 All right. Hi, good morning everybody and welcome to the October 8th, 2019 Board of Supervisors meeting. I'm gonna call the meeting to order and ask the clerk to call the roll. Good morning, Supervisor Leopold. Here. Friend. Here. Caput. Supervisor McPherson. Here. And Chair Coonerty. Hi, here. So I'm gonna now ask you to join me in a moment of silence and the Pledge of Allegiance. To the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. All right, now we have a consideration of late additions to the agenda and additions and deletions to the consent in regular agendas. And Mr. Plosius, do we have some late additions? Yes, we have a late addition today. By forfeit's vote, consider addition of late item, ID number 7929 to the consent agenda relating to the establishment of a technical advisory committee to participate in the county council recruitment process as outlined in the memorandum of the county administrative officer. This is board member 39, 7928. And then there's establishing a technical advisory committee to participate in the county council recruitment process, take related actions as recommended by the personnel director board member, the board memo print out 7929. Great, so I'm gonna ask for a motion to add this. I'm gonna make that motion to add this item to the agenda. Second. Motion by Leopold and a second by Friend. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, that passes unanimously. I guess that becomes item number 41 on our consent agenda. Are there any other additions or deletions? On the regular agenda, we have a correction on item number 11. The item should read, public hearing to consider resolution amending the general plan, local coastal program, public safety element, conservation and open space element and sequence notice of exemption determination. Ordinance amending Santa Cruz County code chapter 1610, geologic hazard 1613, floodplain regulations 1620, grading regulations and 1622 erosion control. Continue the board of supervisors public hearing to November 5th, 2019 and take related actions as outlined in the memorandum of the planning director. And then on the consent agenda on number 19, we have additional materials revised attachment A, replacement packet page 675. That concludes the corrections to the agenda. Great. Now I'm gonna ask my fellow board members if they have any items that I'd like to remove from the consent agenda and put on the regular agenda. Yeah, Mr. Chair, I'd like to move item number 37 from the consent agenda. Okay. So we'll take item number 37, which is accept and file a report on the proposed affordable housing guidelines and make that item number 9.1. Okay. We are now moving on to item number five. This is public comment. This is an opportunity for members of public to speak to us about any items that are not on today's agenda but are within the purview of the board of supervisors. Also items that are on our consent agenda are on our closed session agenda. And if you cannot stay because you have to get to work or you have another obligation for a regular agenda item, this is also your opportunity to speak on those items. And I ask you to please line up and we'll do two minutes each. Good morning, gentlemen. I am the right Reverend Joseph Eaton. I'll be taking less than two minutes. I'd like to speak a parable to you. Then one of the Pharisees whose name was Gamayel, a teacher of the law and honored by all the people rose up and ordered them to take the apostles outside for a little while. Then he said to them, men of Israel, take heed to yourselves and find out what is best for you to do about these men. This is a parable. For before these days rose up Thaddeus, he was posting himself to be a great man and he failed. Other men failed. So now I tell you, keep away from these men and let them alone. For if this thought and this work is of men, it will fail and pass away. But if it be of God, you cannot suppress it. Lest perchance you find yourselves standing in opposition to God and they listened to him and they called those followers and scorched them and sent them away. There are six parables in the gospel of Matthew. This parable is about second story respite. I rest my case. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning supervisors. My name is Kristen Peterson and I know many of you from my work on the Capitola City Council, but today I'm here before you as the senior associate of government relations for the Silicon Valley leadership group. And I'm here this morning to invite you to our 15th annual applied materials, Silicon Valley Turkey Trot, which was founded and is directed by our Silicon Valley leadership group foundation. This goal, the goal that we have this year is mission one million. As you know, there's tremendous need in our region and our goal is to donate $1 million from this year's race alone to five regional nonprofits that help local families in need. One of those nonprofits is the second harvest food bank of Santa Cruz County. To put our ambitious goal in perspective for the last five years, we've donated annually between $905,000 and $936,000 to five nonprofits. We'd like to close the gap this year and reach one million. One of the ways that we can accomplish this goal is with your help. Through our Santel Property Company's Mayor's Cup Community Challenge, this rewards mayors, council members, city managers and supervisors who participate and register in our race either in person or through our remote runners category. So if you celebrate Thanksgiving, you have a meal, you take a lap around the block with your family, your participation, it counts. We'll also be providing points for outreach from you and the board. In outreach is included in newsletters, e-newsletters and social media to your constituents. I will be leaving behind some points scoring sheets for you as well as some flyers and some handouts for your reference. I wanna thank you all for your service to our community and I hope that you will join us for the Silicon Valley Turkey Trot. Thank you so much. And thank you for providing the remote option where you don't actually have to run. That's my favorite kind. Chance. Hi, my name is Tony Crane, Aptos resident here in objection to the peer respite program that was implemented in our neighborhood. So last week, many of the neighbors came in and expressed their objections as well. But what was clear is that we are not opposed to the program itself. We are not questioning whether it is effective or not. It is where it is and the way in which it was implemented. I'm gonna read you the last sentence of an email from Pam Rogers Wyman to members of Encompass. I know where you're losing the ability to move into the neighborhood and not alert neighbors to the program by moving forward with the licensing process, but we don't have a choice. I picked this because you don't have to know anything about it to understand that that's wrong. It's unethical. This is a week after the program, the purchase closed escrow. They owned the property. They had not informed or supervisors. They didn't inform anybody about this program that was mandated to be eight beds, which means that it had to go through a public hearing level five permit review and they lied throughout to avoid that. So we've been coming to you, you have these emails. This comes from an internal email. We've given them all to you. This is the least damning of them, but I chose it because you don't have to know anything about it to understand that that right there shows intent to deceive. So I'm just telling you now, we've given you multiple options throughout this two years to do the right thing and you've chosen not to with all this information at your hand. So you have become complicit. Given you fair warning and now take what you get. Hello, I'm Carol Williamson. I'm here on behalf of all of the family members who have a loved one with a serious mental illness, parents, siblings, friends, spouses. We appreciate so much every single bed that is available in our County to help our loved ones. As you know, there's an extreme shortage. We should be increasing the number of beds in all types of levels of care and we cannot afford to lose anything. And second story has been phenomenal in its ability to help people get back on their feet. I lost my son to suicide and I see the importance of finding connections the way that happens at second story, people find each other, they avoid hospitalization, homelessness, jail and families are grateful. So I ask you to resolve the problems that have been occurring with the neighborhood and move forward keeping second story. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning, my name is Shalott Cabanas. I love Santa Cruz and I have the honor of working as the chair of the mental health advisory board and I'm joined by other members today and I'm here to talk about two things. One, we got the tour of the South County facility that has just been opened. It is beautiful. Thank you, thank you for putting services in South County, making it a priority and helping to end the stigma when it comes to accessing and being able to access behavioral health. In that vein, we also wrote a letter and I can't stay to the end but the very end, Jay, of your agenda, we submitted a letter and basically addressing the, oh, now I'm blinking, great. The wording to the strategic plan. You guys rock, thank you. And basically the wording, your strategic plan is inclusive, it's equitable, it's awesome. But when it comes to the behavioral health piece, it says to support residents and lessen community impacts through increased access to integrated mental health substance use disorder and healthcare services. And we'd like to see that change to support residents and improve community impacts. It's more inclusive and equitable and in line with the rest of your strategic plan. Thank you so much and again, Santa Cruz is awesome. Chairman Coonerty, Supervisors, Gary Richard Arnold. What I continue to see is the movement, building a parallel government. I was at the last AMBAG meeting. I was the only one to attend out of 13 cities in three counties, there was no TV coverage and the local newspaper is shockingly terrible about it. The other things that the newspapers don't mention, this parallel government that's building is pushed by a couple of networks. One is California Forward and CalCog. And there are also numerous fifth columnists dispersed throughout the network, including this county building itself. These are interns and so-called fellows that influence your decision rather than the voters. One of the national parallel governments is the Atlantic Council. Stephen Hadley is one of the vice presidents together with Leon Panetta as a director. Stephen Hadley is a member of a secret society called Quill and Dagger with the dagger through a head. And this also includes Eric Swalwell. He also belongs at same societies, part of Adam Schiff's intelligence committee. Also there's a fun page article about Adam Schiff's gay lover claims of abuse. We don't hear that in our local newspaper, nor do we hear about the American report, headline CIA assets killed in China after Leon Panetta takes over CIA. New York Times says the damage to American intelligence was described as crippling and of a historic proportions. Leon Panetta is the co-founder of California Forward and you maintain two monuments to this communist espionage agent. You are under the Panetta machine and you propose continually supporting these parallel governments that are involved in this so-called coup. It turns out that Adam Smith's a fellow that went to the Ukraine also came from the Atlantic Union. You'll have more details in the information I have here for you. Hello, board of supervisors. Thank you very much for hearing me. I am very grateful for Second Story Rest of a House being a part of the Santa Cruz County community. This community would not be the exact same without Second Story because it has a whole lot to offer to each person who steps into this place. Second Story may seem like just another mental health facility but the truth of the matter is it is very unique in which it is peer run unlike other mental health facilities. I cannot express how safely I feel while being here. I can confidently say that I am very well pleased in how this place has helped me to live such a life of gratitude. I believe that this community needs more places like Second Story because then people can see that one is not alone within the community and the mental health stigma can be overcome within with the help of others who's going through the exact same or similar situations and while being at Second Story as a former guest, it's not just a place of physical healing but it's also a place where people can get emotional healing too and it's also a place where people can feel safe and be able to be part of a community that they never thought would or have existed in their life. And so yeah, as a former guest, I'm very grateful for Second Story and I'm really honored to be a part of the community here. Thank you very much. Board of Supervisors, thank you for the opportunity to speak and thank you for all the work you are doing to combat climate change. Exhibit number one is this wonderful quilt that was made by students on September the 20th. As you can see, they are very aware and very concerned about the problem and we owe it to them to do a lot, everything possible. Further to that, we started collecting signatures on that day and in the last, since September 20th, we've collected 465 signatures for zero, at the top it says, I support zero carbon emissions by 2030, reduce vehicle emissions, limit single-use plastic, facilitate food waste reduction, take other steps as needed. And we'd like to be talking to staff about various detailed ideas. There's 465 signatures in here, which I will pass on to. Somebody. So. Yes, I just wanted to say that we face a possible shutdown of our electricity because of the dry conditions and high winds and the fire risk in the Santa Cruz mountains. All of us in Santa Cruz County will be potentially impacted by the climate chaos. We depend on government officials to enact new policies to limit emissions and our continuing acceleration toward uncontrolled warming. Extinction Rebellion is on the streets. Santa Cruz Climate Action Network is promoting zero carbon 2030. Campaign for Sustainable Transportation is working to change the use of single occupancy vehicles. We are depending on you to change policies. These policies are involving transportation, land use, electrification of buildings, and an end to single-use plastics, and support of regenerative agriculture to absorb carbon. The clock is ticking, our time is running out, humanity has never been in this situation before. Thank you. And hopefully you all are aware of items 23 and 24 on our agenda today, where the county is committing to being carbon neutral by 2030 and then we're trying to establish a Climate Action Manager here at the county to help move those items forward. Thank you. Thank you for that. My name is Carol Long. I'm also with the Climate Action Network, and I've been arranging meetings with individual supervisors and would like to have one with Supervisor McPherson and with Supervisor Friend and Supervisor Caput. Mr. Coonerty and the Leopold have already met with us. We have specific things that we want to ask of you and suggestions that we want to make. And we think it would be fruitful to have face-to-face meetings, about a half a dozen of us come because it requires several of us to cover our subjects. So I have a message in to you, Mr. McPherson, to try to get a meeting and I hope that you will oblige us. And I hope also that Mr. Friend will meet with us as well. And I do want to point out that county operations being carbon neutral by 2030 is a very good thing, but that we would like the entire county, not just the operations of the government to become carbon neutral by 2030. Thank you. Board Chair, Brent Adams of the Warming Center Program. I want to talk about Watsonville Warming Center. Maybe you know why the Warming Center came into being because we have had traditionally a cap of a hundred shelter beds in Santa Cruz, historically at the Armory, then a different regime of control with the Association of Faith communities, homeless services center, and now finally Salvation Army. We started last year in Santa Cruz with the paltry 50 shelter beds and we didn't open anymore until March. Warming Center doubled down and opened up for twice ready, for twice the number of nights, for twice the number of people we stand ready now. We've completed our second year in Watsonville. There was a Salvation Army shelter there. Again, 30 beds maxing out when cold weather hits and we activate, we have 50 people, all the people who don't make it into Salvation Army. They don't even have a street activation team there. We've been working without a hitch. In fact, we are revolutionizing shelter in Santa Cruz by instituting cleaning protocols and putting a highest priority on people with physical mobility. If you don't put a highest priority, they fall to the wayside and they become the lowest priority. I want you to know that you've cut funding without a vote for Watsonville Warming Center this year. We're still gonna try to operate it on our shoestring budget because it saves lives, reduces hypothermia. But I was told by Rainie Maher, former name, that I shouldn't be emailing you, that I should only be going through her, but I need to email you and you need to look into the Watsonville Warming Center now because we have desperate need in Watsonville for Warming Center program. We're completing our fifth year this year in Santa Cruz. We are now focusing on needs-based. As you know, the homeless services center has changed their name to Housing Matters. We're changing our name to Day and Night Services Center because we're offering way more services than the homeless services center has been offering for the last few years. Look for your email from Brent Adams, okay? Thank you. We need to talk about this. Good morning, my name is Becky Steinbruner. I'm a resident of rural Aptos and this morning spent the morning getting my family and home ready for a power shutoff and possible wildland fire. So I wanna speak to you about that and ask you again to fund County Fire. I think that maybe next, at your next meeting you'll be looking at the possibility of raising a new tax on rural residents and I urge you to fund County Fire with the money that the county has. 18 million dollars a year rolls in here from the state Proposition 172 money for public safety. County Fire gets zero. Zero of the public safety money, 18 million dollars. And you wanna raise a tax and you sold Measure G last year on funding fire and zero of Measure G will go to fire, at least to County Fire. That's wrong. And I'm asking you in the face of a red flag warning to fund County Fire using the money that is amply available to you now. I also wanna just protest on Consent Agenda Item 18, spending $90,000 for two new vehicles on the FIT program that did get funded with Measure G. That's a pilot program and we're buying two new vehicles for that. I don't think that's wise. And I support Climate Action Manager if they in fact do a good job. I'd like to see their job description and see what they would do. Would it be just a de facto position to get grant money or is they really gonna do something for a county to get it going? I hope they recommend replanting the trees around the county building that were cut down. In my last few minutes here, I wanna just say next Thursday in the honor of the anniversary of the 30 year Loma Prieta earthquake, I'm gonna be filing 90 binders like this with Superior Court for the legal action against Soquel Creek Water. This county only allows administrative records to be lodged in hard copy. That is incredible for an environmental county to require paper only 90 binders. Thank you. Yay, thank you Becky. My name is Monica McGuire. I live in Corralitos. Now I've lived in Santa Cruz for 22 years and I was quite horrified to see that today's agenda packet is thousands of pages. The hundreds of pages are bad enough, difficult enough. My heart goes out to every one of the people on staff and each of you to have to look at such a ridiculous amount of paperwork. For if not the smallest geographic county in the state, we know that we are not large in numbers either and it's ridiculous. Also, I want to call attention to this incredible lineup of people we all just listened to again. Most of them saying despite our knowledge, our gray hair proves our ability to say please listen more to what we're saying. Now we have only two minutes to speak. Now we don't have constituent meetings on a regular basis where we can show up and give our help. You obviously need our help when there's so many issues here that make no sense. The one I'm choosing to speak on specifically today is the purchase of a tech 84 machine. Those machines that they have at the airports which if you listen and talk to the people who work at the airports, who run people through them, they used to say, oh no, they're perfectly safe. We've been told they're perfectly safe all along. But now they're not so sure because they're all getting so sick. I'm a true healthcare provider. My husband is an MD with electrical engineering and bioengineering masters. He is one of the people right here who's offered himself as most of these people are offering ourselves to assist you. This purchase for $200,000 is instead of asking people to pat down the people who go through the jail. This kind of a machine is when you have millions of people going through and you've thrown away care about their health. The same way this county is throwing away care about the idea that we are economically and ecologically combined. We are not requiring that Becky Steinbrenner, the heroine who does everything she can for everyone in this county has to file 90 binders of paperwork. There are so many people in this room who have come and given you their time and care. You obviously need it. Please have more evening constituent meetings. Please do a better job of taking our help. Thank you. And please take. Thank you. On this $200,000 unnecessary. Thank you. Thank you. Time's up. Please come forward. You can bend it down towards you there. Visors. I want to start by just acknowledging you all and also the staff and everyone in this room. I mean, I just, I am inspired by this county and by the collaboration that is here, the spirit of collaboration. And I'm also very inspired by the fact that people run for office when it's such a hard position to be in. I am Beth Love. I'm here with the Santa Cruz Climate Action Network and also with Eat for the Earth. And I want to address the board about the idea of carbon neutral by 2030. And particularly I wanna focus on a class of emissions that is most likely to be left out of county and city plans when climate action plans are made. And that is consumption-based emissions, particularly around the food that we eat. And I know it's a hard thing to wrestle with and to try to figure out how to decrease the emissions related to the foods that we eat. But I know that it is possible and that there are jurisdictions that are taking measures. And I will be approaching all of you individually with my group Eat for the Earth to talk more about this. Thank you. Thank you. Your final speaker. Marilyn Garrett and wireless radiation has biological harmful effects, period. It's not debatable related to all kinds of illnesses, neurological problems, heart problems. And when you put up these cell towers and distribute antenna systems and small cells in the public right-of-way, you can have one too. Thank you. You are endangering the public and you have been provided data over the years and now we have 5G coming. And I gave you the DVD called 5G Apocalypse, The Extinction Event. And it starts out and I've