. That we, the city move forward with opening of the temporary managed campsite at the Benchlands. City move forward with, continue with preparation of managed campsite at 1220 North River. City move forward with voluntary relocation of Ross campers to the Benchlands. Upon closure of the Benchlands temporary site on May 1st, and I'm going to say parenthetically, there's a major community event already scheduled on May 5th at the Benchlands. So there has to be a closure date there. So upon closure of the Benchlands temporary site on May 1st, assist and facilitate Benchland campers to relocate to new shelter facilities such as 1220 North River Salvation Army Site and other resources. During the Ross camp closure process, the site be secured and accurate census of those remaining be taken and no new occupants be allowed. The intent is that individuals not return to the Ross camp site. So that's the motion on the floor by council member Matthews. There's a second by council member Meyers. That's a substitute motion before any discussion or can we discuss before we take that item? Because I'm not clear. You may discuss. Okay, council member Cron and then council member Brown and then council member Glover. Question for vice mayor Cummings. You had skepticism before if there was enough bed spaces are you satisfied now if we're not going to look at the Ross camp or reconfiguration of the Ross camp? Are you satisfied with and supporting the motion without the Ross camp in the mix? I think that currently with having the security and by slowly decreasing the size of the camp it's going to give us a good census of the number of people if we're going to bring 1220 online and we're moving people to the Benchlands if we're able to get a good census of the number of people that we're moving to 1220 people who are taking alternatives and then we're controlling the population that's at the Ross camp. I think it'll give us a good census of more spaces that we'll need when the time comes that we wanna fully close it but I think that by doing this we'll have a good understanding of the number of people who will remain at the Ross camp and won't want any of the services that are offered and we'll also be able to see how quickly people are moving and transitioning onto different forms of shelter. I think in theory it's good but in reality I don't think our homeless situation is going away and I don't think wanting it to decrease and go away but the reality is we are going to need more spaces and I think the only difference that we're suggesting in our motion is that we go a little bit farther than the past 30 years I've been following this in Santa Cruz and that we prepare for the number of homeless people that really live in Santa Cruz because I don't think they have anywhere else to go but the neighborhoods and I think you are gonna see so I'm saying would you be then willing to open the Ross camp after the census is taken and we see how many actual spaces are needed? I think that if we are at a point where we don't have enough space and we don't have alternatives for people to go I think that's a question that we can have at that time but I personally feel that we need to one, continue moving forward with trying to get people into alternative forms of shelter and I think we need to get an accurate account of who is gonna be left because I completely agree and that's one of the concerns that I have and a little bit of hesitation moving forward with this is that I do, I have heard from communities about what would happen, they've been asking well what's gonna happen with all the people there? Are you gonna shut this down in the state and everybody's gonna go into different neighborhoods and what does that mean for the community? So I think that by slowly having people transition from the camp to other alternatives I think it'll also give us an understanding, a better understanding of what is happening in our community as we're transitioning people out of the camp. So if we're opening up the Benchlands in 1220 and people are starting to find alternatives are we finding that we have increases in crime throughout the city? Are we having more property damage throughout the city? Are we seeing a decrease in the area of Falker price and the tannery? I think it'll be a good opportunity for us to actually begin to collect data. How long do we, and this is a real question, how long do we wait in a month or in collecting data? I would imagine that by the next city council meeting we should have a good understanding of where we're at because if we're gonna find out on Friday where we're headed in terms of the legal decisions that are gonna be made. After that, by the time we are able to meet again we will be at that point having had at least two weeks where people will have been transitioning on and we'll have a good sense of where we're at. I mean, concern is that the people were told that they could come back. When I talked to them yesterday, at least seven people said we were told and then the police officers also who were present said they were telling people this is gonna be cleaned you have to go to the Benchlands and you can move back. That's one of my concerns. I think there's just there's two potential pathways forward in terms of the majority of the council's interest interaction and that could reflect in our voting. That's the one last thing. Vice Mayor. Last thing I'd like to say to that is that we'll have a better understanding. I would imagine as people go to the Benchlands and other opportunities are offered to them we can get a sense then of whether people do wanna go back whether they wanna transition onto something else whether they want to go to 1220 and so I think that we're gonna be able to we'll know a bit more about what people's desires will be I'd say after the decisions we make today. You support a friendly amendment to take the Ross closure off that off the list that Council Member Matthews put forward and then deal with that at the next council meeting. That's not his motion to make a friendly amendment towards. It'd be Council Member Matthews' motion to accept a friendly amendment and Council Member Meyers. Speak. I would just say that there's the intent in the motion. I don't think there's specifics but the intention is to close the camp. That's I would say from my perspective that allows for some degree of flexibility though I think that one of the things that many folks have expressed is that other council members have expressed that they do wanna see the camp eventually close. So let's put that there. Okay, so there will be an intent to close the camp. Again, I think I'll just sort of rearrange it. There's sort of two motions on the floor. One is to have potential modifications I guess to the original motion but essentially the current plan in place is to have folks return back to the Gateway encampment. And the second motion with other considerations is to not have folks return back once they are moved out into other sheltering options that feel more suitable for them. And so. The intent is. The intent is. So do you wanna specify what intent is? I think that's the expressed intention. We still have lots of unknowns before us. The desire is that we clear the Ross Camp site for all the reasons that are obvious to us, the health and safety issues that campers be accommodated at the benchlands and when it comes online, 1220, that we need to close the benchlands on May 1st. We will assist and facilitate the benchlands campers to relocate. During the closure of the Ross Camp, that site will be secured. We will take an accurate census of who's there and no new occupants will be allowed. I think that's really important to the management plan and that our intention is that individuals not return to the Ross Camp site. While others that are still there. Oh, that the Ross Camp site will have been closed. Closed by attrition. Okay, just making sure we're clear on that. I wanted to say it was Councilor Brown. Then Council Member Crown and then Council Member Glover. Then it was Council Member Brown. Forgive me, Council Member Brown, then Council Member Glover, and then Council Member Crown. So go ahead ahead. I just wanna say I support all elements of this motion, all aspects with the exception of the intention to close the camp because this is just another way, it's just another way of saying permanent camp closure, which I voted on previously to oppose. I'm gonna do the same, but I do support all of the other aspects. So I'm sorry, that won't be reflected in our action minutes, but I am gonna make it clear here that that's why I'm opposing the motion. Council Member Glover. Yep, and just to reiterate, I, my motion was almost identical to that minus the collection of data and some other minutiae, which would have been included if I had been given the option to change the motion before the other one was made. That being said, I will just remind my colleagues that we as a city have been communicating to the people of the Ross camp that they will have the option to relocate back once the renovations are complete. So if you vote today to intent to potentially close the camp or to redirect or all this other kind of stuff, you will be directly lying to the people of the Ross camp and therefore damaging any semblance of trust that exists between this body, city staff, and the people that live over there. And to say that we're gonna be encouraging them to go to other places that are a better fit, is it a better fit or that we're pushing them into the sites? And so that's where it comes to another issue as well because there are the concerns that people have about the limitations. And I appreciate Captain Harold, Captain Harold for coming and expressing his perspective and ideas, but there are alternative sources that have made phone calls to the shelters that were being referenced. And they were either told that they didn't have room, they didn't have space or all these other kinds of issues. And so this isn't even going to address the issue of people outside of the Ross camp. And that's what I keep trying to talk about with transitional encampments is that we're just gonna be back here again in another three or six months when people move to another location and we are forced with the same situation again. So I encourage this body to stop doing the same things. There are those of us on this body that have been here for the last 20 years and there's some suggestion that we're doing the same thing. We cannot keep doing it. We must change course and do something that's progressive, forward thinking and innovative, not criminalization and punitive, just assault on people that are the most vulnerable in our community. I'm tired, it's ridiculous. Okay, will we have two minutes? Oh, please. We'll go ahead. Okay, okay, okay. We'll go ahead and ask those in the audience to please allow us to, we'll have Council Member Cohn and then we'll take a vote on this substitute. I had a question for the fire chief. Can we come up for one second? And I don't mean to put you in the middle of anything here. I just want to get what the Council Member referenced the management plan. And I thought the management plan that you had outlined included designing the ROSCAMP and moving back to it. So which management plan, I guess are we talking about? Or was that the management plan originally that we were gonna move back to the ROSCAMP? We're gonna move to Benchlands, reconfigure the ROSCAMP and then move back to the ROSCAMP. My direction from the city council was the temporary relocation of the ROSCAMP and that was at the last city council meeting. So that was designing the Benchlands to have room and capacity for everyone who would be at the gateway camp, as well as coming up with a management plan for the gateway camp itself. And then in the intervening time, there was another motion that was brought forward to close it. Okay. That motion's still on the floor and I'm just trying to clarify the management plan that council member Matthew's referenced, which that's the management plan. I'm not sure what management plan you're referring to. No, I didn't refer to management plan. I referred to the opening of a temporary managed campsite at the Benchlands, which it is. So we have Vice Mayor Cummings and then we'll go ahead and vote on the motion. I just wanna state that I think one of the things that we've been discussing over time is the fact that if we move people from ROSCAMP back to ROSCAMP, we're still not gonna have enough space. If we move people from the Benchlands to 1220, we might not, we still might not have that much space. And so I think that what we need to be focusing on right now while we're waiting on decisions to come down from our governing bodies is that we need to be able to move people out of this situation, clean that situation. We need to try to get as many of those people to 1220. We need to hear about what's gonna happen on Friday and then we can decide whether or not we need to reconfigure the direction that we're taking or if we should stay on course. It will then give us an opportunity to understand where people are at and what they wanna do with their lives. And I think that at that point in time, between now and then, we should be thinking about whether there are alternatives. If you're speaking with the faith community, whether or not they wanna start another program where that would be, our community is okay with something like that because knowing that we are gonna have a situation potentially where if we don't provide enough space that people can end up in other neighborhoods and we can just have people kind of roaming all over Santa Cruz, I think that that is something that we seriously need to take into account. But given where we're at right now, I think that we need to continue to move forward and we should see where we're at in terms of how the strategy that we're unfolding right now might actually help to reduce the size of the camp and whether or not people are actually gonna come back to it after we have seen the impact of moving, cleaning, and providing alternatives. Okay, so the motion on the floor is to actually have some elements around having people not to come back. And I'm gonna go ahead and ask to keep your voices down, to have people not come back to the gateway encampment. The other motion is to do that. So there is a decision point, I guess, to say in that regard. I was gonna ask what the alternative, what the first motion was, if it could be repeated as well. You can repeat your first motion. So the alternative motion that I was going to make for the revision was a motion to schedule, or rather it was gonna be scheduled in that special meeting that we talked about with a special closed session to continue the conversation, but that seems to be a move point. So to continue with the temporary voluntary relocation and management plan of people from the Ross camp to the Benchlands while working to renovate the site and bringing it up to the standards of the Fire Chief, continue to move forward with 1220 River Street opening and transitioning people from the Benchlands of those who are interested in going and approach the association of faith communities as a partner for a potential implementation of a transitional encampment potentially at the Ross site or somewhere else in the community. Okay. So that's the motion somewhat modified the original motion that was on the floor. It was made by Council Member Glover and seconded by Council Member Cron. City Attorney Condati. There is a substitute motion. We should vote on. Council Member Matthews. So you should vote on whether to accept the substitute motion. Should you do that, then you can vote on Council Member Matthews' main motion. Okay, so we'll go ahead and vote on whether to accept the motion. All those in favor to accept Council Member Matthews' motion all say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Nay. So that fails with Council Member Glover voting against, and Council Member Brown voting against, and Council Member Cron voting against. So then Council Member Matthews, Vice Mayor Cummings, myself and Myers voting in support of accepting the motion. So we'll go ahead and now vote on that motion. Now the substitute motion is on the floor, correct? So the substitute motion is on the floor, so we'll go ahead and take the vote on the motion presented by Council Member Matthews, seconded by Council Member Myers. Okay, all those in favor, please act. Could we take out the Ross, moving back to the Ross and separate that away from the rest of the motion? You can ask the maker of the motion. I believe I would like to leave it as one motion. Okay, so we'll just go ahead and vote on it. I see that Council Member Cummings has a question. Okay, Mark. I had a question around with 1220 coming online, is the idea behind this that the city would be managing that, or would this still be? Salvation Army, I believe, no? I thought they were. The idea is that the Salvation Army would still be running 1220. I want to make a friendly amendment for the consideration that Council Member Glover mentioned about working with or reaching out to the associated faith communities to understand whether or not they might be interested in running a transitional encampment. Well, it's my motion on the floor right now. That's why I asked as a friendly amendment. I personally am not interested in, as part of my motion, pursuing and committing to additional encampment at the Ross site. So we'll go ahead and vote on the motion. So all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Nay. So that passes with Council Member Matthews, Vice Mayor Cummings, Council Member Myers, and myself in support. Council Member Brown, Council Member Glover, and Council Member Crone voting against. Council Member Glover. I want to make a motion to approach the association of faith communities about the potentiality of partnering with them for the establishment of a transitional encampment somewhere in Santa Cruz. There's a motion. Second. I didn't hear it. To approach the association of faith community to support a transitional encampment. No, no, no, no. That was not the language. Oh, forgive me. It is to approach the association of faith communities in a conversation about potential partnership or implementation and their involvement in a transitional encampment somewhere in the city of Santa Cruz. Okay. So we have a motion by Council Member Glover. Is there a second? Second. Second by Council Member Crone. Any further discussion? Seeing none. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? No. Passes with Council Member Crone, Glover, Vice Mayor Cummings and Brown in support. Matthews, Myself and Council Member Meyers voting against. So we'll go ahead and close this item for this time. Correct? Just a point of clarification. Yes. So how does that work with the, I mean we're gonna find out what happens on Friday with regards to the stay away slash TRO. Yes. Temporary restraining order. I'm sorry, I hate when people use acronyms, they don't know what I'm talking about. So temporary restraining order, but if that is the case and then they just accepted since the Council Member Matthews motion, then how would we stop people from being at the Ross Camp location if per se the TRO is granted by the court or the injunction or whatever is decided is decided by the court on Friday. Well, certainly moving forward with the closure of the Ross Camp would be contingent upon the outcome of the hearing on Friday. So if the court grants the restraining order on Friday then we would have to evaluate our position but we certainly could not move forward with a closure of the camp if it's barred by a court order. And so basically all we just did right now was add an extra layer of panic and fright and fear essentially on top of a vulnerable community of people just want to clarify. That sounds like a rhetorical question to me. I'm just wondering. There's wondering because it seems like there's no action that the city can take right now in moving people forcefully at all until at least Friday. So anyone who's going to hear this is going to. You're absolutely right that pending the outcome of the hearing on Friday, people who want to relocate to the Benchland site we will facilitate that but no one will be required to move. I just have to say that's rather uncivil. Okay, well we have another item to move on to. So we'll go ahead and move on to item number 14 on our agenda. And so this, okay. I'm going to go ahead and pause just for one second. I want to get clarification on this on the clerk with the clerk. Allow a little bit of time for some transition then we'll convene to our cannabis item. Reconvene here and we'll go ahead and move on to here. If I could have your attention, we're reconvening to item number 14 on our agenda related to cannabis policy. Good afternoon, Mayor Watkins and members of the council. My name is Sarah Fleming and I'm principal planner with the long range planning and policy team here with the city of Santa Cruz. I'm here with Catherine Donovan, our senior planner on the advanced planning team. Cannabis item you'll see today you have an A and a B. Item A is a long range planning team item. So we'll be presenting first and then item B is a finance department item also on cannabis and they'll be presenting second. And I'll turn it over to Catherine. Good afternoon. So this item, we have a recommendation for a code text amendment and then a couple of items that we're asking for direction from the council. The first item has to do with cannabis delivery services and in 2016, this is just a little background. The voters approved proposition 64 which decriminalized marijuana. We, the city adopted a cannabis ordinance in 2017. And at that time, city council had directed staff to include a provision that would prohibit delivery to customers in the city from businesses located outside the city. And this was to provide protection for our own local businesses. Recently, the state passed regulations for retail services that allow delivery services from anywhere in the state to anywhere in the state. So this is contrary to our ordinance but because it is state law, it trumps our ordinance and is de facto the legal law of the land. There, in response to this, there was a bill proposed AB 1530 which would have allowed local jurisdictions to control delivery within their jurisdictional boundaries. But since the staff report was written, that bill has been shelved for this year. And also since the staff report was written, a lawsuit was filed against the state related to the delivery service to go back to allowing local jurisdictions to have control over their own cannabis uses in their cities. So we're kind of in this limbo land right now where right now the state controls whether there is delivery within our city from outside. However, if this lawsuit is successful, then we will once again have control. So we have written a proposed amendment to our ordinance that would allow delivery from businesses located outside the city only if it's required by the state. And this will bring the city's ordinance into compliance with state law but also if the lawsuit is successful or if AB 1530 or some successor legislation comes into effect next year, we won't have to go back and change this again because it will automatically put our old rules in effect. What we also did with the ordinance is we reiterated that a business delivering into the city is required to have a city business license and to pay both state and local sales and cannabis taxes. This would be true even if we didn't have it in the ordinance but we wanna make it very, very clear to businesses that are not located in the city that they still owe taxes if they're operating within the city. And so this is our recommendation. I'm not gonna read it at this point but I just wanted to let you know I have it up there if you prefer to read it from the screen than from your staff report. The next item that I mentioned there's a couple of items we have that we're requesting direction on. The first is whether to change our ordinance to allow the transfer of the cannabis retailer licenses prior to the original adoption of our cannabis ordinance. We had come to the city council for direction and the city council recommended that we limit the number of retailers to five that we give preference to local business owners as well as a number of other preference factors and also that we come up with a mechanism to prevent the flipping of licenses for profit. And to meet those objectives we came up with a competitive price process for those five retailer business licenses and we prohibited the transfer of the licenses. Since that ordinance was adopted we have heard from people who hold those retailer licenses and they have noted that they want to be able to sell their businesses which our ordinance does not prohibit them from selling their business. However, the business is pretty much predicated on them having the retailer license and they can't sell or transfer that license. And so we are now coming to the city council to get direction from you on whether you would like us to change that and allow the transfer and if so, to give us some direction on the manner of doing that. And there was a question from some council people on what those factors were. And I think even if you were involved at the time you probably don't remember them all. So I've listed them here. I don't expect you to read them all here but we can go back to them if there's a question. The second issue that we are asking for direction on has to do with the definition of proprietor. And as you know the cannabis industry because it is not legal federally can't deal easily with banking and loan institutes. And so one of the best methods for a cannabis business to raise funds is through taking on new investors. And generally investors require some sort of security for their investment. In our ordinance we define a proprietor as someone who has a 10% or larger interest in the business. And so under this definition that means that the original business owners can accept less than 10% investment into their business which can limit their potential for getting funding for expansion. So what we're asking at this time is whether you would like us to expand on that. And if so what kind of parameters. And there were some some general suggestions in the staff report. I'm sure there's many other ways that we can look into this. But we just want to some direction on whether this is something that the council would like to pursue before we spend a lot of time on that. And this is the definition of proprietor that's currently in the ordinance. And again I'm not gonna read it to you right now but I have it here if it becomes a question. And that's my presentation and I'm happy to take questions. Okay. So we'll go ahead and return back to the council for any questions. Thank you for your presentation. Are there any questions from council members at this time? Council Member Matthews. Well I did have a question since there is a challenge. I'm back on the first part now. Since there's a challenge to the state law and many other jurisdictions and the League of California cities are challenging that. Legally I would like for us to join that challenge. And is I guess is does that supplant the need to come into conformance with the existing state law? I also like us to support 1530. I mean I would like us to aggressively assert local control. I think I would like to defer to Tony on this. Did you were you here for that question? Unfortunately I had was just entering the chambers when Council Member Matthews posed the question. So I apologize. There's a challenge to the state law that permits delivery services statewide. And that's been, that challenge has been launched by a number of cities and the League of California cities. That's my understanding. Is it on hold at this point in the courts? Is there a need to comply with the state law now if that matter is in the courts and still to be decided? Yes, unless a court issues an order staying implementation of the law or an injunction barring or invalidating the law or barring enforcement of the law then we are obligated to comply with it. Then just I'm trying to get the train of thought. So we have both a need to comply if we have to, but not unless we have to. But also we can challenge the underlying state law. We can join in the challenge to the state law. My understanding is that the resolution would basically establish the policy that if state law is not binding on the city then our regulations would go into effect. And since it's being legally challenged is it currently binding on the city? Yes, that's my understanding. So right away, bingo, we have to start allowing deliveries from anybody. Yes. We can't prohibit that, that's correct. Even though our ordinance currently does prohibit it's not the state law with Trump. Well, I'm very interested in knowing the status of the legal challenge. I'd like us to join that. We are monitoring that and if the council gives direction we will look for opportunities to join as amicus or as a party if that's the council's direction. Okay. Any other questions? Council member, go to the computer question. I'll have the night. Thanks. Do we have businesses right now that deliver in Santa Cruz? If you have a retail license can you also deliver or is that a separate license? No, well it's a separate state license but it's not, the retailer license would allow delivery. And I believe both of our original retailers are doing deliveries. I'm not 100% sure of that but I believe they are. You said both of ours? I think they are, yeah. But there's five licenses out there but only two are operating right now. I think the third has just opened its doors within the last few weeks or month. Are they kind peoples, Oz, and what are the others? There's Canakruz and kind peoples and? West End. Western. West End. West End. West Flip Wellness, thank you. So that's only three, four. Okay. Oh. And I don't believe they're open for business yet, yeah. And where does WAM fall into that? WAM is the fifth and they are also not yet open for business so both WAM and Reefside have locations and they're working on their tenant improvements to get ready to open. Takes a while. Who's in the Finns building? The Finns Coffee Building? I think that's Reefside. Okay. A question about investment. Right now it's below 10%, right? Can you take it from five or six different people that? No, it's a total ownership, total of the ownership. And how have other cities been dealing with that? You know, we are in a kind of a unique situation because A, we have limited the number of licenses, which is not uncommon, but we also gave out those licenses through a competitive process. And I don't know of anybody else who's doing that. And that's really one of the main factors that makes us come to you with a question of whether you want us to pursue this because the factors were something that were important to the council at that time that we'd be able to choose a business that was providing the best benefits for our community. What do you think would be the difference between raising it to 50% or 49, do the Chinese China rule, 49, 51 versus 100%, you know, like where somebody can just pass their business or sell their business to somebody else along with the license? Most of the businesses that we have are not owned by just one person or two people. So in effect, giving them 49% would give them the controlling. I suppose it depends on what the corporate structure is, but just in simplistic terms, if you had two people who owned the business and then they had an investor who owned 49%, that investor would potentially have the controlling. Would you suggest going along with cannabis retailer license factors for, if we did go to a model where somebody could sell their business and license, that the person who bought it would have to comply with the criteria we already have in place? Well, we had several suggestions. One is that we set up a kind of a minimum criteria that you would have to meet and maybe you could say you have to meet five of those factors or you could say you have to continue to meet all the factors that the original owners supplied or there's an infinite number of things, but those were the things that came up to us on the top of our heads. Are there any cities that have a transfer tax where the city gets a portion of, or a significant portion of the sales of that business? I'm not aware of it, but that doesn't mean it hasn't happened. Thank you, Mayor. All right, I just had a couple of quick questions just to sort of follow up on Council Member Crohn's question. One of the things that I think is the underlying principle behind the transfer is really maintaining the character, increasing the minority, women owned businesses, having a protection from sort of a corporate potential takeover, is that correct? Yes. And then in terms of, and that also meets the conversation around the flipping. And then I had a question around, no, I can't find it. Okay, I'm gonna look for it because there's two sections of the item and I'll get back to you because I'll see if other Council members have a question, Council Member Brown. Yeah, I guess I mean, Council Member Crohn kind of, I mean, I asked the question and I'm just gonna kind of, because I, and you touched on it with your response, but I just wanna make sure that I'm like looking at all of the possibilities before us here as we make this decision because I am sympathetic to the limits that we're placing on retail or on businesses to be able to transfer, well to sell their business for what it actually is worth, out necessarily inflating or deflating the value of that business, right? I mean, this is a big challenge. I think that, I'm trying to figure out a way forward so that people can kind of invest, take on investors, build their business and have some assurance that they could sell the business for what it's worth and without artificially kind of restricting that value at the same time that we wanna protect the integrity of, you know, the intent of our original rules around and priorities, preferences around local business and et cetera, et cetera, we can see them all there. So I'm just trying to figure out how we can do that and I know this is like, that's what you've been trying to do, right? So, it's not a need to answer, I would have given it to you. If I had a need to answer, I would have given it to you. Come up with another solution that you haven't already come up with to bring before us today. But I do wanna try to figure out how we can kind of at least get at that. I mean, if we take no action today, we can revisit it, but that's just kicking the can down the road. If I may, I think that what we're really looking for on that item is direction on if you would like us to go and look at it and we would be happy to go and come back, bring back some more thought out proposals with pros and cons. If that is something you'd like us to look at, it wasn't noticed for today to make any changes to the ordinance in that regard too, so I don't know that you'd have the ability to make changes today if you wanted to, but we would be more than happy to take direction from council to go and investigate that, do some community outreach and come back to you if that's the will of the council. Well, I'll just let other people speak, but I'd like to investigate that direction. Vice Mayor Cummings, then Council Member Crown. She had a quick question on how much licenses currently, what the price is currently on licenses. I know that it seems like there's five businesses, so they all have the licenses currently, but how much those were purchased for and if the purchasing of those, if the price was the same? The license is not for sale. It's just that the city only distributes, only has, we will only release five licenses. So I think there was a fee for applying that was in the range of, I think, $1,500 to $2,000. Maybe somebody who applied for one could verify that. And then there's also a use permit requirement, which is about 2,000 to 2,500 somewhere in that range. Council Member Crown, and then Council Member Cobble. I wanted to pose a question to Council Member Brown. Just the free market, we all know is not really a free market. And I'm just thinking about the model. I think it works really well at the university when they sell homes up there. It only goes up according to this cost of living index. So if you bought a home for, as a friend of mine did, maybe for 182,000, it's only gone up to like 220,000 in a few years. It's like a model like that, I think is a good one that kind of depresses it because, but also keeps it within a, hopefully within the family, within the Santa Cruz