 All right, we will now resume the continued budget hearings. Tuesday, June 23rd, 2020, we'll do the roll and right after that we'll have Captain, I mean Chief Larkin come up and speak and then we'll do a moment of silence, okay? All right, and then we'll have, so I guess we'll do the roll. Yes, Supervisor Leopold? Here. Friend? Here. Coonerty? Here. McPherson? Bruce McPherson? Supervisor McPherson, no? Chairman Caput? Here, should we wait a little bit or no? We'll go ahead and start, we'll go ahead. Yes, sir, this is Chief Larkin with the Cal Fire. Are we live here? Good morning, Chair Caput, members of the board. It's with great sadness that I'm before you today to share with you the news of passing of one of our Cal Fire Fire Captains, David Lutz. Late last week, he was on a family outing with his family down in the Big Sur area and he had an accident which caused his death and I just wanna share with you a little bit about David. David was a valued, loved member of the Cal Fire, but more importantly, he was a valued member of the community. He was born and raised, born in Los Gatos, raised in the Corleitas area. He started his fire service career here in Santa Cruz County as a Santa Cruz County volunteer in 2006. He quickly did what David did and he found that he loved and had a passion for the fire service and decided to make his permanent career that. And he did it valiantly and with grace and with compassion. And I just wanted to share with you his passing and we lost a great person. And this past few weeks in this county has been extremely devastating for a lot of people and this just adds to that grief that we all share. So thank you very much for allowing me just to share that moment regarding David and I appreciate it. Thank you. You're very welcome. It says here in the notes, David leaves behind his wife Tisha, three children and Tisha is expecting the fourth child in about two weeks. And he was 33 years old, so yeah, pretty rough. We'll do a moment of silence. We don't normally do the, because it's a continuation. We wouldn't salute the flag again, but we'll do a moment of silence. Should we stand for that? Okay. And so a moment of silence and a moment of power. We'll turn this over now to Mr. Palacios. Are there any late additions or changes for today's agenda? Chair Caput, there are no late additions to the agenda. Okay. And we'll go with the overview from our County Administrative Officer. Yes, we won't be providing another overview. So we can just move on to the agenda. We'll get that tonight. We did. Yeah, we'll get that tonight again. Then what? We won't be doing an overview at this meeting. Okay. Yes. And then we'll go right now to public comment. This is an opportunity for members of the public to address the board on topics that are on today's agenda. Consent items, closed session agenda, and topics that are not on the agenda, but are within the jurisdiction of the board. And also if you cannot stay later to speak on the regular agenda items, you may address those items at this time. We'll give each person three minutes. Okay, thank you. Good morning, and thank you for the chance to speak. And I did also wanna offer my condolences to the Lutz family and to the fire department because what you guys do is very important. So thank you so much. On Friday, June 19th, the Pajaro Valley School District has provided the community with a draft reopening PV-USD contingency plan for reopening the PV-USD schools. So on page six of that document, and it's available to the public, there's three different levels of risk. There's low, medium, and high. So the report is basing its contingency plan on the levels of risk for COVID-19. So what's interesting to me is that that report states that the level of risk in our community right now is high. And it's basing that judgment on, as determined by state and local officials. I was extremely surprised that we were in a high risk in our county. So I was just curious what facts might support designating our community as high risk as it relates to COVID-19. So the questions I ask myself are are the hospitals overwhelmed and from my experience and what I've heard, I don't believe that they are. Is the mortality rate in our county high? And no, it's not. And are there very few known cures or remedies? And again, it's a no. So to me, those are facts and those facts would argue pretty strongly for a low risk assessment for our community. So I guess part of what I would like to talk about is, so for a high risk right now with those facts, how can we ever get to low risk? The community I think has done an extremely good job of complying with the local and state health orders. I think our community is really to be commended for that. So my question is, what are we supposed to be doing differently to get to low risk? What can we do differently to get to low risk so that our children can have an in-person instruction at school? And so they can start once again engaging in their beloved activities and sports. So I submit to you that we're already in a low risk. I think this judgment is incorrect. Our population is pretty healthy. I think most of our population is pretty healthy. Our air quality here is amazing, extremely different from a lot of other places in our country that have been affected extremely hard by COVID-19. Our air quality is extremely amazing. We also have wonderful healthcare facilities here with amazing doctors, nurses and staff. They're all to be commended. They're available. Okay, how much more? If you could do it real quick. Go ahead and give her a little time. Three minutes, right? Yeah, okay. Hi, Becky. Good morning. I think it's you. Yeah, who knows who any of us are anymore here, huh? Thank you. My name is Becky Steinbruner. I'm a resident of rural Aptos and I just wanna also let you know that I'm very sad about all of the losses that our county has had here. It's a very sad time. So my condolences to the families of all. And I wanna thank the woman who just spoke. She's right on. How can we be considered a high risk area when we don't meet any of those criteria? And I wanna say that we really do need to open up our beaches. Closing the beaches from 11 to five is ludicrous. It's not being enforced in some areas. It's being enforced in others. And we need to stop living in fear. County Health Officer Dr. Newell herself has said that the beach poses a very low risk. So we've got to stop this and stop living in fear and start living and to get back to what we need to do to get our people back to work to stop the failing businesses from plunging over the edge. And I wanna say that we have to open up the beaches right away. I want to say that I'm disappointed. I've got this mask on. It's difficult for me to breathe. It's medical issue. And in Dr. Newell's order for face masks, it does list on page three an exemption for people that do not have to wear the mask if it imposes a health risk. I normally would not have this condition, but as you can see, I've had surgery. I'm still on medications that make it difficult to breathe when I'm stressed. I have written the board. I have written Dr. Newell. I have written Mr. Riera who is sitting in for Dr. Newell while she's out and have gotten no response. And I wanna thank the Sheriff's Officer today for being so kind to work with me and not mute me as has been happening before. But the facial shield is what my doctor's note said I should do. I have recently been tested for COVID and it was negative. So there are exceptions and you need to honor them when people ask. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. Anybody else here in the board room? If not, we'll look and see if there's anyone downstairs. There's no one in the committee. Okay. Nobody online. Okay. And that takes us to action on the consent agenda. Items 36 through 52. Do board members have any comments or additional direction for items on the consent agenda? Supervisor Leopold. I do not. I have none. Okay. Supervisor Friend. No. Okay. Supervisor Coonerty. No, I don't. Okay. Supervisor McPherson. No. Okay. Thank you. If there's a motion and a second or any board discussion on the motion. I would move the consent agenda. Okay. Second. Then we have a first and second. If the clerk will please conduct the roll call vote. Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Chairman Caput. Aye. That motion passes unanimously. Number item 32. Consider the 2020-2021 proposed budget for county fire protection as outlined in the referenced budget documents and memorandum of the Director of General Services. Okay. Good morning, Board Chair Caput and Board. Michael Beaton, Director of General Services and the Office of Emergency Services. With me today, we have two presentations. We'll be going over a budget presentation as well as the state of the state and county fire address. With me in the, doing the presentation today is our County Fire Chief and Cal Fire Unit Chief of San Mateo, Santa Cruz, Chief Lorcan. The first presentation that we're gonna go over today is gonna be the county fire budget, which actually comprises of two different units. I forgot to start off at the beginning. The budget presentation will be covering CSA 48, which is known as County Fire and CSA 4, which is identified as Pajaro Dunes. The first financial presentation that we're gonna go over is the CSA 48 County Fire portion of the budget. For today's budget presentation, what I'm gonna be covering is just the highlighted significant changes from the previous year as identified on the chart circled in red. We'll be talking about the additional revenue of about $1.6 million, as well as what the revenue is purchasing through the increased contract with Cal Fire, as well as purchasing of some apparatuses. So in January, 2020, a special benefit was passed by the 56% majority, which increased revenue of about $1.5 million. With that $1.5 million, which is included in today's budget, it actually restores the Cal Fire contract to a 30 engine company staffing. It adds an additional six paid firefighters and provides additional support staff for fire prevention, as well as data analytics. Earlier this year, the board approved a contract with Cal Fire that extended the service agreement until June 30th, 2023. The increase of revenue is basically brought down to a couple of different things with some estimates. We identified an estimate increase in property tax of about 2%. We have a CPI increase to the existing special benefit that was assessed on CSA 48 property owners, as well as the new benefit assessment, which we are identifying brings in about $1.5 million of additional revenue. The passage of the special benefit as identified earlier does allow the County Fire Service to have a three-person staffing engine, three-person staffing compliment per engine, and replace the fire apparatuses and equipment. And again, the CSA 48 service area special benefit was approved at 56.29% approval rating. To highlight some of the staffing changes of what that revenue actually purchases, what you have on the chart today is identifying what the current staffing is, to identify what the proposed staffing is, which is included in today's budget. As