read this before, but this is a miniscule amount of time compared to the millions of advertisements and hours Verizon has filled everybody's minds with. It's important to understand what 5G is doing and what they say it's doing. We're told on the IEEEB forming document that this technology cooks your eyes like eggs in World War II. We don't need to understand these are military weapons. These are assault frequencies. If you know nothing more than that, that's what you need to know. It's microwave radiation warfare. That's what it is. You were given a document called the International Appeal to Stop 5G on Earth and in Space. I urge you to agendize it. And we're also having an event on the 20th at the Resource Center for Nonviolence. Help to stop 5G. It's on the 20th at 6.30. And Dr. Carl Merritt is the featured speaker. Thank you. Thank you. I'll bring it back for board action on today's consent agenda. These are items 13 through 41 with the additions and deletions that were made earlier. I'd just like to comment on some, they also already pulled the one at number 37. On the, I'd like to thank the Chair Coonerty for bringing this item forward regarding the Housing Authority preference for families. If the Housing Authority agrees to implement this proposal, I'd be curious to see how the big difference it can make in getting homeless families placed in Section 8 vouchers. We can't require a report back from the Housing Authority, but perhaps we could request a report from, about the policy if it's implemented and just get a report back on what that includes and how it's going to be implemented. Is, it was mentioned that the concerns about climate change and what's happening. I would say that Santa Cruz County really has been at the forefront of addressing these impacts from climate change for many years now. And these two items really affirm leadership in this regard. I look forward to hearing about the plans to get us to establish a Climate Action Manager. And I think it's going to be a great position. It'll be a very proactive position because that's the way we're gonna make it to get the county to carbon neutrality as well in advance of the state goals. And we are on our way to doing that as I speak. Item number 31, they got gun violence reduction program, pilot program. I want to thank the sheriff's office for putting this item forward as harm reduction effort to our community. I support providing additional resources to ensure people who are prohibited from having firearms actually don't end up receiving them. It's a real important goal that we have. And I want to thank the sheriff for that. On item 33, the smart path for homelessness. I want to thank the human services department for the progress report. I'm glad that we have exceeded our assessment goals, but we have to acknowledge that we have to work to do some referrals on actual placement. There's one line that really did strike me that, and it says, however, without an increase in the capacity of all housing program types. And especially those that meet the needs of the most vulnerable persons experiencing homelessness. The smart path will be unable to refer the majority of persons who complete an assessment to a housing program. This tells me not only do we need to continue our efforts to improve our coordination and governance in this matter for homeless services in our county, which we're going to be discussing later today, but we need to increase housing units for the most vulnerable. I think we all agree on that, we know that. This has to continue to be one of our most critical priorities. And I might mention as a member on the executive committee of the California State Association of Counties, we had our executive committee meeting at Aptos this last week and people, the question was asked, what is the most important issue that's facing you now? And everyone raised their hand, it was homelessness. It's a huge problem. It's a very difficult one to get your arms around to have a real final solution to it. It's going to take a cooperative effort and I'm looking forward to seeing what we can do to ease this crisis that we have in this county and throughout this state. Thank you, Chair. Thank you. Professor Leopold. Good morning, Chair. Just a couple items to comment on. On item number 23, I appreciate the work of my colleagues in recommending the county become a carbon neutral institution by 2030. I think this is an important first step. Is it on? It's usually not in this spot. So maybe I just need to get closer. On item number 23, which is about making the county a carbon neutral institution by 2030, I think this is an important first step and I appreciate the efforts of my colleagues to bring this to the fore. And on item number 24, which is directing the CAO to investigate establishing a climate action manager. I want to thank my colleague, Supervisor McPherson for his support and I hope we have the support of the entire board. Our county has done a lot to reduce admissions. We also have to start preparing for adaptation strategies because as good as we will be about reducing admissions and becoming carbon neutral, we know that the effects of climate change are real, that sea level rise will happen and we've seen the impacts of devastating fires and so what we can do in order to be prepared for the changing nature of the climate is going to be an important part of this job. On item number 33 about the smart path to housing and health, we will be talking about the focus strategy report in a little bit more detail. I appreciate getting this report and it's clear that this is an important tool but it's not a silver bullet in the sense that it will solve our problems. It helps us direct folks and make sure that we're helping and prioritizing those most in need and I really appreciate the hard work of the staff in order to make that happen. That's all. Okay, Supervisor Friend. Thank you, Chair. A couple brief comments again on item 24 to echo what my colleague said and also to add the fact that this did come forward also as a suggestion from our Commission on the environment who've been advocating for this. I think that that's an important position for the county to have, especially in a pretty broad sense. We have an item later on in the agenda today that deals with sea level rise guidance and there's a remarkable amount of damage that was done to local roads. A few years ago associated with climate change, the position can be pretty broad and I'm confident that it's a role that will do well within our county for a number of planning perspectives. I'd also like to thank staff, specifically the director of public works for his work on item number 38, which is the La Selva Beach Library Project. This is an item that had a lot of complexities to it, but has moved forward and stayed on time and the community of La Selva and the library itself is actually closed right now for the renovations for the community of La Selva, which just a few years ago thought that they were gonna lose the library all together, that was saved. Now we passed a measure, they can get a remodel their community center slash library and they view it as a community center will be something that they have had a remarkable amount of input in and I appreciate the county's work to ensure that this happens within just about the next six months. So thank you to the deputy CAO director of public works for the La Selva Beach Library Project. Thank you. Just a couple brief comments on item number 22, this is the item I brought forward to ask the housing authority to give preferences when they come up with vouchers to families. There are 59 unsheltered families according to the focus strategies report representing 133 children. The homelessness crisis that we're facing can be overwhelming. I believe with some focused attention, we can and working with organizations like the housing authority and nonprofit partners, we could end family homelessness in Santa Cruz County. As we all know, not only is that the correct moral thing to do, but given the data that shows that trauma experienced by children has lifelong health and education and economic impacts, I believe that this would be a good investment for our community and I'm hopeful that we can work with the housing authority to increase this preference. On item number 23, the carbon neutrality for the city or for the county as an institution by 2030, just to, I know we want to do more. I was inspired last week watching the young people from across this county march and demand action from older generations for their future and their children's future. This county is hundreds, more than 100 buildings, 2,400 employees, several large institutions. If we are able to, and we've already reduced it significantly, but if we are able to get to zero, that's the equivalent of tens of thousands of cars every year coming off our roads alone and we can work with our partners and it shows other institutions in this community that it can be done and it can be done in a way that benefits not only the environment, but also the workers and residents and then also from an economic point of view, I believe that we will end up saving enormous amounts of money on our power and other costs by getting smart in how we deal with our emissions and reducing those by 2030, if not sooner. So, and then I appreciate my colleagues for bringing a climate action manager position per the commission on the environment's recommendation as a way to make sure we manage this going forward and do our part to address this global crisis. Is there action or is there a motion on the consent agenda? I will move the consent agenda as amended. Motion by Leopold, second by Friend. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, that passes unanimously. We'll now move on to item number seven. This is a jurisdictional hearing to consider an appeal of application number 181132 to amend the Animal Services Master Plan as outlined in the memorandum of the planning director. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning, board. Annette Olson of the Planning Department will be giving you the presentation. Annette is the co-principal planner for development review in the planning department. Good morning, supervisors. This is the jurisdictional hearing for the appeal of the Planning Commission's decision to approve, is that better? Yeah, maybe we could also turn up the microphones today. So I'll start over. This is the jurisdictional hearing for the appeal of the Planning Commission's decision to approve an amendment to the Animal Services Master Plan. That master plan was approved in April of 2007 and the amendment application before you proposes to modify that master plan to allow a partial remodel of the main shelter building, the conversion of an existing structure to a cat adoption center and the construction of a training building. Those are the main elements of the application. A neighbor of. Okay, I'll try. A neighbor of the project, Charles Tabor, appealed one aspect of the amendment. His appeal is focused on the proposed elimination of an original condition of approval of the master plan. That condition is outside dog agility, training and exercise areas shall be located a minimum of 50 feet from adjacent residential properties and fenced as necessary to reduce noise impacts to adjacent neighbors. Mr. Tabor would like to see this condition retained and Animal Services proposes to eliminate it in order to allow one dog at a time to be exercised in that area. For reference, Animal Services is located at the intersection of 7th Avenue and Rodriguez Street in Live Oak. It's shown here outlined in red. The appellant lives in Casa La Familia, which is a 23 unit townhouse for senior development just north of Animal Services. And the buffer area is shown in red. The appellant cites two code sections in support of his appeal. The first is the animal hospitals and kennels ordinance. And he cites in particular subsection B, which says the actual enclosure in which animals are treated or maintained shall be at least 75 feet from any residents. What's notable is that the ordinance does not exclude all animals from being within 75 feet of residences. Instead, it's very specific, focusing on the actual enclosure for the treatment, meaning veterinary care, and maintenance, meaning housing of animals. The code is silent on outdoor exercise areas. Had the intention been to exclude all animals from being within 75 feet of residences, the code would have simply said that. This interpretation is supported by the planning commission's approval of the master plan in 2007. The staff report specifically discusses the project's compliance with this code section at the same time that the site plan shows an exercise yard located about 50 feet from residences. In addition, the 2007 master plan establishes a 50 foot, not a 75 foot buffer. This indicates that the commission saw no code conflict in allowing exercise yards closer than 75 feet to residences. More recently, at the August 28th hearing for the amendment, the planning commission exercises discretion again to eliminate the buffer based upon the following six facts. The original 50 foot buffer was not based upon technical acoustical data. It was not a recommendation of the acoustical engineer for the master plan, and it was not a mitigation in the mitigated negative declaration. The proposed use of the exercise yard is modest and supervised. Animal services proposes to exercise one dog accompanied by a volunteer at a time. The volunteer would engage the dog in exercise, clean up after the dog, and supervise the dog at all times. Animal services provided a letter from Carla Braden, a certified dog behaviorist who has indicated that active engaged dogs aren't typically not barking dogs. Noise complaints usually come from backyard dogs that are left unattended for long stretches of time, and those dogs bark out of boredom and loneliness. That would not be the case with the shelter dogs who would be actively engaged and accompanied by a volunteer. Dogs are allowed in residential neighborhoods up to the property line, so the proposed use where one dog would be allowed to exercise adjacent to residential properties is analogous to a residential use, but superior given the oversight provided by a volunteer. The Homeowners Association of Casa La Familia where the appellant lives unanimously supports the elimination of the 50 foot buffer and provided a letter to that effect. And six, the property has been used for animal services for more than 60 years, and its use in that manner predates many of the residential uses in the area, including the construction of Casa La Familia. The second code section, the appellant sites is the noisy animals ordinance, which prohibits a person from keeping noisy animals that unreasonably disturb a person with ordinary sensitivities. This code section is intended to provide recourse for noise complaints. Based upon the information from the dog behaviorists, we do not anticipate that the dogs being exercised would bark, if a dog did begin to bark, it would be removed by the volunteer. The noisy animals code section also says that when determining if there has been a violation of the section, the use and character of the property where the animal is located shall be taken into consideration. Given this, if a noise complaint were received, the property's use as the county's animal shelter would be considered. In any case, noise complaints about the shelter are rare. Code enforcement has received two complaints in 11 years of shelter operation. In determining whether or not to take jurisdiction of an appeal, your board must determine that one or more of the five grounds for taking jurisdiction exists. In this case, the appellant asserts that two of the grounds exist, in particular, number one on this slide, that there was an error or abuse of discretion on the part of the planning commission, and number three, that the planning commission's decision was not supported by the presented and considered facts. As detailed in the letter to you, no substantiated evidence for error or abuse of discretion has been presented by the appellant. The planning commission considered the facts presented, including the six facts I just reviewed, and approved the application. Given this, and based upon the administrative record before you, staff recommends that your board not take jurisdiction of application 181132. Are there any questions? Seeing no questions, we'll, sorry. I just, just, well, I'm inclined not to support the board taking on the appeal based on the criteria before us, but I want to express some concern about the proposal after the conditions of a permit after the agency was found to be in violation of those conditions. Could you explain when the process started to amend the master plan and include eliminating the 50-foot buffer? The application was applied for on June 21st, 2018, and that, at that time, it included the request to remove the buffer. Okay, did the staff misunderstand that the buffer had already been eliminated or had it been eliminated? No, it had not been eliminated. It was a part of the original master plan, and animal services as a part of the amendment would like to remove that buffer area. Thank you. I'm gonna ask now if the appellant would like to come forward to present their case. Okay, seeing none, I'll now ask if there's a member of the public who would like, if members of the public would like to come forward on this item. Good morning, I'm Eve Roberson, President of the Board of Directors of Casa La Familia. That's the senior townhouses that are adjacent to the animal shelter. Our board is very familiar with the proposed improvements for the animal shelter building next to our complex, and on May 17th, 2019, voted unanimously to support them. The board also supported the animal shelter being able to continue to use the 50 feet next to our property for its outdoor dog training and exercising program. Jane Imhoff, one of our residents whose unit is actually adjacent to the particular use, was ill today but wanted very much to come to let you know that there have been no problems whatsoever with that use. We appreciate that the animal shelter has been in operation for many years before our complex was developed 35 years ago, but they have always been good neighbors to us since then. In summary, as Board President of Casa La Familia and one of the closest neighbors to the animal shelter, we do believe that their proposed development will not only be a huge benefit for the many animals that the animal shelter rescues every day in our community, but it will also be a welcome improvement for our neighborhood. Thank you. Thank you. Is there anyone else that'd like to speak to us today? Is there anyone else after Ms. Garrett? Otherwise this will be our final speaker. Animal shelters seem helpful in some ways, but I'm not for this increased development and the reason one of them that I can't support the animal shelter is that I, you know, I have a cat, I love pets, but we were here a couple of years ago when you mandated that the animal services put in these chips, radio frequency ID chips in animals, supposedly to locate them. We came with pictures from a group called Chip Me Knock that shows cancer developing around these sites. And there were even animals that had been euthanized that had chips in them, but they didn't have the right kind of scanner to do it, but the pictures were horrific. I believe in doing procedures and having policies that are not toxic, not harming people, but this industry with ID and radio frequency ID and more microwaves and harming these animals, we held up these pictures and it's ghastly. The animals were fine before, even animals that had been injected with these devices dying in the arms of their owners. So I'm, I'm, I don't give money to the animal shelter and I'm not in favor of this expansion. Thank you. Okay, that concludes public comment. I'll bring it back to the board for action. I'm not sure if we, do we need to take any action or just, or if we just choose to not take the jurisdictional appeal? Sorry, the motion, the motion would be to act on staff recommendation and not accept jurisdiction. Yeah, so I will make the motion to act on the staff recommendations and have no additional actions. That the animal shelter plays an important role in our community and the site at Jose and Rodriguez or seventh and Rodriguez is an amazing community center spot where people gather and which so many people have been able to take advantage of adding to their family with great pets. I know our family has. And this proposal, which will seek to do some remodeling and refurbishing of the space will actually improve the corner in a way that it isn't right now. I look forward to seeing this completed and I don't think we should take on this jurisdiction appeal. Second. Okay, we have a motion and a second. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? That passes unanimously. Thank you very much. We're now gonna move on to item number eight, which is a public sale of surplus county owned real estate, real property commonly known as 64134th Avenue, pursuant to the terms and conditions stipulated in the Board of Supervisors Resolution 193-2019 and Planning Commission Resolution number 2019-04 and take related actions as recommended by the Deputy CAO Director of Public Works. Mr. Carey. Thank you. Good morning, Chair and Board. My name is Travis Carey, Director of Capital Projects and I'm representing real property today on this surplus sale. So this item is a surplus sale of county owned property at 64134th Avenue in Live Oak, APN-03207520. And it's a follow-up to your last action on this sale, which was on September 10th, 2019. So the sale is a process and I just wanna note that all the required determinations have been made by the Planning Commission, including the secret determination and also the general plan consistency determination as required by State Code and the public notice completed that was authorized at your last Board meeting for this item has been completed also consistent with State Code. I also want to note that the sale, any potential sale is subject to considerable restrictions which are outlined in the Planning Commission Resolution 2019-04, which was included in the bid packet and also in your last action. So there are actually seven recommendations with this item. So the first five are the open sale and then six and seven are follow-up actions. And so the first item would be to open the public sale and then you direct staff to open the bids, which I have in front of me here. After that, I'll announce the result of the bids that were submitted in writing and then you would call for oral bids. If there's any additional bids from folks that are here today, any oral bid needs to exceed the written bid by initial of an additional 5%. And then depending on the result of throughout the sale, you have options, you can accept the highest qualified written or oral bid or reject all bids and withdraw the sale. If you're not happy with the bids or the conditions of the sale, and then you would close the public sale of surplus County properties action number five, I would recommend perhaps before closing the sale at that point with discretion of your board hearing public comment on the item prior to that. And then action six, after you close the sale is to authorize the deputy CEO and director of public works to negotiate a final agreement for sale. And then action seven has to do with the proceeds and you're authorizing a use of those for restoration activities on other liabilities, settlement properties. Great. So let's open the bids. So we've received one written bid this morning. The bid is from Price and McKenna Folger. Their address is 685 34th Avenue in Santa Cruz. And the bid amount is $50,001. And that's $1.00 above the minimum bid set by your board of $50,000. They have acknowledged review and receipt of all of the restrictions that will be required to be followed on the property. And they've also submitted the minimum security deposit in the amount of $2,500. And the cashiers check made out to the County of Santa Cruz. And the bid form is fully signed by the bidder. I would, my opinion is that this is a qualified bid for the property. Okay. So now that we have confirmed the highest bid, now we'll open it up for oral bids. The oral bid would need to exceed 5% over the higher than the written bid. Are there any oral bids today? Seeing none. I will close the oral bids. Now I will open up public comment on this item. Seeing. Why? Why, oh, why, oh, why do is County Public Property listed as surplus and sold? Can you put it in a nutshell? What, and $50,000 in Santa Cruz County to sell any piece of land seems very low. What, what, it just seems to me what belongs to the County or the public keeps getting sold. Can you, and I see this on many agendas. It's very perplexing to me. And since I'm bringing up, there are probably also other members of the public who wonder, perhaps you could explain more. Thank you. Hi, I know there's probably been a lot of work that's gone into this and I get that, but we were just talking about affordable housing and that there's not a lot of stock out there and you own a county building that could be turned into like shared housing in different rooms and all that kind of stuff. So just again, wondering why it's being sold as it is. Thanks. Thank you. Monica McGuire, three people asking the same question. Hopefully this is a time where you can and would answer a question. It doesn't make any sense. It's impossible to have gone through everything in the agenda today to have time to look into this or figure out what I would say besides, but $50,000 really for a Santa Cruz property with all the talk of needed other housing and assets with the county in arrears. Please explain more and give us a better explanation about all of the things that keep coming up. Every chance you get, just to repeat, we understand the Brown Act is you can't always answer on the spot when it would look like it changes your agenda item, but with so many people coming in and saying that they've been here time after time asking that you look at something and still not getting answers to it, it makes no sense and we would really like to hear more those of us who take our time to come. Thank you. Do you wanna very briefly explain this item for the members of the public? Yes, thank you. This is the fourth public meeting on this item and the first two were at the Planning Commission in order to make their determinations of CEQA and also general plan consistency. The Planning Commission set very stringent development restrictions on the site, so it is not a billable piece of property. It cannot be used for any housing development or any other kind of development. The restrictions include significant use restrictions on development, restricts storage uses. It also requires maintenance of emergency flood control use for the county. There'll be multiple environmental protections set by the Planning Department. There also a sense of habitat restoration requirements for any work to occur on the property and that also includes future bridge improvements will be restricted and required environmental remediation. And the grant deed when the county, if the county does perfect the sale will include a conservation easement on the property which covered the entire property and also the county will retain a flood control and access easements for its required flood maintenance on the property. And there'll also be a condition subsequent which will allow the county to take back the property in the event that the restrictions are not met by the owner. Thank you. So for these reasons, it's not a developable piece and that has a very pronounced effect on the value. Absolutely. All right. Will we close public comment and we'll bring it back to the board for deliberation and action. Chair, this property was flooded out many times which is why there isn't a home there. This seems like a sale could benefit other ways of the county in it. And I particularly like this final action about authorizing the Department of Public Works to utilize the sale proceeds to fund required restoration of other real properties obtained through liability settlements. This is helpful, the county has pretty little funds to do this kind of work. And I would make the motion of the recommended actions. Okay, we have a motion by Leopold and a second by a friend. All those in favor, please say aye. Opposed? That passes unanimously. Thank you for your work on this. We're now going to move on to item number nine which is consider an ordinance for peeling chapter 7.12 and 8.12 of the Santa Cruz County code and amending chapters 2.31, 2.33, 3.16, 5.16, 5.35, 7.16, 7.42, 7.54, 7.56, 7.95, 8.55, 8.57, 9.42, 9.43, 9.44, 10.22 and 10.24 of the Santa Cruz County code to correct typographical errors, address organizational issues, align the code changes with state law, delete unnecessary material and make additional miscellaneous changes and schedule the ordinance for final adoption on October 22nd, 2019 as outlined in a memorandum of the County Council. Street. Good morning, Board. Jason Heath County Council's office. This is the 10th ordinance in a series of ordinances to update the County code, move to gender, neutral language, address typos and the like. We're looking at a number of titles in this iteration, two, three, five, seven, nine and 10. There are a couple of chapters that we're recommending deletion of, that would be chapter 7.12 and chapter 8.12 because they're not necessary to have in the code any longer and I'm happy to answer any questions. Okay, are there any questions? No, I'll just say that getting rid of chapter 8.12 may be the only reference to Bongs in the County code, so that'll be a change. All right, is there any public comment on this item? Seeing none, I'll bring it back to the board for deliberation action. I will move the recommended action. Second. All right, we got a motion by Leopold and a second by McPherson. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? That passes unanimously. We're now gonna move on to item 9.1, which is the affordable housing guidelines. This was pulled from the consent agenda by Supervisor McPherson. Yes, thank you. I think this is an important issue that we need to discuss, but I believe the public and the board would benefit from having a greater understanding of what we're being asked to approve in this situation. I do support the creation of a maintenance of affordable housing in our community and I wanna see it happen as soon as possible, but I think we need more details and greater public input before we make significant changes in those guidelines. I also noticed that there's a lottery scheduled for Measure J, a Measure J home in Live Oak that our staff was hoping to apply to these guidelines, but I'd like to move to continue this to a future meeting as part of a regular agenda for a more detailed presentation. And my motion would include a deferral of the Live Oak, Measure J, lottery until after the board has heard those guidelines. I would second. Okay, so we have a motion and a second. So I think, yeah, given that we will be having a greater public hearing, I'll ask if there's any public comment on continuing this item, seeing none. I'll bring it back to the board for action. Chair, if we might ask staff to that these are, this is a major rewrite of a document and it's hard because we don't have this strike out, you know, underlying strike out like we usually see. So any help with additional annotation would be helpful in reviewing these two documents to make sure that we understand all the changes that are inside. Absolutely. Okay, great. Yeah, I want to make it clear. I'm not sure that the changes shouldn't be made. I just think we need to have further discussion. Okay. So we have a motion and a second. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? That passes unanimously. We will now take a 20 minute... Oh, actually, yeah, why don't we, we'll move into a closed session now and I'll ask County Council, if there's going to be any reportable action. No. Okay. Welcome back everybody to the October 8th, 2019 meeting. We're now going to have our 1030 scheduled item. This is item number 10 to consider a study session on focus strategies, homeless baseline system assessment and accept and file a report on focus strategies, technical assistance engagement and direct the CAO's office to return on or before February, 2020 with a progress report as outlined in a memorandum of the County Administrative Officer. And we have Assistant CAO, Alyssa Benson here to present. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good morning, Chair and members of the board. I'm Alyssa Benson, Assistant CAO and member of the County's Homeless Services Coordination Team here within the office of the CAO. I will be providing an introduction and overview to the topic for your study session today, consideration of our first deliverable of our work with focus strategies consulting, the Santa Cruz County Homeless System Baseline Assessment and interim short-term recommendations. We are excited to be here today at this first major milestone of the work, which we'll continue through next spring. Here at the table is Rainey Perez, the County's Homeless Services Coordinator and Kate Bristol, Director of Consulting for Focus Strategies and our principal consultant on the study. As you know, Focus Strategies is the firm we've engaged to support our in-depth examination of our response to homelessness countywide and to help us craft a comprehensive approach to improvement. Our study session format will be as follows. Kate will be presenting the substantive content from the report in three parts. The first is really about a systems approach. We are starting with this to really understand this as a best practice. As a county and community, we have been working on the issues of homelessness for a very long time and understanding how those efforts interact and integrate is an important starting place. Understanding the value of a systems approach will be key in setting our shared vision and priorities as we move forward. The second part of the study session materials will focus on the observations and findings from this qualitative assessment as completed in phase one. We'll then move on to the interim recommendations. Kate will provide the Focus Strategies recommendations regarding immediate actions we can take today to make improvements in advance of the subsequent phases of work of the assessment. Regarding the interim recommendations, we will then have some brief comments from key county departments. The Human Services Department and Health Services Agency as they are specifically noted in the recommendations and from some jurisdictional partners. Weini will present these in the recommendations at that point in the presentation. From there, we will move to board discussion of the report and recommendations. Our objective today is to garner your input and feedback on the phase one report and implementation of recommendations, as well as your thoughts in terms of moving forward through the subsequent phases of work. Before we get to the substance of the study session, I'd like to provide some brief context as to what brought us to this point today. As detailed in the staff report, the board approved the contract for initiating this comprehensive work at its February 26th meeting in early 2019. While the county and cities in a myriad of community organizations and other government entities have been working on the issue of homelessness for many, many years, the urgency and complexity of the problems have significantly increased. The landscape has dramatically changed. Demographics of the people experiencing homelessness are changing and in some cases, increased complexity and acuity of health-related issues of those experiencing homelessness is making it more difficult to address their issues. More children transition age youth and families are experiencing homelessness in the face of housing affordability challenges and the impacts of homelessness is felt community wide. With the crisis here and across the state and country, new funding and expectations are coming forward and we need to be able to make better cross-jurisdictional decisions and have appropriate operating frameworks to plan, execute and monitor this work. In light of the challenges and complexity, the board made the decision to step back and take a look at the big picture of how we're responding or as some might say, to slow down so we can go fast. So as we engage in today's material, I wanna summarize the overall purpose of this technical assistance to put today's work into context. We are engaged in this work to achieve a shared vision based on a systems approach. We wanna invest funds strategically in programs that work. We wanna have a decision-making and governance structure that is effective and transparent. And we all want to actively use data to plan, measure and prove what we do in our effort to end homelessness in our community. With that, I would like to introduce Kate Bristol to lead us through today's materials. Welcome, Kate. Thank you. And I hope I am close enough to the mic for y'all to hear me. So thank you for inviting me here today to introduce focus strategies and the work we've been doing in your community. I'm actually really looking forward to hearing your feedback and your questions about the report, but just to get ourselves oriented, I'm gonna try as quickly as I can, run through the main features and findings of the report. So just quickly about focus strategies. Okay, what's going on with my advance, or? Nope, that's not the right way to go forward. So sorry. There we go. I had the wrong arrow button. So we're a West Coast-based consulting firm. We have staff located around California and in Oregon and in Washington, and our firm only works on helping communities reduce homelessness. We don't do any other kinds of work. And our approaches that we believe optimized systems, the power of analytics and expanded housing lead the way to ending homelessness. And one of the main things that we do is we help communities use your own local data to analyze what you're doing, analyze your effectiveness, and inform change. And we're very much around building on what works. And we know that when people experience homelessness, fundamentally the solution for them is to get back to housing. So I wanna start the presentation by talking a little bit about what it means to have a systems approach or to have a homelessness response system, which we talk about quite a bit in the report. So the goal of having a system is that you're gonna move from having, what most places have now is kind of a loosely coordinated collection of programs and activities that address some homelessness to something that's a strongly coordinated system that jointly addresses all homelessness for everyone. And if I could just offer an analogy, if you think about a school district, if you're a parent and you wanna enroll your child in second grade, imagine if you had to go to each school and you get to the school and the teachers come out and talk to you about whether they're gonna feel like they're the right people to teach your child. And they say, no, go down to the next school and you go to the next one. And you finally get to a school where they say, sure, we'll be happy to enroll your second grader, but we only have space in sixth grade, do you want that? So I think, obviously, you don't want your school system to work that way, but that is in a way kind of how homeless systems work. So if you try to picture what it would be like if the homeless system ran more like the school system, in a school system you have a centralized district, they know how many students there are, they know how many people will be enrolling, they develop a plan to make sure you have enough schools and teachers. There's a policy for how you enroll children in schools based on some consistent system. You might not have all the resources you wanna have in your school system, but you have a structured decision-making process to decide how you're gonna spend the funds you do have to maximize results, and you have metrics for deciding whether you're achieving the results you want. So really, that is the North Star we're trying to help you get to in thinking about how to address homelessness. You want a data-informed system that has a structured way of deciding how funds are allocated to achieve an agreed-upon set of goals, and so each person who experiences homelessness has an appropriate resource. And that might not be an ideal resource or even everything that they need, but it gets them on that pathway to housing. And then you have a clear set of measures to figure out if your system is working. And in some ways, when you're working on homelessness, the measures and objectives, or the measures are in some ways easier to figure out than in a school system because deciding whether schools are effective is complicated. Deciding whether the homeless system effect is effective isn't that complicated because it's really about did people get from being unsheltered into housing. So that's my slightly lengthy analogy, but I hope it helps set up this idea of the system's approach. So the reason you need a system is because individual programs cannot solve the problem as much as you have great individual programs with dedicated staff who are doing good work collectively if they're not working together in a system, you just aren't gonna be able to get there. You have limited resources, so you need joint decision-making shaped by shared goals. You need to know where all the funds are being invested, who's being served and what the results are and have accountability for everyone in the system. So when you do have a system, you'll know you're there. When you have these shared objectives that all the stakeholders agree upon, and then your resources are aligned to achieving those, your programs are designed so that they can get to those goals you're setting, and then you're analyzing your data to understand whether objectives are being met and you can make adjustments as you go along. You'll have a clear structure and process for making decisions that everyone understands, and then each person who experiences homelessness will receive a timely and consistent response. So I'm gonna just say some of the same things, but now with a picture that gets a little bit more concrete about what we mean by a homeless crisis response system. So this is an image that tries to show the fundamental objective of that as people are already experiencing homelessness or on the brink of doing so, they're in that red sideways pyramid and your objective of your system is everyone goes from red to green and green means you're in housing. And so this does not mean you have to build a new housing unit for every single person, but you have to have a mixture of different strategies that include use of your existing housing inventory as well as looking at the size of the existing inventory and scaling it up. So in this system, as people approach your homeless system, they go through your coordinated entry, which is your smart path is what you call it here. You have a variety of different kinds of steps you can use to help people get diverted or to prevent them from entering the system and getting back to housing through some fairly low cost, simple strategies. And then the folks who have the greatest barriers to housing probably need some kind of an intervention like rapid rehousing or permanent supportive housing. And then you'll notice there's that yellow box at the bottom, which is your emergency shelter and other kinds of temporary settings that people can go to. This is a really important part of the system. You have to have emergency interventions. And I think the important thing about this is we like to use this picture just to illustrate that as you're thinking about a system, you have to think about both the yellow and the green. And so what tends to happen, particularly in places where you have a lot of people living outside and you have a problem with very visible unsheltered homelessness is there's a lot of discussion about how do you deal, how much shelter do we need and do we need more shelter or less shelter? And those are important conversations, but your shelter system needs to lead people to housing. And so making sure you connect all those things up is really essential. Otherwise people will just cycle back and forth from unsheltered to shelter and back to unsheltered. Okay, so just these are just a couple key things you need to have in your system. Strategies to reduce what we call system inflow, which means as people are experiencing very extreme housing instability, what are your strategies to prevent them from actually falling into homelessness and going to be outside or going to shelter? So there are different approaches for that, which include prevention and diversion, which I'll talk about a little bit more further on. And also, do you have public systems that are discharging people into homelessness and can you do anything to reduce that? The second thing you need are different emergency interventions that you deploy, like outreach and emergency shelter and transitional housing. These have to be very high functioning and they have to have strong success rates that then moving people forward to housing. And then the final thing is you need housing. So you need those exits so that people can exit homelessness to a housing solution. And again, that could include subsidies and services that you use to get people to the housing you have, as well as expanding the supply of affordable housing. The other side of the coin, in addition to those sort of programmatic elements or the infrastructure elements, so I talked about having a system like a school district, you need leadership and governance that guides system level planning and decision making and gets everybody rowing in the same direction. You need planning, policy, data and evaluation capacity so that you know what results you're getting for your investments. So in addition to just having data, and you do have an HMIS system here, so you have data, but you have to then have the ability to analyze and use the data to shape policy and planning. And then staffing capacity to support the system change and implementation of shared policies is critical. I would just say one reason, in a lot of places we work, we find there is data, but there isn't anyone to analyze it. Data can't analyze itself. The strategies can't develop themselves. The policies can't be written by themselves. You need staff to be able to do that. So now I'm just gonna shift quickly to talk a little bit about our scope, which Elisa already reviewed. So this is just a photographic of the different steps. We got started in March with the research for this baseline assessment. It was finalized in August. That's the Orange Square and presenting it today. The next piece of work is already underway, which is we're doing some quantitative analysis of your system, and we expect to have results of that to present in December. And I would say that just to kind of review that the overall result we're striving towards is that at the end of this engagement you'll have the design for a systematic and coordinated response that's informed by data and then implemented through a new action plan. Okay, next. Okay, so now I'm just gonna quickly give an overview of what we learned about your homeless response system. And this is a very quick summary of what's in the report. So you all received a copy of the report. It summarizes our initial observations about the current response to homelessness here. And as I mentioned, it's just the first step of a