family. And that's what I would be looking at. I had a question for the city attorney. I didn't, speaking with two other council members before this meeting, we all thought the tax rate was actually on the agenda. You said to me that, no, that's not what's being asked here. I'm just looking at paying applicable taxes, including state, local, and sales taxes, and cannabis taxes. I don't know, that's in recommendation number one. Recommendation number one, 14.1, correct? Yeah, so there are two items on the agenda related to cannabis. The first one is presented by planning, that's 14.1. And then the second one will be presented by finance after this presentation of related to the taxes. Okay. Okay, I'm sorry, allow me please to read this language. And we were gonna have both presentations before we open it up to public comment and then return back for council action and deliberation. This refers to delivery services being subject to the tax. City business license and paying applicable taxes, including state and local, sales tax and cannabis taxes. So it doesn't really relate to tax rates. It's applying those tax rates to delivery businesses. What the recommendation is referring to. So just to clarify, we can't take any action on the amount of tax, sales tax that's paid by retail outlets in Santa Cruz today. No, the only thing the council could do is direct that an item be returned for consideration at a future meeting to consider taking some sort of action on those tax rates. Catherine, it looks like you, did you wanna add? There's a second item, that's 14B. It's not my staff report. It's the next staff report. Okay. And we'll have discussion around cannabis business tax. Yeah, that's where the taxes come in. That's right. So we'll see, before we move on, we'll see if there's any further questions on your presentation, then we'll invite up the second presentation and then open it up to public comment at which time we can discuss that. I'll respond to that question when that item is raised. Okay. Yeah. Okay, so I, Council Member Myers. I just have a question on, first of all, congratulations to some of the folks who have opened their stores recently and also just wanna recognize the number of local families who are in the business and setting a standard, I think, for our community. With the license, I'm just curious, these aren't typical businesses because you really can't get a sense from their, you know, sort of from their structure based on loans and I mean, it's very difficult. So I guess I'm just wondering, is there any way to, when we're looking at the actual license transfer piece, is there, we really can't get at a valuation per se with that. I think what I'm hearing potentially is the concern is that either that the value of these businesses may be inflated because of the limited licenses. So if you're looking at a toggle, you can either increase the licenses, but I know we also have a very high percentage of facilities in Santa Cruz County per capita. So the other option is to kind of look at the valuation potentially to try to come up with some community benefit standard or metric that we would be able to, is anyone doing that in the state? Is there any jurisdiction that, it sounds like we're really the only one right now that's got limited licensing and that might be county, that's county wide, Greg. Well, no, this is, the city has a separate ordinance from the county and we're not the only community that has limited the number of licenses, but we're the only community I know of that has based who those licenses go on through a competitive process. And that's sort of the, that's what makes this difficult. If it was not competitive, if it was just kind of, okay, we're gonna do five licenses, first come, first serve, then there wouldn't, we wouldn't be, the issue wouldn't arise because we wouldn't have these factors that we're trying to encourage in our businesses. There would still be the issue that if a business is selling a business that includes a license and there's a limited number of licenses, then part of the value of the business is the license itself. But I wouldn't be as concerned about that piece as I am about trying to get the best businesses for our community because that was the, a very strong direction that council gave us when we wrote this ordinance and we spent a lot of time thinking about how to do that. Okay, thank you. Sorry, could you have additional questions? No, I think I'm good for now. I just have one kind of final clarification question. First I want to thank you for that because having been on the council at the time, we really, the council members that were there really did want to emphasize an opportunity for more equity and allowing more minority and women-owned businesses benefit from the industry as well as having that local preference. So I appreciate your work on trying to do that. I also recognize the challenge there as well. My question I think is sort of related to Council Member Meyer's interest in, is there between the two options presented in the staff report around the license transfers and the removal of the license limit, would it make sense to think about those in terms of direction for you all to research how that they kind of interplay with each other or would you consider them to sort of separate pathways forward? Well, if you remove the limit on the number, then it becomes a non-issue because there's no competition and the business, whether we transfer a license or not doesn't really matter because if someone bought a business, they could go out and get a new license, they could apply and get a new license. Allowing the transfer without raising the number is where the problem comes up. Right, yeah. Okay, so in regards to trying to move forward with potential options policy-wise, if we want to maintain a commitment to increasing minority and women-owned businesses and locally-owned businesses, but also trying to work out some of these details, I think similar to Council Member Brown, if I'm correctly summarizing, I'm interested in understanding a little bit more about that as well. And I know that's sort of, I think my understanding of your hope for today. Okay, so if there aren't any more questions for 14.1, we'll go ahead and ask 14.2 to present and then we'll go ahead and open that public comment on the item. Thank you. Can you give this back to Lisa? Let's start the statement. Yeah. Hello. Hi, Marcus. I just want to go ahead and before we begin your presentation, I was just sort of checking with our staff in regards to some of the items that need to be heard before us today and some of the ones that could be potentially deferred action on from Council. We are, as you can imagine, well behind in our agenda. And we have a couple items that need to happen today, one of which is the item number 16, which is the CDBG item. And that I will recommend that we take up next. I want to also state that item number 18, which is the census item, can likely be deferred until the next meeting and I'm getting a head nod of confirming. We also have our two additional items, item 15. And that is the general plan amendments. And my understanding is that could either be deferred until the next meeting or taken up at 7.30 this evening. Okay. And then this evening, we have two department presentations currently calendared. I personally think that's really important for us to understand sort of the pulse of where we're at from our departments in light of our upcoming budget hearings. But I'll go ahead and see if a council member wants to make a motion, which I believe needs to happen in regards to some of these items. Is that correct, city attorney Kandadi? Okay. Okay, so essentially what the motion would include is a motion to defer the census item and to either defer the presentations or the general plan amendment item, item number 18 and item number 15. Is there a motion, council member Glover? I'm just curious with item number 18, what's the timeline necessary for the 2020 census? Do we have enough wiggle room to be able to reallocate that for the following agenda three weeks from now? Hi, Sarah Fleming, principal planner. Yes, we do. That is a resolution of support. I think in terms of the funding, if the council does wish to give staff direction to utilize that funding, we'd like to do it in this fiscal year. So getting that done this fiscal year would be ideal, but the census itself doesn't start until next year. So we do have some wiggle room on the resolution. Okay, great. Then I would make the motion that in the interest of time that we reschedule items 15 and item 18 to the following city council agenda. Okay, so it's the motion to reschedule items 18 and item 15 to an upcoming city council meeting. I'll second it. The motion by council member Glover, seconded by council member, I'm sorry, vice mayor Cummings. Any further discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That passes unanimously with council member Matthews. Oh, I'm sorry. Did you vote in support? Okay, with council member Matthews voting from the side. Okay, so just for the benefit of those who may be in the room wanting to address the council on those items, I wanted to make sure that you're aware that we will likely not get to a few of them. So at this time, what we'll have is our CDBG item before us after we conclude the cannabis item and then we'll return for our department presentations for the evening session. Okay, thank you very much. Please, Marcus. So Marcus Pimentel, your finance director. In October, 2018, the city council directed staff to return with a fiscal impact of if rates were reduced, what was the impact would be. We've since met with the industry a couple times with many of them who are here in the room and they've been very helpful, very informative, very candid, very insightful in the knowledge of the industry. It's a place that we don't have, we are a little finance group. We don't have practical experience in the industry, the retail market, the cultivation market, the testing labs. It's an incredibly challenging place. And then you add in all the complexities of state, federal issues. Permitting, it's just a complicated zone. And so we don't have, we recognize, this is not a place where we have, we feel we have great subject matter expertise. By way of example, I think you received an email that perfectly outlined some of the industry's concerns with the tax rate structure. And it was very thoughtful in the email and their numbers come out to be 1%, is about 240,000. Our numbers are 1%, it's 175,000. I would tend to trust their numbers. It's just a space we don't have really great insight into. Nonetheless, getting to the point, in October of 2018, Council asked us to come back with a fiscal impact if we reduced rates. We believe our numbers show about $175,000 per 1% rate reduction. Right now the city cannabis business tax is an 8% rate. Under a couple scenarios we just plopped in here, if we reduced the rate from 8% to 3% retail, it could be about an $875,000 annual loss to the general fund. Not factored, this is before factoring in other bonus things that might happen. If rates reductions goes down, maybe there's a change in consumer behavior. It's hard for us to see that being a material impact with the heavy burden of the state fees and tax systems. But it's not always one for one, we recognize that. If there's, if we followed a rate model that for example the county's categories have, they have a 7% retail rate and a 5% rate for manufacturing cultivation, which would bring our rates down from 8 to 7 for retail and 8 to 5 for manufacturing cultivation. We think that could be about a $200,000 annual loss to the general fund, even from a revenue perspective. In the staff report, we tried to outline some of our thinking behind, we don't see an immediate dynamic change in the market from our rate structure, but we recognize we don't have the subject matter expertise to articulate what that would be. So it's just really hard for us. When we make phone calls to our peers, there's just not a lot of great information from our peers in this industry. And we just also truthfully really struggle with resources and time commitments and all the other things we're working on. So our, the recommendation is that we absolutely support and have heard that the state level of fees and taxes is really large. And maybe we're biased. We feel these businesses are in our community. We're supporting them. They're also dealing with our own uniqueness of how we wanna regulate and process. So locally, we have a lot of, we spend a lot of our resource time locally at the local level with the business operations. And yet the state has a huge heavy tax burden on them, which puts pressure on us to lower our revenue, but yet we're the ones who are supporting or dealing with or helping or supporting whatever. We're spending a lot of staff time in that. So we clearly recognize and support that the state consider reducing their rates. There's, every year there's been a couple of bills that have supported that measure. We also, maybe it's a little biased 2.0. The states in a position where they have surpluses were not. And so we feel they're positioned structurally and politically to be able to do that. We also wanna affirm a couple of years ago the city council's established children's fund. At that point in time, they raised the rate from 7 to 8% and that additional 1% was set up to be the children's funds. We just wanna make it clear and transparent that it isn't that 8%, that is the children's fund. It's 12.5%. It's essentially one eighth of the tax base. So going forward, one eighth of the tax base would be set aside in the children's fund. It could be interpreted maybe loosely that if we dropped a rate from 8 to 7, the children's fund wouldn't apply. I mean, I'm not sure that's how we read it. We just wanna be absolutely clear and transparent with that second recommendation. Our third recommendation is to recognize that it's, however you define regionally, cities in the county, Monterey County, Santa Cruz County, Monterey County, San Benino, Santa Cruz County, the greater Central California, all California, there's a greater good that comes out when we have a regionalized tax system. Sales tax is a bad example of that where industries, government agencies have fought for and provide rebates and incentives to attract businesses to relocate from point A to point B. So businesses sit back and just wait for those rebates to come and then jump ship. We don't wanna create that type of paradigm. So our third recommendation is to work, try to work collaboratively locally. So capitals will be looking at the rate structure. The county is poised to raise rates. So we wanna have a regional conversation about a regional rate structure that makes sense. It also makes sense for our consumers and businesses who are working across boundaries and dynamically where the Santa Cruz Inn and Live Oak be in. So those are our three recommendations and I can go down into some more details that we have in a few slides just to support it. Just as a, none of our recommendations would impact the lower 1% and 2% rates that's already established for testing and distribution. Certainly whatever is happening, those rates are staying the same for the time being. So why? So I'm the finance director and we're feeling pressured in a general fund and I know council members haven't seen this and some of these numbers are still being finessed to the final budget that will be released any day now. But this is one of the various scenarios we're looking at right now. If things that could be possible, the left chart is our deficit position or net operating results in the general fund and the right chart is our fund balance, our total available fund balance resources. We're facing at some level increasing deficits as we roll out into the out years. We have been projecting these for a while. We've got measures in place, but more recently costs are going up faster than we have resources and strategies. So there's more work to be done. So we're feeling a lot of pressure to offset future deficits. And we're also looking at our cash balances that are pretty good, but they deplete fast really quickly if we don't act now. So those are some of the pressures of just considering a major rate reduction. Much of this you might already know better than I do and certainly the industry better than us. We just thought we'd touch on just a brief recap of where we've been. Generally, our city voters voted to approve a tax rate of 10%. Council directed to increase it to 78%, let 1% increase going to the children's fund. The industry approached the city, staff and council members asking for relief on distribution and testing, recognizing those are good businesses and good local businesses and good jobs. The rates were reduced down to one to 2%. A council in October directed staff to return with a cost impact. A staff have met with industry a couple different times and also collaborated locally with other taxing agencies to understand where they're at. We as staff, we as a finance department, me as a finance director still don't have a lot of confidence in how to project and understand the impacts of A equals B. In much of our other revenue sources, whether it's water funds or enterprise funds, general fund taxes, we have that level of appreciation and understanding this is still a dynamic place that's tough for us. We found with the, going sideways a little bit, when vacation rentals became a bigger thing, we all had a lot of conversations about vacation rentals, it was a new market to us. And it was once we started getting into the market really from our audit lens, we started tapping on doors and opening up records and meeting with vacation rental properties and finding them that we really got an intimate understanding of Airbnb, VRBO and all those intimate complicated websites work. We think equally the same when the cannabis industry is applied for the permits, it's acknowledged that at some point in time we're gonna be starting audit programs. Once those audit programs start, we'll get some more insight into that. We're not moving aggressively to that space, but it is a space that we recognize that will probably be the place where we start seeing some more familiarity with it. And in the meantime, we're dependent on relying with our industry to help us understand. So our next steps would be ideally, these are dates I've put out there candidly that we would like to by April 30th because of the timeliness, get out letters of support, recognize that AB 2286 is a good bill and try to get our support behind that. Return no later than September 2019 with what we're hearing from a regional approach and move forward with an RFP process to help find us industry resource to help start us an audit program to be able to review and understand what's going on in the market. Those are what we think to be our logical next steps, again, subject to what else comes up that might slow us down. City Manager. I just wanted to add a little bit more background related to the recommendation on the regional approach. So last week, the City Selection Committee met. The City Selection Committee is a committee made up of the chair of the Board of Supervisors and the mayors of all the cities in the county. Its primary purpose is to make appointments to regional entities and also just discuss various regional issues. And so this issue of taxation was on the agenda. The committee discussed whether to take a regional approach to taxation and unanimously agreed that it would make sense for the jurisdictions to work together to review taxation and to develop recommendations before the individual jurisdictions make any adjustments. I just wanted us to report out on that discussion and what action they took at the meeting on April 18th. Thank you for that. And having been at the meeting, I'll second that. Go ahead. So then finishing this with some data and tables because I'm a finance director and it's hard not to have a presentation on data and tables. We try to do an update of our rate comparisons, recognizing that we might be missing something that might not be the most current, what might be happening in the jurisdiction. But recently around us, looking at the County of Santa Cruz, Watsonville, Capitola, Monterey County and Salinas, the rates are across the board. Some agencies like the County and Salinas are poised for big increases. Salinas I think is going up to 10%. I believe it was in January, 2020. They're poised to go up aggressively in their rates. The county will be going up slowly over the next several years. County Monterey has some trigger increases that will also be happening. So that's the lay of the market as it currently stands, noting that there are many agencies that are signaling rates are going to be going up in the very near future. I'm not sure that this is the way to set rates, the saying we want to follow that model, but I think it's having more conversations, city select, whatever that might be, what is the right reasonable model that addresses our local needs and provides a transparent playing field. Finally, we get this question a lot, our cannabis tax, where it's been and where it's going. So it started as a very small revenue stream and it's been growing. Wish all revenues were growing at this pace at the same level of percentage growth. We believe in 2020 our forecast might be a little aggressive and we recognize that. We have 1.9 million anticipating expansion in certain types of businesses. Some of that is just a wild guess on our part, educated wild guess, but we recognize there's more work to be done on the right number for 2020. So the bottom five lines are actuals where we were, where we think this year is gonna finish pretty credibly and then the top line of 1.9 million. That's where we had our budget from about six months ago where we thought the revenue stream was going. We're probably more leaning towards a pullback on that number, just be candid. In our budget document, we're at 1.9 million, so there's a little bit of risk in that one. That ends the presentation. Happy to go back and recap anything or certainly be available for questions. Questions, Council Member Cohen? What's the difference between Monterey and Santa Cruz? How did that happen? Do you know maybe Catherine knows what's going on there? Do they limit, I'm assuming they don't limit their licenses or do they? Actually, do you know the number? Every jurisdiction caps their retail. Every jurisdiction caps their retail according to the industry. You're now the industry. I know when I looked into this issue last fall, Monterey County had just lowered their rates and I think when they started, almost all of the jurisdictions I looked at did a similar ordinance to ours where it was up to 10%. A couple of them were, I think Santa Barbara was up to 20%. And a lot of the ones that started out very high, if they had up to 10% or up to 20% and set them towards the top, a lot of them came down in the last year and Monterey was one of them. They had come down, I think pretty recently when I reported to you in, I think it was October or November. Selena Capitola is new, they've just allowed retail and so they just set it at seven. And I think Santa Cruz County had just lowered the cultivation and manufacturing last year and they're at 5% now, they're going up to 6% and I think they were gonna be 5% for two years, 6% for two years and then I was gonna go to seven and stop. I don't remember Selena's. I wouldn't mind hearing from the public when it's time. What, if for example, the city recommended lowering the tax and things got better and better and better, was there a trigger mechanism that other cities are possibly using for the city then to recoup some of the benefits that you all have by us lowering the tax so you can make it in the business but then later on down the line after you're making it, is there any way of the city recouping some of that money? Is there any questions for staff at this time? Because if not, then we'll go ahead and open it up to the public. Any additional questions? Off the topics of the taxation rates and imagine there will be people wanna weigh in on that. I guess I'm confused and it hasn't been addressed yet so I'll ask it here. In the staff report, the agenda report, the fiscal impacts related to a decision that we make on taxation rate changes is suggested but there's no fiscal impacts related to the RFP proposal recommendation to go out and ask for industry consultant to help us sort through some of this. So I just wanna know what we're looking at on that. That's a to be determined if we're going down a path of using the consultant only for the purpose of setting up an audit program and being able to start randomly doing occasional audits. Generally, their audits recover their fees so there may not be a direct cost for us so it depends on the firm and the contract. So I think that'd be something we'll report back once we start understanding who the players are in the industry and how those agreements work. Typically, they're on a negative percent of what they find so there may not be a direct cost outlay but we might not recover as much so we'd have to report back to you on what that might be. So we would get a report back because my understanding is anything under $100,000 we don't necessarily hear about it because we don't have to weigh in. We'd be happy to just let you know what's going on. I'll leave it there for now with questions. I wanna hear from you. Unless there aren't any further questions at this time we'll go ahead and open it up to the public to speak on this item. Just one for the 12% I'm just wondering why it's so important that we go to 12.5% for the children's fund rather than just 1% why is that something that? It's effectively the same thing but if we're start lowering rates we don't wanna confusion that the children's fund was only the eighth percentage point so we went from seven to eight. So if we lowered it to four and then 1% for children's funds that's what you're trying to stop so if we lowered it they would children's fund wouldn't get any more money. I just wanna be very transparent about it. The intent was at that point in time one eighth of the revenue would be the children's fund. Right, 1% so maybe it's still 1%. Who's with the rate? You know what the council approved was that the additional 1% increase would be allocated to the children's fund not 1% but the additional 1% so this just makes it so that it's proportionate so that if for some reason you do adjust the rates it doesn't become problematic. Right, so if we went down to four you're saying we wouldn't get to have 1% to be five total. You're less than that then. 12.5% But you're trying to lock it in instead of just going with the 1%. Okay, I got it. It's essentially equivalent funding for it no matter what the fluctuation. Maybe the council supports 1% even if we went down. And it would still modify with the 1% or however the taxation rate might fluctuate it will, the 1% which represents 12.5% of the total 8% you know I get it but we'll fluctuate with it essentially. So it's actually To make the motion. Riding the language more clearly. I was just gonna add that for example with the testing laboratories that are at 1% right now that would mean 100% of the revenue coming in is going to the Children's Fund. So that's the situation that we were aiming for. Okay, is there any member of the public who would like to address the council in one minute? Briefly, they are welcome to come forward first. If not, we'll go ahead and open up public comment for those that would like the full two minutes. Okay, go right ahead. We'll go right into the two minutes. I'm assuming. Good afternoon, I'm Jim Coffes. I live in Ben Lohman and I'm here on behalf of Green Trade which is an association of the licensed businesses in the throughout the county in all sectors of the cannabis trade. And I trust that you all received the recommendations and background that information that we shared. I'd like to make Madam Mayor one request perhaps. We had a number of other business owners here but for one reason or another had to leave. And we're curious if it would be possible to extend the time, the total time that is available to direct our comments to each of these three or four major issues that you're considering. I'm not sure if I'm clear on what you're requesting. Well, some additional amount of time to either answer questions or present arguments above and beyond two minutes. For every member of the public interested in speaking or for those that are representing industry. For those that requested at least. Okay, so we'll do two minutes, three minutes for those that are requesting the additional time on behalf of industry. Two minutes for those that are not representing industry. Is that feel, that feels accurate to me since we're significantly behind schedule. I feel like that's there. Very thoughtful, thank you. So you'll have up to three minutes then. Okay, so I'll be quick and see what I can touch on as fast as I can. First of all, I wanna correct a couple of things that were said that, for no fault of anybody's, but just because this is such a dynamic, fast growing, fast moving, new endeavor, one that's never occurred in my lifetime. And so therefore I would guarantee it's never occurred in your lifetime where we've taken something as big as this and tried to try to make it fitted into a regulatory system of some sort. So to date, about a hundred jurisdictions in the state have tackled this in one way or another. As far as the issuance of licenses, the retail licenses, in every case it's been a competitive situation. In other words, they've never just said you got a license, you got a license. It was always you had to apply and there was some set of criteria. I think the city of Santa Cruz had some of the best conditions that they look for when they chose among the, I think you had 13 applicants for your licenses, you set conditions and then you judge the applicants based upon the conditions that you set. And a lot of the other jurisdictions have done similar things. One that I found interesting was no one ever did a real vetting of the capitalization of any of these applicants because that turns out to be probably the most significant one was how much money did they have in the bank in order to sustain a business of this sort. But that, to be said, that was one mistake that I wanted to clear up. There was another which was about the projections and the difference in what the tax revenue may or may not be based upon what percentage you said. Obviously, if you set the tax at 8%, you're going to take in more revenue than if you set the tax at 5%. That isn't really the question. The question becomes at what point can you encourage the consumer to use the regulated market as opposed to the illicit market? Right now there estimates that 80% of the consumer dollars are spent outside of the regulated market. So those are at zero tax. So the 20% that is set inside the regulated market is at 8%. So if you move that rate down, certain amount of the unregulated consumers are going to move in, so they're likely to be an increase in revenue from that source, specifically because you changed the tax rate. Now as far as trying to project, I would suggest that without knowing, am I done? With the three minutes, Bonnie. Okay, thank you. Thank you. But we know you're here if we have questions. So we could have the industries, those that are representing the industry to come forward first and you'll have up to three minutes to speak on behalf of the industry. Hello, I'm Nicole Lagner and I'm an attorney with Clark Newbert. We're a woman known to small business with an office in the city of Santa Cruz. We represent cannabis businesses across the state and do a lot of regulatory compliance and policy work. I agree with what Mr. Coffes said. I personally have worked on 15 applications in the last year in various jurisdictions, West Hollywood, San Francisco, all over LA and they're always competitive and they're always limited in reference to retail. So that is not unique to the city of Santa Cruz. I think most jurisdictions realized that was an important thing to do. Also real estate and setbacks are kind of self-limiting for those types of businesses. There's just not enough real estate. So I think that this entire issue has not been framed correctly. And again, I have so much respect for Catherine and Mike. They've worked really hard to know and understand these issues. So with due respect, it's not transferability. It's change in ownership. If you read the state license, the reason that they have that is that inevitably managers or equity owners are going to change. So it was a little bit glossed over in the presentation tonight that part of the definition of proprietor is a manager. A manager with control over the day-to-day operations. So as written on its face, the city of Santa Cruz would require the one person whose name on the license to self-fund and do all of the management activities of the business. That is completely impossible and unrealistic. So when it says in the report to possibly change the ownership threshold from 10% to 20%, the conversation doesn't start there. It's, that is the threshold of who is an owner versus a financial interest holder if you're using the terms from the state. So that is saying, okay, if you're an owner of this business, you have to be live scanned. You have to submit a lot of information to the city of Santa Cruz. If you own X amount percent or you're a manager of this business, we need to know who you are and we need to vet you. Now, if someone dies, if they want to take on equity partners or they've worked really hard, like all of these business owners in the city of Santa Cruz are longtime cannabis business owners and they have built this industry. If they wanna sell their business because they grew it, what is the problem with that if the city of Santa Cruz is able to vet the new quote owners? That's why every jurisdiction has a process to do that. Capitola, Santa Cruz County, Monterey, every county has a form and a way to do this. So we encourage you to take on a process so that you have transparency and you know who the business operators are rather than trying to limit what these people can do. They have a lot of competition out there statewide and if they can't compete with the businesses that every other jurisdiction can raise equity, they're not going to survive. That's a good timing. Okay, next speaker. Hello, hello. I've prepared a statement. So thank you for bringing the cannabis items forward. I do look forward to the discussion and decisions made today. We'll start with the taxes. We do need to align our tax rates with the context of today, not from 2014 when they're originally set. In terms of financial projections, three additional retailers are opening up on top of many new other local cannabis businesses and other sectors of the industry. That was also failed to mention in the staff report. So all those retailers will be providing a tremendous amount more tax revenue in this fiscal year. Regional structure sounds great, but cooperating with multiple bureaucracies is completely impractical. Everyone in this room knows that. That could take years. We've been waiting years already. Been sitting here for two years waiting. Most regional jurisdictions have reduced their tax rates, in fact, including Oakland from 10% to 5% and Monterey. They were up at 6%. They dropped it down to 4% last year. San Francisco is actually at 0% and they have a tax holiday for a couple of years. They know they need to get the industry off the ground. With respect to ownership modifications, dozens of jurisdictions in the state have had a merit-based application as the previous two folks mentioned. They've had a process and they've since augmented their ownership rules. Every jurisdiction in the state limits the number of licenses for retail. There are many viable options for how this could be done in a fair manner. I don't think that's all gonna come out today. I think we do need to take some more time here and understand the needs of the industry, slow down a little bit and actually look at the nuanced industry and what options are available. The state is in control of the California market and having special rules only for Santa Cruz City puts us at a distinct disadvantage, especially when county rules and state rules allow for flexible ownership. If we can't have that same thing in the city of Santa Cruz, there's a disparity. Our current ownership rules do not allow for investment whatsoever. Adjusting the 10% threshold to let's say 49% really effectively doesn't do anything. And I understand in policy making sometimes it