identified on the chart, it increases the firefighters from 18 paid firefighters to 24 paid firefighters. It also adds a fire prevention captain for fire prevention increase support to the CSA 48 area, as well as the other highlight is a research data analyst to help with data analytics and to start analyzing the response times that we have throughout our community. The budget also includes purchases of some equipment and apparatuses of about $1.1 million. This includes a new type one fire engine for the Davenport area, two replacement utility vehicles, four life saving vehicle extraction tools, some also known as the jaws of life, a decontamination unit, couple storage containers, thermal imaging cameras for the safety of the firefighters, forceful entry door prop for training and a positive pressure fan. The other budget unit that we wanted to go over today, which is the CSA four, the Barharo Dunes budget. With this budget, you'll see basically a very minimal increases from the current adopted budget from 2019-20 to the recommended 2021 budget. With the Barharo Dunes budget, there's some very minor changes to the staffing compliment. You'll see a change in the management fee for County Fire. Originally the CSA four Barharo Dunes paid $10,000 for their management services. It's actually been changed to actual staff time counting the county staff analyst, secretary support as well as administrative officer. The equipment that's included in that budget includes another type one fire engine for the Barharo Dunes and replacement of their fitness equipment for the County firefighters. With that there, that's the overview of the quick budget for County Fire and CSA four. So with today, we're recommending approve the proposed budget as presented by this agenda item and supporting documents. And with that, I'd like to pass it over to Chief Larkin to go over the County of Santa Cruz state of the state and County address. And I use this to change the slides. You can use the keyboard. Oh, perfect, perfect. Good morning, Chair Caput, members of the board, Mr. Palacio and members of the public. Ian Larkin, I am your County Fire Chief and the unit chief for Cal Fire here in the San Mateo Santa Cruz unit. I'm here to provide you a quick state of the state overview of both the state and the County. A couple of things that we're going to cover today. We're going to talk a little bit about predictive services. We'll talk about the state of the state. We'll talk about some important fuel reduction projects that we've been working on here locally. We'll talk about some water concerns that we have as we move into fire season. And then we'll also talk about the impacts that these may have to the County and our local response. So as we look at predicting fire season, there's a couple of things that and factors that we utilize in that help us predict fire season and what the potential with that fire season looks like. And those factors, we'll look at it as over the past couple of years in a comparison to help us better have an idea of what's to come for 2020. The things we'll look at is the snowpack in the Sierras and what our rainfall totals are for our previous year and our current year. So looking back at 2019, 2019 was a pretty busy fire season, but it was nothing like 2018. I just provided this picture in the backdrop there of the concaved fire that occurred up in Sonoma County, which is a devastating fire. But in retrospect to 2018 with the campfire, the car fire, the Mendocino complex, it was pretty mild fire season in comparison. As we kind of move forward and look at some of those predictive models. So when we look at our snowpack and do a comparison from 2018 to 2019, it's very obvious that you see an extreme difference in those two photos side by side. For 2018, there was very little snowpack which was equivalent to a pretty devastating fire season. And then you look at 2019, we have a significant amount of snowpack which provided for a supplement of runoff and water and just moisture that helped keep fuels moist throughout that fire season. And then we do a comparison here between 2019 snowpack and what our current snowpack was as of February 19th, 2020. As you can see in comparison, the 2018, 19 photos are very relative to what the 2019, 2020. So 2020 is looking very, very similar to what 2018 brought us. And this I've just provided you just another outlook of what the comparisons are. This is a half dome in Yosemite. And as you can see going clear back to 2017 in comparison, significant snowpack 2018, there was very little snowpack 19. You can see there was a significantly more snowpack but in 2020, once again, we're showing very, very little snowpack to provide those late runoffs for availability of water. This chart I just provide to you just as an indication that you can kind of see where we're at. The very, very far north of the state received very, very little snow and very little rain. They are considered still in a severe drought in the northern part of the state. And we'll talk a little bit about how that's gonna affect us later on in the presentation. But as you can look, we're averting somewhere about that 50% of our normal snowpack, which is a very significant overall. So the next slide we have here is to talk a little bit about and shows what our rainfall totals are from October to April 26th. So October 19th to April 26th of 2020. And as you can see there in the central coast area, we're at about anywhere from 70 to 90% of our normal rainfall total for that time of the year for that period. But then we take into consideration the late rains that we received. And as you look at that model, it shows that we had a significant amount of late rains which brought us up to that 125% of normal for that period between February and April to just around that 150%. You put those all together with the total amount of rain that we received for the entire year. And it basically puts us in an average rainfall year for Santa Cruz County, which is around that 30 inches of rain for the total. So we look at our fuel conditions. So the late rains, they brought us a little bit of reprieve and extended fire season from starting earlier. But what does that do on the flip side is it gives us a plentiful light fuel crop towards the end of the fire season that will be readily available and ready to burn as we move forward. The drought has impacted those heavy fuels. So even though we've had some similar years where we've gotten more than our normal amount of rain or an average rainfall, those heavier fuels still have not recovered fully from the drought that we have been experiencing. The late rains, as I said, gives us a slight reprieve. But if it's any indication of what fire season may look like here, just recently, I'm sure you're all aware of the small fire we had up off of Highway 9. That fire was in heavy fuels. It was within proximity of the river. So you would think that the fuels would be much more wet in that area because of the proximity. But in turn, the heavy fuels burnt very thorough and it turned out to be about a four acre fire, which normally that would have just been a small spot when we got to it. So if it's any indication, our fuels are readily available and ready to burn. So just real quick to look at the U.S. Drought Monitor. As you can see in April of 2020, it's showing that we're at the abnormally dry for that period of time. And if we look at the seasonal drought outlook from April 16th going out into the future into July, as you can see, we're showing it that we're kind of almost in a normal status there. And that has to do with our late rains that we've received looking into the future. I just wanted to bring to your attention a little bit the tree mortality. This is a tree mortality viewer that's available to anybody to view off of the Cal Fire Frappe website. And as you can see, the Eastern Sierras is significantly impacted by the tree mortality. And you can see as it's starting to spread throughout the state. But I wanna just bring to your attention that you look at Santa Cruz County there, you're starting to see some impacts there. They're very minimal at this time, but that tree mortality is moving throughout the state. And it's a matter of time before we start to see significant impacts here in Santa Cruz County. This slide that I'm providing you is just kind of a viewer of what our fuels are as of about May 1st. These are our 100 hour fuels. These are a little bit larger fuels. And I give you a comparison. The two top slides, you'll see one that says 2000 to 2020 and the other one has 2014 to 2020. There's a comparison there where we've actually done some additional modeling to help us better predict what our fuel moistures are. They've added a solar radiation component to that, which helps us determine how dry that fuel really is. So those are the comparisons. As you can see, those live fuel moistures are starting to drop off pretty rapidly, even though we did get some late rains. And as I said, these are those heavier fuels, not the light flashy fuels. And that's for our Bayside, which is up in San Mateo County. If you look at the Ben Lohman chart, you see that same predictive model where they're dropping off pretty drastically. This is our coastal region. As you can see, those are kind of, they've dropped off drastically and we'll see them kind of flatten out because those are affected by our marine layer and our moisture. So those fuels will continue to dry as we move into the fire season. So the next slide we're gonna talk about is the energy release component, what we call an ERC. This is the amount of energy that a fire will give off when the fire actually burns. And as you can see, gives that same perspective using the solar radiation component there. Those graphs are drastically different, as you can see from that timeframe as we go into the future. We'll see those balance out and be more relative, but those energy release components are starting to increase. So that's gonna see our fires are gonna burn much hotter if they do start. Just looking at those slides, there seems like the difference between 2018 and 2019 seem fairly modest. Yeah, I'm trying to get back to that slide. Okay, hold on. I got ya. Okay. Tell me when to stop. One more, right there. So go ahead. So as I look at the green line being 2018, which we identified as a better year. A bad year. 18 was a bad year. 18 was a bad year. 19 was a somewhat slower year, yeah. Yeah, so 19 being a good year and 20, as I look at some of these, they're very close. The lines are very close. So what am I to draw from that? So what we're gonna draw from that is we've had a steady flattening of that energy release component where it's still pretty high. It's in that very high range of what they're gonna release. So what it really indicates is we're still in a drought and our fuels are not recovering. So even though that we got rain and we had snowpack from year to year, it still indicates that those fuels are not taking up the moisture as they would in a non-drought environment. So our fuels are drying out much faster because they're not absorbing as much moisture over a period of time. All right, thanks