phased scope of work. Identify strengths and challenges. And then what we were asked to do to kind of as part of moving slow to move fast, we still wanna also move fast. So we were asked to sort of share some initial thoughts about some preliminary action steps you could take right now while the rest of the analytic work is taking place. I just wanna emphasize one other thing about the report, which is it's largely based on qualitative information. So we interviewed a lot of people. We did focus groups. We looked at the materials you have and the sort of deep dive into the data that you have is happening now. That'll be in the next deliverable. Okay, so this is a very rolled up summary of the things that we found in the areas we assessed. I wanna just emphasize that the scope of this was not to focus on any particular jurisdiction. So we weren't looking at what's the county doing, what are the different cities doing, but looking at your whole geography of your community and all the different efforts that are underway. So in the next set of slides, I'm gonna give a quick overview of the findings in each of these six areas. So the first one was leadership and governance. And for most of these topics, I think you'll find that the report says we found a lot of strengths to build on and other also areas that we feel like would be important to work on. So your primary governance structure right now, I think everyone knows is the HAP, which is a really good forum for information sharing, coordinating work, it's HUD compliant. It coordinates a lot of the work that's happening in the community. I think there was a recognition a few years ago that you needed to move towards something more integrated and that pulls in more stakeholders and more funding sources. So there was some work done on governance redesign that didn't get finished. We felt it's really important that that kind of gets rebooted and restarted and that that gets brought a little further along, particularly in relation to roles, decision-making processes, funding priorities in particular. And then the last thing I would just say on this topic is like many places in California, there's I think been a struggle to figure out what are the respective roles of cities and counties. And so one of the things that you need to have moving forward is some agreement about those jurisdictional roles and responsibilities. Cities and counties have different kinds of funding streams and different kinds of responsibilities, but everyone has a role to play. So it's important that it be collaborative and collaborative in that everyone agrees what all the roles are and everyone's working together. Okay, reducing inflow. I think this is a really important piece for your community. We found that this was probably the least developed area so far. So the kinds of things you can use to prevent people from becoming unsheltered include what's called diversion or problem solving and targeted prevention. To make these effective, they really have to be targeted and deployed systematically. And so we feel like this is an area where you could really make some impact by building, scaling up some of the initial things that are already underway. Similarly, efforts to reduce institutional discharge. I think there's some conversations happening at the county, but not kind of a systematic strategy yet. Emergency response, I think, sorry. This is an area, I think, that takes a lot of the focus in the community and this is understandable because you have a lot of people living outside. Your emergency response or your front end activities, the most important thing about emergency response is that in addition to responding to the emergency, they have to be thoughtfully and intentionally connected to how you're gonna get people from the emergency interventions and into housing. So we looked at everything through that lens. So you have a lot of outreach efforts, but not all of the outreach efforts are really equipped, not all of the outreach teams are equipped to help people with any kind of a housing resource. You have a little bit of drop in and day services. You have a decent amount of shelter. It seems to be a little bit more located in the north. We found that the shelters have some services that help people move to housing. We feel like these could be systematized and scaled up so that they're more effective. And then you have our planning to build navigation centers which are a best practice in terms of particularly focusing on people who are living outside. So when I say a nav center, what I'm talking about is a shelter that has low barriers meaning that people who traditionally sometimes can't access shelters because of the entry requirements are able to get in. They're focused on housing related services and their open year round and accessible 24 seven. You also have a safe parking program which has just been implemented. That's another promising practice, particularly if it can link people to housing options. And then you have your encampment response which I just wanted to talk about for one minute. So I think it's just important to acknowledge that we heard a lot about the encampment issue. It's clearly something that is a big focus of community dialogue and media and political discussion. I think that we found again, this is not in any way uncommon. The response is largely focused on the immediate public health and public safety issues. Which is understandable. You need to focus on those things. It doesn't yet seem to be connected to an overall strategy for how are you gonna reduce unsheltered homelessness and to reduce unsheltered homelessness again, you have to have a way you're gonna get people from outside into housing which could include that they go to temporary shelter or some kind of a navigation center along the way. You also need a strategy to reduce inflows so that you're not continuing to have new people coming from being housed into being unsheltered. Okay, just a couple more. So most communities have home housing programs that are targeted to homeless people. You all have the kind of typical array of things we would expect to see, including some transitional housing, although those are shrinking down and the supply of rapid rehousing has been going up. You also have a fair amount of permanent supportive housing. None of this we feel like is probably at scale yet and as part of the second part of our work, we'll be helping you thinking about what is the right size for those interventions. But this is definitely a place that you have some strength that you can build up on. And then the last topic, or the second to last topic is affordable housing. So fundamentally you have to get people to housing. As I said before, you don't have to build new units for everyone but our analytic work that we're engaging with now will help you think about how you size that goal. So how much progress can you make with the housing inventory you've got? And then what is the gap? And what do you need to think of in terms of setting goals for increasing inventory? We know this is a huge challenge. We put a couple challenges up here on the slide. Again, I don't think Santa Cruz County is in any different place than most places in California where it's very hard to build affordable housing. I think there's been some historical low growth and no growth policies that have played a role. The loss of redevelopment has impacted affordable housing everywhere. And of course there are sort of community acceptance issues. So this is gonna be a really important piece of your overall strategy moving forward. And then the last thing, just to talk about coordinated entry, which is called smart path here. This is an important system component that's in place and is doing some really important things to make sure that people with the highest needs get prioritized into the housing you've got. It definitely could use some restructuring to get it to be a little bit more efficient and spend less time with people just sitting on lists waiting for things that they're not gonna get. And then as I mentioned already, you need to, there's some issues around data and evaluation capacity and the ability to really use the data you've got to understand the results you're getting from the investments you're making. Okay, so the last couple of slides, I just wanna quickly talk about our recommendations. Again, I just wanna reiterate, this is not all the recommendations that'll come out of this engagement. These are the short term recommendations we were asked to make just so that you all could keep moving forward with some action steps while we're doing the rest of the work. I'm just gonna skip over the summary of findings cause I already talked about them. So we made three recommendations that are sort of more thinking about your programmatic interventions. One is to implement a system-wide diversion practice to reduce inflow and connecting that to rethinking how the smart path coordinated entry system works. We think we can get some diversion practice implemented system-wide that will really help slow down the rate at which people are entering homelessness. The second, as I mentioned, we feel like your shelters are already doing some good work to help move people from shelter to housing, but this is an area where you could really do some focused work right away, particularly since the navigation centers aren't gonna come online in the short term, but you can really make your existing shelters be more like navigation centers. And again, that'll speed the rate at which people exit to housing rather than just cycling back to homelessness. And then the last recommendation is to take a look at the outreach efforts you've got and figure out if you can coordinate them a little better and standardize what they do and have more of that outreach work be around getting people to housing solutions. And then our fourth recommendation was around governance, which is to relaunch the work on governance that was already started and was partially completed. We, as part of our engagement, we can facilitate that discussion. We feel like some of the key questions you need to ask are about resources. What kinds of resources would be pulled under this governance structure? What purview would it have? And then what kind of staffing is needed to implement it? We're hoping at the end of that you'll have an agreement on the new structure and protocols and procedures around decision making, setting funding priorities, implementing funding priorities. Okay, so I just wanna close with some next steps and some thank yous. So first, I just wanted to thank, particularly the Rainie and Elisa and the staff there for all the work they've been doing to help us gather and analyze the information we've gotten so far, introducing us to key stakeholders and keeping things on track. We also have a project advisory group that's met a couple of times and has been really helpful. Some of the folks from that group, I think, are in the audience here today. So the next steps is, once we've heard your feedback today, we're going to finalize and release the short-term action plan around implementing the initial recommendations. We'll be getting started helping with the implementation of those recommendations. And then, as I mentioned, the SWAP is the tool that we use to do the data analysis work that is already well underway. And so we'll be back fairly soon with the results of that. So I think now we're gonna have some folks speak. Thank you, Kate, for the presentation. And we have perspectives on implementation of these interim recommendations from some of our key partners. We'd like to invite up Mimi Hall, Director of Health Services Agency, Ellen Timberlake, the Director of the Human Services Department. With the City of Santa Cruz, we have Ron Prince. I believe we have Fred Keeley, respecting Fred Keeley. And then I'm gonna speak at the end on behalf of kind of the South County Steering Committee and City of Watsonville. Right. Good afternoon, Chair, ooh, morning, Chair Coonerty and Honorable Board of Supervisors. Mimi Hall from the Health Services Agency. I act as the Director. First of all, I wanted to offer both my congratulations and my thanks to all of the members of the Homeless Action Partnership, our community stakeholders and the staff of the CAO's office for recognizing the importance of planning for meaningful outcomes and supporting the work of focus strategies towards that end. The formality and comprehensiveness of the work of local jurisdictions when it comes to addressing homelessness varies greatly. And so does the effectiveness. And I feel like this effort that we're coming together on as a unified effort is something that's going to help us organize around this issue that can often be very paralyzing for local jurisdictions. The Health Services Agency fully supports this opportunity for all of us to come together as a unified system. And most importantly, we're very excited from a public health perspective to be using shared methods for assessing needs, prioritizing our services, evaluating their effectiveness, collecting data and measuring our outcomes. As you can see from the report, the Health Services Agency will be the lead convener in the interim recommendation number three, which is around coordinating and standardizing outreach efforts. And we're pleased to leverage our community partnerships as well as the work we're already doing in this area to create a uniform strategy for the county. So thank you. Good morning Chair Coonerty, members of the board. I'm Ellen Timberlake, the Director of Human Services Department. I wanna echo Mimi's thanks to the CEO's office, to our community partners and stakeholders. And I also wanna take the moment to applaud your board for the wisdom of your support, of a systems approach at tackling a topic. I think Supervisor McPherson, you mentioned earlier this morning, a meeting at the CSAC level where every single community is recognizing this as a top priority. We are not alone, but I think that your board's decision to support an approach that focuses on shared results, that focuses on a real value for community engagement and listening to stakeholders, and that is data-driven is very, very smart. Slowing down to go fast, having a wonderful consultant with the expertise that Focus Strategy has to help us understand how to do that in a very complex arena and then pushing us not to go too slow is really, really gonna lead to better outcomes in this community, so I applaud you on that. As Mimi mentioned, we are also tasked with leading one of the short-term recommendations in the report, and that's the implementation of a systems-wide diversion strategy. As you know, and also on the consent agenda this morning, the Human Services Department assumed the leadership role of the coordinated entry or smart path in October of last year. And our report this morning gave you a little bit of the results, and I think you'll also see the report echoed some of the findings from a smart path, I'm sorry, from Focus Strategies with respect to a lessons learned. I want you to know that the work on diversion is not just beginning today. Our team began working on diversion and recognizing that as a critical missing piece of our strategy back in the spring. In fact, we invited LA and the LA family housing program to come up and train us on diversion and to open that up to our partners so that we could begin that dialogue. Just yesterday with the help of Focus Strategies, we were looking at the communities of San Francisco and Tacoma. So that will also be a very critical part of our process is not to make this step as we go, make this up as we go. We know that there are a lot of communities that are doing this already, so we very much intend to learn from them. In the diversion approach, we will also be continuing to look at developing policies and procedures, implementing conversational guides so that we can try to put in a degree of standardization across our community so that we're not doing, the left and the right hand knows how we're operating this. And also a critical part of diversion is coming up with the flexible funding options that allow for us to take folks who are either just coming into homelessness or one step away, allow us to create the opportunities necessary to keep them from becoming homeless. And of course, we'll be focusing on continuing training. So we're very excited to come back to you in February with what our recommendations are to implement this critical component of the system. And as a part of that, and sort of an inextricable component of this will be this notion of dynamic prioritization because I think you can see both in our report and focus strategies findings that the way the system is set up right now for coordinated entry, too many people sit and are not, are prioritized as having high priority, but don't have the housing. So dynamic prioritization is about how do we begin to make sure that the inventory that we have is quickly made available to those that are highest in need and that we use the diversion component to make sure that folks that don't need to be on a waiting list get resolution quickly. So I wanna say one more time how excited we are to be a part of the process, to extend my thanks to Focus Strategy and really to recognize your board for the wisdom of starting with systems. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning. I'm Ron Prince. I'm a special projects advisor for the city of Santa Cruz city manager's office and chair Coonerty and members of the board. Thanks for inviting me to say just a couple of words. I've got some very general comments, but so for the last several months I've been working on this issue for the city of Santa Cruz trying to understand more fully the impacts of homelessness on our community and trying to understand how effective our current response is. And as you know, we're in a very reactionary mode on a daily basis. We're dealing with going to medical calls, trying to support the River Street shelter, trying to respond to customers and citizens' requests for public safety concerns. So it's just a daily, a lot of work, a lot of reactionary work that really isn't bearing a lot of fruit other than just dealing with the day-to-day issues related to homelessness. And so I have to say in the last several months I've been working on this, this particular effort with focus strategies is probably the most encouraging thing I've heard and it certainly gives us some hope that we're gonna be able to get some serious traction on coordinating our efforts, all the local governments and nonprofits that are working on this. I think focus strategies are really gonna help us connect the dots on all the resources and efforts that are going into this project. And it's something that we're gonna have to be working on for years. So I wanted to just be able to impart the city's commitment to this process and one of the manifestations of that is going to be we're recommending next month to actually add some staffing that'll be used to focus exclusively on this project and into the future help with the coordination and the governance aspects and be a real serious partner at the highest level it can possibly be. So I just wanted to thank the leadership of the board and certainly county staff who have been directing this effort. I know we're early in the process, but I think in the next several months we're gonna get a feeling that we'll be able to get a handle on not only because of the data that's gonna be collected but also get a better idea of like I said earlier how to connect the dots with all the people that are working on this and all the organizations that are working on this countywide. So I wanted to just render my support and thanks because this is very, very important work. So thank you. I'm not seeing Mr. Keely in the room. So I will speak to the South County perspective, which is, we've had this South County homeless daring committee meeting since 2016. We've implemented a day services program down there and a retooled winter shelter program. And yet there's still a lot of work to do and there's great interest in taking a look at working on this issue in a more regional way and not, here's we're gonna work on Watsonville and Watsonville, we're gonna work on Santa Cruz and Santa Cruz, but could not the same solutions be applied across the community. And I think that this moment with focused strategies where we're looking at this through a systems lens and thinking about when we implement that we implement across the system is very important. And, you know, keeping an eye on the equity element between North and South County is an important piece of this as well. So, you know, having spoken with members of the South County Homeless Daring Committee and the city of Watsonville, Tamara Vedas, you know, they just wanna express their support for this work and it's very important, not only for those of us in North County, but for them as well. So. Okay, with that, I think we're ready for your questions and comments. And Kate, is there anything you wanted to add? So, thank you. So I'm just gonna jump right in with questions. I think one, I appreciate the work and I think it's important. And I'm glad to hear that we have the partnerships across both the county departments and both North and South County cities. One of my easy questions is whether it'd be worth it to have this sort of presentation done to this city council and Santa Cruz and Watsonville so that elected officials are also thinking through what are these strategies will be and they can have buy-in going forward. So, I don't know whether that's, I don't know the contractual implications of that, but I think it'd be worthwhile for us to coordinate that. The second part of my question is about the go-fast part of the go-slow to go-fast. So, what I didn't understand is come February and the report back for the implementation of these first initial strategies around diversion and coordination is in February we're gonna be talking about what we're gonna be doing or and then what's the timeline from there? So like, when do we start actualizing this in our programs on the ground? And then how, who, I think it sounds like Mr. Timberlake will be heading up at least the diversion part, but then sort of like, who does it by when, how, trying to understand our part of that. So, I'll take that. I think it's gonna vary a little bit by which particular recommendation it's not gonna all be in perfect lockstep, but we are prepared, we've started some of it already. We're prepared to start the rest of it pretty quickly. And I think that what we're hoping is that between now and the next 90 days and 90 days that that's when we're gonna do the planning for implementation and that we would be able to actually start implementing some of these practices about the first of the year. We probably won't have a lot of data to report back to you in February on how that's going. I think we'll need a little more time for these programs to be in place before we can tell you how effective they are. But we do hope to have some or potentially all of them in place early next year. That's great news. And then in terms of what metric will metrics will we be using in order to understand whether these things are in place? The performance measurement piece of the work is also underway. And I think that by the time we are implementing these things, we will have a clear idea of which metrics we'll be using to measure those successes. And I don't know if you wanna add anything further to that, Kate. So, I think there's some kind of commonly recognized important measures that you're gonna wanna use. I think like for example, if you start implementing this work around making your shelters more housing focused, we would wanna just see the rate at which people exit shelter to permanent housing go up. So, right now we're doing the analysis to figure out where your baseline is. And