can feel like a change is going to actually affect positively but sometimes on the ground it works completely different and again I'd like to be able to have that conversation. We need your help on adjusting ownership rules in order to continue generating the substantial tax revenues that we do. We recently opened our new Ocean Street location by borrowing as much money as we could from our friends and from our family but now we need a plan to pay that back. We're competing in an oversaturated market with the highest density of dispensaries per capita in the state and we're on an uneven playing field with the 12 retailers in the county. Our rules allow no path of succession. What if I got hit by a truck? Everything I've ever built for my family and my two children technically has no value. And my business dies with me, it's unworkable. What about the 93 families that my business supports? They are without a job the very next day. So I believe our business should have full flexibility in our ownership percentages and I urge this council to discuss non-binary solutions. Thank you for your consideration. Hi Pat Malo, I'm the executive director of Green Trade. I think everyone got our recommendations. I'm also at the pleasure of serving on the WAM board. Valerie Corral, our executive director and founder was here earlier. She has a sick mother to go take care of and so she asked me to read a couple things or summarize. First she wants to thank you guys and I do too for the swift action on the creation of a local equity program. I think that is exactly in lines with our history of leading the cannabis issue and hopefully we can have more discussions on what to encourage those folks. And then Val makes a point that of kind of the effects of high taxation. And first thing is it reduces access by increasing these costs, we pass them on to not just recreational consumers but people who are using it for health reasons. And so that obviously has an impact on profit as well. But I want to remind you and Val wants to remind you that profit for every organization doesn't look the same. And profit in the WAM model is any extra goes literally into the bodies of the sick and poor who desperately need it. And I don't need to bring up the relevance to the last issue of that. But Val likes to say we are all one illness away from homelessness. And in that situation that we need organizations like WAM to be able to provide this free medicine. And so ultimately we can consider all these things from a business perspective or we can consider it from what I got into cannabis for is to provide medicine for people who can't provide it for themselves and to say it bluntly to end the racist drug war. And so as we're considering these tax rates we need to consider what type of industry we're trying to encourage and figure out a way to get there. And so to kind of take off my WAM hat and just talk as a community member. I've grown up in Santa Cruz, never intended on living anywhere else desperately trying to stay like everyone. And I've watched the old medical system and all my friends who were still able to stay here employed or as business owners in that old legal medical system which Santa Cruz was leading in. Now after legalization they're having to figure out whether they want to be criminals or not. And that's a very sad situation. I am lucky enough to have several friends who also grew up here who are in this room who are still somehow owning businesses locally. And I wanna make sure that they stay. And I'm also a member of CPP, Community Prevention Partners and there's nobody here to represent them. Our thing with CPP, our motto is keep it small, keep it local. We need to ensure local businesses survive so we don't have corporate ownership. Thank you. Okay. And I believe you're representing industry as well? Yes. Okay, so you'll have up to three minutes and then we'll open it up unless there's any other industry representatives. You're industry as well? Okay. And then you'll be the last on behalf of industry for the additional three minutes and then we'll have the two minute time. Go ahead. Hi, thank you and thank you everybody for taking and still listening to us. I know it's been a long day for everybody here. My name is Jacob Lagner. I was awarded one of the cannabis retail licenses by the city. My store is set to open this summer on Ocean Street, Reefside. I'm also the CEO for Oz Distribution located in the city. And today I lend my support for the motion submitted by GreenTrade to make the necessary changes to the ordinance regarding the definition of proprietor and the related revisions to allow for my business to function as any other corporation that can raise funding through equity, enter into strategic partnerships and hire managers for my store. As written, the ordinance seems to require me to personally fund and manage all aspects of the business which would be impossible for me to accomplish. The revisions drafted by GreenTrade and their attorneys complement the state process through which the licensee provides the information and background checks of any new managers or equity owners beyond a certain threshold. This is a benefit for the city. It's not a detriment. As it maintains the transparency and allows the businesses to thrive and operate with the sophistication they deserve, creating more revenue for the city, more jobs and other benefits to the community. As a CEO of Oz Distribution, you know, I see a lot of businesses out there. We work with 370 dispensaries across the state and it's an extremely competitive environment. And I believe that we deserve the same tools that dispensaries are allowed in other jurisdictions as well. So I request that you vote today to mend the ordinance pursuant to the motion provided the thoughtful document that was provided by GreenTrade. Thank you. Hello, Troy Bookout with Santa Cruz Roots. I am an owner-operator of a cultivation site here in Santa Cruz. I'm also really nervous talking in public so do my best. It's really hard, I'm born and raised here. We're a self-funded operation and we're up against a lot. One of those things is the state and being in compliance. I understand that the city of Santa Cruz needs to make some money off of the cannabis industry as a whole. And I'm just hoping that that can be adjusted down even if it's temporarily to the recommendation by GreenTrade, which is a three, two, two, zero, zero. As a cultivator, we're paying 8% right now. Dropping it down to 2% of gross would significantly benefit us and allow us to stay in business. Thank you. Oh, and thank you so much for dealing with the homeless issue. I know it's a really potent and intense issue. So thank you. So now we'll go ahead and open it up to folks not representing industry wanting to speak to this item and you'll have up to two minutes. Nate Alex.Kennedy at gmail.com. The big thing that we seem to be missing here is everybody's talking about cannabis as marijuana, but what about industrial hemp? Why have we not heard more about this from the city? What we need is to change the regulations so that people can grow basically as much as they possibly can and maybe put some restrictions in, say a quarter of a percent THC in the final plant. I think it should be more like 1% for the city just because the pollination from blowing in from anywhere can pretty quickly change that around. But hemp is something that can be made into virtually anything. The shoes I'm wearing right now are hemp. And the pants I had a while ago were hemp and I wore them every day till they fell apart and I couldn't keep using them. It's one of those things we could be, in fact before 1937, when marijuana was outlawed, cannabis was one of the key ingredients in almost or even more than 90% of all medications that you would find at the pharmacy. These days, the pharmacy can't even tell you the stuff. From an industrial hemp point, it can be made into clothes, paper. Henry Ford in 1937 had shown a hemp car to the world and right after he showed it to the world, it got outlawed. I think he showed it in 1936, but it ran off hemp seed oil. So we don't even need to be using pedrochemical oils that are destroying the entire environment. We could be running off of hemp seed oil, which would be grown from an organic source that would actually provide more oxygen, not take it away. If we had completely legal industrial hemp, we wouldn't need to be tearing down the rainforests in foreign countries all over the world just to make into houses here. Thank you. Thank you, our next speaker. My name is Ernestina Saldana, one more time. And as I was here waiting to talk about the issue with homelessness, Valerie Corral asked me to come and talk on her name. I am a member of the One Collective and let me tell you why I am a member of the One Collective. I can go and get my fentanyl or my hydrocodone anytime I need it and I pay $1 for that. Being a low income person receiving Medicare, that's my payment for that kind of medication. And I used to do it that way. And what happened was that every time I was on need or more and more doses. I have multiple fractures in my body as a result of a car accident 30 years ago. So I'm here to ask you to consider to lower the tax for medical marijuana because people living with social security, which is the ones who need most of the time the medical marijuana cannot pay a lot of money. I leave my income is $900 per month and with that I had to pay my rent, my bills and help my two daughters at college when needed. If you have big tax, even for free product as one provides me with, okay, I will have to pay tax on that product. And that is onerous in people who has a very limited income. So please consider that proposition and thank you. We have one more member of the public who would like to address us on this item. You'll have up to two minutes. Good afternoon, I'm Scott Graham. Following up on what Ernestina was saying, medical marijuana should be without any tax. If you go to a pharmacy and you buy a prescription drug there's no tax on it. So why are we taxing medical marijuana? Especially now that recreational marijuana has this high tax, I would suggest removing the tax altogether from medical marijuana. Another issue is the number of outlets that you're allowing. How many alcohol outlets are there in the city of Santa Cruz and why don't we just match that number? In Oakland they give priority to people that have been arrested for selling marijuana to get the marijuana licenses. And that may be a good direction to go here too. I would say if you lower the taxes, the revenues from taxation may increase because more people may be buying at the distribution points. Whereas if you keep the tax high more people are gonna keep on buying it in the gray market instead of buying it at the legitimate market. So I would suggest that you not only eliminate the tax on medical marijuana, but you also decrease the tax on legal marijuana so that the people that have these businesses can stay in business. Right now they have a lot of cost the gray market doesn't have. They have to pay for rent. They have to pay for security. They have to pay employees. They have to pay workman's compensation for their employees. These are all costs the gray market doesn't have. And the prices on the gray market keep on going down because of the legitimate market. Okay, your time is up. Okay, thank you. So at this time we'll go ahead and close public comment on this item and we'll return back for action and deliberation. Having been sort of a part of the conversation this is definitely an iterative process. And I just wanna acknowledge that it's a changing industry and we're learning as we go. I also wanna thank those that I know have been waiting to have this item come before us for their patience in waiting even longer this afternoon and sticking here after a long earlier item. I just will say a couple of things just cause I can't make a motion sort of in terms of my thoughts on this and you all can, we can have the deliberation at that point one of which is that for the policy language around the children's fund I wanna thank you for bringing that back. My only thought would be to instead of having it reflect to be designed designated for the creation and funding of a dedicated children's fund just to take out creation and funding and just say for the purpose of the children's fund that would be my request. I think that having sat through the city select committee meeting recently in regards to the cannabis taxation question I think it'll really be a great opportunity for us to think about how regionally we want to discuss this or learn and work within each other and not trying to go too far off base. I also recognize that for those that feel that this is way out of whack currently regionally that it could make sense for me I would support potentially going into alignment with the county's model in the interim of having a new sort of cannabis taxation structure created while the conversation about the regional taxation rates ensued essentially. So that would be my instinct. I would also just say that in terms of the I maybe it's more of a question but maybe just sort of understanding a little bit more about the investor conversation proprietor, what does that look like regionally? It sounds like we're off there but how do we also ensure what I think what we all value in terms of our standards and ensuring that we maintain some control over how we get a locally owned businesses without risking the potential which I can imagine is probably pretty high for big business to come in and purchase these types of businesses and communities. And so just more clarification on the state definition is that what the regional partners have? I don't know. So that would be something to explore along with what was originally discussed with council member Brown's thoughts around the same topic and the licensing. So those would just be sort of my few comments on it and then I'll open it up for council discussion and recommendations. My understanding is you're really hoping that we can move forward at this time with some guidance for you all to return back to us for action. Okay. So any council members want to share? Council member Matthews. I'll take the first item in 14.1 which was the ordinance amendment. I had a little bit of a hard time slogging through the language so I got a slight revision from the city attorney. If you look on the ordinance, it's page 14.16 that paragraph A at the very top, all commercial cannabis uses allowed within the city must be authorized pursuant to the procedures described, et cetera, et cetera. And then there's a long red line that I honestly couldn't make sense of. So it's simplified to say delivery services performed by businesses located outside the city of Santa Cruz are not permitted within the city with or without a permit, except as otherwise required by state law. So I would go ahead and just move that. I'll second that. So is that a motion? Yes, Mr. I think we just take these things one at a time. Okay, great. So we'll go ahead and take that. That's his recommendation of the presentation of item 14.1. Correct? Number one. 14.11. 14.11. And that was a motion by council member Matthews, seconded by council member Meyers to add that additional language to the ordinance. So what I was going to say here is- The language then, the motion actually, I was just reading language change, but the motion will be introduced for publication in proposed amendments to part 14 of chapter 24.2, the Santa Cruz Municipal Code, restricting cannabis delivery services within the city of Santa Cruz by outside delivery services, only to the extent, permitting them only to the extent required by state laws or regulations and also conditional on the delivery service business obtaining a city by business license and paying applicable taxes and fees. That makes sense. Okay, do we want to take these items one at a time and vote on them at that time? Is that the consensus of the council? I'm seeing head nods. Okay. Is there a discussion on the motion on the floor? Council member Cron and then council member Lever. Just a question about deliveries. That's already started. We, anybody in the state can deliver to Santa Cruz? Right, as of January 16th. And I don't know. I'd like to hear from somebody in the industry. How has that affected Santa Cruz? I mean, what are you seeing? What's, you know, I'm without, maybe the lawyer person that was spoke earlier. Before we do that, I think I just want to be mindful of time because we have another item that is actually now, I think about two or three hours behind what was originally designed for as well as evening session and oral communications. I think this is definitely gonna be a process where we can get more information from industry and have those conversations. But as opposed to an ongoing dialogue at this point, it would be my preference that we postpone that. And honestly, mine is only simplified language. Right. I would like to also add, if I could as part of the motion that we give, and maybe we can't do it now, city attorney. You can tell me support AB 1530 regarding local access for local control of delivery services and join the legal challenge to the current state regulations. Before we those be separate, before we do that, I'll just go ahead and acknowledge council member Glover was next to speak. Yeah, I haven't finished my questions yet. I had two more questions. We'll go ahead and postpone that then. The medical marijuana, do you know if there's a tax, if anybody else has that in the state and have they relieved them of taxes? I believe this, it's actually exempt from the state tax. I knew the original proposition very, very well. There's since been a lot of regulation that's gone in and I don't know it, but I believe that's the case. Okay, and my other question was, do we know how much has come into the children's fund so far? We've got 60,000 allocated available for use currently. Is it already earmarked or is it? No. Okay, thank you. I'll just add if I may, because we had a city schools meeting yesterday, we met to discuss current needs, gaps, and ways to move forward with the children's fund allocation recommendation, knowing that that entity was designated to be sort of that oversight of the fund. So that should be forthcoming. Council Member Glover. So there's clarity who decides on where the money for the children's fund goes? The city council will decide ultimately where the money goes, but the city schools city committee is the committee that is as experts are looking at needs and how a process could ensue in regards to how those resources are allocated to meet the needs of early childhood education, prevention and vulnerable youth populations. They'll return with a recommendation. Okay, cool. I think we'll just clarifying because as she was referencing it, I was pulling the red line version upon my page, but Council Member Matthews, would you mind just clarifying which section you're talking about with the revision? Yeah, it's just that very first one, A. A, okay. And the red line, I just confessed I couldn't make sense of it as written. So it's rewritten revised to say, delivery services performed by businesses located outside the city of Santa Cruz are not permitted within the city with or without a permit, except as otherwise required by state law. Simplifying. Okay. City Attorney, did you have an ad? I have a follow-up comment, but I think it can wait. Okay. Was that the question? Okay, so did you want to now add to the original motion in regards to what the Council is looking at? If it's permissible to do it at this time, I'd like to also have the city go in support of AB 1530 state bill currently in the works, which would support local control of delivery services and also to join the legal challenge to state regulations restricting local control joining League of California cities and other jurisdictions. That was what my comment was going to be directed to and my recommendation would be to direct that that be agendized for council action at a future meeting. Yeah, that's fine. Okay, so that is directing that. Okay, a component of the motion, which would be directed to come forward at a future meeting. So this is again, 14.11. And we can, unless there's any further conversation on this element, we can go ahead and take the vote on that. Okay. So all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay, that passes unanimously with council member Brown who had just stepped out. Okay, so that moves us on to 14.12, I'm sorry, 14.12, which is the second element to the gender report, which is to provide direction to staff on whether to propose amendments to the cannabis retail license ordinance to allow for the transfer of cannabis retail licenses and whether to change the definition of proprietor to allow original applicants to add investors to the approved retail business. And if I could, before we jump into that discussion for clarity, from the agenda report, it appears that the staff at minimum suggested what would make sense in this regard without further kind of investigation would be, to simply change our definition to align with the state, is that correct? That was an easy one, yeah. Okay, okay, thank you for that. Any further discussion or action to be proposed on this component of 14.1? Councilor Meyers, anything? Okay, go ahead. I'll make a motion on this, if there's any other comments. I would like to provide direction to staff to evaluate proposed amendments to the cannabis retailer license ordinance at this time and to come into alignment with the state definition of proprietor. I think that this, so that will be my motion. I guess my follow-up comment is just that this is a complicated and I feel like we need to hear more from the industry and I think staff direction at this time is appropriate to continue to evaluate this. Okay, motion by Council Member Meyers. I'll go ahead and second that motion for the discussion, Council Member Glover. Just with regards to some of the suggestions that were provided by Green Trade specifically on this item and then also from what we heard from Ms. Lagner. Is that how you say it? Lagner's how you say it? Yeah, so Ms. Lagner brought up the issue of the need for there to be the potential change of ownership and so I don't know what timeline is associated with your motion, Council Member Meyers. I'll just say that this entire item in addition to the other component of the item is further direction for staff to explore and then return at a future time. As my understanding, there's no real urgency either way. There's no real set timeline. Is that correct in terms of the ask from the staff? There's no urgency on my part. The industry might disagree. I was gonna say from my conversations I've had with people from the industry, there is a sense of urgency because if something were to happen in these tomorrow, then their business could be at jeopardy with regards to the investments they've made or their ability to gain capital. So I was just wondering with your motion, do you have a timeline associated with asking staff to come back or is it just an open-ended come back whenever? I guess I would defer. I don't want this to disappear for a year. I guess I'm looking to see, can planning fit this in and how quickly could this evaluate? Should we done? It would be difficult to get it back to you before your July break. I believe Marcus had a suggestion on when he was coming back in September. So it makes sense to me to come back at that same time. Okay, thank you. I really appreciate that and thank you, Councilor Meyers for clarifying. Yeah, there is this language here, so is that something that you would include in your motion or that's insinuated is that they would review the recommendations coming from industry and then come back with their recommendations from that industry recommendation or just them doing general research? My motion is to come into alignment with the state definition, which would be to set the definition of proprietor at a percentage of 20% interest. And then I would direct staff to evaluate the continued definition as has been brought forward by the industry, specifically regarding the description of managerial interests such that there could be alignment with the actual operational capacity of the business. So that would be, and I would like to see if we can get this done soon. So for clarification, it seems that if I may, that the state change could probably happen pretty quickly while the other types of conversation take place. Okay. And just to clarify, is that including, and you mentioned the definition of management. So in this provided version from the representatives from Green Trade, it talks about a managerial interest shall be deemed to exist when a person participates in the direction, control or management of the business, including a general partner. So are you talking about that language? Yeah, that's their language in 6.91.020. And then also they're in the event of the sale or other transfer stuff. So including that in the conversation as well, just for clarity. I believe that it aligns with looking at the retailer license ordinance at this point. So that would be evaluated then. Both of these things would be evaluated. Okay, great. Yeah, I just want to make sure that the recommendations from the industry granted. I'm sure that may have been insinuated are just clear that to look at both their suggestions for revisions in 6.91.020 and the following section with the definition or rather clarification in the event of sale or transfer with the business or operators covered by the license, et cetera, as provided by Green Trades. If that's in there, then I can... Yeah, I mean, yeah. We could clarify it, submit it on April 23rd from Green Trade, the letter in the communications. Okay, great. Councilor Brown. Okay, so that was one of my, I don't want to wordsmith your motion here. But so that was one of the things that I wanted to just make sure was clarified and confirmed here. And then, I mean, could we say for the sake of clarity to staff to immediately realign the definition of proprietor with the state's definition of 20% immediately and to return as per, you know, with all the other language with discussion and recommendations, no later than September 2019, which seemed to be acceptable to staff in alignment with the other return date recommended on the checks. I accept those. Okay, thanks. So there's no further discussion on 14.12. We'll go ahead and move us along to 14.2. So all those in favor of the motion made by Council Member Meyers, seconded by myself, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That passes unanimously. Thank you, Catherine. So we'll go ahead and move on to the additional item on the cannabis tax rate policy discussion. Excuse me. And I see three elements here. Our, do Council Members have any questions at this time in regards to 14.2, the presentation by Finance, our Finance Director here. Council Member Crom. In the projections that you've had, Marcus, was that 1.9 that you were projecting for 2020? Yes. Was the medical marijuana included in that? Yeah, it's our total tax basis. It currently stands with some expansion expected in the industry. Could you come back to us and ask, what if we didn't include medical marijuana? How do you even, how do you project, there is no, they're not selling anything right now, right? I mean, they haven't been selling anything or is there, are they up and running their business? That's just wham. Yeah. It's wham, yeah. Medical marijuana is sold by all of our retailers. They are, okay. And I don't believe at this time when they submit their taxes, they differentiate between medical and non. Okay. Could we find out what that would, how would that affect our sales, our revenue that comes into the city if we did not attack medical marijuana? I don't believe unless planning has something, we don't possess any data on that. We'd have to default totally to the industry and have them produce it for us. All right, financial records or something like that. Councilor McLeary. I'd like to just ask if Ms. Lagner would mind coming up and providing some clarity for that? I would just go ahead and request that the council not engage in a dialogue at this time, knowing that we will have a further discussion about this and can later conversate with other people from the industry and our staff in regards to how to move forward. If we open up the dialogue at this point, we'll be further behind it. I know some folks have been waiting equally as long as some of the cannabis folks for an item that should have been heard, I think about three hours ago. So the interest of time and adhering to some of their time, I'd appreciate that. Absolutely, thank you. Any questions on this side in terms of, I guess we'll start with item, we'll just take them maybe one by one in terms of the recommendation, which is one to support reforms to lower the state taxes and state fees on the cannabis industry and directing the mayor to write to Senator Monning, Assembly Member Stone, and the League of California Cities asserting this position. So moved. So we have a motion by Council Member Glover. Second. Seconded by Vice Mayor Cummings. Definitely. We should get the state to reduce the taxes at the state level. Council Member Brown, and then Councilor Macintosh. We get a second already. It was a motion by Council Member Glover seconded by Vice Mayor Cummings. Thank you. I'm gonna support that motion. I would also like to include perhaps as a friendly amendment and maybe it's already kind of implicit, but to direct staff to engage with the industry in lobbying efforts with the state because. Accepted. I'll just, I'll zip it there. I have a reason for that. Okay. So friendly amendment made by Council Member Brown accepted by Council Member Glover and Vice Mayor Cummings. Okay, Council Member Matthews. And then if we could bring back for an official action a future time endorsement of AB 286, which has to do with lowering state taxation levels. Accepted. That would be for future action. Okay, is there any further discussion on item 14.21 at this time? Okay, all those in favor please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That passes unanimously with Council Member Myers having stepped out. So now under recommendation two of 14.2 is a resolution amending council policy 12.16 to affirm that the set aside for the children's fund is set to 12.5 of the total cannabis business tax collected. In terms of a motion, I would just only recommend simplifying the language and the policy to say purpose instead of creation and funding. So moved. Okay, so I'll second that. There's a motion by Council Member Matthews with the language modification or from creation and funding to purpose. Does that work for you Council Member Matthews? Yes. Okay, great. Are you changing? Just basically changing, modifying the policy statement that the first sentence in the red line version stating, did you get it? I'm sorry, so it states it is the policy of the city council that 12.5 of the city of Santa Cruz cannabis business tax revenue be designated for and striking creation and funding and putting the word purpose instead of a dedicated children's fund. Minor. Okay. Any further discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That passes unanimously. Thank you for that. And then the third recommendation is to direct staff to advance a county wide regional cannabis business tax study and taxation model and present an update to the city council no later than September 2019. I'll just add before we begin that discussion to city manager Martin Bernal's original comment that there was a regionally that conversation that took place at the last city select meeting with interest in moving forward with a county wide strategy. And I think there was a lot of interest in wanting to have kind of that kind of conversation ensue. So just sort of to highlight that as a regional interest as well. Do you have anything to add? Yeah, that's correct. There is just concern that without just really being thoughtful about the different tax rates and also understanding the different markets that are or operations that function within the different jurisdictions. Like for example, the amount of revenue that's generated off a retail versus cultivation manufacturing does vary. So how you adjust the rates could have an impact on competition on revenues of variety factors. And the thinking is we should be really thoughtful about that because there have been some in some counties where they just sort of do sort of a race to the bottom kind of approach to taxing and also really not really being very thoughtful on it has not turned out to be a very good thing for them, for those agencies. And so we wanted to make sure and be careful about that. Again, again, it's also further concern just in light of our budget situation that anything that we do that potentially reduces our revenue makes it much more difficult for us to balance our budget. Okay, thank you. And then in the interim, I mentioned this earlier. There's the interest of the council. One suggestion I would support is modifying and aligning our tax structure to mimic the counties while this took place so we could have more information before we move forward with just sort of choosing a taxation number. Council Member Glover. So two questions. One, what's the cost associated with the establishing the tax study? I don't see it in the staff report. On the agenda report. Maybe I'm missing it, but I just see the fiscal in the back and talking about it. You mean working regionally with? It says to put together a business tax study and taxation model. So is there a fiscal impact on that? It may be nothing and it may be something. So I think it depends on, certainly as you heard from the industry, we know ourselves and sometimes things are more complicated than we think. So as we talk with our fellow agencies, it may be pretty straightforward or we might need help. So I think it would have to be something we would come back to you unless. And then just to clarify. It looks like there's more information. I was going to say it would just start with the staffs of the various agencies getting together to discuss and understand the issues and then figure out what's the best approach to take forward. And so we may need some assistance in that regard, although we may share the cost associated with that. That's the other or just use some of the data that some of the other agencies might have with their existing consultant services. So it's anticipated that it would again, it would start as a sort of a staff led effort. Okay, great. And then just to clarify something you said, Madam Mayor is that you would support three and suggest additional language that the city mimic the county tax model during the process. That would be something I would support. Knowing that particularly the 8% is somewhat out of range, particularly around the cultivation manufacturing percentage. Okay, then I'd like to make a motion directing staff to advance a countywide regional cannabis business tax study and taxation model and present an update to the Santa Cruz City Council no later than September 2019. And in the interim mimic the county tax structure until we hear back about the analysis. Okay. We have a motion by Council Member Clever. I'll second that for the sake of discussion, but I have a question. Go ahead. I just want for clarification, are the county I believe taxes testing and distribution at 7%? I presume you're not going to raise our rates there. You're talking specific to cultivation. For retail cultivation and manufacturing. So I'm sorry, I was momentarily distracted is the motion to reduce the city's rates of taxation to mirror the county at this time? With the respect, sorry, I'm going to just, can I do this with respect to retail cultivation and manufacturing. Since that is not described on the agenda, I'm going to recommend that the motion direct staff to agendize that for action at your next meeting. Okay, we'll go ahead and have that. I will adjust that then. Yes, so move with number three on 14.2 and instruct the staff to please put down the agenda to come back to the next city council meeting for us to take action on the changing of the tax structure in the city of Santa Cruz around cannabis. For clarification, I believe your intent would be, let's say, hypothetically, it becomes January 2020 and the county's rate goes up. We would mirror wherever they're at in the interim. Well, if say we don't finish, I mean, this is to come back by September 2019 or so, so I don't anticipate. I'm just being hypothetical. But if that were the case, under that direction, that's how I would interpret it as well, yeah. Vice Mayor Cummings, is