for that clarification. All right. Oh. You're almost in control. I'll let you. Just. It froze. It froze. Okay, sorry about that. I got. The way it's going back is this way. Oh, fine, okay. One more. One more, one more. There we go. Actually, one more. Okay, here we go. So as we look at our significant wildland fire outlook, predictive modeling, as you can see in the May prediction, it had us right at that below normal area for potential. But as we kind of continue into June, it's kind of still got us at that green level, which is considered below normal. And we're, it's kind of representative because we are seeing an increase in fire incidents, but not to the level we've seen in the past. And then as we move into July, it still has us right in that area of normal to where we're potentially gonna see those increases here locally. But I guess the big takeaway here is if you look at the rest of the state, especially that North Coast and the Eastern side all the way up into MoDoc County, those are the areas that we could potentially see large devastating fires, which are gonna draw local resources away from us to protect those other areas of the state. So when we look at the significant fire potential, our lower elevations on the East side of the state are above normal for fire potential in that August to October, where we really see our fire season increase. And that's due to that robust fine fuels due to the late rains that we've seen in the years past. So just a real quick overview of our state of the state. A couple of highlights, our Hollister air attack base, which where we have our tankers and our air attack planes came on much earlier than it normally would. Normally we'd come on in June, around June 1st to June 15th. This year we came on May 18th because we had some early fires in the North part of the state. We have started our fire season transition, which we'll talk a little bit more in depth. Our fire crew strengths, this is a big topic that we have going on in the state right now, especially with the COVID-19 and all the impacts that that is going to have. Our fire crew strengths due to early release and not having the available inmates has caused our crew strengths to drop drastically. So in a kind of a numbers situation, we have five crews staffed with 15 to 17 inmates up at our Ben-Loman camp here locally. For the last two years, that has been reduced to the point where we have dropped to four crews. And for the vast majority of the time last year, we were down to three fire crews that were available at any given time. So with the inmate population dropping, this is a big concern that we have is not having available hand crews to help us with the suppression and control of fires here locally and throughout the state. We have entered into agreements with the three C's, the California Contribution Corps, to help establish some fire crews, to help offset some of those reductions that we have on the CDCR, the California Department of Corrections side. We have crews in Butte Fire Center, our San Luis Obispo Camarillo crews out of Ventura camp. In Amador, El Dorado, we have our Greenwood camp and South Lake Tahoe Fire Center as well as our Placer Center that provide us two hand crews staffed with firefighters out of each of those centers. To bring you up to speed on this year, we are at early staffing as well as our peak staffing. So that's a typo. I'm sorry, this should be 2020 level to staffing. We went to on April 13th where we bring up to five engines, one per battalion in the unit. We went to level three staffing, which is one engine per fire station. And we went to that on May 18th. Normally we would not be going to that staffing level until June. Just this week, June 22nd, we went to level four peak staffing, which in turn, we normally would go to that peak staffing on July one. So let's talk about some of the exciting stuff that we've been doing to help in the prevention world. Fuel reduction projects here in Santa Cruz County. As you can see, this is just an indication that we've been extremely busy, both using mechanical equipment as well as we've introduced fire back into as a tool to help reduce fuels here within the county. This project that you're looking at here is a before and after picture of our Empire-grade shaded fuel break. As you can see, the picture on the right is the completed product. And that's about a four month aftermath of what the other picture looked like. So significant fuel reduction. These are areas that will allow us to help control fire and make it a more safe transition for the public in those thoroughfares as we use Empire-grade as a fuel break. This is just another picture of another section of the Empire-shaded fuel break. As you can see, these are not before and after. These are just evidence of the great work that's being done out there, both by our fire engines, contractors, and our CDC crews. The Abtos Creek Truck Trail, the Buzzard Lagoon Road, and the Hinckley Ridge Project was one of the governor's 35 priority projects when he took office. And as you can see, the before and after photos, it's a very, very distinct reduction in fuel in that area, which will allow us to have fire engines in there, use this area now as a fire break and make it much safer for the public in our efforts to suppress fires. Some of our recent and upcoming VMPs, our Vegetation Management Projects, the one big picture there on the left, that's the Locoteli Ranch. We've burnt, I think it's approximately 70 to 100 acres on the Locoteli Ranch. We haven't burned the Locoteli Ranch or provided any fuel reduction in that area for almost 20 years. So we're rapidly and aggressively out there trying to do these fuel reduction projects. The San Vicente Redwoods Burn that we did, that's a cleanup. We utilize now that we've done our fuel break on Empire Grade, that's the upper part of San Vicente. We've introduced fire in there now to help control and maintain that shaded fuel break as time goes on. And then upcoming VMPs, we're really trying to reintroduce fire into Big Basin State Park. It's been several years since we've done that, but we have planned projects for later in the year to introduce that back into the park. Let's talk a little bit about COVID-19. I know we've talked a lot about that every day. Here we are, we're all in a meeting wearing masks, which is evidence of the pandemic, but it has really changed how we do business on a daily basis in all aspects of life. COVID-19 will change the aspects of our response to large scale emergencies. So you can only imagine trying to put 500 to 1,000 people that are fighting a fire into a base camp and try to meet social distancing. It's not gonna be very easy. So we're working on what that's gonna look like. We have ran a couple scenarios. We've actually worked with a local cooperator here in the county to set up a simulated base camp to see what social distancing would look like and some of the parameters and how we're going to logistically support all those firefighters that are out there doing it. It's also gonna affect our resource allocations during these assignments, whether we're gonna have to rotate people out faster so that we reduce fatigue or if we're gonna be able to keep them on incidents longer to reduce exposure to those large numbers of folks that are needed to suppress fires. I know I spoke to you guys just briefly about this last year, but our new helicopters for our fleet and Cal Fire are here. And I'm happy to report that the Copter 903 that you see in that photo dropped water on a fire up in the Tejama County earlier this year. And it was a very successful first mission for that ship. And we have three additional that are coming on board here this fire season. Unfortunately, we won't see one here locally at our Alma Hell Attack Base in Santa Clara County until probably the latter part of a 2021 fire season, just as it's being manufactured overseas. And once again, our C-130 project is being accelerated. We have seven C-130s that we're gonna add to our fleet to allow for a Cal Fire to have a much more robust and capable air fleet for suppressing fires. Those should start being on board somewhere in the first part of the fire season in 2022. So a little ways off, there's a lot of work that needs to be done there. So water concerns, this is just a snapshot that I was able to find of Lexington Reservoir in January, 2020. So even though we had an average year, we saw that reservoir start to come up, but as you can see, we still have limited water resources due to that normal rainfall and the lack of snow melt. So this is gonna be a significant concern as we move throughout the year due to the potential shortage of water. So what does this look like for the county? We potentially have our state and local resources that we'll see potentially a normal to above normal response throughout the state. It could potentially see our strike teams gone for longer periods of time due to COVID-19, but also due to the number of fires that potentially could occur. And then we continue and we'll always rely on our volunteers and our local government partners to backfill and cover behind as our Cal Fire resources get committed statewide. That ends my presentation. If you have any questions, I'll be more than happy to answer. Chair, I have some questions. Thank you, Chief Larkin for your presentation. I wanna express my condolences on the loss of Captain Lutz. Everything I've read about him, he was an exemplary firefighter and a good team player, a teammate and mentor. And one of the saddest things about the losses that we've experienced here in Santa Cruz County is the age of the people we've lost. He had such great promise in terms of what he could contribute to our community and to Cal Fire. And so I just wanna express my sympathy for you and the other members of the team who knew him well. Thank you. I really appreciate the report here today about the state of the fire season. We've been spending a lot of time in my district working on this. We have a very dedicated group. And I wanna express my appreciation to Rich Samson and his crew for helping out with a fuel reduction effort, a demonstration shaded fuel break project at the Loma Prieta School that they were able to carry out in April. And it was a great use of the South Santa Clara County Fire and Safe Council, Cal Fire and local volunteers working together to help in that area. And I just really appreciated Rich came in there and identified a project that would really make a difference and got it done really quickly. And so if that is an aspect of what we could expect to see with this passage of this measure last January, I think that the community will be well served. It's great to see the number of additional staff and new equipment that is part of this year's budget. I think that we're all watching very closely about what's gonna happen and appropriately worried. And with COVID-19, it adds a whole other level of concern both cause people are at home and that creates some issues. And also because we're worried about managing two crises at one time. There is a major shaded fuel break project that we're working on on Summit Road. And