we should know that pretty soon. We can look at it by intervention type. And then from there, you can start to figure out where do you wanna get to in six months? Or do you wanna get to in a year? Where do you wanna get to in five years? Yeah. Okay, great. And then my final question, and this goes to your experience with other communities, is it seems to me we can make some pretty big impacts by better coordinating and better investing more in prevention, as you said, and more diversion. And especially in the sub-populations, I think in South County, we can have some really good impacts in families and vets. I have a feeling that the most challenging subset of our population that are causing the most impact. And then when we talk about homelessness, most of the community is also thinking about homelessness. We'll be one of the most challenging to on the, well, they won't really be served by the prevention side because they've been chronically homeless for a long time. They may not be as open to shelter or diversion possibilities. And if we're trying to build public support for increased funding or programs, they're gonna wanna know what we're gonna do with that particular population. And when I look at your strategies, those seem to be the least likely to benefit. So what have other communities done in order to show the community that not only are they helping extrovert people, but they're also reducing community impacts? So I just will say, so first of all, the preliminary recommendations are only kind of a subset of the eventual things. We wanna recommend how you're gonna get to an overall system. So there isn't everything in there, I think that you need yet. So homelessness among single adults is the single biggest challenge as you're correct. It's easier to solve homelessness for families and veterans because there's more resources. This is sort of just an evolving, an emerging area. I think for many, many years, the belief has been you have to have permanent support. If someone's a single adult who's outside and chronically homeless and has a disability, they have to have permanent supportive housing, which is a very expensive intervention. A lot of communities are now looking at whether they're, some of those individuals can actually get housed with lower intensity interventions, such as rapid rehousing, which are more short-term rent subsidies. But I wouldn't say that anyone has figured it out. I think you're gonna need, again, I appreciate that you're gonna really need to figure out some strategies and show some success on reducing the visibility of unsheltered homelessness and the reality of unsheltered homelessness, which I think is gonna be about a combination of changing where your outreach strategies are about getting some shelters in place that people will go to because they offer them things that they need and want, which is about sort of the navigation shelter strategy. And then what are the housing interventions you deploy that people need and want and will take advantage of? Some people will not go to shelter, but you can offer them housing resources while they're unsheltered. So there's, I think it's gonna be a mix of those kinds of things. And one of the things I'm hoping that the action plan can get you to, because we are doing this analytic work, is just to sort of think of these things a little more in a quantifiable way. So this is roughly how many people we think you have. This is about how much progress you can make with diversion. This is about how much more you could do by scaling up your rapid rehousing, and here's your housing gap. So I think you need to kind of think about it in those terms, and we're hoping that that will be in the final deliverables. Right, and I think that's exactly right, and I'm looking forward to seeing those strategies. I think one of my concerns is that for that particular subset population, it's gonna be very expensive interventions with mixed results. And so the inclination is gonna be let's spend a lot more where we can have relatively less money and have immediate results. But if we don't show the community that we don't have, we have few people sleeping in parks or in doorways or on Coral Street or other places, then I'm not, a lot of this future investment, we're gonna put that future investment in jeopardy and political support. Okay. Supervisor Fierce? Yeah, this, I think two words to really stand out to me is transparency and coordination that has been reiterated, how the system operates, who makes the decisions, how effective we are collectively addressing the problem. And I do agree with the consultant's assessment about the need to change the governance model. You know, we need to more clearly lay out what roles people are playing and build the systems. And we have some existing JPAs that we could learn a lot from that have been become reality here. One thing, and as I was, was mentioned earlier, there was with discussion with other counties what the state is looking at. And they're looking at a regional approach or it looks like they wanna go to that. Maybe it's just try to be simpler to get a few regions rather than 58 counties or something. But I'm not, I'm just think we go outside the county and try to, it's gonna be difficult enough to get the cities and the county on the same page. How do you feel about, do you think the state is moving toward a broader implementation process with regional government? Because I think that we need to really focus on what we're doing here. I don't have any inside information. I think I have heard that they want in the next round of what used to be HEAP is now gonna be called HAP. They are going to have some guidelines around how they want the governance to work. I do not know whether they're gonna recommend sort of at the county or the bigger regional level. I don't know if you might know more. I agree with you that I think it's hard enough to coordinate across a county with multiple cities in it. That it feels like a big thing to bite off to then try and do multi-county coordination. I can see the point though, particularly if you think about some parts of California like the Bay Area, for example, where there's a lot of movement. People aren't necessarily experiencing homelessness in one place all the time. They move around and so thinking about it kind of across multiple counties, they make sense in that sense, but I just think sort of in terms of feasibility of getting started somewhere, it makes sense to start at the county level. The one thing that I've definitely heard about is the idea of having a more regional homeless management information system, HMIS, so that when someone moves across the county line from Santa Clara to Santa Cruz, we can still see, oh, you're enrolled in this program over there. I can see that you have a case manager that you're working with in Sunnyvale or it's not a hard wall between systems. So there is great interest in having regional and or possibly state-wide HMIS accessibility. Okay. To Ms. Bristol, thank you for your work and your presentation. Are there any elements of this in Santa Cruz County that are different from some of the other communities you've dealt with? I would say, you know, so we've only done our first pass of learning about your community. I would say that most of the challenges you're struggling with, I think, are common across a lot of places. Every community kind of has its own. Unique, every community context is different. I think that you, you know, perhaps more, there are some places we have worked where there is a much smaller problem of unsheltered people living, particularly in the downtown core. I mean, you definitely have that as a significant challenge, not every community shares. But I think, you know, for the most part, the need to pull the pieces together into a system with shared measures and objectives and strategies is a pretty common challenge that everyone's facing. Yeah. Maybe this is a bit more directed to the local, but what do you see in receiving this report of how we, what role can we play in fixing the effectiveness of the issues identified in the report? For instance, it doesn't seem like we have a wide acceptance right at this point of a navigation center, which I think is critical. But I mean, how do we, if that's what we should do, if you decide that's what we should do, that's something we should look at, or what is that, are those the kind of issues that you'll be addressing, I'm sure, as part of this? I would say yes, you know, we're working to do more robust messaging about the key issues that we're facing. And I think, you know, even amongst our, you know, small circle of jurisdictional partners and providers, there's been a lot of debate and discussion about what is a navigation center. The state has recently come out with a definition, which I think we can at least use as an anchor around which to build, you know, what it is that we think a navigation center would need in addition to that basic definition. But, you know, it's really low barrier 24-7 with resources that help get people into housing. So, you know, when we know that we don't have a site yet at which to provide a navigation center, that's why we're thinking so industriously about how we can do navigation absent to building. And that's where in we're thinking about the housing focus services in shelters. So I think that educating and informing about what a navigation center is and, you know, making sure we're consistently telling that same story to everyone is important. And I think that we'll be continuing to do that as we're implementing these things. How the eventual system redesigned with the impact or interact with core? Do you, how do you see that taking place or how- It is already taking place. So the focus strategies has been in close communication with the core consultants. We are looking at the performance measures together and looking at the recommended systems, measures that are part of a typical homeless system, but also looking at the key indicators in the core suite of wellness outcomes. And we are wanting to make sure that they are aligned. And that will probably come into play when we enter into future contracts, for example, when we're trying to do results-based accountability and looking at how are the contracts we're implementing, getting us to the outcomes that we want. So we're definitely marrying the two as much as we're able to. And there's so much bandwidth and this is a huge issue, but getting the cities and counties together on the same page is gonna be difficult enough, but is there any reason why the County Office of Education or the school districts, it seems like that they could play an important part with some input or I don't know if that's in coming to a resolution that you've on this issue, have you, do school districts normally get involved in this at all? So school districts have, they have a responsibility for keeping track of the numbers of families that are experiencing homelessness by the other definition, the school system definition of homelessness, the federal definitions are different. So school districts know a lot, particularly about how families that are precariously housed and potentially on the verge of homelessness. So they're actually, I think really good potential partners for this expanded diversion practice where you can engage with families who may not be literally unsheltered but are close to losing their housing and try and help do a kind of a strength-based process of helping them identify a housing solution. So I think that's a good place that they would fit into this systems work we're doing. I would also add that although I don't know that they were a key interview for focus strategies, they are very involved in our homeless system. They attend all our homeless action partnership meetings and the County Office of Education is a sub-recipient through community action board for one of our youth homeless demonstration projects. So they are part of the youth homeless response team, which is a co-project between the County Office of Education and CAB. They originally were gonna each submit separate applications through the Youth Homeless Demonstration Project grant process. And when they discovered that they wanted to do essentially the same thing, they decided to come together and put in a joint application. And that has been working very well. And Michael Painter who heads up the alternative ed and the homeless services aspects of the County Office of Education is very involved. Thank you, that's good to know. I think you've explained somewhat this question. What are the next phases of work on the action plan? Is it the quantitative analysis that I've talked about in December? Is that what's the next page to this discussion here? Yeah, so I think the companion to this baseline assessment which is largely qualitative is we'll have these, this analytic results soon and we'll be able to really understand where dollars are being invested and the results you're getting. And then we actually can use, we're going to be using that to do some modeling work so that we can really kind of help you think about what would be the pros and cons of different kinds of changes you wanna make and what would the actual results of that look like. So I think between the work we've done so far and the analytic work and some of these initial implementation steps we're talking about will be working with the key stakeholders to happen, some other folks to talk about that a little more over the next few months and that will roll into a overall system strategy and the action plan. So yes, so I think that's maybe a long way of saying the quantitative and the qualitative together will underpin the action plan that will help you all develop. And about tailoring strategies too, there are subsets as we've heard about and the one I hear about is really address those with behavioral health needs or mental health needs. That's the projection or the estimate is that's a quarter to a third of the homeless out there. That's what I hear time and again, is that about right that you hear consistently is better in that? I mean, that's treating people in a couple of different ways, homelessness and then just a personal behavioral way too. Is that estimate about correct here that probably a fourth third of? I think it's about a third. It varies from one year to another, but I think that number is about right. Okay, thank you. Go ahead. Supposedly, Bob. Thank you, Chair. Thank you for the presentation and appreciate the work that's being done to really look at this systematically. I think it really does help. A couple of years ago when the community participated in the creation of the all in report, that was very helpful because it got people starting to focus on these pieces. But we didn't, and although each jurisdiction adopted that plan, the action plan wasn't created out of it strongly enough that we could actually see great movement. And I saw pretty quickly afterwards that then some jurisdictions were trying to think about what they should do around homelessness without referring to the report that they had just adopted. And so I appreciate Mr. Prince being here and the commitment the city has made to focusing on this, because I think with the partnership, we know that when we work in partnership that we can accomplish a lot more than when we just try to do it alone. I also just want to acknowledge, I see Monica Martinez and Phil Kramer here. You know, Monica, when she was head of the group, we now call Housing Matters. And now Phil, when he's first started with the 180, 180 campaign and has continued with Housing Matters, you know, they helped me understand about the importance of eliminating homelessness, not just simply making, just simply providing support for people with homelessness or people experiencing homelessness. And the goal of that initial effort in the 180, 180, now the 180, 2020 campaign was to actually start reducing our numbers in categories. The persistence of homelessness among veterans is gnawing and the fact that we can't seem to get it down below 130 or something like that. When the resources are out there, when someone could come in today who's a veteran and could get support to be in a hotel probably tonight, it's perplexing. And it means that we really need to look at things a little bit differently because simply having the supports doesn't mean that we can actually get a positive solution. I really like the focus on targeted prevention because that's the one thing that I saw in the homeless point in time census this year is that I think the last census we saw about 43% of the people who were in the count had been homeless for a year or less. This year the number was 11% and there was another 30 plus percent that had been homeless for one to four years. And so to me that's our, it seems to me our best shot is to prevent someone from being homeless. And then our second best shot is to help them while they're newly homeless because the longer they stay out the harder it is. And it also builds up additional issues, right? To live outside is a rough life. If you have to self-medicate or you start dealing with all problems of mental health it just becomes a steeper hill to climb. And so focusing on targeted prevention seems to me to be critical if we're really gonna bend the curve in some way. And I appreciate the remarks by my colleagues about the partnership with the schools. I know in the Live Oak School District there's a large amount of families who are housing insecure. And for our efforts to be focused there to make sure that they don't end up in the census, let's say, becomes critically important. I know we're also using our resources to help ameliorate that in some way. We will have before us in a couple of weeks a project to build 57 units of a family affordable housing as a way of trying to provide a stock of housing that people could actually live in and that families could live in that are close to schools and other services. I also like the data-driven approach. There's a lot about this that, you don't say it in here but it's really a collective impact process, right? Which was we wanna get all on the same page. We wanna have clearly defined goals. We wanna use data to drive our decisions and metrics to measure our success. And there's a lot of that going on but focusing us will hopefully sharpen our responses in some way so again, we can really look at making a dent in the size of the homeless population. I would say that I was to see that we didn't grow in population in the last census or at least stayed the same because you could say it was statistically in the margin of error. But when we look at neighboring jurisdictions that saw 30, 40% increases that tells me we have some hopeful sprouts. It means we really do have to reach some scale in order to make a difference. I also think data is important and one thing which I didn't see in here which I had hoped that we see in future reports is data on the unincorporated area. There is data about the city of Santa Cruz and the city of Watsonville but half the population lives in the unincorporated area. We all experience issues of homelessness both in the families, in our neighborhoods, in our schools and what we see on the streets. And I don't want our efforts to miss out on the needs of Live Oak, Soquel, Aptos, Felton, you know, wherever that is, I think that's critically important as well. And when we look at data, we should be looking at it at all the different parts of the county, not simply the cities. It may be easier to find there but that's part of the challenge is to find ways to track that. I think that if we can get all of our jurisdictions on the same page and we can look at these short-term efforts to build on the long-term efforts that will help us in making a difference. And we're gonna have to come up, our board has been thinking about innovative housing strategies to figure out how to do that, how to lower the barriers of people to build different kinds of housing to think differently about the kind of housing development that we have in the county, which I think is critically important. And I hope that this effort continues to work with all of our partners, not just in the jurisdictions, but also with our community-based partners because they obviously play a key role. I would stress that I think the governance piece is important, the remarks in here about the heap, the heap, hash funds was disturbing because it's not too often that we get money from the state to make a difference. And if we aren't using it as effectively as possible, then we're missing opportunity. And so I think that's a challenge for us on the board and all the city councils to work out this governance structure as quickly as possible to ensure that when there is money that's coming in for our county that we make the best decisions possible and not just try to make everyone happy. So thank you for the work. Thank you. Supervisor Brown. Thank you, Chair. And again, thank you for the presentation. I don't wanna go over what my colleagues have already talked about, but I wanted to add sort of an internal look that builds a little bit on a point that Supervisor Leopold had made, which is that he had brought up the housing component and I recognize the comment that we don't need to build a new unit for every individual that we're talking about. However, with an integrated systems approach, I think it also requires an integrated look at all the policies that the county actually has. And there's a lot of people that aren't sitting in here from departments associated with economic development or planning, for example, and what the interrelationship between those policies are and the root causes of what we're talking about are because everything seems to be presented to us in a vacuum. Even this project that has coordinated components with DENTIS and others, that it's a great project coming forward from Supervisor Leopold's district, realistically should be also talked about in the context of this. This isn't about just integrating in service providers in the community, but what is our long-term planning component to build adequate housing? When we have people specifically in portions of my district in the lower income range on the southern portion of the district, what are the job opportunities there? And we talk about equity of services, but what about equity of access or prevention in general associated with what county policies are associated with that? The conversation really never happens. Haven't quite figured out why. But if we're in a strategic planning world and we're trying to break down barriers, then we don't need to just integrate the outside world in with some of these concepts. We need to integrate the inside world in what we're doing outside. And it's beyond the scope of what you're talking about, but I think it'll still hit a wall. It's ultimately gonna hit a wall when we don't have those things. And until we break that down internally, then we're still gonna end up in this component. In other words, we're gonna know what the solution is, but we never actually built to provide it, which it's great to have the information, but it ends up to the end user ends up being pointless because their lives aren't impacted for the better. So that's more for you and for Mr. Plosios because it's a top level thing, but I think that there needs to be more players on the table. And even the recent PPIC study that showed our poverty rate in this county, when I spoke to the researchers and said, isolate the one variable. They said, well, it's really housing costs and what people earn. Well, then from a policymaker's perspective, that means that if I could do something to reduce the housing costs or increase wages for the average workforce, I might have a greater impact on even some of the systems discussions you're having, but that's actually not even what's being discussed here today. And how that