this, okay. All right, any further discussion? No. Council Member Brown. Okay, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay, that passes unanimously. I think that concludes our cannabis item and we'll go ahead and have maybe a three minute break. Very quickly. A lot of these can come back on consent, right? We've already given the direction. Yeah, yeah, that was pretty much essentially. Okay. We're now onto item number 16 of our agenda. And item number 16 is the CDBG and Home Funding and the Housing and Community Development Program discussion for our 2019-2020 program year. And I'll turn it over to our Economic Development Department to kick off the presentation. I will also note that at 7 p.m. we have oral communications and we will go ahead and pause if we need to for oral communications at that time and then reconvene after. For those in the audience, I want to let you know that we don't allow food in the chambers, so we'll go ahead and ask you either to step outside and enjoy your food or to put it away for the time being. And there will be an opportunity for public comment on this item after with the presentation. So at this time, we'll go ahead and have the presentation, maybe open it up to public comment and then return back. So please. Great, good evening, Mayor, members of the council, Bonnie Lipscomb, Director of Economic Development. And I'm just briefly going to introduce the item and then turn it over to Tiffany Lake, who's our Principal Management Analyst in Housing and pulled the presentation together and has been working on CDBG since she started with the city recently. So the item before you today is preliminary approval of the recommended funding program for our Community Development Block Grant, more commonly known as CDBG, and home 2019-2020 program year and direction to staff to complete the draft action plan for the upcoming year. We annually receive funding from the Community Development Block Grant and home program annually from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development HUD. In order to receive that and reallocate the funding, we must have an adopted consolidated plan. It's a five-year plan that identifies and analyzes strategies for addressing community needs. We currently are in the fourth year of the five-year consolidated plan and the action plan and draft today with your direction will be for the final year of our five-year plan. Next year, as I mentioned, will be the fifth year. We will begin a robust community outreach process for the new five-year consolidated plan later this spring and we will turn at the May 28th hearing at the second hearing with an outline that goes along with the final plan for their proposed community outreach process for the next five-year plan. On February 11th, 2019, the Community Programs Committee, Council Committee met and made preliminary recommendations on the Community Development Block Grant, CDBG and home funds and that is actually what is before you today. This is a preliminary plan. It's an important step in the process but it is not the final decision. Tiffany will go over the timeline and the decision points in the next few minutes. But we do need a motion from you today approving the preliminary recommendations and directing staff to proceed with a draft action plan. As Tiffany will review, the second hearing will be on May 28th following which the action plan will be finalized and submitted to HUD. Funding does become available July 1st so we have a pretty tight timeline. I do wanna clarify that the motion that's in the staff report, the actual sort of revised motion just to clarify is to approve the Community Programs Committee recommendations and for the Recommended Funding Program for CDBG and home activities for the 2019-2020 program year and also the second motion which is in your packet is correct which is also directing staff to complete the draft action plan for the upcoming program year. And with that, I will turn it over to Tiffany Lake who has a brief presentation. As Bonnie mentioned, we are in the middle of our five year consolidated plan and what we'll be talking about today will be related to the year five, our program year 2019 which is for fiscal year 20 and we need approval on recommendations for funding so that we can move forward and draft the action plan and submit it to HUD. So the annual action plan has a pretty regular schedule. It always starts with the application submissions. We've already had that. We've noticed the public hearing dates and in February the CPC reviewed the applications and made initial funding recommendations based on rankings from staff. So now we're in the first public hearing today and you'll hear the draft recommendations from the CPC and confirm those so that we can move forward. This graph shows the historical funding for both CDBG and home over the years. The green is CDBG and the orange is home so we can see that the amounts have varied a lot and they've been declining over the years. We did have a spike in 2018 but we can't count on that so our estimate for the 2019 is somewhat conservative. So for CDBG funding from the grant itself we expect 485,000. We're expecting program income of 8,000. That's a total combined amount of 493 that we have available for allocation and again that is a conservative amount because we don't want to budget more than we really have. Of that 493,000, 20% of it is for administration. So administration can cover environmental assessments, layering studies, consultant and legal fees as well as staffing costs. And our staffing costs include researching, monitoring, drafting notices, the action plans, doing environmental reviews, reporting and also drafting the consolidated plan which is coming up the next five years. And so this administration portion doesn't cover all of our costs and we could charge administration to the programs and projects themselves that we award money to but economic development and the housing division wants the dollars to go further in the community so we keep it only at that 20%. The rehab administration is for collecting fees, sorry for collecting loans so we pay fees for collecting on the rehab administration. And code enforcement which was part of the consolidated plan as the number one goal which was to increase and preserve affordable housing and we specifically outlined in our consolidated plan that we would do that with enhanced targeted code enforcement in the neighborhood revitalization strategy area and also the code enforcement target area and that is how HUD will evaluate us at the end of the five years. So that means we have only 290,900 available for programming but we can see that's not nearly enough compared to the request. We had 240 requested for programs and over a million for projects so that's more than a million difference between what's available and what's requested. We can see all of the applications we receive for community programs here and the top three which were ranked based on meeting national objectives being in the target areas and having goals that were part of our consolidated plan are seen here and all of the top three were recommended for funding by the CPC. Now we have a 15% activities cap that's mandated by HUD but we can have an exception to that because Nueva Vista is a CBDO which is a community based development organization so we can go over this cap of $74,000 but if we do that means we have less funds available for funding other projects so that's something to keep in mind so you can exceed the cap but it lowers the amount available. So when the CPC met in February they recommended funding Nueva Vista at 50,000 and the city also provides additional funding to Nueva Vista from Red Cross funds and also core funds for a combined total for this upcoming year of 128,000 which is above the requested amount. The CPC also recommended funding the teen center at 35,000 and we have a star next to California Rural Legal Assistance. The CPC recommended interest in funding this program if available and so we did some research to find how we could make it available. So we are able to move the security deposit administration that the housing authority runs that's $12,500 we can move that to home which had no other applications this year and we can do that if we track the administration by the unit and the housing authority has agreed to do that so that freed up $12,500 and we've also lowered the administration portion of the rehab program and that's 7,000 that we've reduced from our own administrative budget and that allows you to consider funding CRLA at 19,500 as was indicated that the CPC was interested in. So we also had project applications and again the top applications are ranked and circled above the CPC recommended funding all of these. MHCAN and New Life were ranked the lowest and because of the lack of funding CPC did not recommend funding them at this time. We'll go ahead and pause here. Just want to remind folks in the audience that you're not able to speak while we have the presentation and we'll have a chance for that. Okay, thank you. Now the total available of 186,000 for project applications is less than 104,000 that we had allocated for the programs. So if that amount changes this amount could go up or down depending on whether that the program allocation increases or decreases. So in February when they met CPC recommended funding Central Park at 96,400 Highlights of that program project include improving drainage and improving ADA access. The CPC also recommended funding the Boys and Girls Club at $40,000 and that is for creating a safe and secure check-in area for staff and participants. And they also recommended funding the Pogonip Farm Kitchen at 50,000 which would partially fund their kitchen renovations that they're proposing and that's a total of 186,400. Moving on to home. For 2019 we estimated that we'd get 250,000 and also another 40,000 of program income and the amount mandated by HUD is 10% for administration. So less 29,000 we have 261,000 available for programming. So again the star indicates a change from what the CPC recommended. So the CPC did recommend funding the security deposit program that was at 50,000 and I'm proposing that we fund it at 100,000 that allows us to cover the admin portion that we moved from CDBG at 15% and it also allows us to increase the security deposit money available for assisting low income households get into housing from 50,000 to 85,000 because this year even though we extended the deadline we had no other applications. So this year the housing authority ran out of funds in March after assisting 35 households and they've also run out every year for the last few years. And when families move out of housing they also return the security deposit funds for us to use again in home in future years. So we also have a 15% set aside for CHODOs that's a community housing development organization. So HUD mandates that we allocate 15% for CHODO or we lose the money. We have only two Insana crews and Habitat for Humanity wasn't ready to apply for it this year. Mid Peninsula Housing has an upcoming project, Jesse Street where they're going to be converting 14 units that are available for very low income persons with psychiatric disabilities that'll go from 14 units to 27 units. So we're proposing that we use that set aside for them and that gives us 117,500 available for programming next year. So we have some steps we still have to do after today. So based on your decisions that you make today we'll draft the action plan and we'll also place a notice in the paper summarizing the decisions. And then we have 30 days required between this first public hearing and our second public hearing. At that second public hearing we should have the final budget numbers from HUD and we can finalize the amounts. And we also have a hard 15 days between that second public hearing and submission to HUD which is gonna be due June 21st of this year unless HUD changes it. And then funding as Bonnie mentioned will be available in July. And that is it. Thank you for your presentation. As a member of community programs I wanna thank Council Member Glover and Matthews who serve on that committee with me in terms of the conversation that took place at that meeting to get us to this place as well as some of the modifications that seem to extend the dollars based on your presentation. So we'll go ahead and open up for questions. I want to just let the council know that we're approaching our 7 p.m. timeline for oral communications. So we'll go ahead and pause the item at that time open up oral communications return and then invite folks to speak to this item during public comment. We could potentially postpone oral communications depending on how many folks are here in the room who want to address this item on public comment. And if that's the case then I think the council would need to be supportive of that given that the council member handbook suggests that it's generally oral communications at 7 o'clock no matter what. I agree and it would be my preference to do so and so I can make that, I will make that plea that we could potentially even pause questions at this time open it up for public comment for this item if it exceeds into oral communications a bit then we'll go ahead and deviate from our practice. Yeah, motion for that? No, unless there's any objection to that, how's that? I'd like to see the people who've been waiting here for a long time and be able to speak if oral communications folks who have been waiting at 7 can wait for an extra 20 minutes or so, that's... That seems totally appropriate to me. I just know that that has been a strong position of the council in the past, so okay. So who here in the audience is interested in speaking to this item? Okay, if you could please line to my left and we'll have up to, why don't we go ahead and do this? If you're interested in speaking very briefly to the council please step forward and we'll allow you to speak for one minute and you can self-select that way and if not, and you would like to speak for the full two minutes, then you're welcome to do so. So if you are interested in speaking, you'll have one presentation after the one minute. Are there any folks who wanted to address the council for just one minute to briefly make your point? And I just want to acknowledge and thank you all for staying here and this item was scheduled to be a lot earlier, please. Go. When we conclude this. Okay, go ahead. After public comment on this item, so likely a little bit after seven o'clock depending on how many folks speak for the full time, okay. So if you're interested in speaking for one minute, please step forward. Hello, my name is David Steinberg, I'm a bioinformatics programmer at the UC and I'm also a resident of the Central Park neighborhood and today I come as a delegate of our household, Maya and Fiona Steinberg, we're not available to make comments today. Let me go ahead and pause you here. Are you here to speak to item number 16 on our agenda or for oral communications? 16 to the agenda. I'm sorry, okay. Central Park funding. Oh, okay, excuse me. Okay, apologies. Please start the time again. Should I start over? You're welcome to start over. I think we know where we're at. Go ahead. Okay, Central Park, I lived there. And my kids love to play there and so we're excited about the fact that you all are considering improvements to our humble little park. I don't know if you've seen it. It's called Central Park, it's probably one of the smallest parks in Santa Cruz. It's also a lake, a good amount of the year and this year we made boats and floated them on there but it would be great if it drained out, we'd be able to use the park more. I'm really here because Maya and Fiona wanted you all to know that they really love the merry-go-round that's there. It's like an old fashioned metal merry-go-round thing that they really love and that I had to be here in order to tell you that. Other than that, we appreciate the improvements that keep this park usable by us because we're out there every weekend. Thank you. Thank you. Apologize for the interruption. Okay, are you interested in speaking to the council for one minute or for the full two? For two. For the first who's been here all day. I just want to acknowledge that at this time we will have one presentation. I apologize, it was in my script at the wrong location so I don't have it here. And then we'll go ahead, you'll be our first speaker but we had one presentation that will follow the one minute. So we'll have just a four minute presentation and then you'll be the first speaker after that. So you will be the first one after the presentation. Ray, please feel free to come in. You're being lost for one minute. Are you would like the one minute? Okay. Anyone's a minute? Hi, my name's Cleenie Humanis and I live in Beach Flats. I've lived there for almost 10 years and every, I'm going to come here every year and speak on behalf of the community center there. It's such an awesome place for these kids to go to. They get their homework help, they get food. There's always something for them to do and it's a positive thing that's going on there and they need the funding, they need the funding and it's just, it's the only Hark in Beach Flats in that area. That's the only resource that's available for low income, especially the Hispanic community. And I just wanted to lay it out there and my son wants to talk to you too. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, so you'll have up to one minute as well. Hello, my name is Rocket Humanis from the community center. I just want to talk about how it really helped me and like I could do my homework over there and then we also have other activities that we can do. Like, I forgot its name. But they also have, they also go to the ocean. We also, we can go to Monterey Aquarium and also do other things. And I really appreciate it that they are always there for us. And I'm happy about that. And you'll be given the additional time of four minutes with some approvals. My name is Raymond Cancino. I'm the CEO of Cabea Bridges. Thank you for the opportunity to speak and for the city council and the staff of the continued partnership. With your support, we've been successful in working with over 750 families annually through a wide array of services to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to unleash their full potential and thrive. We request the council to consider investing in Nueva Vista by supporting a proposal that directs 100,000 of CDBG funds to support our work. Your support is needed now more than ever. As our community continues to be targeted by ICE and federal government policies such as the census citizenship question, we need to ensure that we continue to provide a safe space for immigrants and community members who might not otherwise seek services. We need your help to ensure we continue to meet the measures, goals and desires of almost every single strategic plan that identifies the services we provide at each family resource center in Santa Cruz County in a cost-effective, bilingual and bicultural way from being eliminated because of reduced funding. We ask that this council continue to align your values and objectives to the budget decisions. Throughout every single strategic plan, we see that services we provide at Nueva Vista Family Resource Center are needed to accomplish our community goals. That is why it's critically important that you support us. We see this laid out in the Santa Cruz strategic plan, 2018-2024 where it calls out comprehensive health and safety as basic needs services and health integration, behavioral health care, providing two years in promotional health equity that integrate our nutrition and education program geared to go beyond this county as well. The dynamic economy as well is called out, allowing us to help support people that are underemployed or unemployed. Our services are also covered under Santa Cruz County Office of Education, number two, increase educational options, opportunities for all students and parents and the community. This has also been something that's been created. Along the same lines, we have your own Santa Cruz City two-year plan that specifically outlines, prioritizes youth programs and families as well as within the Beach Flash strategically located priority locations. I ask you not just to have lip service to these strategic plans, but to actually invest in some of these programs. Lastly, the comprehensive turning the curve by the youth violence prevention, which we had partners here today that wanted to explain that our intervention services help support youth and families locally and reduce the crime rate. In light of these needs and the goals, we need the council to match your objectives to your budgets and ask that you invest and not divest. We urge the council to direct staff to increase our funding without the requested amount we're gonna see an overall 25% cut. Here are the funding over the last several years across all the different funding sources including the city and county. Even though we changed the language in this last presentation, it still doesn't change the facts that we're seeing 25% cut regardless of how and who paid for what. The reality is that we're losing services in this community, it's gonna be most impacted as 86% are low income LatinoX and long-term consequences will result in this community. It's having a negative impact on a small minority that's already under attack and we don't need the city of Santa Cruz to also add to that list. Please, now, thank you for your patience. You'll have up to two minutes. So my name is Shantanu Pukand. I live directly across the street from Central Park and I'm concerned about a persistent problem arising from the misuse of its merry-go-round. On warm nights, it has become a magnet for groups of young adults who are not the homeless, by the way, I want to clarify that, who gather on the merry-go-round to drink, to make noise, and on several occasions now to have sex. On summer nights, I am awakened by these noisy revelers about once a week. This problem has gone on for the last eight years before the installation of the merry-go-round, the park was largely quiet at night. I have now had several conversations with the park department officials whose response has largely been that the merry-go-round is immensely popular with parents and their children. That apparent popularity has not prevented both Galt and Soquel schools from removing merry-go-rounds from their playgrounds because there's a higher incidence of injuries to children playing on them. One park official has told me that he is aware of this risk and also of the resultant trend to remove merry-go-rounds from playgrounds. So my question to the park department is this, how do you justify retaining a structure despite knowing its risks? And now also it's unwholesome nighttime uses. So far the parks department has not recognized this as a problem that needs to be solved. They have not, for example, suggested any alternative structures to the merry-go-round or any design solutions that might make the merry-go-round unusable at night. I'm asking the city council to urge the park department to think resourcefully and responsibly to solve a recurrent problem of which they are now fully aware. Children and their parents are not the only users of this park. In fact, adults outnumber children in this neighborhood. So your time is up, but you're welcome to submit your comments to the council and we'd be happy to take a look at them as well. Thank you again for your patience, okay? As well as those who've been here as long. You'll have up to two minutes. Thank you very much. My name is Kevin Steerhoff. I'm also a resident of the Central Park neighborhood. We've been residents there for about two years now. I'm here representing my wife and daughter who are here for many hours this afternoon, but had to leave optimally and also four other families with about five or six other young children that utilize the park heavily and are very excited and happy for the proposed improvements to the park. Very much appreciate that. I'll echo David's comments in the back that it's often flooded and unusable during certain times of the year. So rectifying that problem would be a huge improvement to the park and greatly improve its use. We're quite sympathetic to the concerns that other neighbors have about misuse of the equipment on the park, but in pulling the families and the other children around, it's clear that the merry-go-round is sort of a central, from their perspective, at least the central aspect of that park, it makes it quite unique within Santa Cruz and it's heavily used. We'd really like to see it stick around and just got a moment. I'd like to play a short statement from my daughter who sent this after she had to leave. She's speaking for her friends. Maybe this will work. Well, my name is Ian, and I do not want you to take the merry-go-round away, because even my friends like the merry-go-round. Hopefully that's somewhat convincing. Again, we really appreciate the efforts to improve our park. We use it heavily, we very much appreciate it, and just want to put in our two cents to see the merry-go-round stick around it. It does make the park quite unique and we appreciate having it there. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, next speaker. You'll have up to two minutes. Good evening. Thanks to all of you for your patience today as well. It's been a long day. My name is Gretchen Reganhardt. I'm the directing attorney of California Rural Legal Assistance and for our local offices here in the county. I want to thank you for considering renewing our partnership, which for many years was in place until just the last few years. As you know, I hope our services are designed to help city residents address the effects of poverty through the legal system. Specifically, we work to keep people in their homes by doing eviction defense, by addressing housing discrimination, working for affordable housing. We also help people collect unpaid wages and address employment discrimination. We try to keep kids in school by assisting kids who are in the school discipline system and we also work on public benefits. So we hope to bring all that here to you. We thank you for supporting us. And we have opened an office again in Santa Cruz at 501 Soquel. We're having a grand opening next Wednesday the first and we hope you can join us. It's in the evening, 4.30 to 7. Please come by. Thanks. Yeah. Okay, next speaker. Good evening, everyone. My name's Edgar Laundito. And I'm the program manager for Nueva Vista Community Resources, a program of community bridges. Nueva Vista has been serving the Latino community of beach flats and lower oceans since 1983. It's originally began as a health clinic servicing the Latino community's health needs. Since then it has morphed into a multifaceted resource center that continues to address the emerging needs in our community. Today I'm here to ask that you please reconsider the proposed recommendation of another $25,000 cut in CDBG funding and propose that we be considered for 100,000 in funding to support instead. Another cut in CDBG funding to our center will reduce our capacity to operate at our current level of support to both the community and city departments. The center has been at the forefronts of every major neighborhood Shaco. It has been there to advocate and support the immigrant community. Some of these events have included the redevelopment of the Nueva Vista apartments, outreach and assisting with census count of the hard to reach population 2010 and the redesign of the beach flats mural and the downsizing of the beach flats community garden. On multiple occasions, the Latino community has entrusted us to carry their concerns to elected officials. Furthermore, Nueva Vista has had a long standing relationship of collaborating with the city. On an ongoing basis, we work alongside the city's departments. We have history of working with the police department as well. For instance, the morning of February 13, 2017, when there was the Homeland Security raid in beach flats, we were called shortly after to disseminate accurate information about the event in the community. This was done to restore trust into the community, especially during the current political climate that has generated fear into our immigrant community. As a sanctuary city, our role has been to provide accurate information and to advocate for Latinos. Thank you. Okay. And I believe you're our last speaker on this item, correct? So you're on, yep, okay, thank you. One process question, I actually, I'm Paul Goldberg from the homeless garden project. I had a large crew of folks. I have a leather here from one of our training graduates who has been battling drug addiction and homelessness. He had to go to his SLE. He did write out his speech. I can circulate it or if I might have a minute to read after my speech. I think it'd be most appropriate for you to circulate it at this time. Thank you very much. And we'll be happy to look at it. Okay, so you'll have your two minutes then. Thank you. Thank you so much, Mayor Watkins. And again, on behalf of our executive director, Derek Ganshorn and our board president, Kathy Calpho, who were here to make comment. But in extenuating circumstance in a very interesting day, you've heard how much you all know what a crisis homelessness is in our community. And here you have an opportunity to fund and make an impact on a program that is successful. Last year, 100% of our graduates obtained stable employment and stable housing within three months of leaving the program. So here is your opportunity to fund a program that's really making a concrete difference. A few misconceptions at the CPC. One item came up about wanting to fund city-owned property, this building that we are building, it's not a renovation, we are building a new home for this innovative program that is 30 years old that drew me from the East Coast to Santa Cruz because it is so innovative and so progressive in changing and transforming lives. It's city-owned, it will be a city-owned building that will be part of our public-private partnership where we will be operating it with volunteers and community members who cooked. Our major donor and volunteer Patrick Teverbaugh was here to speak to that earlier, but fortunately he also needed to go. 50,000 is wonderful. That represents 12% of the cost of the kitchen and 1% of the entire PogoNIP project. Our $150,000 request, our full request that we please respectfully request that you consider would be 4% of the overall project that will be on city-owned land. So this remains the only government grant that we could go for. Heap and Cash was suggested at CPC. We were not funded from Heap and Cash because our program is really an employment program. It's not about beds, but we create housing and employment opportunities. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Okay, so that will conclude public comment of item number 16. I think we'll go ahead. Oh, you're here for item number 16. Okay, forgive me. Please, you're our last speaker on this item and you'll have up to two minutes. Well, I've been going to MHCAN over 30 years and I wasn't born with these chromosomes or these genes, but I'll tell you, I make A's in college and I'm in college right now. I'm going to Davis, but I'm here to address several things that MHCAN would be a perfect place to put the funding that you're saving next year or whatever. That's ridiculous. When people are in the street, they're laying around, you're harassing them, charging them money or whatever. I mean, it's just, it's pathetic. As someone who's lived in the street for years and seven months, it'll be on the first of, you know, MHCAN has plenty of room. There's an art room over there. You can do art, you can do music therapy. You know, we range flowers, we do meditation. We have all kinds of groups going on. There's beds over there. There's so many places to sleep overnight that I can't understand why you don't fund that as a shelter. I don't understand why you don't give the, ask the university to like kick down some land. They certainly can kick down some students. Why can't they kick down some land? Like they could kick down land for the students and the weirdos and the people with families. You know, keep them all separate, but they got plenty of land at the village and the farm or whatever's happening over there with no carrots, I don't get that at all. But back to MHCAN, it helps me, it helps me go to college. It helps me make A's. When I go there, I can go there on Monday every morning. This cute little couple out of nowhere, Dennis and Colleen make breakfast for us and they're so sweet and everyone loves Monday. We're just so darling to each other. But it's a little family over there. There's free coffee. If you just wanna pick, you know, there's stuff to do and I just think if you're gonna put funding somewhere, why don't you put funding in? The last hidden stigma is mental health. Mental health, if you crossed that line, oh my God. You know, you should think about funding MHCAN and use it as a shelter, thank you very much. Okay, so we'll go ahead and close public comment for item number 16. We'll go ahead and return to council for action and deliberation after oral communications is complete. So at this time, can I get a sense of who is here to speak to the council in regards to oral communications? Okay, you can go ahead and line up to my left and you'll have up to two minutes. Pat Kittle, Santa Cruz. I've discussed this before and it needs to be discussed because frankly, people don't discuss it. And a lot of times when I go to discuss it, members of the city council immediately need to go to the bathroom. It's not something you guys like to hear. But the remainder of you are gonna hear it and I hope you will too. The Israel lobby is the most powerful lobby in this country and it has subverted our priorities tremendously. Domestically, I'll wait until you're done there, Justin, as I was saying, the Israel lobby has greatly subverted our priorities both locally, regionally, and nationally. We're fighting wars that benefit nobody in the world but Israel. And Trump promised he was gonna get us out of this crap. He's a liar, he's made it worse than it was in the first place. So long, Tony. So anyway, you can go to a fellow locally, a professor by the name of Christopher Bolin, that's B-O-L-L-Y-N. He has done his homework on this and he has written a book and he will demonstrate clearly if you care to go to his website, B-O-L-L-Y-N. If you just simply use that search and go through the distractions that Google nowadays will throw up at you, Bolin.com, you will see overwhelming evidence that Israel did 9-11 specifically to get us into these wars and we have put trillions into it. If you care about funding for anything, you should look that up, Bolin.com. Oh, next person. My name is Pauline Seales. Thank you for the opportunity to speak. I'm going to read this. Dear Santa Cruz City Council, we thank you for adopting the emergency climate resolution. Now we need action from all departments of city government. We need to greatly reduce the use of gasoline and natural gas while increasing bike safety and car free areas and encouraging public transportation. We need to drastically reduce food waste and increase composting. We need to plant many thousands of trees and increase climate education. We recognize that there is some work in action and some progress on these issues, but we need much more. These signatures were all collected at Earth Day. Thank you very much. Oh, good evening. I'm Dana Bagshaw. I live in Santa Cruz, following on to the climate action, the call for climate action. I think we need to do that through our budget and we're doing the budgeting process now. And I recently attended the last Tuesday, the parks, no, the public works gave their presentation and I was overwhelmed with the enormity and the scope of the work that the city does. I can understand when Mark Dettel said that he didn't want to add any more projects to the budget, but I think it's time for us to take a look at what is in the budget now, the practice of breeding forward items from years before that haven't been completed. I heard that from public works as well at an earlier meeting. So I think we really need to take a hard look at what's there and say, look, does this item increase carbon emissions? If it does, if the answer is yes, then we just slash it as simple and as tough as that is. Okay, and then once we cut through all the old projects that no longer make sense today, then we can start looking at maybe post-effective ways of doing other things like some of the things Pauline just mentioned. One