I'd love to talk with you offline about that. Staff has been very helpful. There's a grant deadline coming up and I might need some help from you and County Fire with a small amount of resources to make sure we can get that application across the finish line because they moved up the deadlines. So we're just trying to get it done. We're working with the Fire Safe Council. I'm wondering, given what you know about this year's fire season, the impact of what we saw on the North, how does he think that affects us here in Santa Cruz and what might we see in loss of resources if people are fighting fires up in the Northern part of the state? So I think what we'll see is we're gonna see a significant drawdown of our resources to supplement those incidents in the greater part of the state wherever they may occur. So that could reduce the availability of initial attack resources elsewhere in the state. We do our best to move resources around so that we meet our drawdown commitments but it's also gonna put us in a position where we're relying on local government to help backfill. And we have a very good relationship with our local cooperators here. And we utilize them on a regular basis to help backfill our stations until we can get other state resources from farther South. I wonder if you could also say there's been some efforts on the part of our public work staff to use some of the PG&E rule 20A money, which is historically we've used for undergrounding utilities to improve the view shed down by the water. And instead using it up in the rural areas to underground utilities there. What kind of difference would that make in protecting communities? I think the under grounding of utilities in itself obviously is a fiscal matter in retrospect. It's very expensive to underground utilities. I think it does provide somewhat a little bit safer environment potentially but it also brings different problems along with that. We are in a geologically sensitive area here where you have fault lines running through here. So if the earth moves, it can be very costly to maintain those infrastructure based on those kind of factors when you start to put them in longterm. So I think it's a give and take. Yeah, I mean, I know that we have the problems with wind and rain and other things, knocking down poles, knocking off wires, cars hitting them, all those things are our issue that we have now. It doesn't mean they some of the, we have different set of problems but the idea of being able to take these power lines away from the trees seems to be valuable. And I think we're gonna propose that we do that here in Santa Cruz County and love to have the support of county fire on that. Yeah, I think the vegetation management program with PG&E, they're making the headway to try to get back to something reasonable but it's far from being where it should be. Yeah, well, I mean, it seems almost episodic. It seems like there was a big flurry and then they went away and they didn't do all the work that they said they were gonna do and we don't know when they're gonna come back to do it. And so the idea of taking that risk factor out seems to make some sense and in conversation with our public work staff, we think we might be able to get more undergrounding done in the rural areas than we can down by the water. So it might be a good trade-off. So anyway, I really appreciate the work that you and your staff does. I appreciate your leadership as head of county fire and the cow fire unit. And maybe have an uneventful summer. Okay, thank you. Okay, Supervisor Friend. Thank you, Chair. I don't have much to add actually to what Supervisor Leopold said. I do wanna thank Chief Larkin also expressed my condolences to you and your entire team on that. And also I appreciate if nothing else, the reminder of the fact that as we've been in this pandemic, fire season is really where we're moving into as far as the next phase of what could be of significant impact on our community, not that the pandemic has by any stretch gone away, but I think that your presentation helped remind us at an appropriate time of the fact that as a board, we do need to start doing some outreach into our communities and on our list to ensure that people are doing the proper preparation in regards to fire season because we've been so focused on other issues, we have to also remember what comes at this time of year and I appreciate you doing that. Thank you Chief. Okay, Supervisor Coonerty. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I don't have anything of substance to add. I wanna add my condolences to the CAL FIRE team and certainly the Lutz family on this tragic loss. It's a, there's a lot of sorrow in our community right now. I am too worried about the upcoming fire season and hopefully we can coordinate with public works to do the mowing and maintenance that will also assist your efforts as we look forward. But yeah, again, my condolences to the whole, your organization and the family. You bet. Supervisor McPherson. Supervisor McPherson, you're muted. Please unmute yourself. Can you hear me now? Just a minute. It says on duty. We can hear you Supervisor McPherson. Supervisor, you've muted yourself again. You're muted now. You were so close. Oh, we can't hear you. There we go. Okay, can you? Yeah. All right. I too wanna add my condolences to the Capitol Lutz's family and the whole CAL FIRE team. I don't know when enough is gonna be enough but I think we've had enough of all this. Anyway, I just, I wanna talk, make a few points about these prevention measures. They've been going on for a while. They're absolutely essential. We know that they've been helpful, that what we've done in the past along Graham Hill Road, even the state, you've seen the work it's done. I think it's the most expensive firebreak effort that's made on Highway 17, the six miles over by the Lexington Reservoir. Very noticeable and hopeful preventive for any fire coming from that area over the hill to our county. But I know that there's a project in the north end of Sims Road that is on the schedule. I can't wait for that to be done. But overall, I wanna thank the General Services Director, Michael Beaton and Captain Ian Larkin of CAL FIRE for their presentation and their cooperative work to fund our county fire response. We don't know how fortunate this is going to be for us, but we hope that we don't have to have a huge response, but this is gonna be very helpful for what we're doing today for a potential fire problem tomorrow. For many years prior, my time in the Supervisors Office, they kept county fire services team even as shall we say, even though they lacked full funding to support the number of first responders for industry standard. I'm glad to see we're up to standard now. When I came into office, this problem had existed for many years and needed to be addressed. We've worked together to educate the property owners and CSA 48, and they voted to raise their fee to properly fund county fire. And I wanna thank them for it. I wanna thank the voters for doing that at General Services and CAL FIRE for its two-year effort to explain the need for that. We don't know how important that's going to be. And I wanna thank CAL FIRE and all of the fire units in this area for putting down some recent fires we've had in my district, the Rincon fire. It was, and one just recently that we've had. Thank God we got to those very quickly and I know they were very expensive. Chief Larkin, I think the Rincon fire, I mean it was eight acres, but I think it cost millions of dollars of a combined effort to put that down, but it's well worth it as we know. So I just wanna thank CAL FIRE for its effort, for the voters for approving CSA 48. It's gonna be a very good thing that we have done to protect the people of Santa Cruz County. Thank you. You as much as we can. And on your list, the reality of it is that what you would like and what you probably end up getting, I noticed for personnel, you'd like to get up from 18 to 24. You wanna use the microphone, Greg? You might wanna get clean. You gotta speak right into it. You got the mask on. Yeah, okay. So if you, I think I saw that correctly, from 18 to 24? Yeah, so the addition of those six firefighters will allow us to put three people on the fire engine on a daily basis. So currently you're at 18. So during the non-fire season, we have 18 firefighters which provides us two persons each day on the fire engine. I know, yeah, this should have changed long ago. I mean, you're supposed to really have four, right? Well, in an urban area, yeah, in an ideal situation, we'd like four, but in an urban area, it's a little bit probably more representative of a traditional staffing, but in the rural areas, three people, and then we use our volunteers to, as a primary responder to give us that fourth firefighter on a consistent basis. That's correct. Is it more of a wish list or do you really think you're gonna get the funding? Well, if our budget is approved, the funding will be there to provide for that staffing. And a lot of, most of it's coming from the state, right? No, none of the funding for the county fire department comes from the state. They're two separate funding mechanisms. Right, and with the economy, the way it is, I'm just wondering, I want you to get it. I want you guys to get as many firefighters as you can. And I'm just trying to look at different scenarios and whether or not the economy recovers somewhat, it'll have to recover somewhat in order for you to get those additional firefighters, right? Anybody, anybody? We're not a general funded agency. The county fire department is not. We're based solely on property taxes. So unless there's a significant recession where we have a loss in property tax values, there shouldn't be a significant reduction in the county fire available funding. Yeah, I agree. I'm just wondering how many people are gonna have a hard time paying their property tax? Yeah, we do understand that, yes. That's the unknown right now. Anyway, yeah, reading what you wrote here. Captain David Lutz was raised in Corleitas and he lived in Watsonville until the family recently moved, I guess, to the Prudendell area. That is correct. Yeah, and you wrote down here, David leaves behind his wife, three children, and she's expecting very soon, I guess. And he was 33 years old and the flags are flying at half mass. Yes, I've ordered all flags at all county facility, county fire facilities, as well as our cal fire facilities in the unit to be flown at half staff, as well as shrouding our badges in his memory. That's great. And then you wrote also, keeps the Lutz family and your thoughts and prayers during this difficult time, and we'll make sure we continue to take care of each other during these trying times. Very, very well put. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Okay, we'll open it up now. Would anyone in the public like to speak on this item? Each person will have three minutes to speak. Hi, and we'll start with the community room. You're on. Come on, chambers. Thank you, chair. My condolences also to the chief and all your fire staff and the community, certainly. Charlie Edie, I am the consulting staff person for Pajaro Dunes, and I'm representing the home owners association of two associations of Pajaro Dunes here today. I just wanted to express on behalf of the associations of our appreciation for chief Larkin, Melissa Scalia, for the time they spend with us and our board. We have a budget committee that reviews in great depth the details of the fire budget. And so they feel confident that they're getting full understanding of all the components. And in this year in particular, the question came up about the 10 year increase in the benefit ratio, which had gone from something like 57% to 93%. And so the budget committee asked if they could provide additional line item detail for the components of that, and they did. And we got a nice spreadsheet from Melissa and that really clarified the situation. So I wanted to thank them for the time that they spend with us at Pajaro Dunes and for their willingness to be very responsive to the requests. Thank you. You're welcome. Good morning. Becky Steinbruner, resident of Albatross Hills in CSA 48. Thank you, Chief Larkin and Mr. Beaton for your reports. I want to first off say that I am I'm disappointed that we do not see the images of Supervisor Friend or Coonerty who are remote, but we have no idea if they're really paying attention. And I would like to thank Supervisor McPherson for indeed showing his image and ask that the board, those others who are operating remotely to please show their image so we know that they are indeed paying attention. Supervisor Caput, you said it very well. This funding situation should have changed long ago. Your board has the ability and has had for all these years to make that change, but refused to do so. You have ignored the ability to fund County Fire with Proposition 172 money. Last year alone, that fund came at $18 million into the county. You gave zero to fund County Fire, zero. You passed, you were able to pass Measure G, a new half cent sales tax in the county claiming that it would fund Fire, zero of Measure G money goes to Fire. Excuse me for a moment, Ms. Steinbruner, you need to have your mask on. All right, stop, I'm sorry, it's hard to breathe. I wanna say that you have had the ability and you continue to have the ability to fund County Fire. You canceled on June 16th, the roadside mowing program with Public Works. That would go a long way. It was $600,000 and you canceled it on a consent agenda matter. That would go a long way to improving fire safety in our area. You formed the County Fire Save Council and now you refuse to fund it. I wanna say that the volunteers, having been one myself, are the bread and butter of this county. When our Cal Fire strike teams go out, it is the volunteers and their local knowledge that save our county and yet Cal Fire in the agreement has not been doing any recruiting at all that needs to change. I wanna thank you, Supervisor Caput, for your mindfulness of people having difficulty now and in the future paying their taxes. Mr. Palacio told us yesterday that we'll be a problem next year and yet there's new assessment, benefit assessment, will impose thousands of dollars on some people in the rural areas. I have heard from them and they're very worried. They don't know how they'll pay it. They may lose their property. I wanna say that CSA 48 recently received a 3.3% CPI increase, not a 2%. So it's doing well. But I wanna say I really support County Fire. I really support Chief Larkin and the volunteers and you need to make the decision to fund them with 172 money and Measure G money. Thank you. Anyone else in the room? No, we'll go to the community room downstairs. We don't have anyone. Okay, anyone? We have no web comments either. Okay. I would move the recommended actions for this item, County Fire Protection. We have a motion from Supervisor Leopold. Second. We have a second. I'll do the roll call vote. Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Friend? Aye. No, two barks is usually a yes. Yeah. Yeah, aye. MacPherson? Aye. Chairman Cabot? Aye. Passes unanimously and that takes us now to... Can we take a break so we can sanitize the microphone, please? Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, how are you doing? Good. Good. Capit and members of the board, county staff and members of the community. I'm Kathy Malloy, the planning director and I'll be making the budget presentation today. I do also have Assistant Director Payah Levine and Housing Manager Julie Conway here for any questions that you might have after the presentation. Start with the, you said it would work. Not working. All right. I'll start with the strategic plan. As you know, there's a county strategic plan and below that we have a department strategic plan. Our key mission is overall to ensure safe sustainable development that enhances the community. Our vision for development services is that the permit center be a user friendly location to obtain information, facilitate the permit process and educate the public regarding regulations. And we try to do all of that consistent with the overall county values of, that are in the county strategic plan. Obviously with the pandemic, the emphasis on the permit center location itself is now disaggregated to phones and email and by appointment service and other alternate means of service. But we're happy to report that we've been able to retain and maintain service levels throughout the past three months. You're also aware then that the county's strategic plan that guides the county's priorities and investments, et cetera, is highly aligned with the sustainable Santa Cruz County plan. And we're currently doing the general plan and local coastal program and county code update to incorporate those policies and values and principles into the general plan. And I, with respect to where we're at on that effort, also happy to report that we've gotten a lot of work done. And the notice of preparation of the EIR is going out next week. The planned date for the EIR scoping meeting is July 21st. That will be a remote call in type of meeting. In terms of the release of the draft work products, so that would be the draft general plan LCP, the draft code modernization, the draft EIR, those all work together. Those we expect to release in winter, 2020, 2021. At this point, I'm gonna probably say that we won't release it during the holiday season that we will wait till after that and likely release in January, February of 21. And that will mean that we have an extended community outreach, public input, and education sessions all happening within a several month period in spring of 2021. We're anticipating probably March, April, May for a lot of community outreach and public input. And then the next summer, about a year from now, we'll be preparing all the revisions to the documents based on all that public input as well as the responses to comments on the draft EIR. So we expect to be in public hearings for considering adoption of those really important documents in fall of 2021. In terms of the objectives, the county's operational plan, there's four that this presentation sort of points out as things that are going well. We had a key objective of applying for affordable housing funding and we're 80% achieved our operation plan goal for that. We've applied for five grants, including four of the five that have been specified. And so that's helping to fund new construction of affordable units and tenant-based rental assistance and other housing activities. I just gave you a bit of an update on the sustainability update. And a key piece of that is taking the hard look at the traffic and circulation. And so that's a complicated traffic study that's underway presently. And that'll be a key part of the general plan update as well as the EIR. The disaster mitigation, we're required every five years to update our local hazard mitigation plan and that ensures that the county remains eligible for state and federal disaster relief monies. So that is on track to be completed by the end of the year. And of course it's being informed by the safety element update and all of that work that we've done over the past several years. And you'll be seeing that back before you, hopefully for adoption at your meeting of September 1st is what we're recommending for that. You are aware that we've spent a lot of time in this past year or actually more than the past year on amending county codes and regulations related to a whole variety of types of affordable housing. So this includes farm worker housing, agricultural employee housing. And so those general plan and zoning amendments were completed and we've gotten interest from nonprofit housing developers for nearly 150 units of farm worker housing are in the planning stages currently. Success stories or affordable housing, you're well aware of the 17th and Capitola Road site, which was the county successor agency and we've funded with affordable housing monies and we've processed the development application for the mixed use project that includes 57 units of affordable housing, as well as the medical and dental clinic. So they haven't pulled down that money yet but we're getting close to that final agreement and the implementation stage of that project. Again, farm worker housing, we have units that mid pen housing is looking to add some units to the Hardinus de Valle Murphy's crossing project. And also we did fund their acquisition of the Atkinson lamb property for up to 80 units of farm worker housing that will be proposed and processed for that site. Another success story, thank goodness, is that we have been spending the past couple of years shifting to electronic services. So that really served us well when the pandemic and the shelter in place work remotely occurred. It greatly facilitated our ability to continue to accept and process building permit applications. And it really kind of kick started what we knew we would work toward eventually through the Primo continuous process improvement effort, which was to extend the electronic plan submittal to discretionary permits. So we have created a portal and we are now accepting discretionary permit applications online as well. And as you know, we've expanded our email capacity. We've added special email addresses so that people can get directly to the environmental planning section or their records room and other places in addition to the phone messaging. And so we're making every effort to make sure that we're as responsive as we can be to the public's need for information and permit processing. The accessory dwelling units, we've spent, we've done two or three different chapters of amendments to that code in response not only to our own objectives as a county, but in reaction to state changes to state law that have occurred over the past several years. And so to illustrate the success of all of those ADU changes, there were 31 accessory dwelling units in 2017. And the following year that went up by 35%. This past year, we had 35 ADU applications. So that already exceeded the whole 31 for 2017. We had 35 through June, so in just half a year. So we were on pace to double the number of ADUs from 2017. Of course, we hit a bit of a hiccup with