integrates in is important for us as policymakers because we need to change, we need to really flip this page for the next 15 or 20 years. And a lot of the decisions we make feel like they're episodic or they're unique just to an individual situation. And so whenever this does sort of continue to wind its way back to the board, the degree by which other policies, and not just 30,000 foot view, we need more housing, but I mean, very specific when we're identifying components of housing and type of housing and unit size should be directly coordinated in to these discussions also on the economic development side. Thank you. Great, now we're gonna open it up for members of the public to speak to us. If you're interested in speaking, please come forward. Seeing two, please come up. Oh, hi, my name is Serge Gagnot. I was up before as part of the county's mental health advisory board. We had a letter for you. I also stepping up Santa Cruz, do a lot of advocacy for the homeless and trying to connect people with services. I made a resource directory trying to get people access to the services that are available. I'm on the smart pasturing committee and I'm on the city's community advisory committee on homelessness. I'd like to echo what a few people have said. Ellen Timberlake's thank you to focus strategies for coming and helping out and for all of the work of all the different departments coming together to try to solve this. Ron Prince's feeling of being encouraged of where we are and where we're going. Supervisor McPherson, your earlier comments about affordable housing and needing that for this whole process. I have three things, four things, four stick, four. Yeah, I would, I appreciate and encourage the unbiased experts in research that are being brought into our county and how we have this struggle of community perception and how the value of actually getting outcomes actually comes from that kind of research. So I really hope that we continue taking that into account. I'd like to say that for the comments about mental health and getting people into shelters and stuff, compassionate individualized, the outreach that health services gonna be spearheading, that kind of thing of getting people into the navigation centers and changing into the shelters, people don't wanna be in them because of actually some of the rules and some of the setup. So I want you to understand that we can actually change our system to get some people off the streets. We have people in the different, in Live Oak and in Aptos and who are in unincorporated areas who don't wanna come downtown, don't have bus passes. There's no services for you, for anybody in those areas. There's some showers that the churches have done and stuff like that. Sorry. Go ahead and give us the next two points, but briefly please. So trying to get some services because I know the people who are living in Nicene Marks and stuff like that and those trying to get them connected is really hard, but it's that outreach kind of, I have a pair of socks, how can I help you today? And then in a month, maybe the person's willing to talk about CalFresh or something. There's a recommendation for case management in the shelters. And I would ask and suggest for the Salvation Army program, some funding for North County, they don't have case management. So people are there and I see them and I've seen them for years and they don't move on. They just leave the shelter at some point and then come back at some point. And then ask for your help about sighting because I'm on the city's advisory committee and we have our challenges within the city, but we also need, there needs to be more services, even if they're smaller in many places. And that doesn't have to have a negative community impact if it's designed well. If the community gets to come in and gets to see the, hey, this is our plan for your community. This is our setup. Hey, why is the smoking next to my house? Oh, okay, we'll move it over here. If they get to say what their needs are, then the program has a much better ability to not impact them negatively. Thank you. That's it, thanks. Board chair. So Brent Adams of the warming center program and also we have the day and night storage program and laundry service. We're changing our name on the heels of realizing that homeless services centers turning heel and maybe turning away from basic needs of experience homelessness towards housing matters. We're changing our name to day and night services center. We've already been serving, offering way more services to the person on the experience homelessness on the street and homeless services center has for a while. I want to, I know it's really difficult with the, with HUD, each continuum of care district, ours is the HAP, we're, you know, the paradigm is, you know, the talking points are shelter doesn't end homelessness housing does. That's kind of a no-brainer, but we're not, you can see actually out there, it's a path to nowhere, smart path, this vision. We're not building any housing. So you're kind of in a locked up system here, no matter what we do here, we're never going to get people into housing at the numbers we have to. We have to as a community like many other communities, yes. Half of our focus is on permanent support housing and other types of housing, but you also have to focus on the people on the street. We're watching, we've already served more than 600 people with storage. I want you to really grok that. What does that mean for the people in your district and definitely in a downtown core? No longer do people have to carry their things or it's been a complete transformation of homelessness. Laundry, storage, and then all the things that they get, they get hygiene and all kinds of stuff. I want you to stop by our facility. We're transforming homelessness, also with the warming center, different things like that. Now we're not getting a penny of government money this season, but what's true is for everything you're doing here, and very quickly, Navigation Center in San Francisco, it kind of was a bust, 90 days and by 30 days they were putting people back on the street because they didn't have enough housing. That's pretty much all I have. I just want you to really focus, no matter what you're doing here, homeless services for people who live on the street. Let's double down on that and double back to actually serve people where they are. Thank you. Yeah. Okay, that concludes public comment. I'll bring it back to the board for action. Second. Motion by Leopold, second by McPherson with appreciation for county staff and the work and focus strategies for their partnership and the cities, both cities for their collaboration on this. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? That passes unanimously. So we will return at 1.30 for our scheduled item, item 11, which is a public hearing to consider a general plan, local coastal program, public safety element, conservation, open space element at 1.30. Thank you. Thank you. Good afternoon. Good afternoon, everybody. We are back for our 1.30 scheduled item. This is a public hearing to consider a resolution amending the general plan and local coastal program, public safety element, conservation and open space element and secret notice of exemption determination and ordinance amending the Santa Cruz County code chapters 16.10, geological hazard, 16.13, floodplain regulation 16.20, grading regulations and 16.22, erosion control and schedule the ordinances for final adoption on October 22nd, 2019 and take related actions as outlined in a memorandum of the planning director. We have the planning director here to introduce the item. Planning director's here and I'm gonna turn it right over to David Carlson who's the lead planner on this effort. Perfect. Okay, good afternoon. This project is before the board because an update of the safety element is required by state law and it's also triggered by the recent update of our housing element. The existing safety element contains policies that apply to development projects and the coastal areas of the county and other areas that are subject to hazards from earthquakes, landslides, fires, floods and coastal erosions. And the policies are implemented by regulations in the county code. A little background on this project. It was considered by the planning commission back in 2015 but was continued at that time for us to complete some additional work on the airport, land use and sea level rise. The coastal commission sea level rise policy guidance document was also an important source for model policy language. And these policies must ultimately be certified by the coastal commission as part of an amendment of our local coastal plan. The environmental review in 2018 determined there would be no environmental impacts from the proposed amendments compared to our existing policies. Several public hearings and informational meetings occurred in 2018 and 2019. And on March 13, 2019, the planning commission adopted a resolution recommending that the board of supervisors approve the proposed amendments. Between March and October of this year the county staff has had several meetings with coastal property owners, representatives and coastal commission staff. And the staff alternative that's in your packet grew out of these discussions and is supported by the Coastal Property Owners Association and we're hoping it'll be supported by the coastal commission staff and ultimately the coastal commission. Several sections of the safety element would be amended and a couple of new sections on climate change and environmental justice would be added. Air quality policies would be moved to the safety element and four related chapters of the county code would implement the policies of the amended safety element. The introduction would be revised to provide information about requirements of state planning law to update the safety element with respect to flooding fires and climate change and include information from the climate action strategy and the local hazard mitigation plan. The seismic hazard section would be amended to add some clarifying language regarding technical reports and additional information on seismic hazards. The policy regarding recording a notice of geologic hazard on the property deed would be renamed and includes additional requirements for owners to accept risk, release the county from liability and agree to waive claims against the county in connection with the county issuing a permit and proposed amendments to Santa Cruz County code chapter 1610 geologic hazards would also be necessary to implement the proposed amendments. A new section would be added that addresses climate change and incorporates by reference the local hazard mitigation plan and the climate action strategy and future updates of these plans. Amendments would address slope stability. Again, adding clarifying language regarding technical reports and including the updated requirements regarding the recording of a notice of geologic hazard on the property deed. And again, amendments to chapter 1610 geologic hazards would implement those changes as well. There would be significant revisions to the section on coastal bluffs and beaches addressing sea level rise and we'll address that a little bit later in the presentation. There will be updates to the grading and erosion control policies which would lower the amount of land clearing allowed without a permit from one acre to a quarter acre and clarify the definition of certain types of grading activities including cannabis activities. And again, the policies would be reflected in updates of the grading and erosion control ordinances chapters 1620 and 16.22 of the county code. The flood hazard policies would be updated to account for sea level rise by requiring elevation of certain structures above the minimum required flood elevations and the amendments would create a separate flood hazard ordinance updating and clarifying and consolidating all of the flood requirements into one standalone ordinance based on FEMA and the state model ordinance. Fire hazard policies would be updated to be consistent with existing state law and the county fire code. Extensive background information is added to the introduction of this section and new policies are added regarding creating and maintaining defensible space for fire protection around structures. The amendments would also remove a lot of detailed information from some of the policies because the same information is already included in the fire code which gets updated on a regular cycle. And a recent update to state planning law also requires safety elements to now include environmental justice policies addressing disadvantaged communities. The updates to this section are just a start to including these in the safety element and a more extensive update and addressing of environmental justice provisions is planned in the sustainability update which the planning department is currently working on. One example however in the proposed amendments is a policy addressing the hazard of wood smoke in the San Lorenzo Valley by supporting financial assistance programs for a phase out of wood stoves. And these types of policies including them will help the county seek grant funding to address some of these environmental justice issues. So moving on to the main event, the proposed amendments to the coastal bluffs and beaches section of the safety element which are intended to address climate change and sea level rise. For the coast, climate change and sea level rise means higher tides and inundation of coastal areas more intense and more frequent wave impacts and storm surges and accelerated erosion of coastal bluffs and beaches. This represents a risk to coastal development and to existing beaches and public access to the coast. The state also recognizes the issue and requires local communities to address these types of climate change impacts and local general plans. And the state coastal commission has provided guidance on sea level rise policy development because this amendments must be certified by the coastal commission. We've tried to align our policies as much as possible to the coastal commission's sea level rise policy guidance document. The overall objective remains the same as the current objective in the safety element and that is to reduce and minimize risks to life property and public infrastructure from coastal hazards including projected hazards due to sea level rise, wave run up and coastal erosion and to minimize impacts on coastal resources from development. Section 6.4 of the public safety element amendments begins with a set of guiding principles that recognize the diverse nature of the coastal areas of the county including different geologic conditions and different patterns of development. While there are basic requirements for coastal bluff setbacks and beach level development the policies are written to allow for a project to be evaluated based on the specific characteristics of the site. The policy approach treats urban areas differently compared to rural areas by recognizing that allowing carefully planned development in urban coastal areas can help achieve better outcomes for the coast. The proposed staff alternative further breaks down the urban areas geographically to define shoreline management areas that would be subject to future planning efforts. So as I mentioned previously for the most part the policies are consistent with nearly all the model policy language in the coastal commission guidance document. However there's two key issues where differences remain. And one is the amount of construction to modify an existing house that defines the difference between existing development and new development. If the modifications are minor the house may still be considered an existing structure. If the modifications are major the house may be considered new development. The threshold's important because the new development is subject to these policies while existing development is not. Second, if the project does qualify as new development and the site is protected by an existing shoreline or coastal bluff armoring structure continued reliance on the existing armoring must be addressed. And so the existing definition of development activities or new development for the purpose of evaluating geologic hazards is found in Santa Cruz County Code 1610. And it's the same as the proposed definition on the left except the current threshold is 65% structural modifications and we are proposing to lower that to 50% which is more consistent with the coastal act. The county currently uses different thresholds for structures on coastal bluffs and beaches because we need to use FEMA's 50% evaluation method for development in designated flood zones and at beach level. There's actually a long list in the definition of development activities in the code but these are the most relevant parts that apply to most projects. So if the project meets or exceeds any of these thresholds on the left it's subject to geologic review and meeting the requirements consistent with these policies. If the project does not meet the threshold generally it's not subject to geologic review. So the coastal commission definition on the right represents a much lower threshold because the 50% calculation applies independently to each part of the structure, foundation, walls or roof while the county definition applies to the structure as a whole. And the coastal commission definition counts all past work done on the structure all the way back to 1977. So the coastal commission definition means many more applications would be subject to geologic review and these policies compared to the county definition. And it should be noted here that the staff alternative proposes to change that five year rolling period to a 20 year period consistent with the time horizon for this general plan update. And these are the relevant coastal act policies regarding construction of armoring. It's allowed to protect existing structures but it's not allowed to protect new development. However, there's a third situation that's not addressed here and that is modification of an existing structure resulting in new development where there is an existing permitted armoring structure. The county has always allowed reliance on existing armoring structures where a structure is modified beyond the 50% threshold and the proposed amendments would continue this practice within the urban services line and the rural services line. The coastal commission, however, interprets these two provisions of the coastal act in a way that does not allow reliance on existing armoring and the proposed amendments would adopt this approach in the rural areas of the county. This is an example of the hybrid approach that we're proposing where we adopt the coastal commissions preferred approach in the rural areas of the county and maintain the county's existing practice in urban areas. And so for comparison, if we adopted the coastal commission preferred definition of new development and the policy interpretation of no reliance on existing armoring, this would represent a major change compared to past county practice and a major restriction on development within the urbanized area of the county. Many more projects would be subject to geologic review under the coastal commission definition and without reliance on existing armoring, new development would not be allowed on many more properties. We think the county's urban rural hybrid approach is a more reasonable approach and includes a variety of additional provisions to address the risk of future sea level rise. This slide shows the urbanized areas of the coast, including the cities of Santa Cruz and Capitola, and the small pockets of urbanized development along the south coast of the county outlined in green. Other urbanized areas are largely built out, making it very difficult to retreat in the face of sea level rise. Rural areas are largely undeveloped with larger parcels, which could accommodate to retreat more easily. And this image shows the extent of armoring in the urbanized areas compared to the rural areas. And a couple of examples of improvements and fixes to existing armoring that improved conditions along the coast. You have the Pleasure Point Sea Wall and then a repair of an armoring structure that was failing. So this is the key policy where this rural urban concept is reflected. Within the urban and rural services line where shoreline and coastal bluff armoring is common, allow the effect of existing shoreline and coastal bluff armoring to be considered when calculating coastal bluff erosion rates, consistent with our existing practice. However, in rural areas of the coast where the shoreline and coastal bluff armoring is rare do not allow it the effect of such an existing structure on the analysis of the coastal erosion rate. Within the urban and rural services line require evaluation of an existing shoreline and coastal bluff armoring structure that protects the homes that are proposed for redevelopment and require improvements to the armoring that would address impacts of the armoring on coastal resources. In the rural areas of the county where armoring is rare again adopt a policy of no reliance on an existing armoring structure for new development. The staff alternative that you have would go further and identify urban areas where armoring would be allowed as part of a shoreline protection exception area and not necessarily limited to protecting threatened structures but as part of a proactive approach in a given area to achieve a larger outcome like increased public access and opening up beach and shoreline area to public access. Existing policies addressing new armoring would also, this is the existing policy that addresses new armoring. It would also be modified to address existing shoreline and coastal bluff armoring and the policy language regarding existing armoring in 6.4.25 would only apply again to new development. The policy requires reevaluation of existing armoring to determine existing impacts. If an armoring structure doesn't already have one a monitoring maintenance and repair program the MMRP must be established. The policy encourages replacement of existing shoreline and coastal bluff armoring with a more modern type of armoring that would reduce impacts on coastal resources and thereby improve public access and recreation along the coast. Existing policy requires mitigation of impacts on sand supply and recreational opportunities caused by the shoreline and coastal bluff armoring and the amendments introduce a new option to satisfy this requirement involving the payment of fees. The preference would be that armoring would be physically upgraded to address identified impacts. However, we understand this is not always feasible. For new development, this policy significantly expands the language in the notice of geologic and coastal and flood hazards that we already require to be recorded on property deeds. The language includes but is not limited to acceptance of risk waiver of any liability claim against the county and indemnification of the county in connection with the permitted development. The language also includes a list of future conditions that could develop in the future as sea level continues to rise and coastal properties become increasingly at risk and even damaged as a result. It's not stating these actions will take place but could take place based on future conditions on the ground while respecting the constitutional rights of property owners. The amendments propose a series of new policies addressing future conditions under which a structure would have to be evaluated and possibly removed or relocated due to coastal hazards. These policies do not mandate removal or relocation of structures that describe how the county would proceed in the future under certain conditions if structures become unsafe or dangerous due to coastal hazards. And lastly, a policy that encourages a more comprehensive