idea that I had was the West Cliff Drive, if we just made that into a one lane, one way system for cars, and then opened up the rest of the street to bicycles and jump bikes and skateboards and removing that from the sidewalk where the pedestrians are. So things like that is what I would like to see happen. Thank you. Good evening. Anna Brooks speaking as a private citizen only for myself. Last week, my neighborhood met with representatives of the police department to discuss ways we could improve security because of an increase of incidents in our area over the last few months. I didn't mention where I live. It's important to me that that not be shared in this public arena. I thank and compliment Sergeant John Bush, Officer Raul Pizano and Lieutenant Jose Garcia. I especially appreciated Sergeant Bush's graciousness and transparency during the well-attended meeting and Lieutenant Garcia's comments. I also thank Deb Elston of Santa Cruz Neighbors for attending and providing handouts in advance regarding what we as individuals and neighborhoods could do to help prevent crime. Please don't mistake the brevity of my acknowledgements for a lack of appreciation. I'm also here to remind the public that there are resources available to help people enhance safety in their neighborhoods. I heard Sergeant Bush say during that meeting that preventing crime is the best way to decrease crime. I believe that there is a level of personal responsibility involved in crime prevention. That's why I especially appreciated the handouts of Santa Cruz from Santa Cruz Neighbors, which are available on its website. The police department's website also has crime prevention tips and information about neighborhood watches. Both the police department and Santa Cruz Neighbors are easily found online by typing their names into any search engine. Ordinarily, when I speak at oral communications, I stay to hear the other speakers. Today, however, is one day on the calendar, on which I usually do not conduct business and the day is drawing to a close. So I wish you well in your meeting and I thank you for all you do. Next speaker. Hi, I'm Nate Alex, dot kennedy at gmail.com, three, four, six, nine, eight, eight, eight. What I want to say right now is one thing we really need to do is we need to get these city council meetings on the air, on regular radio stations. Just go down the list and keep asking them which ones you want to do it. I mean, just off the top of my head, KZSC, KSCO, KION, KPIG, K-PIG, so on and so forth. Whoever can help spearhead this needs to go to all of them and with some luck we'll get at least two stations that are willing to broadcast our city council meetings live. So people driving around in their car can listen to it. People jogging west cliff with their little FM radio on the strap to their arm can listen to these council meetings. Aside from that, what we also really need to do is take the stream, the audio stream and put it on the website for the city where I can listen to the council meeting live over my internet. But it needs to be scaled down because there's a lot of bandwidth issues, especially if I'm watching the video, it usually chokes things up pretty hard. But you get the idea, we need to get this out there and then what else is really important? My cell phone, my tablet, if I set up the proper software on my computer can all handle live speech to text recognition so we can have subtitles up there on the screen. Not only that, but it will not only do subtitles, it'll do translations into any other language so we can do live English subtitles and Spanish, both on the screen. We really need to do that as well and with all that said, I'm almost out of time so Justin, Drew, Sandy, all you get a hold of me. Okay, next speaker please. And you'll have up to two minutes as well. Good evening, my name is Lisbeth Olazo and I'm a student at Cabrillo College and I'm also a current dancer in the nonprofit organizations in Darrells. And first of all, we wanna thank you for sponsoring and helping our Galaghetza. That is, it's gonna be in San Lorenzo Park for the second year and it's gonna be in May 19th. We wanna invite you so you can appreciate and see Mexican and Oaxaca culture, food, dance, music and everything. We also bring 25 musician students from Oaxaca and a band, the full band and yeah, that's basically it. He's, his name Prolan is a graduate from that school at Oaxaca and he's gonna use his two minutes to show some Oaxacan music that you could also appreciate in our Galaghetza. Thank you. Okay, come on up if you want, right up to them. And I'm a board member with Cinderos and yeah, I just wanna reiterate Lisbeth's invitation for all of you to come out to Galaghetza. We have a full month of Viva Oaxaca events including the week before we have our convite, our procession and our downtown fiesta, Cooper Street closure and so we thank the city for city arts, I see Beth back there, for sponsoring Galaghetza for the second year and for the city for all the support. I'll leave these flyers. Thank you. Okay, thank you very much. Hi, I'm Garrett. I'm just gonna talk about a suggestion really more than a specific item. I'll start out by saying that only the federal government is actually authorized by the constitution section eight to define what is faring well, what is poverty, what is the level of welfare to be administered with federal tax dollars and not really authorized by a small city government unless it is using federal authority and funds. And a lot of what we've been doing is have a one size fit all where, for instance, just as an example, the homeless really they're, well, start with poor people. Poor people in the welfare system are kind of separated by the deserving and undeserving because there are rules, there are priorities, families with children, just have only vulnerable people. You know, they go to the top of the list and the grifters really get, well, nothing basically. Now the homeless don't really have that sort of separation of the deserving from the undeserving. I think that's something that needs to be done. I don't think charity is necessarily that good at it. And I further kind of think that actually even the non-profits need a little separation of the deserving from the undeserving if they are in fact some undeserving ones. So I'll read this now, I'll see how far I get. A required, full, easy to access, publicly available set of detailed financials and detailed statements of the public benefit accomplishments of non-profit organizations that receive government funds or use the public land or resources would be an extra benefit to the public. In this way, potential donors may more accurately judge including deciders of public trust like you, the efficiency of public benefit and presumably promote those who provide best and discourage those who provide the least effective public benefit for those donations. And IRS form 10, 990s are a good start but they're really for the IRS use and can still be quite vague and that those forms group together all donations. Okay, your time is up but you're welcome to leave your document with us and we can review it up here. Okay, so just checking in to see how many folks are here for oral communications that still are wanting to speak. Okay, so you will be our last speaker. Hi, I'm Gayle Necunam and I'm here to inform you. Maybe you already know about the California Supreme Court or opinion that affirms municipal authority to regulate utilities and right of way small cell towers. I'll leave this article for you. I'd like to give a copy of it to the city attorney as well. April 4th, 2019, the California Supreme Court published an opinion supporting municipal authority to make regulations on so-called small cell public right of way towers and uses of the public's right of way. This opinion affirms the 2016 appellate court ruling. The opinion seems to go far beyond mere aesthetic standards. The focus of the lawsuit by T-Mobile West LLC affirming the exercise of municipalities full police powers to regulate small cell towers and public's right of way, including that municipalities do have discretionary power. These rulings have bearing on smart meters in California because of the affirmation of local policing powers. The Supreme Court and appellate court decisions repudiate CPUC claims of exclusive jurisdiction over utilities made during the smart meter rollout. An amicus brief was filed May 11th, 2017 on behalf of the League of California Cities, California State Association of Counties, the International Municipal Lawyers Association, and SCAN N-A-T-A-O-A. These decisions give cities and counties a backbone and legal cover to create and enforce rules and ordinances to protect the public, the environment and public land. These decisions are vital documents for local officials and decision makers. Hopefully as well, they will provide support for actions in other states and countries. One of the things they include in this opinion is cities and counties may make and enforce within their limits all local police, sanitary and other ordinances. Thank you, your time is up. Good evening, my name is Sherry Talmadge and I live at 783 North Branson 40 Avenue. And today was the first day they started giving out tickets that cost money. They were warnings given out before because there's a new residential parking permit program established there. I was surprised when we got a warning ticket about a week and a half ago because I never saw the mailer that was supposedly sent to me in January about this issue. And there were supposedly neighborhood meetings. I was never contacted by anyone for any of these meetings. So I was upset to see this parking permit. I used to live on 9th Avenue by the beach. I know why we need residential parking permits if you can't park within like four blocks of where you live. I get it when you're a resident, that's a hardship. In the little place we lived there didn't have any garage or any driveway. So we needed to use the public street to park. But where I live now, I've lived now for 24 years, there's never been a problem with parking. Never a problem with parking space. We have always been able to park in front of our home or in front of the house next door. My issue is that I believe this thing which was brought up by residents supposedly passed by 67% margin is only designed to keep homes people from parking their vans behind the whole food store and the ride aid store. And my concern is that these are residents, they pay taxes, they wouldn't have gotten any notice in the mail to tell them this decision was being made. So I didn't find out to the signs went up in my neighborhood. And there's a lot of other people who didn't know either. I find out now that it's too late to do anything. I have to wait two years to petition this. But my issue, I asked when I spoke to Brian who's the manager of this kind of program, he mentioned that it's just a response to requests by the residents and the businesses in the area. And I can tell you that there's not a business that doesn't have a parking place here. They have a huge parking lot that's never full. Never full. And this is only designed to keep homeless people out of our neighborhood who have been good neighbors. Thank you. Okay. And you'll have up to... My name is Dave Willis. Last time I came to the meeting, you had started the meeting pertaining to being civil. So when this member right here was reading his definition pertaining to being civil, this member right here, she was like, had complete contempt for what he was saying. It was ignoring him completely. And I remember like when he was speaking once, the second after he was finished with his last word, you, the mayor, you just shut him down real quick like saying, shut up, all right, that's enough. So I don't understand that, but I remember that this member right here, he had mentioned, he asked this guy a question. And then this member here said, she asked him the same question. And he gave her the information. So I don't understand what that means. Like if he tried to make her look good, her would be smart. Why didn't he get the answer to his question? So this member right here, he put in a lot of work, he put in some work about creating a new, better plan, a more cost-effective plan. And he didn't even get notified that, well we'll go a different way with our answer to this problem. So where's the courtesy or the professionalism in that? I don't know what's going on here, but we the people, we elected all of you all who are up there. So that should be recognized and respected. I don't want to come here no more. I hope I don't, I don't know. Good luck. And then you'll be our last speaker here for oral communication. Good evening, I'm Scott Graham. An issue that's bothered me for years about the way the city does business is that projects come forward completely fleshed out to the council and to the public without the council knowing anything about these projects ahead of time and without the public knowing anything about them. And that the city staff spends a bunch of time flushing these projects out and bringing them forward. And then it's like, oh, well, we've already spent so much time and money on this. If you try to stop it now, you're wasting all sorts of city resources. And to me, it would make more sense that when there's a seed of a project to bring that seed forward and say, hey, we're thinking about doing this. Do the council want to go that way? Do the public want to go that way? But instead, no, we come, the staff comes forward with completely fleshed out projects. And they do it all the time. It's like, and to me, that's not being an open government. That's being the staff being in control and trying to push projects forward that don't necessarily need to be pushed forward. The other issue I have is about the agenda. I've talked about this before. I have a copy here of the way Berkeley does their agenda. And I'll leave it here so that it can be copied and distributed to everyone. We don't necessarily have to do it exactly like Berkeley does, but there has to be a formal way that city council members can get an item on the agenda and know it's going to be there. Thank you. So you are our last speaker for oral communications. I'd like to talk about the buses. The buses and the lack of shelter in the town. It's totally pathetic and I- Okay, we'll go ahead and we'll go ahead. We had oral communications. This is oral communications on items that are not on today's agenda. After having folks come in- You're on, you're on. Whatever it is, I can't stay here till midnight. So I have to go on the bus, the buses. Okay, well, why don't we go ahead and do this? We'll go ahead and extend two additional oral communications, I believe, and that will be it, no additional. So you're welcome to come up. You'll have up to two minutes. Ma'am, you're welcome to come up. You have up to two minutes. You will be our last speaker. Well, I just wanted to say that on the weekends, I don't know if you're aware that most of the buses start at 1030, 1015 is the first bus that I'm allowed to go on. And I always miss the last bus, which is at 10, oh, it's at 430 or so. I miss it by 10 minutes every time. And then I have to walk from the university, which doesn't seem like a long way. But if you have as much stuff as I usually carry and with a walker, it's an exciting, I have to pray a lot to get down that mountain. I just like to fund more buses. The city streets are totally appalling. The earthquake has happened how many years ago and the streets are falling apart and we need rings on the fire, on the sand, fire pit rings for barbecues. I mean, you know, there's a lot of places you could put money for people to make them like warmer, have a spot to be, you know, over the university has a spot over there where they have abalone and you could put people over there that put them at the edge of town if you want to and have them keep away from the abalone or whatever. But, you know, I know there is that beach and I know there's a lot of available possibilities. I keep saying natural bridges and the other homeless garden and there's Thurber Lane and there's all kinds of places and it's pathetic that year after year somebody gets the money that's studying or whatever's going on. I keep saying to my friends, you're pocketing the money playing the ponies or someone's playing the stock market. Like, I don't get what's going on at all. I don't. But I wish that you'd be more cognizant, more appropriate with your funding, you know, more aware of people's needs when people are laying in the street because they're sleepy and I saw someone get arrested the other day for laying in the street. I'm sorry, it's appalling to me. Your time is up. You'll be our last speaker. You'll have up to two minutes. Good evening, city leaders. Congratulations on the downtown to boardwalk trolley going electric. This is a great step forward in green technology. However, we chose to again neglect our think local by local stance. Why is it that first transit, a Cincinnati based company, the manager of this service yet again? For example, our own Metro could have hired a new driver that is seasonal for that specific service to then transition to local bus service beyond the trolley. Furthermore, there seems to be continued patterns of poor communication and collaboration. These things need to be worked on on every level of governing body from the city to public agencies or city to county. But if our Metro is truly incapable of managing the trolley, keep this in mind before giving them the keys to the Santa Cruz branch line as that is a very large responsibility. After being fed up with the inconsistency of quality bus service, I resorted to vehicle ownership. There are times I find myself staying late over the hill for friends for fun or for an assortment of contract work. I can now park and ride public transit all night long throughout most of the Bay Area, but not thanks to our Metro. Another cog that seems apparent in our Metro is its non-elected management. With this in mind, I turn to you the elected officials to make better judgment of the leaders of our non-elected officials, especially when their term comes about. In the meanwhile, I look forward to seeing you ask the non-elected officials the tough questions, especially those who lead our housing and transportation sectors accountable. Enjoy the attached reading and look into publications from the Daily Herald to learn more about this saga. Thank you. Thank you. So that goes ahead, that will go ahead and conclude oral communications. We're gonna go ahead and return back to the item that we had paused for the moment, which is item number 16. And now is the time for any questions from staff and action and deliberation. Are there any questions of staff in regards to this item? Vice Mayor Cummings. I'm just curious how much the drainage of the Central Park renovation, how much of that, or how much of what is being presented as the drainage cost. I believe someone's here from Parks and Rec. Who could speak better to that? $55,000. $55,000. Oh, no, that was. Okay. Council Member Matthews, just while we're on that park, part of it was also ADA improvements. That's another component. So for the ADA improvements, it'd be another $30,000 worth spent there. And then the remainder, we were just gonna try to get a recreational feature. I'm gonna place the plug it in. Council Member Glover, and then Council Member Cron, and then Council Member Brown. Thank you. So I sit on the Community Programs Committee, which is the one that made these recommendations. It was a good conversation. I will say, unfortunately, that my perspective was not represented in the final allocation recommendation. So for my colleagues, it weren't a part of that conversation. I had prioritized the full funding of the Nueva Vista request for the $100,000, as well as $100,000 of the $150,000 request from the Homeless Garden Project. I'm concerned with code enforcement with regards to the impact that it has had in one way or another on our affordable housing, which is why I found it was really interesting that the definition was to preserve affordable housing. So maybe I was wondering if the economic development or whoever deals with code enforcement could talk about the impact on affordable housing that it has had and if it has helped to increase, decrease if the units that have been red tagged have been renovated and put back in the market. Have we lost housing because of it? And what's the rationale behind the neighbor complaint clause essentially, which makes it so people can anonymously complain about their neighbors who think there may be a code violation and then people come out and red tag potentially the unit. Why is it not a tenant-based complaint structure where the tenants complain about their quality of living and then that would trigger a city investigation? Alex Corey, assistant planning director. I'm not aware of what you're talking about as far as this complaint process. Code enforcement in the target areas has been proactive, looking to increase and improve the housing stock and that's been the main purpose for the last 20 years of the CBDG funding of code enforcement. So I'm not aware of how many units that have been lost as far as that area. I don't believe there's not many as always in our code enforcement and parental inspection. We try to save units, not lose them. So unless there is a life safety issue that requires the unit to be vacated and a relocation assistant provided for those tenants, we leave them in there and deal with the issues accordingly. Thank you. And then what triggers an inspection of a house? Well, we're proactive in the target areas and so we're looking for violations. However, if we get a complaint, we will deal with them and most complaints are not anonymous. We require the complaint to file a complaint form. But in the target areas, we are proactive. We're driving around those areas looking for violations of housing and et cetera. Okay, great. So thank you for those answers, I really appreciate it. So with that then, I would make a motion to, since the drainage is a big issue at the Central Park area and I believe there's the opportunity for us to use Quimby funds to supplement any additional or some additional costs that may be going into the ADA accessibility, I would then move to change the allocations that were put forward by the community programs committee to be 55,000 for the Central Park renovation to cover the cost of drainage, 100,000 to Nueva Vista resources or community resources, maintaining the 19-5 for the CRLA, 100,000 for the Homeless Garden Project, 40,000 for the Boys and Girls Club and 45,000 for Code Enforcement. Second. Okay, motion by Council Member Glover, second by Council Member Cron, Council Member Matthews and then Council Member Brown. Well, I'd like to speak to some of these. I was also on the committee and we didn't have the benefit at this meeting of many of the project agencies coming forward, just in general. I think it is important that over time we have used CDBG to support both essential city programs and activities and partner with community entities. I do support Code Enforcement, we'll see how that shakes out, but typically this has been a way to fund a needed member of our planning staff in maintaining safe and secure housing and I think many of you have seen City Manager's Weekly Reports from time to time, the kind of truly health and safety threatening conditions that are discovered and abated through that program. In terms of the, I would say to CRLA, welcome back to Santa Cruz, that's great. In terms of the Central Park renovation, that's long overdue for upgrading. I'm glad that there's interest in the drainage. I think also at the same time, the ADA improvements, definitely should be done and I'm gonna ask our staff, is he, yeah, my understanding was that the Quimby funds were pretty well allocated. Is that true or not true? Speak to the park sky. Quite rich, but. Evening, Travis Beck, Superintendent of Parks. The Parks and Rec Tax Fund, some of which are designated as Quimby funds for particular areas, we do have a balance in those accounts, however we also have an enormous list of unfunded capital improvement projects and two of the priorities that are not likely to make it through. The General Fund's CIP are safety and energy efficiency upgrades to ball field lighting at Harvey West Park and Della Viego Park, so depending how some other financing options work out, if we have to dedicate the Park Tax Funds to those projects, it would completely exhaust our available funding. That really illustrates my point that these aren't allocations in a vacuum and I would like to see the ADA improvements proceed with the Central Park renovation because those ballpark lighting projects are really important in terms of our, we've had the people come up and speak about climate action and energy efficiency and those are big ticket items that are very important. We'd like to get those taken care of, so I personally would like to see the full amount, I think it was 55 plus 30 for the ADA 85, that's pretty close and maybe some improvements. I will just say parenthetically, the gentleman who brought up the activity on the roundabout, I wouldn't like that on a weekly basis outside my house either. There may be some opportunities to some redesign of the features I realize roundabouts have their pluses and minuses and we're not talking about that now. Anyway, those are my thoughts. I'd like to preserve the capital improvement money here for both the drainage and ADA and in terms of the Boys and Girls Club, that is a really essential local nonprofit that serves thousands of kids every year and this is a very modest improvement. I would like to keep the allocation for the homeless garden project at the amount when they came and presented to the committee. They were grateful for that, they are on a fundraising campaign. This is a significant contribution to that. It helps leverage, it helps demonstrate the city's support, it helps leverage but I think they will be successful in their fundraising and this can be significant without going to the whole amount. So I think those would be my comments. I would, I don't know if others have questions about the allocations. If so, well I guess I would like to propose some amendments but I'll let others comment as well before we kind of see how this shakes out. There was a good deal of discussion by the program proponents at the actual committee meeting. We have Council Member Brown, Council Member Myers, Vice Mayor Cummings, I had a question and then we'll go back to Council Member Glover. Yeah, well I recognize that all of these projects and programs and requests are worthy, deserving of investment by the city. I understand that we have limited resources. Given that, I'm gonna just put it out there that and I'll wait to see how it shakes out with the rest of the Council and the way this funds get distributed but my priorities right now are the additional 50,000 for Nueva Vista Center. That is a program that serves, it's the only program that serves the beach flats and lower ocean community. It is a critical program for a population that is as we know underserved, marginalized and increasingly in fear given our broader national context and so the support that that center provides is critical both in terms of the direct services for after school homework programs and just a place for kids to be and the engagement with the community around some of these immigration enforcement and know your rights issues. So I just think that is absolutely a priority and I want to see that program funded. I understand also just for those who may not have been around for this history that the Nueva Vista Center, formerly Beach Flats Community Center before prior to the merger got shifted into the CDBG funding path or category because they are eligible for CDBG funds and then core came along and their allocations for community programs funding through the core at the county and the city got shifted around and as a result, their funding is being reduced. So I can't support that. We went through this last year at that time I supported Nueva Vista getting fully funded. I will continue to support that now and because it really is a reduction for them that it's significant to their operations. I also think that we ought to be making a bigger contribution to the homeless garden project. They went weighted, they requested funding last year they got nothing, this is 1% of their budget. They have engaged in robust fundraising campaigns from the community and they work very hard at that and I think the city ought to acknowledge that and protect that with a contribution that is, while it's not really a significant portion of their overall funding, they're working very hard and they deserve to have some additional support from the city, especially given that these investments are actually on investments for city-owned properties. So the same argument that has made for Central Park for the pump track last year, any other park in the city, the same argument can be made for the homeless garden project in the Pogo Nip. So I wanna support them and I would suggest the $100,000 that Council Member Glover suggests as well. See where people shake out. Oh, and I have a question. I saved my question for last so that I could actually make my comments. I understand that the rental inspection allocation has been traditionally in the CDBG budget but I'm just curious as to, so that's custom and what we've become accustomed to but I'm just curious as to why the rental inspection position is funded through CDBG when that program is supposed to be self-supporting through, I would just add before Mr. Curry has any comments that it's because the level of service that's our core services, what's in the city budget and that the additional funding that's in CDBG is over and beyond the core services of the code enforcement at the city. So the idea was that it would be an additional service in the beach flats to assist the low-income residents of the beach flats per the CDBG guidelines. And again, rental inspection is not in the CDBG funding. It's not, it's a code compliant specialist position, not a rental inspector. Rental inspection is not in this program. And that's been the case for a really long time, yeah. So for around 20 years, we've had a code enforcement program in the beach flats area for the out of CDBG and then the rental inspection program was separate program. Okay, Councilor Myers, Vice Mayor Cummings, myself and then we'll return back to Councilor Glomer. I think you just answered my question, Martine. I just had a question. Where, so in the description for the code, for the, sorry, my brain is getting tired. The, yeah, code enforcement, target area program, is that low, is that beach flats or what is the target area? It's a designated area that includes the beach flats and parts of the lower ocean, as I recall. I brought up a map of it. There's a map, there you go. Oh, great, you beat me to it, great. That was my main question at this point. And I guess I needed clarification on page 16.12. And I'm just prefacing this. I'm just seeing this for the very first time. So my first go around with these grants so I'm just trying to understand the various descriptions on the item for Nueva Vista, which I share similar comments for as an important resource for our community in the lower ocean and beach flats. I'm just wondering about the CPC recommendation. There's a note about additional funding and I'm just curious, I'm just trying to understand what that, I don't see those notes in other applications. Yeah, so as Councilman Glover mentioned, his, he wanted to give additional funding but to make the numbers work and to come to a decision, they had to move the numbers around and to reach consensus and move on. That number was at 50,000 when the group left. But as he mentioned, he did express interest in funding it at a higher level. No, so if I could just because this was the clarification point I wanted to make during my comments was in the agenda report, it shows that when we do get official kind of funding amounts, that that would be prioritized to have an increased award amount at that time. Yeah, so knowing that we have limited resources, incredible services that we all wanted to fund in a million dollar gap, but wanting to help restore that 50,000 if and hopefully when additional funding came in with the final allocations, that's where we agreed as a committee to prioritize. So would it be correct to say with the additional funding that we would know by the hearing, by the second hearing next, at the next second hearing, we may be able to reach beyond this $125,000 request or are we still missing another? We wouldn't be able probably to go beyond the 125,000 but it's possible that we might be able to go up to the 50,000 and have the final budget numbers. If HUD doesn't make the budget numbers available, then that'll mean the deadline will be extended and we can push it to a later meeting where we should have those final numbers because the deadline gets moved out based on them actually telling us the final numbers. But just to clarify that further, that if there's additional money available by HUD, we could know that any day. We just don't know yet. But if you could make that recommendation to add it in the way of a VISTA, whatever is available up to their requested amount we could put there. It's just we just don't know at this point what that allocation will be. Okay, thank you. I have two questions just for clarification. Same kind of deal. This is my first time going through this. Can funds be transferred through, or transferred between, for example, programs and capital improvement projects or are they restricted to those categories? I'll bring up a slide and speak to it a little more. So for example, the, sorry, here, the program funding here, it can move slightly, but we have, for example, 104,500 allocated here. If we did allocate less, then more could go to the projects. And if we allocated less for the projects, we could shift more here as long as we don't go over the 15% amount, which is 74,000 for the teen center and CRLA. So we wouldn't be in danger of that if we increase the amount awarded to Nueva Vista since they are exempt from that cap. But they're the only one that's exempt. And so the, which there's a different slide that shows that the actual bi-formula allocation, there it is, is 74,000. And so that's what we can award for the program application requests with the exception in a way of Vista, which we can exceed the cap. But any amount that you exceed is less that's then available for the projects. So just to have that awareness. So just for clarification. So for example, we can move funds from the capital improvement projects to Nueva Vista in the community services, correct? And could we, and then for clarification as well, could funds from C programs be moved to community services to Nueva Vista as well? I'm just trying to understand, because I know, okay. Yes, they could. I was just clarifying because I know that it seemed like funds were going between categories. And I just wanted to double check to make sure that that was actually okay. Yes. I think I made my, that was the other point I wanted to make, that there's sort of a cap. And we had, if you move funding around, you're decreasing it somewhere else. Actually, okay. I had one more question as well. With regards to the drainage project, I was wondering if the drainage could be done separate from the ADA improvements, if that would be possible. Mm-hmm. Totally okay. It would need to be done together because the ADA improvements essentially would be located in the same area. So they'd be providing access to the recreational amenities at the site. Council Member Gleber and then Council Member Cron and then we have a motion and I'd like to re-understand what the motion is. Absolutely. So just because I thought it was really important and per our conversation around homelessness and emphasizing the importance of the homeless garden project, I wanted to read this letter for the record since Paul didn't have the time to do it. To the Santa Cruz City Council, this is dated April 23rd, so today, 2019. My name is Shad Stevens and I've spent the last seven years experiencing homelessness and battling drug addiction here in Santa Cruz County. I've been in and out of jail and found myself to be stuck in the revolving door between the courts and homelessness. This last time I was incarcerated, Dary Ganshorn, our executive director, came in to share about the homeless garden project and all of the opportunities they had to offer someone like me. I was released to new life drug treatment and came to work at homeless garden project. I'm grateful to be a part of this organization where I can grow as a person alongside this beautiful organic farm with a crew of people who have gone through the same misfortunes I have. Working together in a clean and sober atmosphere is an essential part of my recovery. Lunch is a very important part of our program. We get to taste all of our hard work and eat healthy, organic produce. We grow ourselves. Lunchtime is also when we get to break bread with one another and bond as a community, not only with our crew, but with the volunteers who donate time to help our cause. Anybody else who is hungry is welcome to join as well. I've lived in Santa Cruz County my whole life and I'm grateful for the opportunity to become a better member in our society. Please consider the importance to this community of our kitchen at Pogan at Farm. Thank you for your time. So I think that in itself speaks to the importance of the homeless garden project and the sheer, I mean, just if we look at the numbers, the amount of people that it touches and the ability to destigmatize homelessness and bring people into an effective work-living situation. And then also, I'm not gonna read it, but we all received copies of a letter from an individual named Tiffany Bravo talking about her daughter's participation in the spring break camp at the Ocean Scholars Program through Nueva Vista as per the presentation from Mr. Cancino. The program impacts 750 families annually and I did appreciate that he brought up the issue of ICE and the impact on our community and the need to invest and not divest from low-income neighborhoods, especially those that are black and brown constituents. So I think it is important that we maintain the highest level of possible funding while still offering some support to the other programs that were identified through the recommendations of the community programs budget. And then just to reiterate, and it's up here on the screen also, Councilor McRathies, I'm not sure if it is kind of hard to see, but it's the 55,000 for the Central Park, which is enough to cover the drainage. Then looking at Quimby funds, that was the other question I wanted to ask after I'm done with this. If the Parks and Rec could give us a balance of what's available in the Quimby funds, if you know, if not, I totally understand because that's a pretty specific question. For Nueva Vista, 100,000. For CRLA, maintaining the 19-5. For the Homeless Garden Project, increasing it to 100,000. The Boys and Girls Club maintaining it at 40,000 and then reducing code enforcement to 45,000. Boys and Girls Club is shown at 50. Is it? No, it's shown at 40. 40. There it's 50. There's a typo. There's a typo in the report. In the report, right. It's 40 though, right? 40. 40. Well, mine says 50 here. Mine does say 50 on the chart in the report. Thank you. Yep. I'm not taking money away from the kids. Okay. Council Member Crum. Yeah, just a quick question. Why the spike in 2018? In the CDBG. I'll go back to, I have a slide for that. Just the total. Just the total funding, not specific for anyone in particular. Right. There was a spike just because CDBG had more funds than prior years. So every year, the federal government establishes how much they're gonna fund these programs and it can vary from year to year. But you didn't get any other information like that's kind of weird. Like what was the inside baseball kind of stuff going on? No. I have a question for Alex. If you could talk a little bit, and I've been on here now almost three years. Can you talk about the relationship of code enforcement and rental inspection because I'm not clear on that. And do the people participating in code enforcement also participate in rental inspection or it's totally, totally different? Talk about the staffing. Yeah. There is some cross training between the two but the rental inspectors mainly do the inspection based on the checklist that the council has approved to do rental inspection inspections in our rental units. The code enforcement people other than in the target areas are reactive so they're responding to complaints normally from people all around town. So that's usually the difference. Okay, thank you. And I wanted to know about the Quimby funds too if that was available. Sorry I don't have those numbers with me tonight but we can share those with you later this week. Thank you. So my understanding is tonight you're interested in having a draft kind of proposal to move forward for alignment with the regulations of this process. Yes. Okay. And then also I think I mentioned this during our community programs meeting. I'm not sure how any of the accountability metrics are in place like in terms of the funding resources what do they report back in terms of being able to accomplish with those dollars? Is there any kind of report back for the money? From which types of programs? Just any, I mean some of them I mean I would naturally assume that the capital investments would, you would see if the capital investments were made but if it was programming support what do you anticipate sort of monitoring with outcomes and objectives and numbers or impact which often grant proposals require funding allocations require some. Yeah part of the application process and also part of what they have to report on in order to receive the funds as we go out through the year is they report on the number of people they serve in certain target groups and then we report that back to HUD comparing it between the application and who they actually provided services for throughout the year when it's a program and when it's a project it's much more in depth there are things such as making sure everyone gets a state prevailing wage and that certain jobs are posted to low income individuals and there's a large amount of regulations they must follow for the project based portion. Okay. And then I just had a question in regards to the funding proposal being proposed by Council Member Glover in regards to does the actual amount equal? No, it's a little bit over the amount right now the proposal is at 501,000 and we have 493 so we would need if that were to move forward we would need to adjust it some. Okay. I think Council Member Matthews had a question then Council Member Glover. So again, I'm just going to run down the under CDBG the first bar admin by formula stays at 98.6 the ongoing city programs you had code enforcement at what level? At 95 from the original recommendation and 45 with the new recommendation. Then the wave of Vista at 100 so that's up by 50. Parks and Rec for the teen center and CRLA and then the Boys and Girls Clubs either add a different order at 40 that stays the same. Homeless Garden at 100 is up by 60. Where's Homeless Garden? Oh, yeah, it's up by 50. Yeah, in the, I apologize, in the staff report this page in the staff report, those were transposed. So that's why, yeah. So the Boys and Girls was 40 and the recommendation for Pogonip was 50. Okay. So that goes up by 50. I guess clarify though, I have to move Ridge while she's calculating. Pardon? I was gonna say I can just clarify there. The, the, the, the above total is off because I originally had 46,000 for the park but when I heard that the drainage was 55 I wanna make sure that we get the park for the drainage because that was the number one thing concerned by the community. So we can remove the additional nine from code enforcement. And if you drop that, it should take us back down to, if I could. To bring it down to the 43. To 493. 493. So there'd be seven, 8816. I'll just say personally, I understand the beauty of round numbers but I would like to fund the Central Park renovation at a level that gets some serious improvements there. Notice that there, and this was in the city's unfunded list and it's a little neighborhood park that's a pond in the winter and is not ADA accessible. So, and they said, you know, they want to do a whole park renovation and new equipment and all. But, you know, we could do the basics for 96. And I think to do the basics, which is drainage, ADA and maybe a new play equipment or something. I would like to fund that and maybe 15,000 less at the homeless garden. I mean, let's play around with it. That's still more money than was originally recommended for the homeless garden project. And they were honestly in the hearing very happy with that as a contribution to their project. Vice Mayor Cummings. I was just going to give clarification on the numbers because I just, it seemed like there's- It's not adding up. Yeah, so it would be in capital improvements. It would be 55,000 for the Central Park renovation. 31,400 for the downtown, the Boys and Girls Club. So that would be reduced. And then 100,000 for the homeless garden project. No reduction to the Boys and Girls Club. And the math doesn't work out. The reduction would be to code enforcement. Yeah, he suggested reducing the amount allocated to code enforcement as well. He suggested- So all the reductions out of code enforcement? Out of code enforcement, the Central Park and something else. But the reason for that, and especially this is what I was trying to say, is that the reason why I am prioritizing the drainage at Central Park and none of the other projects is because the project itself was just spurred by the Parks and Recs Department. As they say, they just came up with it because they saw a grant and they wanted to go for it. So those things there are a wish list for the park. But I went and thank you to Noah and his team for holding a community brainstorming conversation in the park, which I attended, which was good. There were probably about 15, maybe 20, correct me if I'm wrong, people that showed up throughout the day. You can see it up here in 25. Up 25, thank you. So, and everyone was happy that we were out there, but they really were not concerned about anything, in my opinion, besides the drainage and keeping the merry-go-round, they wanted to see a baby swing and there was some potential landscaping and stuff that wanted to be put in there. But as far as the demand from the community, there was no outcry or specific request for anything outside of the specific drainage. So if we can accomplish the drainage needs and then use other funding and maybe do some fundraising through friends of our parks and recreation to not only do the park or the lights thing that was mentioned before, but then if they are really interested in doing ADA accessible stuff, that's great. But in reality, the Central Park is a block and a half away, two blocks away from San Lorenzo Park, which is completely ADA accessible, to my knowledge. So it's not like there's a lack of green space in the area. There's not a demand for it from the community. And if we can use those funds to better impact people that are actually in need and coming and saying that it's impacting their lives, that's the logic. Okay, rice mare coming. I'm just trying to see, so because I'm just doing all the math and coding there, I can't really see that far. Can you do a little bit, please? Is code enforcement at 45, or 45,000? With Councilman Glover's recommendation, it's at 36,000. Okay, 400, okay. So I'll just say before, I think we can sort of play with the numbers to try to get it to work out as best we can and it's hard, because this is my second time now coming through this process and there's so much need, there's so many great programs and just not enough resources. I am hopeful that we can get to a place where we can move forward with the recommendation knowing that this is just a draft approval at this time, which is again, coming back to us is my assumption for finalization. I felt comfortable with the proposal that the community programs originally brought forward, particularly highlighting that if the additional money came in, we would increase the Nueva Vista Resource Center at that time. So I'm comfortable with how it's presented, but we do have a motion to change it and a few modifications at a certain point, I think we just have to make that decision and see where the majority of the council is on that. So I don't know if you wanna read your final motion, Council Member Glover, and we'll go ahead and see where folks are. Absolutely, I'd love for you to make it purple. That would be great. Yes. It's the little things. So I associate blue with Council Member Crown. So the motion is to revise the recommendations of the community program's budget as follows. So we would have the 36-4 for the code enforcement, 100,000 for Nueva Vista, 35,000 dollars for the teen center, 19-5 for the California Rural Legal Assistance, 40,000 for the downtown Boys and Girls Club Improvements, 100,000 for the Pogonip Farm Capital Campaign Kitchen with the Homeless Garden Project, and 55,000 dollars to cover the drainage of the Central Park renovations and development. Okay, so that was the motion by Council Member Glover and I believe was seconded by Council Member Brown. I'm sorry. Crown? I'm sorry, Council Member Crown, pardon me. Okay, so at this point we have a motion to make the modified changes. Council Member Mathews. I think there is a clause in here if there are additional funds that they get allocated. Can we say that if there are additional funds they get allocated to the Central Park renovation so we can do the ADA? Okay, would you accept that as a front line? Make that part of your proposal. As a point of clarification, any additional funding to Central Park and this is, we're talking right now about Council Member Glover's proposal and so the CDBG would remain at 36-400. The Code Enforcement would remain at 36-400. Yeah, sorry, Code Enforcement would be at 36-400. I guess we could say that any additional funds would go to the Code Enforcement. That's the other possibility. Split between the two or, yeah. I would accept the amendment from Council Member Mathews that, well with the stipulation that it would come, ideally come back, because if we get like a hundred thousand dollars more, I know it's not, probably not gonna happen, but if we come back and get a huge sum of money more, I wanna make sure that we can reallocate that and potentially equitably distribute it if we can do that. So I'd like to, I mean, if there's a language that you'd like that would represent that, Council Member Mathews? We don't know whether it's gonna be a trivial amount or significant. So I think maybe just say that to the extent there are additional funds that the Central Park renovation and the Code Enforcement be considered priorities for restoration. That's a friendly amendment to Council Member Glitter. And just a question to clarify from the Parks Department is that you said it was an extra 30K for the ADA access? We'll design it to accommodate whatever funds we get. The original plan was 30,000. Okay, so then I would be happy to say that up to $30,000 of additional funds can be allocated to Central Parks, ADA development. And anything over 30,000 in addition would come back to the City Council for redistribution. Just a point of clarification. It's gonna come back at the second public hearing. So we'll use that for our guidance and all the numbers will come back to you again. Okay, we could also split it if you'd like between 15 Code Enforcement, 15 Park renovations, but I think the ADA. I don't know what it's gonna be but it's all draft anyway. Okay, so we'll have another chance to roll up our sleeves on this one. City Manager Bernal and then. I just wanted to highlight that with respect to the, I don't think it's up there yet, the CDBG funding, which you've reduced. Where is that? For which program? I'm talking about Code Enforcement. Yeah, Code Enforcement. Yeah, I'm sorry, Code Enforcement. That would, just to be clear, that would result in the elimination of opposition. Okay, yeah. Okay, so go ahead. Council Member Myers, please. Yeah, that was my question was, will we lose the program altogether? And if that is the case, speaking towards the target area for this, the age of homes in that area, the economic status of a lot of people who live in that area, I think it's a huge mistake to lose an important program that keeps people safe in their homes. And it's exactly counter to actually what a lot is being said tonight. So I think that would be, I just think that's a huge mistake. And I'll just say, just to reiterate that, I think the original proposal that was outlined really did allow for a reprioritization to restore the Nueva Vista funding. And we had a long discussion at our community programs meeting to get us to this place. So I'm supportive of the plan as presented. We'll have another chance at it. We can go ahead and take the vote. Council Member Gleber, do you have anything else? I just want to just make a, just with regards to the statement from the city manager, I appreciate your analysis and projection of what that might be. I do feel that that is a little bit of a binary perspective. Either we fund it with the money that could go to support critical community programs or we have to lose a staff member. I am, as you know, very much interested in reallocating money in the budget. We spent $600,000 from the general fund to rebuild a golf course restaurant for a select group of people that use the golf course in Santa Cruz. So to say that we're going to have to completely close down code enforcement because we're taking money and putting it in a program that's proven to help low income families when we have money in a general fund that is being used, in my opinion, very inappropriately and irresponsibly, I would appreciate it if we could frame it in that we'd have to pull money from other places and not just we're going to lose code enforcement because I think that's an inaccurate representation of the realities that we face with money allocations. Okay, all right, that's okay. Okay, so we have, if I could, I mean, I think there's a time and place for today. We will have another chance, as I remember. I don't want to go that, let that go. Okay, Council Member Mathews, we'll go ahead and take the vote after that. That is an expenditure that will be repaid within an estimated four years and will be revenue generating from that point on. Okay, all I want to say. Thank you for that, okay. All right, so we have a motion by Council Member Glover, seconded by Council Member Crone. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? No. So that passes with Council Member Brown, Vice Mayor Cummings, Crone and Glover in support. Thank you very much. Thank you all. We'll go ahead and take a 10 minute break and then we'll reconvene for our evening session, which is two presentations. And I will ask that we sort of set about an hour per presentation and manage the time within that context. So we have, we're now on to our evening session of tonight's agenda. And this is two presentations from our department heads in regards to preparation for our upcoming budget hearings. So we have a first presentation from Economic Development and that's a department presentation to be led by Director of Economic Development, Bonnie Lipscomb and other staff, I guess, will weigh in as needed. And then we'll move on to our planning and community development department presentation as well. It does appear that we may have a couple of council members who have decided to leave. Is that correct? Council Member Crone did inform me that he was leaving, but I'm not sure. I didn't hear from Council Member Glover though. Okay. Okay. Okay. So we can keep going. Do we essentially, okay, well, I believe Matthews is returning with her stuff. So we'll have five council members. What the process is, is to hear sort of an overview and as I said in preparation for the upcoming budget hearing and we will have the presentation and then allow time for questions. And one of the components would be sort of trying to have a set amount of time per presentation, looking at about an hour tops per each presentation. But given that, we may have a couple of council members who are not here at this time. We will have potentially less or more time for questions from other council members. So we'll go ahead and turn it over and Council Member Myers. I'd like to see if I have the potential to, I'd like to make a motion to see, well, I'd like to make a motion to fix the time to adjourn if we could this evening to 10 p.m. Just knowing it's been a long day and it looks like we've lost a lot of people in the audience. So I'm assuming that's probably going to fit the schedule. It's 8.30 now. I don't know if that's possible or if we could go to 10.30. Can we just agree on it? We can agree on it, certainly. I agree. I don't think it'll be an issue given who is here. Okay, great. So it looks like we'll have a approximately 10 o'clock fixed time to adjourn this evening. And just clarification, do we know is Mr. Glover gone? He was headed out that way. So, okay, well I will just encourage maybe our city manager to have him reach out to the department heads directly for any preparation materials or information they'd like to have in advance of our upcoming budget hearings. Thank you for being here this evening and recognizing we're starting an hour after time. I want to thank you for your patience and feel free to take it away. Thank you, Mayor. Bonnie Lipscomb, Director of Economic Development. Woo. And we have a presentation. It's roughly about 30 minutes and then there's time for questions. Maybe we won't need quite as many of those today. I will say that it's a very broad brush stroke of a presentation. We're not going into depth on a lot of the things that we do within the department just given the timeframe that we have. So I'm happy to sit down with any of you or with Council Member Cron or Glover afterwards to go into any of the detail and the presentations will be available for you as well. So first I just actually want to thank our team for spending a considerable time putting this presentation together. So Amanda Rattella is our Principal Management Analyst that really has the ownership for this presentation, and so she did a really good job on it, which you'll see. But we also had a lot of people from across our department, pretty much everyone had a hand. And pulling together and providing information on the work that we do at the city every day. We have a few here in the audience today, and then presenting today will be myself, Rebecca Unit to talk about business services, Beth Toby to talk about city arts. And then to answer any specific questions about property asset management is David McCormick who's also in the audience today. So I just wanted to start off by acknowledging that. Okay, so what we do and what we value. We are roughly five divisions, and so this is focused on sort of how we deliver those core services, which are housing and community development, asset and property management, infrastructure, development, also the work of the successor agency in our funding arm, business support, and city arts. Our values are providing high quality customer service as we do the things in our five divisions, finding and implementing solutions, and positively impacting our community. Our expenditures for fiscal year 2020 is roughly a little over six million. The majority of that is broken down with housing and community development, asset property and property management, community and business support. Our largest percentage is personnel, a little over a third. And then admin and other, which includes consultant contracts and outside legal for affordable housing projects and programs. Our resources is roughly a third of that. These are outside general fund resources, and not to confuse you, the general fund are revenues that we actually receive into the general fund, where we act as a fiscal agent on behalf of the city. And so where it says general fund 19%, that's actually funding we receive through our downtown PBIT, a property based improvement district that we receive that funding. The co-op retail management is another entity that we act as and administer that program on behalf of that property based improvement district. So these are resources coming in to administer the work that we do. Additionally, we have affordable housing trust fund. I'll go into a little more of that this evening and CDBG funding, which we just talked about. Our overall percentage of the general fund is at apartment is roughly 4%. And one of our governing documents that we use to really help guide the work that we do is our ED work plan. And this is just a snapshot. This is available on our website and to anyone who is interested in finding out a little bit more about sort of the things we focus on in some of the metrics. I will say this is heavily focused on the ED strategic side, but it crosses over, as you can see here, into housing development, affordable housing, and all the other divisions that we do because they all are under the umbrella of economic development. We are in the final sort of six months of our ED work plan. We will be gearing up a new one and we'll tie that into the council goals and objectives for the next two year period will be wrapped into our strategic work that we do. This is an overview of our team. We have 14 positions and then we additionally have two part time temporary positions. One is part time, half position in the downtown is a downtown liaison. And another one is part time property management on the tannery and doing right away acquisition for the city. This goes across the four divisions, five divisions that we just talked about. So next I'll talk briefly about, actually this will probably be a little bit larger portion of the presentation about housing and community development. This is just a photo of our completed project a couple years ago on the Riverwalk. Remember you know this at 21 units on Limburg Street. This is a housing team overview. This is largely the work that we do on the housing side and I'm not expecting you to see all the details of this. But again, this is available for you if you're interested to know about the different things we focus on in the housing department. And this includes HUD and state, HCD grants and grant reporting, policy development and updates, including ordinances which we work on those in conjunction with the planning and community development. City program, administration, housing development and preservation and monitoring. And I'll talk a little bit more about monitoring coming up. This is just an overview of our affordable units city wide. And we have roughly 1,745 affordable units city wide. The city helped create largely some of those with our redevelopment housing set aside funds, roughly 1,200 of those 1,745 units. We monitor about 1,550 units city wide, little over 1,000 of those are affordable. We additionally monitor about 580 non affordable units through the ADU program. This is an interactive map on our housing webpage. So if you go there, you can look at the major projects, affordable housing projects in the city that are 10 units or larger. We're not showing all of the projects out of respect for privacy, but some of the larger projects that also have various funding sources in it. You can interact and look at the breakdown of some of those funding sources and a little project information on our site. So just a couple community program highlights from fiscal year 2019. We had in fiscal year 2019 100,000 CDBG and Red Cross funds for Nueva Vista and community resources, 82,000 funds for the teen center through Parks and Rec and 73,000 in CDBG home and Red Cross funds for our security deposit program. So these are just a few of the programs that we funded in the last year and administered all of the reporting for these programs and administration. Project highlights, roughly this year in fiscal year 2019, we provided additional funding to the Water Street Project and I'll go briefly over the total funding in a few minutes. But this year from home funds for Water Street Project, 268,000, 250,000 for the homeless service facility. This is for the sewer line replacement and then 72,000 CDBG funds for the bike park revitalization and Parks and Rec and you can see a little rendering of that above. Water Street Housing Project, it's a 41 unit affordable project on Water Street. You can actually see this is in construction as we speak. Photograph, it looks very true actually to the rendering. We have 4.6 million in city investment and this is across all of our various funding sources. And that's really the takeaway about a project that the city is involved in. It's just how many funding sources we need to leverage to be able to support affordable housing development in our community. So that 4.6 million, we have home funds, federal home funds. We have our CDBG block grant funds. We have our affordable housing trust fund about 1.3 million and another roughly 1.3 million of our RDA bonds. This is from our housing successor agency in this project in order to make this work. And how that equates to a cost per unit because that's something that comes up frequently is how much money are you putting into the project as the overall project funding and how much is per unit. That roughly equates to from the city investment to about 115,000 per unit, which is really good leveraging. That's a beautiful project. It is. And this project is through a considerable community input. The original rendering was a very different design. And so there's a lot of community input and engagement and this is the final product and I think everyone's really pleased with it. So just as an example, how much work actually goes into an affordable housing project. And just framing this slightly, it's important to note that for the Water Street project, we've partnered and put in considerable money with an affordable housing developer and really help pull that project together. One that was more intensely involved at the city level. This is one that actually came to us as a private development initially and in 2000 and actually since 2009, but in progress since 2010. And the city has been involved in that point, since that point. The numbers in the boxes you see up there is just our involvement in 2019. This isn't a city led project, but this does give you an example of the various layers and levels that we get involved in affordable housing projects at the city. So legal counsel just in 2019, we've had over 200 hours in staff time working on this. We have four city agreements, two lender agreements. We can go into the details of what those agreements are. But this is just what it takes to actually make sure that the units going forward will be affordable. How we get those layering agreements, how we get the affordability in place going forward. Affordable housing 2019 highlights, we have either directly funded or helped create 160 units created or awarded funding in 2019. That includes 41 units at Water Street that we just showed you, 27 units at Jesse Street with home funds and the 64 units I just mentioned at 350 Ocean. This also includes roughly 1.5 million of ED infused into the housing and community programs and projects throughout this year. I just want to take a moment and mention AB 411, which is the bill that Assemblymember Stone introduced into the state this year, into the legislature. And we actually, Councilmember Brown has been instrumental in championing this initially. He's probably persuading Assemblymember Stone to introduce this bill on our behalf. So thank you for your support on that. What this will do for us is take our frozen capital bonds, it's over 16 million in frozen former redevelopment bonds and allow us to repurpose those for the purposes of creating affordable housing in our community. So this will fund a number of important projects in our community. And as you saw, the breakdown of the funding from the previous slide, 16 million will go a long way. And it has the potential to create a lot of affordable housing in our community. So we're pretty excited about that. It made it unanimously through the first two committees. The Housing and Community Development Committee unanimously at the local government committee through after testimony and now tomorrow it's being heard in the Appropriations Committee. The consultant really likes the bill, which is great. So we are really cautiously optimistic that it's going to go forward, that it's the right time for this bill to have support at the state level. We've also, as a highlight, had 40 households receive security deposit support this year. You heard Tiffany earlier talk a little bit about the success of that program and how they actually needed additional funding, which is one of the recommendations that we had to increase that on the home side. And then we're also in support right now, and we fund this through our affordable housing trust fund. We're in the third My House, My Home project right now. So that's pretty exciting for us. And that leads us to a little spotlight on My House, My Home. And this program, it's important to mention we're going to show briefly just a portion of a video of the first My House, My Home project, The Whitleys. And that this is a project that's a partnership that I think everyone knows is with Habitat for Humanity and the Senior Network Services. But what you may not realize that our own, it's just recently retired, Carol Berg, was really instrumental in helping design and define this program, working directly with Habitat for Humanity. So we're really proud of this program, we're really proud of the leveraging and what it creates for community and really aging in place in our community. So with that, we will, we had a little bit of technical audio difficulty earlier, so hopefully this will be fine. So sorry. Part of the My House, My Home project, where you're at dwelling. It's where I basically can be right next door to my parents in case they need me or need any help. My House, My Home is letting the seniors age in their house instead of having to go to assisted living or something like that. They're making it accessible where a family member can live in a dwelling like this and also be able to take care of them when they get older and unable to take care of themselves. This program is unique. It's a partnership between Habitat for Humanity and senior homeowners to build them an accessory dwelling unit, sometimes called the granny unit. And that allows them to either downsize into a smaller unit and then they can rent out their main house. And that allows them to stay in their neighborhood, keep their garden, keep all of their neighbors and their friends and their support network. So that's just, my audio keeps going out. That's just a little taste of the video, but we're really proud of the program and the impact that it has on the community. And some of you may have recognized Brenda, which is great too. And some of these are nodding at me and from our public works department. So it's great to have that right here at home as well. So the next, I've had a lot of questions and feedback on our affordable housing trust fund. So I wanted to take just a minute to highlight this. And again, I have a lot of detail here. We don't need to go into all of them now unless there are questions. But I'm available to go into detail on this later with any council member's request. So where do these funds come from in our affordable housing trust fund? And it's actually a variety of sources. The main sources and some of the larger infusions have been through loans or grants from the former RDA. We've had two major state grants over the years. One was in 2008 where there's a state grant matching program that's an affordable housing trust fund at the state level program. And you have to have funding as a match to be able to receive it, which we did in 2008. And there's another round recently with SB3 that was just passed last November. And so we do want to be able to apply for those grant funds and we need the match in order to get the funding. So we are projecting that for next year and I'll show you in a second. The other source of revenue that we have in 2014, you'll see that green area. That's actually when we sold 2030 North Pacific. And we actually own those units originally as a negotiation for their inclusionary. So we actually took two units in lieu of the inclusionary. And we since sold them, we initially rented them out as affordable units. And then we sold them and put the money into the affordable housing trust fund. So that's the spike you see in 2014. In this current year, the funding that you see in blue on the far right hand side of your screen is actually the inclusionary fees, the in lieu fees paid by a 555 Pacific. So those are the major sources. And sometimes it's hard to predict that we have sort of a moving target of when development goes through. And if they are paying in lieu fees, which is under our Muni code as a legal alternative to providing units in site, then those funds go into this fund and I'll go into a little bit of how we budget those and how we do spend those. Looking out ahead for the next few years, this 2021 that the bar you see in pink is an anticipation of being able to apply for the state funding that is coming up. We do need to have a minimum balance of a million in grant funds if we want to secure a million. There's the potential for it to go up to two million, which would mean that we would need to have two million in funds, which we don't currently have in reserve right now, so it's something for us to discuss later. Once the notice of funding ability comes out, we can come back to you and have a discussion about how we want to move forward on that. In regular annual revenue that we have coming in, it's roughly a little under 200,000. 