modern approach to coastal protection rather than property by property measures is proposed. The policy would encourage the county to seek grant funds to develop one or more shoreline management plans to guide these efforts. It's envisioned these plans would address specific areas of the urbanized coastline that have similar characteristics such as the lagoons between the harbor and pleasure point and the South County beaches. The plans may accommodate upgraded and even additional shoreline armoring as appropriate to open up beach and improve public access. They would also include triggers for when other adaptation responses become necessary. For example, when armoring is no longer a feasible option. The staff alternative goes further and designates the Opal Cliffs area as an area where armoring would be allowed and identifies the area between the harbor and pleasure point as the first priority for development of a shoreline management plan. And so now just a brief summary of the staff alternative which includes identifying the geographic areas where shoreline management plans would be a priority. And then all other areas outside of these priority areas would be allowed 150% modification unless a future shoreline management plan would allow additional development. In the shoreline protection exception area along Opal Cliffs, armoring would be allowed. The alternative also clarifies that the term of a monitoring maintenance and repair program for an armoring structure would be 20 years and that extension beyond the 20 years may require additional mitigation actions to be taken. The alternative identifies the area between harbor and Soquel Point as the first priority because this area is limited in terms of beach area and public access and could benefit from a more comprehensive approach that would increase beach area and public access to the coast. And so our recommendation today is to open the public hearing and consider both the planning commissions and the staff alternative proposals regarding coastal bluffs and beaches, provide direction and refer to the planning commissions meeting of November 13th for its review and recommendation. And we're asking for November 13th now to allow us a little more time to address some of the comments that we received and prepare the planning commission staff report. Number three, provide direction regarding the board's desired content for any of the other proposed amendments for other parts of the safety element and then continue this public hearing to December 10th to consider the planning commission's recommendation and to consider taking action on the proposed amendments. And that concludes the staff presentation. All right, let's open it up for questions. The information on the screen then is inaccurate. You're just talking about continuing the public hearing December 10th. Yeah, I didn't have time to upgrade that slide. I apologize for that. Sure, I'm happy to ask. Thanks for the presentation. This is pretty difficult work because trying to think, you know, there's a lot of things this board is doing to think about development differently in the county, differently than it's been done for decades. And, you know, we talked earlier this morning about housing policy and homeless services, trying to do things differently, trying to think about what the future of our coastline looks like with sea level rise and the impacts of climate change is not easy because we have estimates, but we don't have enough of all the facts to know, but we have values that are important. And we have this guidance document from the Coastal Commission. And I went down to the Coastal Commission in July as a part of a panel to try to engage them in understanding that local situations are gonna be different and a one-size-fits-all effort statewide was probably not gonna work. And I appreciate the work that has been done to try to bring some specificity to this about where things would be allowed or what kind of work still needs to be done, whether they would start to work on building what triggers are gonna be in place. I think that that is all helpful. It's helpful for the public, whether you'd be a property owner or you're a surfer to know what some of these pieces are gonna look like and prepare for effects or understand when life is gonna change different than it is now or how we allow coastal development. I had a couple of questions that I wanna ask. Most of them are on the coastal development piece, but there was one piece I just wanted to ask for about the grading changes. You mentioned about grading changes around cannabis and I'm wondering, did you review that with the Cannabis Licensing Office? Yes. As you might recall, these amendments have been drafted quite a while ago and in fact, while the cannabis regulations were being drafted, they were being kind of made consistent with the proposal here, so. Great. Well, I would just encourage that as it goes through this process of coming back, just check in with them. We have new staff over there and it'd be nice to get this right if we're gonna go through this whole process. Regarding the coastal development pieces, we've had lots of different concerns that have been discussed. There's been concerned about the people who have permits, existing permits, and what happens under this new regimen. And it's my understanding that the entitlement that someone has with their existing permit stays. It's really, if it's gonna be new construction, redevelopment, replacement, is that accurate? Yes, there needs to be a trigger. That's for the county to impose. But if I've got received a permit and I have some kind of armoring structure and maybe I have a maintenance requirement, that doesn't change. No. And it's only gets triggered if it's gonna be considered new development, greater than 50%, greater. Exactly, geologic review is triggered by that definition of new development. It seems to me it would be helpful to have a more clear statement. And maybe when we, at the end of this, I'll suggest some language that we could put in there. I know that what we see here is not final and so it would be good to, as we do this, to think about language that brings clarity to it. There's also been concerns raised about the indemnification clause. And how that gets written and everything else. There seems to, and letters from some of the property owners, they've referred to some San Diego case and I'm not sure what you know about that, whether this part of it could use some refinement. I'm not familiar with that case that's referred to and that's part of the reason why we're asking for a little more time here so we can do some of that research and look into that comment. I think that there's an interest in the Coastal Commission and I can tell you that this interest from this supervisor, maybe the entire board, about finding ways to increase beach access and increase the size of our beaches, right? This is one of the concerns raised by armoring structures. The, nothing in this talks about trying to incentivize people changing the kind of protection structures they have. I mean, many of the pictures you showed in the Live Oak Pleasure Point area are rocks, a riprap. They take up a lot of space and I know that when the county put in the sea wall at Pleasure Point and removed all the riprap, suddenly we had a lot more beach that we all get to enjoy than we did beforehand. And I'd like to see us have, create some tools to incentivize the removal of that riprap and if it means a vertical structure, that's a win for everybody involved. Yeah, I think that the, it could be an incentive to get property owner to support development of a shoreline management plan because the staff alternative tries to make it more clear that if you're designated, you achieve designation as a shoreline protection exception area, that basically means that we have a near to midterm vision of that the shoreline is gonna be protected, hopefully with a modern sea wall that's consistent throughout the exception area. We, as we've stated, the first priority for development of a shoreline management plan would be from 7th Avenue to about to the Soquel Point and there's a variety of conditions there but it might be that that effort would result in some or all of that area being deemed a shoreline exception area with the opportunity to then implement a project that would take up riprap, expose more beach, provide greater public access stairways or what have you. And so, you know, we hope that the property owners along that stretch will want to participate in the shoreline management plan effort and so that we can all figure out which areas should be protected or what other strategies might be appropriate along that area. Sure, and I know that we're starting to see some, let's say more innovative access ways in which the commission has taken a look at it. There's, there was a armoring structure right down at Pleasure Point put in recently that increased access through a platform area, stairs down to the beach that didn't exist before. Is this kind of what you're thinking in places like Opal Cliffs or something like that? Yes, so under the staff alternative, we made it even more clear than the planning commissions recommended because it was in there too, but we tried to emphasize and make it more clear that the Opal Cliffs area would be considered a shoreline protection exception area. And the reason being, there's most of that area doesn't have a whole broad beach anyway. A lot of it is inundated much of the year. Secondly, those, it's one line of homes and then it's Opal Cliffs Drive which is a critical public access route between the harbor and the city of Capitola. And so the, it's already predominantly urbanized. There's a lot of various conditions and materials that could be cleaned up and improve, expose more beach, incorporate public access, stairways, platforms and the, what you just mentioned. And that is the idea that hopefully the property owners will work together and define a project that includes all those benefits. I wanna ask about sand and surf a little bit. You know, there's a piece in here about sand mitigation fee. And there's, I've heard a lot of concerns on the community about what that means, the value of it or non-value of it and the costs. And I recently heard a presentation by Gary Griggs, noted coastal geologist from UCSC that says that most of the sand at least in North County really comes from the San Lorenzo River and not the cliffs face that make up the shoreline and the eastern, you know, live oak, pleasure point, et cetera. So what are we actually talking about here with the sand mitigation fee? I mean, what would be a cost at a house on 24th Avenue, you know, that would be looking to do something? It's kind of hard for me to understand that. Well, here's the concept. And it is a 90% of the sand in the littoral system is coming out of the San Lorenzo River. It's estimated at about 10% is supplied by erosion of coastal bluffs. So there is a sand content in the coastal bluff that as it erodes becomes part of the beach. If you armor that coastal bluff, you cut off that sand supply. So the idea is as a mitigation for construction of an armoring structure, have a professional engineer or geologist examine that coastal bluff, determine the sand content with actual site specific sampling. And based on the erosion rate over a defined period of time determine the amount of sand that would have ended up on the beach had that bluff not been armored. That's the sand mitigation fee. There's an established methodology. It's a mathematical equation to do that calculation that is used by the Coastal Commission. They've imposed, the Coastal Commission has been imposing this requirement as mitigation. It's actually called out in the Coastal Act regarding new armoring that you must mitigate for sand supply. It's been upheld by the courts. And so however small it is a mitigation that we need to apply to these projects. But it's a single property, as I say on 24th Avenue, what might be the range in which people might be expected to pay? I know that the science hasn't been done but there must be some kind of calculation that you've been thought of. Right, for the urbanized section of the coast in the Live Oak, Opal Cliffs area, you're probably looking at for a typical 50 foot wide lot. You're probably looking at somewhere in the range of $10,000 plus or minus. I think the one I'm recalling was less. It was maybe $8,000. The other piece is about surf. There's a lot of concern about armoring and its effect on surf. I know when the county built the seawall at Pleasure Point, there was a tremendous amount of measurement that was done both before and after the structure was built to assess some of that pieces. And depending on who you talk to, the science was, I would say at the very least was, at the very worst was unclear about whether it had any meaningful effect on the surf. If you talk to surfers, there's a diversity of opinion, right? And I respect that. One of the things that actually I first heard about from Jack O'Neill, but now it seems like there's some research that's been done about the shape of vertical structures and that the idea of placing some kind of curve into that. So when the water comes up and pulls up the sand, it actually deposits it back generally where it came from rather than pushing it out into the sea. And it also helps with the impact, because when the wave hits the wall, you get the ripple effect back, but when you have a curved portion, it basically, it has less impact on the incoming waves. And it would be, I think helpful to sort of, as we go through this process to look at designs or some of that engineering, I know that Dave Rovell, the coastal geologist working with the city and a lot of other communities has done some work on this. Because to me, it's an interesting idea, you know, Jack kept on taking physical classes in his 80s. And we had a number of conversations where he was looking for ways in which to minimize the impact on the surf. And that's where he first talked about it. But now it appears there's also some science behind it that deals with the question of how if we have a shoreline exception zone, we're a ways in which to protect the surf, which is critical, not only because some of us might like to surf, but it's a huge part of our economy. And protecting the surf becomes important for the long-term livelihood of the Pleasure Point area and other points where people like to surf because that's why they wanna go there. So I think that's all the question I have now. I look forward to hearing the discussion from the public and I may wanna come back after that. Supervisor Friend. Thank you, Chair. I'm in agreement with my colleague's points that he raised up. And there are some additional questions I had, although I'm looking forward to hearing some of the public input on this. Significant amount of work and time has already been put into this. And I appreciate the modifications that have actually already come through both the Planning Commission and your work with organizations within my district and Supervisor Leopold's district to make this a more balanced and appropriate document. And you've done good work on it. There are some questions I had and just sort of, I do feel like even in reading through the alternatives now, or not alternatives now, it's a staff alternative that I wanna ensure that there isn't something left of future staff interpretation that is expected of us from today's votes or moving forward votes. So that, because when we've met with members of the community, and I've had wonderful conversations with both of you, some of the feedback I've gotten is that, well, we don't read it that way. This is what we believe it to say. And I think that we should just then state it so that I'm equivocally says something because there's a complete clarity for somebody coming in, moving forward. And that that also is understood by location. There's a lot of clarity now for areas in the Opal Cliffs or Pleasure Point area, but there's areas within my district where conditions are unique as well, such as what we're doing specifically. They have a G out there that I think makes sense to have a recognition of what applies to them and what doesn't apply to them. And I think that to the degree that we can provide that level of specificity, I recognize that the Power O'doons Association's wrote a letter asking for additional desire to meet with them. And I think that that makes sense, but I'd actually like to see very specific things considered by the Planning Commission in regards to what applies and doesn't apply to Power O'doons. The reality is, is that they're on a dune. The reality is, is that they haven't had any sand loss. The reality is that the conditions there are fundamentally different than areas up coast. And I wanna ensure that there's clarity for the residents of the dunes moving forward in regards to that. I do have a question in regards to sort of check-ins. You mentioned in the alternative that this is meant to be an adaptive document that although it's a 20 year look that there'll be check-ins, will there be periodic specific check-ins that would actually modify the document if some of the conditions that we're anticipating within our mean aren't actually met? To the safety element policies themselves? Correct. Certainly. I mean, I think at this point, we're using what we see as appropriate for the 20 year projections, but at any time, if some of the underlying assumptions shift, then we can always amend the safety element again. Should we build that in specifically or is meaning that at a five year or 10 year point should there be a look back at the document to say the conditions that were estimated to be in existence at this point are 75% of what they thought it would be. And what I wanna ensure is that we're not, we could be wrong either way, right? I mean, we could be creating a document that doesn't actually recognize the amount of rise that's actually occurring to the negative side or the positive side. And I feel like that if it's truly an adaptive document then there should be timelines built in to actually go back into the document to potentially modify the document to actually reflect the conditions on the ground. We tried to put in a policy that says that as we administer these policies and coastal development permits, that we would use sort of the middle of the range of the best available science. And so that I think we can continue to have as a principle that we change the number in terms of projected silver rise as appropriate without formally needing to amend the document. But we could or we could include report backs. Okay. You know, in terms of status reports. In terms of the coastal development permits that are issued themselves, we have within that package of conditions would be a requirement for monitoring, maintenance and repair programs. Also certain that would have a 20 year life and associated mitigations and conditions of approval associate that with the expectation that before expiration of that 20 year term, we take a look at the MMRP again and look at actual conditions on the ground at that time, see what the coastal impacts are at that time and have another round of mitigation if you will, maybe there's another 20 years. So that's part of the adaptive response that would be associated with the coastal development permits themselves. And so that's one of the reasons, frankly, for a policy that would go into effect in 2020. And we know that sea level rise at some point is going to make it infeasible, impractical to keep shoreline protection structures 180 years, 100 years, however many decades, hence it's going to be practically an economically infeasible that they're there. So we're looking at in this document which is a general plan safety element with a kind of a time horizon of 2040 is we're looking at the near to midterm and trying to articulate an approach that is practical and makes sense for now. And, but one of the things about letting someone do things to their homes, you know, go over 50% of major structural components or value or addition or what have you, is that then we establish a relationship with them. Now they've gotten something they want and ability to get a coastal development permit to improve their home or replace it or what have you. We have conditions of approval. We have the notice that's recorded on deeds. We have sand mitigation fees, recreation impact fees. Hopefully we've done projects in a manner that has improved public access, exposed more beach, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So the package of benefits for the public comes along with conferring a benefit to the property owner. So, you know, that's adaptive because one, when we have those conditions of approval then we get the 20-year check-ins. And if there is bluff erosion that gets within 15 feet, then they're required to hire a geologist, contact the building official, coastal commission executive director, and we all go out there and say, okay, given this hazard that's now even closer to your structure, what is an appropriate response? Do we need to take off part of the structure? Do we need to vacate part of the structure? You know, what needs to happen here? So, so that's, we think that this, you know, in summary, it's a long answer, you know, but in summary, there's a lot of different aspects of this that we consider to be an adaptive approach for the interim between 2020 and such time that it becomes, you know, impossible to keep protecting certain areas of the coast. I mean, at a minimum that the report backs would make sense at timed intervals, I think that the future board should have the flexibility to reopen up the discussion if conditions aren't, are either way what we didn't anticipate. You don't want a document that has inflexibility in an uncertain situation. Getting back to some issues specific to my district that I had specific questions on, there are, there's revetments and built that are associated with a homeowners association on beach drive, the beach islands, which are, they, the HOA is functionally for that and other purposes, but that's one of the main purposes. And then there's a district that handles with the dunes. If you're an individual then that is remodeling your home and goes above the 50% threshold, what's your expectation regards then to the protect to looking at how those revetments are done outside of your property? Well, we do have a clause in that policy 6.4.25 that addresses armoring structure that talks about reevaluating existing structure. But in the, what that clause says in the case of a geologic hazard abatement district that has a plan of control for the purpose of maintaining and repairing that structure, we would not require an individual owner to reevaluate that structure if it's already happening as a HOA or a geologic hazard abatement district project. Okay, then similar to I think Supervisor Leopold's point, I think to the degree that we actually specify the individual areas that currently at the time of adoption have that, that would make sense so that they can feel that sense of understanding that it doesn't, in essence, apply to the individual homeowner and either of the dunes. And it also wouldn't apply to the individual homeowner in the case of the beach island, the Rio de Mar island homeowners either. When it comes back time for a motion, I think one of the things I would like to see is the planning commission consider whether the mitigation, sand mitigation fees even make sense of the dunes at all. There's a whole point of this is if you're actually removing sand from the actions taken by your development and when you're in an area that hasn't shown it for the last 60 years, I think that it's a value to have that kind of look. But that level of specificity, I think would make sense for both the beach island and the dunes specifically since they have unique situations set up