150,000 of that is rent revenue from one unit that we have on River Street, which is actually a unit that we purchase to maintain affordability. And we have rental revenue coming in that and it goes in this fund. And then the area in green is roughly some development fees estimated that we've been giving annually. And it's related specifically to what we know we will be getting is about 46,000 a year, which is part of the agreement for 555 Pacific. So at a minimum, we'll have roughly 200,000 coming in and the Affordable Housing Trust Fund each year until 2032. Meanwhile, there'll be other projects that will come forward that likely may opt to pay in Luffy's, and then that will be reflected here as well. So how are funds used? We do have current Affordable Housing Trust Fund commitments. This is just for this fiscal year. I went over earlier, overall, from the Affordable Housing Trust Fund. We've actually funded 1.3 million out of the Affordable Housing Trust Fund for Water Street. But this year we have the remaining funding, it was roughly just under 36,000. We also have a estimate of a gap financing that was requested that we've previously committed roughly of 325,000 for 350 Ocean Street, a placeholder for Pacific Station of 150,000, and the two ADUs currently from my home, which is roughly totals about 662,000. Additionally, we have program commitments that we fund out of the Affordable Housing Trust Fund. We have the Landlord Incentive Program, which we recently came to council to do a slight amendment to that, a program to allow it to be open to more landlords within the program. That's a commitment roughly of about 22,000 a year. We have the Inclusionary Housing Affordability Preservation Program of 24,000 commitment. And that program, largely, we've purchased one unit through that program, which is to preserve an inclusionary housing units which are at risk of losing affordability. Is that we then have the opportunity to go in and try to maintain affordability. And that's similar to the Riverfront Apartment Fund, which is, we've made an agreement with them a number of years ago for them to maintain their affordability on those units beyond their initial commitment in exchange for doing ADA improvements at roughly 10,000 a year. So it's a pretty good deal for the units that are in that project. And then additionally, we have some small amount of funds for administration for the projects and the programs that go forward. And that is roughly proportionate to the projects that actually go forwards each year. And then we do have some debt, and we're holding this debt. We're not paying it right now. But it is debt that at some point we will need to address. And that's the former RDA debt of half a million and the, which we actually used to seed funding for the Affordable Housing Trust Fund at a point in order to get the state grant match and the Red Cross Earthquake Fund of 250,000. So all together, when you look at the overall balance of 2.7 million, we have existing commitments of 1.5. Remaining uncommitted funds is 1.2 million. We would like to recommend reserving that at minimum 1 million so that we could apply for the state grant funds to match, which gives us an available balance right now of 229. Which could fluctuate depending on the NOFA from the state of how much is actually available to apply for state grant funds. With that, I will quickly go to asset development and property management. This is just a highlight. We, through the over the 100 sites that we manage across the city that includes 22 cafe extensions and parklets, we bring in 2.5 million in general fund annual revenues. That's not reflected in the beginning of our slides. We don't include that for our department, but it's just important to recognize the amount of funding that does come into the general fund from the leases that we manage as part of this department. Overall responsibilities of this division are lease management, project management, leveraged investment, real estate transactions, and tenant marketing. We do work also on behalf of some of the other departments right away acquisition. For example, Highway 1-9, some of the process that we go through that. And just property disposition of city assets as well. Sky Park would be another example of that. Spotlight on the municipal wharf. This is a project that we collaborate with both Parks and Rec and our public works across the area. But we do manage the leases on the wharf and manage the overall property. The majority of the property is owned by the city. There's a couple long term leases where the property reverts to the city at the end of their lease term. But we do manage those and it's something we take a lot of pride in. And highlights on the wharf, roughly 2 million visitors each year, 30 million in annual sales, 25 businesses, 2 million in city revenues are returned from the leases on the wharf and over 400 jobs are employed at the wharf. Briefly on infrastructure and development, I'll just highlight a few slides on a couple of these. I'll just mention the Tannery Art Center here. I don't have another slide for there, but that is a major project. And you can see from the previous one, here's another picture of it. That is a project that the city former redevelopment agency, the city owns the eight acre campus. We contract with a long term ground lease with art space to manage the housing on the site. And additionally, we subcontract currently the management of the 27 commercial tenants. So we're in the process and that's something that'll likely be back to you before to the end of the year of working with art space. I'm possibly having the city manage those commercial leases locally. We also have direct leases with the arts council and the Crone House and with the Jewel Theater Company for the Colligan Theater at the Tannery. So those some of the things that are coming up next year is we're in the process of doing a sculpture garden through our arts program. And we need to determine the final phase of the project development with art space. That is a part of our original disposition and development agreement. Wayfinding, fabrication installation is coming. We have the plans and specs engineering done and it's going out to bid and we anticipate working around sort of the main tour season and starting installation in fall of 2019, which is really exciting. This is a city wide wayfinding program. Downtown refresh, as you can see on the side, this is a plan and development. This is looking at the downtown, the infrastructure, the improvements that are needed, looking to see where we can have some efficiencies. We have some funding set aside from the former RDA bonds as well to do some overall beautification, streetscape improvements, street furniture, street trees, things like of that nature. But we're doing an overall assessment currently of the downtown conditions and then we're going to come forward for council consideration of a recommended program to move forward. Worf master plan, I just want to show of an old rendering. And we'll just mention what's important about the Worf master plan. We've been on hold for some time just with other priorities at the city. But we do need to move the plan forward and finish the EIR in order to do a number of projects. Whether it's the full master plan as envisioned originally through the master plan. In order to secure state grants and other federal funding, we do need to have a master plan in place. Coastal commission has requested that we finalize the master plan. We have a public works plan as well and some of these are contingent upon us having an approved program going forward. So that is an important element for us. And then the trolley, all electric by the 2020 trolley season. We're showing this nostalgic photo of our much loved trolley because it's on its last legs. You will see it this season. As some of you may recall, we had two trolleys, we're now using the parts from one historic trolley to keep the other one going. We do love it, people enjoy riding it, but we are going all electric. We received a grant this past year from the Monterey Bay Unified Air Pollution Control District Board to purchase the additional trolleys for two electric trolleys. So you'll see those next season, not this coming season. We're in the process of finalizing that. So you will see this trolley this season on major weekends, all weekends and major holidays this summer from noon to eight. Briefly, Pacific Station. This is 100 give or take maybe more affordable housing units in our downtown. And this is a project in conjunction with the Metro, but we do have a plan A and a plan B and I'll just briefly mention that. The vision for Pacific Station is that we're creating critically needed affordable housing for our region. This is a partnership with Santa Cruz Community Health Center in Diantis. And so we'll be providing high quality health and dental care for underserved children and adults in our community as part of this project. As well as some improvements to a safe, efficient, attractive public transit hub with amenities and modern technology. The idea is to completely renovate the streetscape and make it very pedestrian friendly and vibrant on lower Pacific Avenue while creating affordable housing units and a new Paseo that connects to the riverfront in downtown. This is a layout of the current Metro site and what you see in sort of that orange hatched is the area that is our plan A. Of where we could develop and really activate the street front with a mixed use housing project. And that got off. So site A is that lower, site B is where you see the blue city owned site. The potential acquisition and green and the yellow area that's recently was dedicated to the city. So if we're unable to work out the details on the site relocation with Metro, we do have a site B assemblage that we're working on as well. Just to make sure as we're looking with Metro on how this would work, this is just a massing study so you can see the project. And this is a layout for the corridor to make sure that it would work for the double loaded for the affordable housing. And with that, I will turn it over to Rebecca Unett who's going to talk about business support. And then we'll conclude with an arts program presentation by Beth Tobi. Good evening, Rebecca Unett, I'm business liaison for the city. We do business support in a variety of ways. And my team is an economic development coordinator and our temporary downtown liaison. Just to provide some highlights of our activities over the past few years, we had 600 contacts with businesses in FY 2018. And that comes through walk-ins, phone calls, emails, and the business visits and outreach that we do. We were able to provide $50,000 in facade and commercial signage grants in fiscal year 2018. And that helped five businesses beautify their store front. We also facilitated $300,000 in our gross Santa Cruz loan fund in 2016 to be able to support Santa Cruz Millworks expansion in Harvey West and Kefe Compasino owner Dina who's pictured here, who was able to open her full scale restaurant Jaguar on Soquel Avenue. And then we also welcome 228 new businesses to the city through a welcome packet and a letter signed by the mayor and Bonnie with information about resources to grow their business. So one of our major programs is the facade improvement program. And it's definitely more than just a fresh coat of paint. One of our success stories is Alejandro from Dela Hacienda, Takaria. We did this project in, it was completed in 2016. Amanda actually managed this program, this project. And he was able to report to us that his sales dramatically increased after the success of this project. And we gave him a $12,000 grant to make a huge transformation. So we have found huge success with this program. And we also added our commercial signage grant program in 2015 to create a little bit lower barrier to entry and another impact. And then this year we did significant outreach. We switched to a call to applications and worked with Peter B.C.A., our community liaison to do some targeted outreach to our Spanish speaking community and really try to get those grants into the folks' hands who need it the most. So just to cover one of our other core services business liaison, so that is myself and this position was created last year and I was grateful to be promoted into this role. And so I like to characterize my services in four major areas. I provide one-on-one support to businesses. I do collaboration, marketing and promotion and celebration. In fiscal year 2018, I was able to assist over 120 businesses. And I also like to point out that 84% of our businesses in the city of Santa Cruz have nine or fewer employees. So I'm really working with small businesses, local businesses, and able to make a big impact and see their successes in the community. An example of the efforts that I do, we do one-on-one support or four-on-one support like last Friday when we helped David Torres of La Montaña, Taqueria get his ABC licensing notification out. We really pulled the team together to help him. And I do that also, I handle one-on-one with people to help them understand the process. I coordinate with the different departments, largely with planning and sort of work on creating a checklist for people because oftentimes they'll come in and they will have never been to City Hall or never started a business. And so they really need that friendly face and someone who can translate the technical aspects to them and help them through what can be sort of a scary process. Collaboration, I really work on being the person who knows all the resources that are out there and can connect the dots for people. We coordinate events, we partner with the Small Business Development Center and other technical assistance providers to make sure that our business community has the tools that they need to be successful. And then marketing and promotion, we do that through a variety of things. But we like to tell the stories of our local businesses to the community and we like to support our business community through specific events, such as last year's Alliance of Women Entrepreneurs launch event that happened in the downtown that we were able to support. And then celebration, which is really the best part of the job. Being able to celebrate either getting a building permit to start construction or we've been cutting all hands workshop that happened last Friday as well. And the kind people's grand opening that Bonnie attended on Saturday. This is really the fun part of being able to share in the success and knowing that we're able to help them and that they're going to be able to contribute to our community. And then just a brief overview, our downtown liaison position that we added. Candace Elliott is filling that role for us and she's really focused on being a point of contact in the downtown to connect stakeholders and work on some of the initiatives that we're really focused on in keeping our downtown vibrant. And I'll hand it over to Beth. Good evening, Mayor and City Council. I'm Beth Tobi, I'm the City Arts Manager. And this is a photo of our third round of scrap, the Santa Cruz Recycled Art Program that was held at Radius Gallery. And our next round is coming up in December, it's going to be at the Blitzer Gallery. So we have five ongoing programs in City Arts Scrap, the Santa Cruz Recycled Art Program. Which is a great collaboration with Public Works. Our Sculptor Program, which is our downtown rotating collection of sculptures. Graphic traffic, which is our signal box art, our mural slash mural matching grant. And just completed last year is a real trail arts master plan which will be implementing over the coming years. We have currently 79 public artworks in our collection. Between the fiscal year 17 and 19, we created 16 new artworks. We had three conservation projects. We gave out four mural matching grants, and we gave out nine cultural festival sponsorships. Our major ongoing initiatives are centered around equity, inclusivity, and environmental justice. This is something we've been working on for the last two years. We brought in a cultural equity expert. We've had two retreats with the Arts Commission. We're working on a policy statement. We're working on a resource guide and focusing just that lens on how do we make all of our projects and programs equitable, inclusive, and environmentally sustainable. And then the Rail Trail Arts Master Plan will be implemented as funding allows for art along the rail trail and again the scrap. And then another initiative started up this year is the artist meetups. And these have really been a collaboration between the City Art League and the Arts Council of Santa Cruz County and they're focused on giving artists ability to network but also professional development skills. So training, how do you get your art in the gallery? How do you do social media? Things like that. And we've had a great turnout at those. And in the vein of equity and inclusivity, we really love this project that we worked on with the Diversity Center. They came to us with this idea and then we ended up funding them for, and they wanted a wall. They needed a wall. So we let them do this mural at the Loudon Nelson Center and they made a great video that I'd like to show. I think create this mural. It's my community. This project has personally been so important to me. Being a part of this mural project, it helped me feel unashamed to be gay. Me personally. I feel so connected to the people that I've seen it at with. In the Santa Cruz area, I didn't feel accepted as much. But the people's great spirits about the mural made me feel more of a part of this town. As a queer Latinx young adult who grew up in this community, I have experienced lots of injustice in spaces that the youth have the power to change and just the factors that we know. I like that it projects our optimistic vision while not letting go of the parts of our history that maybe aren't so beautiful or easy to talk about. The bridge to intersectionality resembles the healing we must do to create a co-existing, interwoven, genderless world. I rarely feel like it made a difference. Not only for just the people that are going to see it from that everyday life passing by and seeing the underlying messages. I hope that every time someone sees this mural, they can smile and remember that together we can make change. Just the visibility of this artwork is such an important part of starting a dialogue with young people about how they believe they can improve and influence our community. But as much as we have changed for the better, our society still needs to continue working towards our goal of equal rights for all. Many people pass by this mural every day, which reminds us that we have come a long way, but that we still need to continue fighting for equality. I am hopeful that I will be able to grow up seeing this piece of art inspiring the minds of my generation to move forward and stay strong in our march towards a more perfect world. We as community together in supporting queer youth and art is a way to do that. Now more than ever it's easy to say we have a bleak future, but I've seen the kind of people, especially the youth who are dedicated to driving us towards the future we painted. And I really hope that everyone can benefit and find joy and find peace in this story. This is just such a beautiful gift for the community. That's it. Thank you. What a lovely note to end on. Thank you very much for your presentation. Do you have another mural project? Let us know. I love it. I love it. Baby, keep us posted on the mural project. I want to go out and paint. Well, actually, if you didn't see the email about the GoFundMe for the project that Taylor Reinold is doing in collaboration with Bayview Elementary, I'll send it out again. But they are still fundraising for it. But that whole wall along Mission Street is going to have a gorgeous ocean conservation theme mural on it. Well, I'll look forward to when the dates are set to participate. Please do feel free to resend that. Thank you for your presentation any other time and thought you went into putting this PowerPoint together. I'll go ahead and ask the council if there are any questions of our economic development team doing a whole bunch of work in our community at this time. Councilmember Brown. I don't really have any questions at the moment, but I just did want to take the opportunity to send a big note of kudos and gratitude for all the work you do. It's kind of amazing to see all of the amazing things that can be done with limited resources and the way that you all leverage outside resources and kind of make these things happen and put it all together continues to astound me. I just really appreciate it all, particularly as we know with the end of redevelopment. And so I just want to take this opportunity to say thank you and thanks for the presentation. Thank you. Thank you, Councilmember Brown. And I know Councilmember Myers had some questions and then a Vice Mayor come in. Quick comments too. I just also want to double exclamation mark on Bonnie's comment in regards to the legislation moving forward at the state level. And thank you also Councilmember Brown for moving that forward. It's really steep. Team, team, team effort. Very important and hopefully fingers crossed. Okay, Councilmember Myers. Yeah, I just wanted to thank you for the presentation. One thing I would love to kind of understand more is we see the sales tax numbers from our businesses, but it's hard to know is that all costs go or is it the 300, 400 plus small businesses with nine. So I mean, putting your work in the context of how important your department is to actually creating a budget for the general fund and the things that we're going to get into in the next couple weeks. I think it's really important for all of us as council members but also for our community to understand that you're key to that success. And so I don't know how we translate that into a number, but I think you're instrumental in that and I'd love to see you kind of promote that part of your outcomes as well. My family started a business downtown about two years ago. I think they're coming up on their third anniversary this summer. I know that they've really enjoyed advice from your department and so I really think, I know from personal experience that I think my sister-in-law would probably have hair my color if it wasn't for you guys. So I know that what you do to help people start businesses is very, very important. So I just want to thank you for that. And then I had a question for Beth actually, way back in the day, 20 plus years ago now when we wrote the San Lorenzo Urban River Plan, we hired a very famous public art person named Buster Simpson to also write a public art master plan for the Riverwalk. And I'm just curious if that still stays on the shelf and sort of if we can look at that as a public space, maybe in our planning coming up and just curious where we're at with that. Yeah, that's a great question. I was given the hard copy version of that when I started because it wasn't even an electronic version at that point. Actually, tomorrow we're having a cross department meeting to talk about some state grants that we can apply for. And one would be for amenities along the Riverwalk, which would include public art. So, fingers crossed that we'll have funding to be able to do something to enhance the Riverwalk in that regard. Yes, I have seen the plan and there were a few good ideas in there, so we might resurrect a few. I have a giant steel head that Buster made for me hanging in my backyard, signed by him. And I have also met Buster, he is very famous, yes. He's a character. Okay, great, yeah, I'd love to hear more about that maybe in the future. Thank you. Thank you. Vice Mayor, come in. Thank you for the presentation and just a couple questions. One was, could you explain the Landlord Incentive Program a little bit further? Sure, so it's a program that is run by the Housing Authority. And I can actually forward to you the staff report that we brought forward. I think it was like probably month, month and a half ago about the amendment that we did to it. But basically, it's funding that's available. We leverage the 22,000 into the program so that they can provide an incentive. It's basically like an extra security deposit. It reduces the risk for landlords to really incentivize them to accept Section 8 vouchers into the program. So it's just sort of like a risk mitigation fund in effect. And so it's been really helpful. I have stats that I had when I came to council last time of how impactful the program is and what the success of the program is was just a little bit of leveraging and being able to influence positively landlords to both start in the program and accept Section 8 vouchers, but as well as to stay in the program. Because if they've had a bad experience, sometimes they leave the program. But with this extra sort of fund that's available for security deposits and risk mitigation, they often will stay in even with one experience. Thank you. And then the other question with regards to business support. So if somebody was interested in starting their own small business, could they just come in? And can you just clarify what are some of the resources, like are there financial resources in addition to staff time? Sure, yeah, so businesses are welcome to contact me directly and I can walk them through all of the steps of the process that might relate to their specific business. I'll usually refer people to the planning department for their business license and zoning clearance. They need a building permit, I refer them there as well. And then in terms of financing resources, we have a gross Santa Cruz microloan program that we facilitate with a group called National Development Council. And then the Small Business Development Center provides one on one confidential mentoring for business structure, financing resources, marketing plans, and a variety of other things. So I'd be happy to meet with them and just compile a whole list together of the resources we have and get them pointed in the right direction. Great, thank you. All right, any further questions? Just so many small successes. I mean, there's the great big things and then there's just the little small business things. And just a point and Donna asked about taxes and some of what you do is tax generating and some of it is job generating and they're not always the same thing. But they're all important. Absolutely, absolutely. And Rebecca, if someone just has a snag, can you be kind of a hand holder for them? Absolutely. Okay, I have a couple, I have a couple with the planning department. So the planning department and I work really closely together. I see my role as really being able to translate for people. And I can spend a bit more time, our planning staff is fully loaded. And so I like to be able to provide extra time to be able to explain things to them. Sometimes it's just a miscommunication about what's happening. And so I'm able to sort of clarify those two things and try to get them going forward. And just a comment, I know you do the little, oh, the videos on the website. But I mean, just hearing your comments, the few stories, it seems like there's so many opportunities for nice little case stories, letters to the editors. Newspaper, this, that, and the other. Again, broken record, but we don't tell our own story well enough. So something we're always working on. I know, but it's so rich with material. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. And before we conclude completely, I want to remember that this is also an opportunity for public comment. Was there any member of the community that wanted to speak to us on this presentation item of economic development? Okay, seeing none, we'll go ahead and return it. And then we have one last question by Council Member Mayer. I just think it's important for our community just, I just want to ask you. I know we talked about the downtown area and your work there. But I'm assuming that you also provide support to sort of the outer west side manufacturing slash growing biotech, slash crazy food and all kinds of cool things as well as the Soquel corridor as well. Yeah, the entire city. Okay. Great, thank you very much. Okay, have a good night. And we'll go ahead and invite up our second presentation from Planning. And we have Lee Butler here, our Planning Director to present. And his colleague. Good evening, Mayor and Council Members. I am Lee Butler. I'm the Director of Planning and Community Development. And I'm very pleased to present our department update for you this evening. We've got a number of folks here with us that I'd like to introduce for you. Alex Corey is our Assistant Director. And we have here Sarah Fleming manages our Advanced Planning Division. Laura Landry manages our Code Enforcement and Rental Inspection. Sarah De Leon oversees our administration. And Eric Marlatt oversees our current planning. And I believe Mark Ellis is also going to join us shortly. He oversees our Building Division and is our Chief Building Official. So our department exists because we all want and deserve a safe built environment. We want buildings that stand up in earthquakes. We want electrical work that doesn't shock people or start fires. We want a healthy indoor air quality. We want concerns that we express about safety or hazards to be addressed. We all want and deserve an aesthetically pleasing built environment and a clean healthy natural environment. We all want and deserve access to the coast and to our parks and recreation areas. And we all want a bright future for our children and for all of the future generation here in Santa Cruz. And our department's job is to help make these things happen in coordination with many others here in the city. Our mission is to enhance the quality of life, safety and civic pride for our community by providing land use and development guidance through responsive, respectful and efficient public service. So this is something that really captures all of the five divisions in our department and the work that they do. We represent about 7% of the overall general fund. And most of our expenses go towards personnel. You can see that we do have various other expenses. Typically consultants but also materials. We have a fair amount of publishing costs and printing costs with all the notices that we do for public hearings and so forth. We have a, oops, there's a little bit of overlap there. Sorry, our fiscal year 2020 request is about 7.6 million. And the majority that is coming from building in safety with roughly equivalent components for the other divisions with the combined code and rental slightly less. And then revenue, when you look at the overview there that matches up. Most of our revenue comes in through building, but we also get revenue from current planning and advanced planning as well. Also through our rental inspection and we've got a special green building fund as well as some other smaller revenue sources. The revenue that we get from development supports not only planning and building as you would expect, but also other departments. So parks and recreation, public works, water. These are actual breakdowns of fees and they're for the entire development process that these specific projects went through. So you can see that in residential projects, for example, there are significant percentages that go to parks and recreation to fund new parks facilities. We serve a wide variety of customers, current and future residents, homeowners, renters, the development industry, architects, engineers, contractors, visitors, the able-bodied and those with disabilities. We really have everyone in mind when we are implementing policies or creating policies, we try to take a broad scope that looks at our entire community. Here is our organizational chart. We've got the five divisions outlined or identified along the top there, and you can see the distribution of staff within each of those. And you can see 37 and a half full-time employees throughout the department. And I'm going to jump into what each of the divisions does now. So in administration, they are typically the first point of contact for a customer. They get our customers to the right people if they don't know where they're going. They usually call our main line and then our administration staff helps them. They also support four hearing bodies, the Zoning Administrator, the Planning Commission, the Historic Preservation Commission and our Building Board of Appeals. And they do cash hearing not only for planning and building and code as you would expect, but also they take in business license revenue and various other taxes that we have in the city such as and rental payments as well for city-owned facilities. They also help and really oversee a lot of our record management work. So some of the stats for them, we implemented at the beginning of this calendar year, so from January 1st through March of this year, our admin team answered almost 4,000 calls in those three months. Since the beginning of this fiscal year, they've digitized nearly 9,000 files and responded to 323 public records requests. Those public records requests sometimes are very time consuming and they're not cost recovery. So we oftentimes, I spent more hours than I would have liked to just recently on a public records request and it wasn't just me when those requests come in, our entire team ends up digging through emails, sorting through files, getting that information ready to go out. And our teams mailed over 6,000 postcards just this fiscal year. And they've staffed 96 public hearing items at the various commissions. A couple of things here before and after, when we're imaging those records, they make them more accessible for us and for the public so we can cut down on some of those public records act requests. It also builds in capacity in terms of space and our offices. So it is really important that we've got a dedicated team working at clearing out all those file cabinets and boxes that can readily pile up. Our admin team also helps to improve our website. And a couple of things that I wanted to point out for the council. The left image at the bottom right, we now have the ability for people to sign up for any community meetings that planning department is holding. So previously you may not even be notified about a community meeting depending on where you're located. And if you wanna know about all of them, you can just easily sign up for e-notify and get on that email list. As well as planning commission or zoning administrator and so forth. We've also implemented on the right side substantial amounts of additional information on our website about projects that we have going on. So each of those significant projects up top, you can click on those and see the actual plan sets that we have that we're reviewing. So all of that information is available for the public. You can also comment right there on the website. So we are really facilitating public participation by someone going on there. They can check out the plans and they can add a comment and right there they'll get emailed to the project manager, making it really easy. There's also additional information for some of the other projects as you can see starting at the bottom there. We're just really trying to expand the information that we have online. Code has done that as well with a flow chart that explains the process. And various timelines associated with the different categories of complaints that come in. So moving on to code, code really protects the public health safety and quality of life of our residents and they maintain and help to enhance the housing stock that we have in our community. When we're talking about the social equity efforts of our department, code is really huge in protecting the most vulnerable members of our