for their revendment protections. I think the individuals would be concerned. The last question I have, but I think you've answered this question to me directly, but I think that it makes sense to answer it in public. If your home were to be destroyed due to an act outside of sea level rise, even by an act of somebody else, meaning your neighbor's home catches fire and your home burns down, somebody through arson burns your home down. And therefore you need more than a 50% rebuild. The way I read this would mean that you would be if you're within certain areas of my district, you would have to rebuild according to potentially even an eight to 10 foot up if you're within the FEMA mapped V zone, right? Irrespective of what cost it, correct? Yes, the FEMA regulations require any repair of substantial damage, which could be any cause to comply with the FEMA regulations which may require elevation of the rebuilt structure. And there would be no flexibility in your interpretation from the board perspective on addressing what the cause would be because of the FEMA standards? Is the question, is there any flexibility in that regard? Because that would affect our participation in the national flood insurance program potentially. So we don't wanna necessarily compromise that. No, that's what the question is. And so if that's, in conversations with people that I've had in my district, one of the concerns has been, well, if the goal here is to recognize that sea level rise or wave action are what's causing damage, then you would imagine or could cause future damage. If something were to happen in my home, totally outside of that, why would I be responsible to actually rebuild my home in a way that means that I could lose a floor, for example, if I have lived in seascape, certain locations as opposed to not. But in order to continue to participate in this process, that would be the answer that they would receive, correct? Yes, okay. For beach level, for the FEMA flood zone level development, yes. Thank you, Chair. Mr. Pouser, my person. Yeah, there's not much coastline in Santa Rosa Valley, but just wait, just wait. But the Santa Rosa River plays an important role in this whole thing, as we know. But so I've got a piece of the pie. I know I'm really very, very concerned about this issue. And my point right now is, well, first of all, I wanna thank the county staff for doing this. I know that two other counties have attempted to revise their plans and they withdrew those plans. I think it was Marin and I can't remember where they went, but, and there is some serious issues that'll be faced in some of the coastal areas, not too far from us up in Pacifica, in particular in San Mateo County. But I guess my very good questions asked, and I'm just, I'm concerned about what we're projecting, the sea level rise to be that, and I think you have taken, the staff has taken into effect the concerns of the property owners as well as the coastal commission itself. But there's a lot of different variables in sea level rise, as we can see right here. I mean, it's three or four times differential. And I just, just one thing, we have some new environmental laws that I think I hope we can stick to in this state regardless of what the federal government would try to do. So, what the impact of all those to slow down the sea level rise, if it has any impact at all, but I'd hope we don't take a huge, giant leap forward and say, you've got to wipe out this for 10 feet or something. When we see that in 100 years, when we see that it's only gone up in three inches in 15 years or something, I hope we take a measured approach. And I think we are, that let's check as we go along. And as you've done, respect their rights of property owners, but also the coastal protection issue and the sea level rise is, that's all part of it too. But I really hope that we just take a measured approach in our estimates as we go along. And I think that you will and have up to this point. Okay, thank you. I guess my brief comments, so this started in 2015 and then it got table for a while, before that. How many public hearings have you had on this? Five at the planning commission. And then how many public events have you had? A few more information, informational meetings, stakeholder meetings, yeah. Okay. Earlier rounds in development of the document which occurred before prior to 2015 with coastal engineers and architects and other, you know, coastal staff and others take holder. So we've been working on this since about 2011 or 2012. Okay, and then how many, how much, assuming we go with the staff recommendation, how much time between now and when this is adopted and then maybe adopted by the coastal commission, do you anticipate you'll be spending on this? Well, we would anticipate if we're back here in December for adoption of proposed amendments and then a second reading on that. Early next year, January, thereabouts, we would be submitting a package to the coastal commission. And then it's in their hands and we don't have control over the timeline or the amount of time it takes them to prepare it for their commission that it would likely be in 20, sometime in 2020. Okay. I mean, I think my, part of this is an appreciation that you all have stood between essentially the coastal commission and property owners on what is, all my colleagues have pointed out, it can be sort of very challenging and difficult regulations in a changing environment. I also think given the amount of time and given the other priorities, we're talking about a very small section of homes that are, and especially homeowners that are full-time residents of Santa Cruz and we have fire emergencies, we have affordable housing crisis, we have homelessness crisis. We need to start dedicating staff time to those other things. There's only one of you and many, many issues. And I think whatever it is, I think we need to make sure that at some point we give coastal our last best and final offer sooner rather than later and let them make a determination. And then we need to move on to these other issues because this is taking an enormous amount of time and effort on issues that we're not spending on other housing issues that are pressing in this community. So hopefully today and going forward, you will let us know what you need to sort of get this wrapped up and to coastal sooner rather than later so that we can focus on other things. Okay, now's an opportunity for members of the public to come forward and speak to us about this item. Good afternoon. My name is Steve Ray. I'm president of the Coastal Property Owners Association of Greater Santa Cruz County, representing about 600 property owners. And if you include the HOAs, we're well over a thousand members. I'd like to speak to the item 7892 regarding the county's proposed amendments to the local coastal plan and safety amendment. We have submitted a letter of support. We are very much appreciative of the county staff's efforts to try to accommodate or at least address our concerns in the document and with some additional changes to be made. There are three remaining issues in the revised LCP that we request further clarification on. And that is written into the LCP, the term and condition of existing shoreline protection armoring devices shall not be altered. And the property owners shall be allowed to maintain the shoreline protection according to the terms of their initial permit. Existing shoreline protection shall be taken into consideration when calculating the useful life of the structures and the required setback for new permits or redevelopment permits. Second issue is the language in the LCP used regarding the recordation of the hold harmless, indemnification and waiver of liability needs to be revised to specify the specific purpose and time or term for that liability release as pursuant to the San Diego court case. Thirdly, the sand mitigation fees must be reasonable based on hard science and estimates of the actual potential sand loss that occur at the specific site. Property owners should be offered, may offer improved public access or protection of beach erosion in lieu of these sand mitigation fees. And lastly, we request a meeting with staff before this is presented back to the planning commissioners. Thank you. Steve, before you leave, it would be really helpful if we could get the case, the San Diego case that if you could provide information about what that case is, I wanna make sure they're looking at the right thing. So if you have the case name or any other. I'll look back through the research. It was an article that was published in, it basically was pursuant to a ruling on their particular. Yeah, I just wanna make sure they're looking at the right thing. Okay, thank you. Next speakers. Anyone else who wants to speak, please line up and come right forward. Thank you, Chairman Coonerty, supervisors. My name is Jeff Romundo. I'm president of the Bahara Dunes North Association and speaking on behalf of both North and South today. We do appreciate the progress made on the planning document over the past year. We've made a lot of progress. The staff has been very cooperative in at least allowing us to meet with them and give them our point of view. We truly appreciate that. And the document shows the attention they've paid to it. We do support the additional time to continue this review and so that we can assess and finalize our own point on it. We recognize that it may, some of these things that I'm gonna point out may be addressed in the document already. And several of the supervisors have already raised the issue with the planning staff, but three things stand out to us that we would like to at least look more deeply in and discuss with staff. One is the adaptive localized approach that given the uncertainty and sea rise modeling identified in the county's own planning process, we believe the LCP should provide flexibility and discretion to the staff to embrace adaptive approaches and to incorporate unique site conditions in the granting of waivers or the imposition of restrictions on development. Secondly, on sand loss, we believe the document tends to presume that we have a lot of sand loss along the coast. Pajaro Dunes, we believe both photographic evidence and on-site demonstration shows that we get inundated by sand to the frustration of some of the homeowners who are below the dune level and can't see the ocean anymore. And we believe the existing shoreline protection, the permit and renewal and approval of existing revetments should be presumed, we believe, to be granted unless substantial changes in circumstances are identified that would necessitate additional permit review. Again, these things may actually be present there already. We just, in the short time we've had, we're just, it's just not clear to us. So thank you very much. Hello, my name is Ali. I'm speaking on behalf of Sir Fryder Foundation's Anacruze chapter, speaking on behalf of our thousands of members and supporters in the county. We submitted a letter yesterday that outlines some of our concerns with the local coastal program update. And I hope that you'll all have a chance to review it. Sounds like some of you have, which is awesome. I'd like to focus today on the shoreline armoring policies and the update that the update proposes. First and foremost, Sir Fryder is greatly concerned that the interest and rights of the beach going public are not represented in the county's proposed policy updates. This update puts the rights of property owners clearly before the rights of the public trust. Beaches belong to all Californians and maintaining natural processes that preserve lateral access along our beaches, as prescribed in the Coastal Act, should be the goal of sea level rise adaptation planning. Sir Fryder opposes seawalls for any new development and redevelopment. This is because seawalls destroy beaches. The only reason that pre-coastal act homes are allowed to use seawalls under the Coastal Act is because they were built before we knew better, now we know better. No amount of mitigation for new development relying on seawalls, including stairways and access or park improvements will be adequate to mitigate if there are no beaches and waves to go to. It is well established that when we meet sea level rise with seawalls, we lose our erosion. The county moves forward, if the county moves forward with the plan as proposed, eventually the waves of Santa Cruz will drown as the rising seas meet hard, armoring and the bluffs are prevented from eroding as they naturally would. Santa Cruz County has a duty, not only to their residents, but also to the beach going public, including the thousands of surfers through the city and county who frequent pleasure point and other breaks adjacent to county land. The county's proposed update would allow for all development, including new development to rely on shoreline armory and incorrectly defines existing development. It goes against every interpretation and court ruling on the Coastal Act and is deeply and fundamentally flawed. This is the future of our county and our coast. Please do not sacrifice the public beaches and waves for the interest of a vocal minority of home owners. Thank you for your time. Looking forward to working with you on this. Good afternoon, Charlie Edie, consultant for Pajaro Dunes. I just wanted to add a footnote to what Jeff Ramundo had to say. First of all, I appreciate all the comments that supervisors have made and you have anticipated some of the issues that we're concerned with. I'd like to ask Bruce to send a little more sand in general, if he could, from his district. But in any case, what we really wanna do, and we would hope in your motion, you would direct staff to meet with Pajaro Dunes. As Zach pointed out that the situation there is very unique. It's different than the rest of the coast and the ordinance addresses in kind of a broad way how things are going to be reviewed in the future. What we'd like to do with the staff is go through some hypotheticals. If this happens, how will the regulations work? If that happens, how will the regulations work? They've got about two miles of revetment around Pajaro Dunes. Sand is increasing there. So I think by the virtue of the process, we can get together with the staff and go through this in detail. We'll be able to tease out where there are gaps and where there might be a few refinements, additions, whatever is needed, sort of along the spirit that Supervisor Friend mentioned in terms of clarity. That's what we're intending to do. And we're certainly not trying to hold anything up. We know, Ryan, your point is well taken, but we think this can be accomplished within the timeframe that has been proposed by the staff. Thank you. Good afternoon, Co-Britain. That's Britain Architects recently appointed president of a nonprofit, Pacific Coast Protection Association. 1,800 in the mailer list, but we're doing our membership drive. We are focusing more on a technical aspect to a lot of this, the existing laws and existing structure. We don't necessarily accept some of the basic premises of the guidance document. We do accept and do believe that sea rise is occurring and it's a threat, not just for the ocean front, but inland also, just for Supervisor McPherson. One of the things proposed in here is raising the FEMA level and the floodplain. I believe there's a lot of homes in your area there. What does that, how does that impact it? Respectfully to planning staff, I've spoken with Gary Griggs extensively and numerous geologists and engineers and attorneys, including a retired, hopefully you'll give me a second more or a few seconds more. Regarding these things, including a past planning director that's an attorney, including an attorney that was for the Coastal Commission. And many of the premises that you're hearing as factual, we would disagree with, but we need more than three minutes at a sitting to be able to explain why that is. And we need the warning to do it and we need the meetings with Coastal staff to do it. So I was part of the group that they met with us and they took none of our advice and all the professionals will tell you that. So I want you for just a one second and consider a hypothetical. Here you're protected by a levy. You could call it coastal protection structure. The city of Santa Cruz is protected by that protection structure, right? It's a levy. So would you sign away your rights to identify anybody regarding that? You would probably question it and want your attorneys to assure you that you're not doing something wrong. Has that occurred? Well, now, so far I haven't found what attorney said the demarcations that they're recommending is a good idea. Would you pay millions of dollars of sand mitigation fees open-ended for having this revetment? Would you do it? So the idea that this is taking a long time, the reason it has that we haven't had the type of meetings to discuss those things. Thank you. Is that, is there anyone else who'd like to speak? This will be our final speaker. Thank you very much. I'll be brief. My name is Anna DeBenedetto. I'm an attorney. I have several clients. I won't mention any names, but most of the concerns that I'm getting from some of the coastal property owners have to do with the deed restrictions and the legal insurability and perhaps value impacts. I'm wondering if the county has reached out to perhaps the Santa Cruz Association of Realtors, mortgage blenders, other professionals that might help take some of this work off their laps, so to speak, so that they could get on to other things. With respect to some of the legal issues, we would, I think there's a lot of attorneys in town that practice in real property and land use that would be happy to brief, so to speak, some of the issues with respect to indemnity clauses and things of that nature that are being proposed as deed restrictions. And so I would just suggest that perhaps county staff reach out to some of the local professionals in the community that might take some of the work off their plate and offer some valuable input. Thank you. Hi, my name is Mike Cando. I'm a property owner on Pleasure Point Drive and have been for almost 33 years. I've experienced three seawall failures in that time. Two recently in the last two and a half years for which I am now waiting for a follow-up, coastal permit follow-up. I have trouble understanding the sand mitigation fees. I heard staff just say for a 50 foot wide lot, approximately $10,000. I have a 50 foot wide lot and the paperwork that was just submitted, my mitigation fee was $485,000. I in the three failures have contributed in excess of 200 yards of sand back into the ocean, which I in turn was allowed to fill with concrete. And I have the figures of the amount of yards of concrete I poured to get less than what I started with because I wasn't allowed to go out to where my property was originally. And I would just like to see that addressed a little bit more accurately as far as figures. Thank you. Thank you. That concludes public comment. I'll bring it back to the board. I'll just make one brief or semi-brief note, which is the sand mitigation figures are all driven by the Coastal Commission. So the alternative is we come up with policies that are approved by the Coastal Commission or we don't come up with policies that are approved by the Coastal Commission and each homeowner gets to go litigate and advocate to the Coastal Commission one at a time. So it's, these are not our policies are driven. And to Mr. Britton's point, I mean, I've been on the city council where the Coastal Commission is dictated virtually all the policies in the city. And many times I've disagreed with those, but I don't, at the end of the day, they have jurisdiction and their decision is final. And so we've litigated, we've appealed, we've worked and this is a similar situation where it's a county policy that has to be, needs to meet Coastal Commission approval. And so if you want to litigate with the Coastal Commission or engage with the Coastal Commission, you should please feel free, but we have to figure out something that's that can be approved moving forward. Professor Leopold. Thank you, Chair. And thanks for your comments. I know it can seem frustrating with all the things we do have to do here at the county, how long something like this takes. Part of the reason it's taken years is because the Coastal Commission has been wrestling with what their guidance documents are. And it would have been foolhardy to try to come up with something before their guidance came out. And it's taken several months. In fact, Coastal Commission staff just told me last week they had finally figured out what their own guidance met and could offer some advice as to what ours could be. So there's a lot of times when I've pushed hard on the planning staff, I think on this one that taking just a little bit more time to get this right is as wise as we can be given the impacts, not only to individual property owners, but when we talk about coastal access, that's really critical. I'd like to try at a motion to see whether this captures everything. It's to approve the recommended actions, including coming back on December 10th. And also to make any necessary changes to the implementing ordinances. So they're consistent with the general plan policies as outlined in the revised staff recommendations. I'll talk a little bit more about that at the end, but also some additional directions that we work with stakeholders and obtain and review litigation language as referenced from the San Diego case, regarding indemnification and determinant modifications to our language are necessary. Write something in there about more clearly about that new regulations are not gonna affect the existing permit conditions. That we explore the use of policy and ordinance tools to incentivize the removal of riprap along the coastline to increase access to the usable beach for the general public. Explore language when defining conditions and parameters of coastal armoring structures that take into account offshore resources, such as but not limited to surfing and sand mitigation. And also before it comes back to the board to meet with the various stakeholders today to answer questions and to engage in a useful dialogue that could help inform the final ordinance. Oh, one more thing. Have the planning commission look at the sand mitigation fees, especially in the South County, to ensure that they are actually necessary. I'll second. And I believe that some of these things can be done outside of a motion, including the specificity of the language for HOAs or geologic hydro debatement district. It's already in there, but just specifically call out the areas that currently have it at the time of implementation I think could be useful for those areas, including the beach island. And Pajaro dunes. And again, some sort of report back or check-in mechanism associated with this adaptive document. Again, I don't think it needs to be part of the motion, but just when you come back, that can just be something that's built into it. I totally support that. And my suggestions about making necessary changes to the implementing ordinances, we don't have this all done in the final language and the final language could help be more cleared for everybody involved. And I think specificity is what everybody's looking for. So the motion to is really to keep working on the staff alternate and refer that to the Planning Commission for their review and recommendation. They'll have it on there at their meeting on November 3rd, 13th, and then this meeting be continued to December 10th. That's that works. Okay. We have a motion and we have a second. Any questions, comments? All right. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? That passes unanimously. Thank you for your work on this. We'll now adjourn to our next regular scheduled meeting, which is October 22nd to begin at 9 a.m. here in the board chambers.