community. The folks that can't necessarily speak up to their landlords because they are fearful about the potential repercussions. Our code team and rental inspection team goes into these places and make sure that they have the same quality of health and safety standards being met in their housing. And I'd like to share just something, some excerpts from a letter that we got just earlier this month and something that's not unique. But this individual thanked us for the professional handling and said that they were beside themselves with the concern for the living conditions with hot water heaters and heaters working off and on mostly off, they say, during the last ten years. Yet the tenants were paying $2,000 a month to live there. And the person was afraid that the families would be turned out of the home. It's something that we've heard in many of the conversations we've had with the community. And they said, I'm so impressed with the fact that everyone's still there and that their privacy was respected. You respectfully inspected the units and interacted with tenants in a meaningful manner to secure their own safety in the home. You demonstrate a caring attitude, perseverance, at the same time, managed to give tenants a personal dignity we all crave. And so that's really what our code team is out there doing, what our rental inspectors are out there doing, is they're protecting our tenants and providing safe, habitable living environments for them. We did redact some information to protect identities here. Moving on to some of the stats for code compliance. For these statistics, we are talking about eight months. So July 1st through the end of February, so two-thirds of the year. They've completed over 3,300 inspections, opened 411 code cases and closed 488. There are 126 accessory dwelling units either in process or complete for the legalization efforts. There have been six citations that have been issued. We have had to issue 16 orders to vacate and I want to specify that we don't take this lightly at all. This is only when there are very significant life safety issues that need to be addressed. They're gas leaks, for example, or very significant issues that, structural stability that are imminent threats. So of those 16, 13 were either already vacant or they were owner occupied or the tenant was able to move to another place. So perhaps there was an illegal addition onto the back that was unsafe for occupancy they could move into the main house, for example. There were three orders to vacate where the tenants actually had to relocate and it wasn't an owner occupant. And we've also completed four neighborhood cleanups. Those are the CDBG funded cleanups from the lower ocean and the beach flats neighborhoods that we conduct and literally collect tons and tons of debris at each of those. They're always welcome events in the community. Again, with statistics from July 1st through the end of February, so eight months, some of these are city-wide, so over 5,500 rental parcels, over 1,100 rental units. And during that eight months for the rental inspection we've conducted over 2,600 inspections. During the course since 2011, there have been 300 units that have been identified that are unpermitted. We have about 450 units in the queue. I talked about the 2026 or so that we're working on, which I'll get to in a second. But we have 30 that were legalized before the April 2017 implementation of a formal legalization program. And we have 126 of the 450 units, so roughly 27% are in process. And you can see here that some of those units, sometimes that does result in removal of those units from the market. Oftentimes there are costs associated with that. Sometimes there are zoning or general plan barriers to that. And so a big chunk of those 15 units removed are either the costs associated with it, or there are regulatory barriers. And one of the directions that we have from the council is to evaluate those regulatory barriers and see how we can help to get more of those units online. You can see we've legalized 18. We've issued permits for 12 and plans submitted for 27. So a big chunk of those are making substantial progress towards the legalization. And we really seek to hold people's hands in this. Oftentimes maybe they purchased the property and it was existing there. And they haven't done development before, so they haven't been through this process. So it is something that we really try to work closely with those homeowners on to try and legalize as many units as we possibly can. That is the objective. One, keep people in the units if they're not legal as long as they're safe. And two, to then move them towards the legalization process. You can see here that we've got rental properties, registered rental properties spread throughout the city. And we have our 719 code cases spread throughout the city. And then some of the community-based code compliance, we mentioned the community cleanups and the UCSC Housing Fair here had 500 plus students and were out at neighborhood association meetings and various other outreach efforts to get the word out. Moving on to current planning. Our current planning team reviews permits and projects to ensure consistency with the plans that the council has adopted. The general plan, the zoning ordinance, subdivision ordinances, as well as with state requirements, the Coastal Act, federal laws and state laws and so forth. They administer the historic preservation program. And they're often in front of either the Planning Commission or the council in presenting projects and consistency with those. Again, a wide variety of customers for the current planning division. And these stats are projected for the current fiscal year based on the numbers that we have to date. We're expecting to serve 3,400 customers at the counter to complete 420 plan checks, 400 zoning clearances, 318 short-term rental applications. That, I believe, is the number that we have currently. And so there may be some more that come in. But of course, when that program was implemented earlier this year, there was a big push. And then 200 discretionary applications and 22 projects reviewed under a new interdepartmental review meeting. And this has been a really nice improvement that everyone has seen a lot of value in. And when we have fairly significant projects, we bring all of the different reviewing parties into a single discussion. And the applicants are sometimes present, they're welcome to attend. What this does is it helps to iron out any discrepancies between different departments. So water department might say one thing, fire department might say another. And police might say another thing. And understanding those different perspectives and being able to deliver one voice of like, all right, well, let's figure out what the direction is from the city instead of from each department. That's part of the benefit of having these interdepartmental meetings. And the value has really been recognized both with the development community and with the individual departments. Public outreach is a big part of the current planning division's work. Since the recently adopted community outreach policy was put in place, there have been seven projects reviewed. There are a few of them up here on the screen. Seven projects reviewed at community meetings held under that community outreach policy, so expanded notification ranges. And information available on the website and invitations to people throughout the community. Another big component of the current planning division is reviewing projects to increase the housing stock. You can see here all of these have significant housing components. And over the last fiscal year, there have been 250 multifamily units entitled through the current planning division. And of course, a lot of others have single family and ADUs and so forth. The current planning division also works closely with our advanced planning division and through their project review to promote natural and cultural resource management. One of the things that they put together in coordination with the Sierra Club and the Audubon constituents here is bird friendly design measures. And you can see that in the fritting on the glass here. So new developments that come forward now if they're adjacent to open spaces will have conditions on them to help protect birds. There have been a number of projects with repairing restoration. Nearly all of our projects have some elements of greenhouse gas reduction. And then through site design and the California Environmental Quality Act review, there's also natural and cultural resource management that occurs through our current planning team. Moving on to building and safety. The building and safety division really seeks to ensure that we have a safe, built environment for our residents and for our visitors. When you look at the codes here, our building official often says it's legislation by disaster. And so every time there's an earthquake, every time there's a fire, they say, hey, let's do things better. Let's put in protections so that the next time there isn't so much property loss or there isn't so much loss of life. And you can see that now going from a skinny book back in 1926 to a few volumes in 85 and now several thousand pages of codes that our building division implements. And so they review plans and inspect construction to ensure the minimum requirements of these codes are in place to safeguard public health, safety, and general welfare. They look at structural strength, means of egress, stability, sanitation, light and ventilation, energy conservation, safety to life and property from fire and other hazards, and also safety for first responders and emergencies so that when they're going into buildings that they are safe as well. Some of the examples, obviously ADUs are a big one, making sure that ADUs are safe. And the top left there and the bottom left, the electrical safety is a big one, earthquake resistant construction. We've got the in the middle top there are the Shot Creek panels. Those are actually test panels that were put in. And we recently had two different construction projects that proposed Shot Creek and they went out and put in these test panels and we did some special testing on that. And for one of them, they were allowed to proceed. And the other one, they actually didn't pass the correct strength provisions. And so they didn't meet the requirements and they had to go back to port and place concrete. And so that's part of what we're doing out there in the field is we've got our inspectors out making sure that not only did the plan specify what needs to be done, but their tests that are being done to ensure that the standards in the plans are being translated out into the field. On the bottom there, we have underpinning that's shown. Also, shoring will occur when we're looking at protecting adjacent buildings during construction. This is at 1547 Pacific. And then we are building division reviews accessibility requirements. They also do emergency response. So you can see on the top or the middle picture on the right there, a car hit this structure and they come out and evaluate what portions of the structure are safe to occupy and which portions are not. And then when fires or other disasters occur, they come out and make sure that the structure that is remaining is safe or they say, all right, certain portions need to be taken down. There's direct inspections that occur to evaluate the structural stability and safety in those instances. Some of the numbers, these are the 2018 calendar year. So this is a full year, but it's a 2018 calendar year. So about 6,500 customers that we served at the calendar, 10 and a half minute average wait time and 90% served under 30 minutes. They completed 3,400 building permit and plan reviews, 1,900 permit applications accepted, 1,600 issued, 190 housing units permitted and nearly 9,000 inspections. So it's a busy group out there. Also as part of our building division, we have our green building group and you can see Kurt Hurley in the picture there inspecting some cooling units. That's on the top of Costco. And this, we have really strong green building standards in the state of California, perhaps the strongest, definitely one of the strongest set of green building standards in the nation. And our green building code goes above and beyond that. And so we have always been leaders in this. We had green building standards in place before the state did and it brings a wide variety of benefits reduced energy and water use and improved human health for occupants of buildings. And so we're really proud of the work that we do with our green building program. Moving on to advanced planning. They have brought so far this fiscal year, seven significant ordinance or policy updates forward. I'm sure you'll recall most, if not all of these accessory dwelling units, relocation assistance for displaced tenants, the community outreach policy. They put together the short-term rental licensing process following the short-term rentals to get those permits together. Two cannabis ordinance updates and then others that came to you earlier today. Parking standards have been updated to lots of different updates from our advanced planning team. And I wanted to provide some snapshots of the work plan so that you all understand sort of the approach that we use. This is a portion of the work plan for things that we've completed this fiscal year. And we keep track of all the pending items and completed items. And you can see some of them that have been just complete here. Some of the things like accessory dwelling units you won't see on here. We got through part of those, but we've also, it's still in the queue because we've got direction from council to come back and do some additional evaluations. But we also have a number of things you can see down here with EFGHI council direction. So every time we take council direction and every time there's a recommendation, it does, it competes with the other things that we have on our list. So let's talk about that list a little bit. In our general plan, there are 420 action items that are planning related and most of those, the advanced planning team. And some of those are cross-referenced and they complement one another. But still, if you're talking 300 or 350, that's still a lot of different recommendations. And you can see some of, there's some really big ones. There are 10 plan updates, the Seabright Area Plan, the LCP updates. We've been working on updating our local coastal plan, our local coastal program. We still have, we're using the local coastal program from our old general plan. And so we've been looking at updating that and we've been working for about two years, two plus years with consultants to get that done. And we're really trying to get that over the finish line but there are competing priorities. And so that's something that we're really trying to prioritize and get over the hump, particularly because as we keep reviewing it, new things come along and so we're having to go back. As you can imagine, things that were done two years ago, even in the realm of sea level rise and climate change, we need to continue updating those things. And then the Beach South of Laurel Plan is another, we've got 10 new plans called for in the general plan 16 zoning ordinance updates called for in the general plan plus nine additional ones that we've identified that are on our list. So a lot of different things just in the general plan. We also have about 70% of the recommendations from the housing blueprint subcommittee that came from council. About 70% of those are 28 or so are in our advanced planning division. And many of those are things that have been done or that are underway, but there are also some really significant ones that we still need to work on that can really make a difference in producing housing or protecting housing in our community. So some of those are listed here, the Ocean Street rezoning, the enhanced state density bonus ordinance, which is something that could really promote additional affordable housing, something that the county's done and something that we would like to implement to promote additional affordable housing. Parking ordinance updates, legalization of unpermitted dwelling units, which dovetails with the legalization program, additional ADU direction that we've gotten from the council, and then encouraging a variety of housing types. So all of those things are still in the pipeline and still direction and some of the priority items that we still need to continue to work on. This is just a sample of the things that we have for this fiscal year and how we track those. And so all of these things are things that we have intended to work on, but we don't always get to work on those because other priorities do come up. And so it's constantly shifting. Another set of things, and you can see the prior was sort of fiscal year 19 and then fiscal year 20 and some of those things will be shifting to fiscal year 2020. Moving on to sort of department-wide, those are many of the things, the future efforts from the Advanced Planning Division, moving on to department-wide. We continually, customer service is a real focus for our department. And you can see the picture here is the work in progress for our new customer service, our new public counter. And that'll allow us to help more customers. It's gonna provide a substantial amount of additional counter space. And so that'll be a great enhancement for the customer experience. And help us bring people out and not bring them back into our offices to help them, which we sometimes do now when we've got backups. Automation and website capabilities, we're trying to continue to expand online and electronic plans submittal we're gonna be working on and we have been working on. And then early communication with the community consistent with the council's outreach policy. We wanna maintain our established turnaround times. We've got a whole series of metrics that we look at. So in planning, we've got state mandated 30 day response times and building we have for certain projects a 10 working day response time or a 15 day working day response time. And so we've got all these standards to provide consistency and to provide a clear understanding with the development community and the general public of when we'll have responses to things. Yeah, I'm just gonna interrupt you for one second. I apologize, cause I don't think maybe you were in the room, but there was a kind of an interest in having our keep going. Okay, I just want to double check. We talked about having this sort of 10 o'clock, but as we're approaching it, I don't want to cut it short. And this is the last slide. Oh, you kidding? I'm sorry. So almost there. Turn around times, we want to make sure we're still meeting that service for our customers. And then code updates you talked about. We talked about the advanced planning. We also this year, every three years, there's a new building code cycle. And so the 2019 code adoptions will be coming to you later this year. And so with that, I am happy to entertain any questions. And I would just like to say that I am really, really proud of the great work that our team does. I mean, the folks in the audience here work tirelessly and really have worked not just this year, but every year in trying to promote the best interests of the overall community. So I want to thank them for the efforts that they put in day and day out. Thank you for that. And I apologize for cutting you off right before your last slide. I just wanted to ensure that I was following the council consensus. I appreciate your passion. And that's one of the best things I think about these presentations. We have really the right people in the positions who know the work, really care deeply about the work. I know that is also the sentiment of your team. I appreciate your whole team being here to help us understand what you all do every day. And I know a lot ends up in your department in terms of the direction that the council has and just a lot of big issues. So thank you for all the work that you do for our city and for our council. We'll go ahead and see if there's council member questions, council member Brown. I know we said 10 o'clock, but if you can indulge for just to give an opportunity while staff is here and you came and you waited and you stayed. I just want to say thank you for the presentation. Thanks for all the work you do. On the slide where you mentioned the seven, as an accomplishment seven policy updates, I would just add, you could add, exhibited supreme, as an accomplishment, exhibited supreme patients with respect to delayed consideration of agenda items due to time constraints. And also some mixed messages from the council with respect to policy direction and priority. So thank you for bearing with us. We really do appreciate it. And I do have a question which can be answered later, but it occurred to me earlier in this morning in a meeting with constituents. I would like to get a sense and it doesn't have to be now, but an understanding of that with respect to like those 300 unpermitted units that were discovered. How that happens? I mean, I'm sure it happens in many different ways, but maybe like we can email with each other, I can call you and I'd like to understand that better and not take up too much time tonight. No, it's fine. I think we're, folks are fine with that. If you feel comfortable, I answer the question. Sure, right. So it happens in a variety of ways and I can invite up our code compliance manager to speak to it in more detail, but essentially, we'll go out and sometimes there are complaints. Sometimes there, we had several units recently, a individual complaint because there was a leak in their roof and their landlord wouldn't fix it and the ceiling actually collapsed and we went out there and there's an extension cord running to a shed and there was somebody living in the shed with no power other than the extension cord and a portable toilet that had been put outside or excuse me, it was a compost toilet that had been put outside. And so we found several units through that, through the complaint process. Other times it's, we go out for an inspection and there are areas of the property that have been converted and we look at it and we say, all right, this meets health and safety standards, you can stay here, but we're only showing one unit here and you've got three and so we put them into the queue and like I said, the 300 units was just from the rental inspection so there are 300 from the rental inspection. So that means there are about 160 that have been identified through complaints or through other code efforts. Anything you'd like to add, Laura? All right. Any other questions from council members at this time? Council Member Matthews. Sarah, the current schedule for the counter, I'll invite Sarah. Sarah is helping coordinate the efforts with Public Works and our building's team, so. I've ignored a slew of emails from them today about the update, preparing for this, but we've been looking at hopefully July, August, basically next fiscal year to open the counter. I have a lot of moving parts with staff moving and making sure they're set up properly before we start taking payments and plans in, so fingers crossed for the next fiscal year early. Big customer service improvement though. Absolutely, it will be a big enhancement to the cramped quarters that we currently have. Vice Mayor, coming. Started mentioning that you all are shifting over like automated form submissions. Like where are you all at with that process? I mean like in terms of the amount of paperwork that people usually have to do for different planning purposes and submissions, like I guess just out of curiosity, if that's like in the initial stages or are you kind of farther along? We are, I would say in the middle stages of that. We are testing a program that we have purchased called Blue Beam and really we need to integrate that into our procedure flow. It obviously has lots of benefits. It saves money because you're not having to print plans and obviously it's greener because you're not printing all that stuff but also it's more convenient. People can submit those at any time and they don't have to bring plans down when the counter's open and they don't have the GHG associated with driving all those down. So there are many benefits. Right now we're looking at rolling out some of the smaller ones. So looking at sort of the simple ones and testing those to learn with the bigger projects. So whether that's solar installations or water heaters, some of the easy things, let's test it with those. And so we've got some procedures outlined and our next step will be rolling out those tests with the small projects so that we can learn from that and then incorporate those changes and those learning experiences before we start bringing in some of the plansets that our building division has. There's hundreds of sheets and require five different departments to review and eight different divisions. And so let's start small and work out the kinks. So that's where we're at with that right now. And we hopefully within a short time for months we'll have those first sets rolled out. And the next. Yeah, I just wanted to thank you for the and for everybody to be here so late tonight. So thank you. I think it was great to, I'm glad you gave us such a kind of global look at the department. I think sometimes we think of the planning department as the department that's all about just development and debating the merits of development. And I think you're common at the opening, which is really about health, public health and safety in both homes as well as public facilities, offices, all of that is such an underappreciated thing that planners do. So I appreciated that. And I think also just your view in terms of the green, pushing people to think about green building and looking at those kinds of opportunities. So I think just the global look at the department that you gave us was very helpful to me and you guys do a lot of work with a small amount of money and not very many people. And so just want to appreciate the way that you presented it. I learned a lot. Thanks. I just have one quick question and then an acknowledgement. One is in regards to, and you referenced it in your presentation around the housing blueprint subcommittee recommendations and a lot of work to be done. But if I heard you correctly, a lot of that is sort of on pause. Is that seem accurate? Some of that is on pause. We're trying to move forward with those as expeditiously as possible. We have certainly had things come up that have pushed things back. So I don't necessarily want to say everything's on pause, but we have pushed back the timelines. For some of those things, the ADU, the additional ADU things that the council has directed. The rezoning of Ocean Street was one of the things that we had hoped to get done early this year. And as we were addressing some of the priorities of the council as the new council was seated, some of those things got pushed back because some of those work items came to our advanced planning division. And so we have pushed some of those back and we'll also be adjusting as the council sets their priorities, we will be responding to that accordingly and adjusting our work plan. So we're looking forward to that. We've got tons that we can be doing, but we also want to make sure that we're aligning with the vision that the council has and the priorities that the council has. So it's a balancing act because some of those things like the LCP updates we've had underway for several years. And so we really want to keep pushing on those. But others, we haven't started, we're planning to start, but if the council provides direction on those priorities, then it may slide some of those things further back. Thank you. I think it would be beneficial for us or the new council to understand some of the work around the housing blueprint subcommittee and the three sort of pillars of that being housing production, protection, and community vitality. I will just add that I also appreciated the preface. I definitely, since health in all policies in there and Lee and I had a chance to actually present together at a class at UCSC recently in terms of his role and then the role of health in all policies as they intersect. But then also just quickly want to give a shout out to your team for the recognition you've been receiving. I know it was in the city manager's report in regards to your innovative work around the housing blueprint subcommittee. And you can say a little bit about what that has been and how you've been recognized and the presentation that you just did. Thank you for raising that. And I can't say that that is just our team because that was really a citywide effort and a council led effort that really prioritized housing in the community. And so a couple of things. One, two weekends ago we presented at the National American Planning Association Conference on the work that we did around homelessness and around, that was the 20 point work program that was developed for homelessness as well as the housing voices report that developed 99 recommendations and then the prioritization exercise that came out of the housing blueprint subcommittee. So we presented it on the national stage there. We also just were informed within the last week that we received a Northern section of the American Planning Association Award of Excellence for the housing blueprint subcommittee and housing voices outreach effort. And so that was really an effort that our entire city undertook with people from various departments and with the mayor at the time Cynthia Chase went out and did many, many hours of outreach and that culminated in the set of 99 different recommendations. And I mentioned that in the presentation that there are still a lot of really good ideas in that housing blueprint or excuse me in the housing voices report that we still haven't implemented not because they're not great ideas but because there were so many great ideas that when we went through the prioritization and council member Brown and Mayor Watkins you were a part of that effort. And so thank you, you're both to be committed for the work and for the awards that we got you're a big part of that as well. And we still have a lot not only from the housing blueprint subcommittee recommendations but great ideas from the housing voices report as well that just didn't rise to the top because there were so many suggestions that our community that was entirely community generated. And that was one of the things that was stressed as part of our presentation and one of the things that helped us achieve that recent award. So we'll be hopefully, we'll be applying for and may get recognition at the state level as well for that effort. Thank you. And any, unless there's not any for the... Just when we go into our priority session soon. Do we have a date for it? I'm looking to Martin Bernal. We're working on the contract. In any event, it'll happen. I don't know if that... I think for all, it's true for all our departments but keep reminding us of the demands on staff to achieve something. I mean, just going to more digitized processes. It's one thing, because I've been around this block a few times people, 10 years ago, we got to digitize our processes, it should all be online. That's really easy to say or to actually do. And so we do have all these great ideas and we tend to get latch on to the latest shiny objects. So when we come to our strategy sessions, bring us down to earth. I mean, my intuition is that the date of the local coastal plan is probably really important. I don't know, I'm just guessing, but they're... Yes. You know, to a certain extent, I would welcome some professional advice on which things are really, really important that we tackle. And I'll just sort of remind the council that there's sort of gonna be two paths moving forward. One sort of just the upcoming council work plan for the next several months, but also a larger sort of process to ensue that is engaging with the community, is engaging for a three-year strategic plan work plan. So there'll be two opportunities to kind of have some outlines for strategy moving forward. Okay. So that concludes the presentation. We do have, sorry, I almost forgot, public comment. Was there any member of the community that wanted to comment? Please, okay, you have up to two minutes. Yes, please. As a member, oh, by the way, I was a building inspector with the county for 18 years. So I kind of have a feel for what you all do and an appreciation for it. So thank you very much. I live in the Circles neighborhood. We've got a project proposed there that was significant enough that there was an outreach, public outreach meeting, and it was generally considered to be of not very successful. And so I'm organizing in the neighborhood and getting a lot of questions about where's the process? Where are we in the process? And even though with my experience, I'm finding it's very difficult to get answers for my people. And I go online and it's represented, but it's only a plot plan. There's a project that we feel is gonna have significant visual impacts and density impacts and all kinds of impacts. So can you tell me how to get that information so that I can relay it to the people in my neighborhood? It's my understanding that this is supposed to be public, available to the public for that. So in one, one, one area at Circle is down. We'll go ahead and pause the time really quick. We'll go ahead and have you finish your comments for it and then we'll take that in and then we have one more, we have one more, I mean, before we close and respond, we'll have one more public comment, I believe. Okay, did you have additional comments? You still had the time. No, that was it, it was really a question about how can I access this information because I find the stuff that's online is just a plot plan that's been up for two months, I think, or a month and a half anyway, and I need more information for my people. Thank you. We'll go ahead and have our next member of the community up to two minutes and then we'll return back and if our staff wants to respond, we can do that. We had the discussion of cannabis earlier this evening. I just had some more thoughts of just stuff. Go ahead and pause this. This is if you had any comments related to this item. Yes. Oh, I was like, public comment again? Okay. My mistake. No problem. Okay, so we'll go ahead and close public comment at this point. I saw that you, Lee was interested in sharing some of the online tools in response to the member of the community who's here tonight. Do you want to briefly address those or potentially reach out also after? I would just say reach out to the project manager but I'm happy to talk with you after the project manager's listed here and we can also, our current planning manager is present as well so we can give you the latest on that. And it seems that you have this online tool for community members who might also be tracking projects that you found on our website, is that correct? That's correct. So this has some basic information and we're always looking to update that. Sounds like we have a desire from the community to provide some additional information. We can look at getting this particular project with additional info online. Just use that, not the arid circle, that one, the Ocean Street one. It's incredible. That's a great tool. Yeah, so this is a way for us to track all kinds of big projects that are underway at this time. So it's a good idea for, no, we actually closed public comment but if you have interest in speaking with our staff it looks like they're available after. This is a great tool. Yes, so plan sets for certain projects and then this is the online comments middle. Okay, great. Thank you. Thank you. So unless there's any additional questions. Not on this item. Not on this item. Okay, we'll go ahead and adjourn this. No, we're going ahead and closing this item but we're not adjourning the meeting. In the cluster of the afternoon we skipped right over the calendar. Okay. Is there any calendar updates at this time? Possibly. Okay. The closed session that was for April 30th. Which we, have you heard back from council members in availability? I'm not sure if I'm available that day. I think if I hear. I can call in. I'm driving back from Sacramento. Okay. Okay. We'll talk about that one. Okay. But we'll have to schedule that too. And we're scheduling the priority setting session too. Oh, good. In May. Great. Okay, it looks like we'll have some additional meeting time then. My 22-point program. On that note, we're going to go ahead and adjourn the meeting. Thank you. I'm going to give that one a.