COVID, but still there is a lot of strong interest in development of accessory dwelling units. In terms of performance measures, I know these charts are a tad bit detailed, but the main point that we're trying to make, we compare four fiscal years here. We did project through for this year, we projected through to the end of June. This is the level of building permit activity that occurs through submittal of plans. And so for each of those four years, on the left it's E plans, electronic plan submittal. The dark blue, royal blue, purple is paper submittals. And then on the right is solar photovoltaic. So you can see that the E plans have really grown. We did 14 in fiscal year 1617. We've done, we project 574 E plans submittals this fiscal year. Paper has dropped. I also wanted to point out here with this slide that about a third of our building permits with plans is solar photovoltaic applications. So there remains a lot of strong interest in the community for solar PV. But the overall numbers are steadily increasing. Each year we have had experienced an increase in the number of building permits that we're processing initially. This slide shows month by month. And so it's not intended to compare one month to the prior month necessarily. But I wanted in particular to show this because it shows the effect of the pandemic and the shelter in place. So, we always vary every month varies each year. Some months are more active for people interested in building permits than other. But on average, they had been over about 200 permits per month of what we call over the counter. So this is permits without plans. A lot of people just coming in and getting a quick permit or online, getting a quick permit that had been on the order of 200. In March, it was 134 because of close suite. The pandemic hit halfway through. In April, that dropped to 85. In May, it started recovering. It was 173 and projected to through June. It's almost back up to 200. 185 permits is what we project. So, bottom line is there was an impact of the COVID but on building permit activity, but we've largely recovered. We continue to see strong interest in building permit activity. You know, it's hard to say what's gonna happen in the future but we do remain busy. This shows again, the over the counter. This is not the month by month comparison but this is the four year of the permits without plans. What this kind of shows is there's beginning to be a shift from fewer over the counter permits with no plans and more permits with plans and E-plans submittals. So, people are not coming into the counter quite as much but again, the conclusion of this slide is that these types of permits dropped a bit but this year is quite comparable to last year. In terms of discretionary permit applications, this slide shows you on the left that batch of bars is showing for the past four years how many level one through level four discretionary permits we processed. So, this is the type that is again, sort of zoning plan check or administrative staff. Level four does have public notice but no public hearing. The middle batch of bars is things that involve a public hearing. We do fewer of those. So, that's the level five through seven. It remains fairly consistent year over year for these four years that we're looking at. And then the right-hand batch of bars is we total them up. You know, all the levels one through seven, how many discretionary permits were submitted and are we processing? So, you can see that last year was our highest in a while but this year is more comparable to the year prior to that. In terms of the proposed budget getting into the numbers, of course, this will all change. So, I'm not gonna spend a whole lot of time on it but we get about $3 million to fund some of the things that aren't permit related, code compliance and public information, other activities that our department is involved with. And we're proud that we achieve about an 80% cost recovery level. We're calculated it at 79%. We have 68 positions in our department and this was a big year because we actually are fully staffed except for one position that was frozen due to the pandemic and the budget situation. But we're very proud. We've got a great team. We've added a lot of wonderful youth and people that have worked in other jurisdictions and a really complimentary set of backgrounds and skills and expertise and the staff is doing a great job. Some of the major project applications that have been filed or that are expected in the coming year. The medical office building on Soquel, that is the site that's illustrated on this slide. That is a major medical office building and we're currently doing an environmental impact report for that proposed project. The East Cliff Village Shopping Center, they had submitted for a pre-application consultation and feedback from the county. We gave them a lot of feedback. Now they have just recently resubmitted a revised pre-application for some additional feedback from county staff. So we're involved with that to try to give them some good guidance for a project that might be supportable on that site. The Atkinson lamb property, as I said before, Mid-Pen has purchased the land and they'll file an application for on the order of 80 farm worker housing units. And then there's the successor agency disposition site at Seventh and Brommer and we're working with the planning department and Office of Economic Development and the potential developer. We're involved in, we expect to be involved in processing a development application for that site. That will be a mix of visitor and housing uses. Housing program, again, not a lot of time on the detailed numbers here, but one of the key things to point out here is that we have about $7 million. You'll see in this, what we call the low and moderate housing income asset fund. That is the old redevelopment housing monies. And you'll remember back in 2011, we saved on the order of $45 million. We dedicated it to a whole variety of projects and activities that's winding down. Some of this money is the money that's already been committed to the Atkinson Lamb project. And then we expect that there's enough money to fund one more new construction project. And so we continue to work with our nonprofit housing partners and expecting the coming year or two that will be identifying one more that will pretty much use up the remainder of this old RDA housing monies. COVID-19, the key takeaway here is that we have been able to continue our services. Although in modified and alternate ways, the staff has done a great job. They've been resilient. They're a strong team. The commitment to customer service has been retained. We're all learning new models for how to run public hearings and obtain public input and keep connected to each other and get the work done. But our productivity level is high. I wouldn't have necessarily anticipated that it would be as high as it is. So I'm quite proud of staff. Everybody is working great. And I used to hate Microsoft Teams and now I don't and so it's going well. The temporary permit, the new process that we put in so that people could, the businesses could spread their activities outside. We've got two people that we created a special email and a dedicated two people to be monitoring that and really quickly turning around those projects. And we have issued several of those temporary permits. So that concludes my presentation. The recommendation is that you improve the budget for the planning department and housing funds and the reference pages as noted in this slide. And I'm available for any questions. And as I said, the PIA and Julia are also available. I'd ask some questions if that's okay. Thank you for the presentation. I mean, Malloy, appreciate the work that's been done. I especially want to just acknowledge the hard work and thoughtfulness you went into the temporary permit and program. I know that I've talked to several people who've gone through the process, have found that the staff was really geared towards helping out business owners in that and turning things around really quickly. And I think that's what we need right now. Related to that with the drop in permit requests that we saw in April and May and staff productivity still remaining high, were we able to catch up on anything that was in the queue? Yes, I don't have the, I should have gotten that direct quote, but we have an aging list and you may be aware we have an aging list and that shows how many projects that are in for building permit are kind of beyond their due date. And I think it used to be 13 pages long. Don't quote me on this, PIA may know. And I think we've been able to get that to three pages. That's good, that's good. Yeah, so we have been able to kind of catch up for the most part. And yeah. Yeah, well, I mean, I didn't know, I was going to ask about the typical aging for an E plan document. Is that moving faster through the system or slower or the same as someone who brings something in across the board? We have different timeframes for, depending on the nature of the project. Some are more complicated, some need to be routed. And so it's not a one size fits all answer. But I think that we've committed to really pulling team members around, you know, and our agency partners to look at things that are overdue and really try to tackle them and troubleshoot and get them off the late list. You know, sometimes it's the applicant and they're, but sometimes it's us. And so we're really trying to work together to share that down. Great. And I noticed we, there's still some slide on the sustainability update and the EIR and everything. It would be great in August when we come back to get update about whatever changes in the budget of how that will affect the timeline for that project. Well, I think the timeline that I showed you here, that is the timeline. I don't expect that to change in August. So we're releasing that notice of preparation and we expect the draft general plan and local coastal program draft commoting and draft in ERR to be released probably early 2021. You know, so we can't really release it in the holidays. So it'll be early 2021. Yeah. And I hope we have just sort of a robust public outreach process. Cause it'll be six years since the process concluded probably seven or eight. Then some people had been at meetings, I'm sure. There'll be a reeducation. Exactly. And, you know, as much as an EIR comment period, it's really more about walking everyone through what's in the proposed policies and regulations. And then of course the EIR will inform, you know, and explain, you know, potential environmental impacts of that. But the EIR is also informing our drafting of the documents so that we don't have environmental impacts, hopefully. Yeah. Well, I mean, I just, one thing that I've seen, you know, as we dealt with vacation rentals here at our last meeting, the point of view of how people feel about them has really changed in the last eight years. And so some of the things that we talked about seven or eight years ago, people's feelings about what they will want to see or can live with or everything that might change. And so I think there's going to be a lot of we can have to re-induce the concepts about why we're doing this rather than just presenting like this is what we studied. We agree. And also the changes in state law, enhanced density bonus and some of those other changes we're having to filter in and refine some of those proposals so that we still get to the same place. Places where we feel that the community tolerance levels are. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Super. Supervisor Friend. Thank you, Chair. Thank you for the presentation. I do actually have a question in regards to the E plan uptick. I know that the board has been really encouraging the use of electronic submissions online for over the counter permits. My concern is that this increase when you showed the year graph really was only because we had the pandemic. And so I was wondering what is being done to ensure that E plan continues to increase outside of COVID. Increasing. Do you have the slide? One of those slides actually, let me see. If you're on teams, can you please mute yourself? Thank you. The first performance measure slide this is the building permit applications with plans. And so we're almost at 2000 submittals this year. The solar PV are by and large electronic. That's almost 700. And then another seven of them are E plan. So paper, I mean another 600 are E plan. So we have probably two thirds of our application are coming in electronically. And we're very focused on facilitating that and continual process improvement to make that as easy as possible. This slide wasn't the one I was referencing. I was referencing the slide that was specific to this year, which showed that while there has been a slight uptick in electronic plans submittal for general building permits, it wasn't until we had the shelter in place that they actually increased. So my concern was that if you take the first six months of the year versus the second six months of the year, in theory, the first six months of the year, if we were really seeing a significant increase in electronic plan submittal should be significantly higher than previous years. And it just didn't look to be the case. There was still a lot of paper plans being submitted. And I thought that we were really trying to encourage local contractors, local developers to only do the electronic plan submission. This slide, it might be a little bit, maybe not the best one to show because these are actually permits without plans. So this is only a subset of some of our permit activity that what we call the quote over the counter permits that you don't even need plans for. So the fact that we're getting more of them electronically instead of at the counter with people who just drop in and get a water heater permit type of a thing, this is all the stuff without plans. Okay, I appreciate that differentiation. I think that if you're submitting something without plans and over the counter, we functionally should be requiring or something pretty darn close to it that it be done electronically so that there's a minimal A that it's easy and people are actually encouraged to get things. As you know, a lot of people don't even get permits for these things and B, anything that can be done because as we move towards sort of a new workforce model and I think realistically some of the remote work will be integrated into the County workforce moving forward to what degree we don't know but the ability then to have things done electronically would help facilitate that element as well. And so I just wanna ensure that we are really placing that emphasis. We'll go to Supervisor Coonerty. I thank you, Mr. Chair. I don't have any questions. I wanna commend the planning department for embracing continuous process improvement and also electronic permitting. Hopefully we can use this moment to continue to think about how we can streamline and make it easier for people to interact with the planning department and get their process permits through quickly. I also appreciate the efforts you've made to help small businesses adjust their seating and make other changes so that they can get their business open in a safe and effective manner. Thank you. Supervisor McPherson. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Director Malloy and your team for your achievements this year. We've seen significant residential developments come forward this past year, which is critical to addressing our housing shortage. I'm especially interested in our code monetization work and moving forward on our sustainable Santa Cruz County plan. As we move to a society that's more regular, the remote working shall we say, it's gonna be more important than ever for our housing and permitting teams to swiftly meet those needs. A big concern I have going into the next few months is fire prevention, as we have just heard, and readiness, and we're better off than we were a year ago. But one of our biggest concerns for my district, especially the Santa Rosa Valley, is the threat posed by properties with code violations. I know we're not in a position for our budget to grow, but do you anticipate any ways to expand code enforcement division in the coming years? I get a lot of calls on this and complaints. And I think with what we have, what you have in the department, you're doing a fantastic job in getting to as many as you can. But what additional resources could we provide as a board or could the county seek from the state or federal resources to boost this code enforcement staff and the overall effort? Is there anything that you see that may be coming? And I know you have referred to changing state rules and regulations, so to speak, regarding housing, but can you say anything coming or on the horizon for code enforcement assistance? You may recall that we had several flavors of code compliance abatement funding that we consolidated about two or three years ago and your board selected some of the, some key, quite problematic properties in terms of cleaning up and we initiated proactive code compliance. And I think we're nearly done with that list. At some point, a replenishment of that pot of money would enable us to tackle proactively some of the more complicated code compliance and nuisance and environmental damage type properties. I think we have a little bit of money left that we can use this coming year, but then that fund I think will be exhausted. We have talked about, we started the administrative citation process a couple of years ago and that has been really appropriate and pretty effective in some of the more minor, frankly, code compliance issues. It gets, it's a traffic ticket essentially, but it gets people's attention and it does generate some funding. You know, it doesn't, it's not a cost recovery type of a mechanism by any means, but that does generate some funding. And frankly, I'm trying to remember whether, I don't think we corral that funding and reinvest it in the planning department's budget. That might be one idea is to ensure that we retain the administrative citation revenues. And maybe that gets into an abatement fund and slowly replenishes that pot. It's difficult to come up with ideas for how to fund code compliance. It's expensive and there's not a whole lot of sources of money for it. If we did a decent job of doing that, what's your estimate of what it would cost to have a substantial or worthwhile, effort in code compliance efforts for the county? How much would it might that cost? Would you have a guess? Sometimes people refer to a code compliance programs as black holes because they're very labor intensive. Depends how proactive you wanna be. Depends if you wanna take on cleanup and lean properties. So it really, really depends on what your objectives for the program are and how much you're gonna shift from being complaint-based to being proactive. Identifying the problems ourselves and tackling them. That's a big distinction. And so I don't really have a ready answer for you. If you want a program that's twice as robust, it'll be $800,000. But... Okay, I get it. Thank you. Gives me an idea. Yeah, thank you very much for your time and support and everything you're doing for the people in Santa Cruz County. And from going back a few years, just reflecting on the whole permit processing and different things that we've done. We've made it a lot easier, right? On people when they do come in and they fill out all the forms and whatever. If you can reflect on that a little bit. I mean, we've tried, we're a complicated county. We're not a city that's built on a flat plane with grid streets and housing tracks, you know? We've got mountains, we've got coastal bluffs, we've got rivers, we've got old, new, and everything that we're doing. Excuse me, I'm sorry, they've lost audio. I'm sorry. So our regulations are by necessity pretty complicated because we have so many different physical and community contexts that we're dealing with in terms of our social, cultural, and natural environment. And so we do have complicated regulations but we revised what's called the list of required information to try to make that as clear as possible so that people when they submit their applications can get to completeness faster and then not have to resubmit and resubmit again to get a complete application. So we're putting a lot of effort into helping people submit a complete application at first because that saves time and money in processing. The ePlan submittals, we've got checklists for our plan checkers in terms of what to emphasize. We're trying to do more in the field with the building inspectors checking certain things instead of every little thing needing to be on the plan. So it really is a great example of continuous process improvement. We'll never be done. There will always be more that we can do to make the system better. But we have a team that's very committed to continually improving and the electronic is part of that and our lists and our changes to the code to continue to clarify and try to make it easier. But we always have to be mindful though of the public and community interests that are part and parcel of a permit processing process. The public wants to be notified. They wanna have input. They wanna make sure conditions of approval are appropriate. So there's that balance of going fast but also making sure that the public has an opportunity to be heard too. Well, I think you've done a lot to make the process less stressful for the public when they come in compared to before and delays and things like that. Or have you noticed at least a little bit of improvement on the stress level for the public? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, we get some good positive feedback that things have improved. I don't know about the other supervisors but I don't get as many complaints as like six, seven, eight years ago. So anyway. Great, thank you. Would that be true with you guys too? I don't know. It depends what's happening on someone's block. It's really good. Thank you. We'll open it up to the public and if we have any questions, anybody in the room here? Anybody out in the hallway? Okay, I don't see any. Anybody downstairs? No one in the comment. Okay, anybody online? We have one web comment by Ken Davenport. I'd like to see our supervisor's vote to eliminate the four unfunded positions and cut the budget at least 2.5% across the board. Businesses and the people in Santa Cruz are suffering. The administrative officers claim 79% cost recovery rate will only lead to higher fees, assessment permits, et cetera, for the citizens who are already negatively impacted by COVID. Please take a leadership role for a change. Okay. And anyway, we're open for a motion or if there's any other discussion. I'll move approval. Okay, we have. Second. Second. You call it. Was that Coonerty? I think Supervisor Coonerty made the motion and Supervisor McPherson in the second. Is that sound right? Yes. Okay, that'll be fine. I'll take the roll call vote. Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Chairman Caput. Aye. Passes unanimously. And that takes us to item number 34. Consider the 2020-2021 proposed budgets for the Department of Public Works as outlined in the reference budget documents and memorandum of the Deputy CAO and the Director of Public Works. Welcome. Good morning. Thank you. Good to see you. Good to be seen. So thank you, Chair. Thank you, Supervisors. Mr. Palacios, Mr. Heath, thank you. I want to start by just voicing some appreciation for the opportunity to present our budget. As you mentioned, my name is Matt Machado and I'll be presenting our public works budget today. And so I'll dig right in. Get this. So I'll be covering a bit of a high level. This is our proposed budget pre-COVID a bit, but we'll be talking about that. So I'll cover operational plan, our budget, some emerging challenging issues, and then of course our COVID actions. So to begin with our objectives for public works, we actually have 19 in total. Today I'll be covering just a handful of them as part of the County's operational plan. So the four positives that we see are storm damage repair. We've completed 42 sites, more in progress. In our capital improvement for landfill, we're working very diligently to put together a great plan for some of our deferred maintenance and future needs. In our area of library projects, two out of the six sites are in progress are complete. Those are Felton. That one's complete unless Selva Beach is under construction. And then in the area of sewer repair, we've completed nearly 12,000 feet to date of replacement and repair work. You can see our objectives. We've got quite a few on time, some of them impacted and we'll cover those soon. So in terms of our on time objectives, the storm damage, I mentioned that one earlier, you see we're at 123%. Our capital improvement program, this is for landfill is well underway and moving forward. In terms of our library projects, we're still on track to be complete with all six of our projects, either initiated or under construction by 2021. And so that's exciting. We have four more projects going to construction in the near term. And then in our sewer repair area, we're at 118%. We've exceeded our goal in that already. So that's good news. In terms of those objectives that have been impacted by COVID, we're sharing three of those. These are the leading impacts in the area of traffic counts. Traffic is off quite a bit with COVID. And so that's delayed our baseline establishment and our organic waste. We've seen impacts from COVID. And so we've pushed that out to December versus its earlier June goal. And then in a plastic reduction, further delays due to COVID and the epidemic trying to protect our public. So I'll cover some of our numbers. I'm going to try to just highlight some of the driving forces behind our proposed budget and proposed numbers. I'd like to direct your attention toward the far right column, the percentage increases. I'll note that percentages don't always tell the story, but at least it's a point to discuss. And so I'll start with that 136% increase. Now, granted, this is the second year of a two year budget. So a lot of our changes are because they were budgeted in the first year and they're rolling into the second year, but there's still some worthy highlights in this area right here. And so that 136% is really a focus in our parking area. A live out parking program is Soquel District trying to really step up our game in terms of enforcement. And the numbers are small, the percentages are great, but that's what's driving that number. I'm taking down a couple of steps, that 72% increase, and this is a large number. And what's driving this number is our storm damage repair. And so in our first year of our two year budget, we had budgeted quite a few of our projects and those are carrying forward and we're continuing to put as much resource and energy into this area as possible. And so that dramatic increase is due to federal highways and FEMA projects. I'll take you down to the very, very large percentage, the 5,000% number. And that number is significant as well. And what's driving that almost exclusively is our Freedom Sewer Project. And so that project was budgeted in the first year, but is being carried into the second year. And your board is in the process of kicking that project off right now. And that's a great project for freedom or the sanitation sewer line replacements. I will conclude this slide with the final recommendation of public works budget at 155,759,638. This is our revenue side. And now this is our expenditure side, which the numbers do match, but they're broken down slightly differently. And so I would like to highlight a couple of the percentages on the far right column as well. Take you down to that 892% number. That's again our Freedom Project, what's driving that number. And then the one below that at 82%, there's an interesting driver in this category. And this is our CSA 9A is included in this line item. And that's our LED crosswalk projects. And so that's really exciting. We've been quite successful this year and we hope to be even more successful next year, which benefits our pedestrian community a lot. I will highlight that further in the presentation. So moving forward into some of our emerging issues, which are also our challenges, plenty of challenges in the world of infrastructure. We continue to work on recycling and solid waste. We do have a lot of upcoming very costly needs and those include a new way to dispose of compost, a new way to transfer our trash as our landfill comes to a close. And then of course the continued deferred maintenance, which is a common theme in infrastructure. And then the two parking programs, it's quite a fine line of balancing revenues and program needs. There never seems to be enough revenue to address the need. So we continue to address those and point those out as challenges. In the area of sanitation and quite honestly in water, the common theme here is aging infrastructure. So that's always a challenge. And of course that's true for many of our sanitation CSAs not listed here, but you've seen recently with assessment increases that there are a lot of challenges in the area of aging infrastructure, especially that infrastructure that can't be ignored such as sanitation and water. And transportation of course is always a challenge. So we show this as an emerging issue. I will comment last year, last calendar year, this current fiscal year, we had great success with some time extensions in our federal highway program. We had 85 projects that received extensions worth $42 million. We have successfully delivered many of those projects, but at risk we have about 30 sites worth about 12 million that will most likely require an additional extension. So that's a bit of a challenge for us. And then still fighting the fight for prior storms, 2011, we're still pursuing insurance claims. And then of course the deferred maintenance of all things infrastructure. Pavement maintenance is a large one at $266 million of deferred maintenance. And the annual need shown here is 24 million to continue our road maintenance where we are today, which is not great. It's at a 48. What we're projecting in the next 10 years is really at about $8 million investment per year for pavement management, not anywhere near what we think we need, but it's what we have. And so we're doing the best we can. We're spreading the dollars in far as wide as we can and we're seeing some improvements out there, but not enough. Of course in our storm drain system with so many culverts and 228 million deferred maintenance, that continues to be a challenge. And so we keep working on those. A lot of those have resulted in emergency responses, which your board has seen recently, a number of culverts needing to be repaired in an emergency state. In our traffic engineering area of emerging issues, we're continuing to work on some of our traffic signal work, such as Soquel Drive, Robertson Road. The project on 152 at Hollahan, we're actually pursuing a grant today this week for that. And so that's some good news. I will comment that many of our transportation needs, we are pursuing grant funds, which is great. The challenge though is that all grants do require a local match. And you can see some of those numbers here on this slide. And so that becomes a challenge in itself. Continuing in our traffic engineering area, there are always needs that go unfunded. So for now we've highlighted a couple. We do have a great project in the Sea Cliff Village area that's near complete design. So we're pursuing funding for that. And then county wide, we have signals that need to be improved. And so we're working on an assessment for that. One area that I want to highlight as a heads up and it's unfortunate, but it's the way it is in terms of the public services that we provide in our survey area. We are closing our front counter to the public. It's just been an unfunded item for some time. And at this point, we've been in a position to close that counter. So we will be tracking the community input on that and certainly keep the board informed. So moving into some of our COVID actions, we have seen some success with our staff levels. We've done some great work. Our road crew has done some really nice work out there trying to get the word out on our shelter in place. Our encroachment permit staff have worked with many businesses to work with them expanding their operations into road right of way. And our rural property group has stepped up in many ways to work license agreements and work shelter agreements for the needs of COVID. Some of our operational successes throughout the entire COVID pandemic, we've been able to fully operate all of our field operations and continue to push projects. This summer alone, we have more than 25 projects under construction. Most of those are storm damaged and that's a good thing. And then in our capital projects division, our library projects continue to move forward even through COVID and real property continues to step up and help in many areas COVID related. Speaking of stepping up, I'm very proud of our staff. They continue to do great work and huge volumes of work, which is outstanding. I also wanna thank the board last year, your board adopted a state approved accounting procedures called Cupca and we've used those to a great extent to improve our efficiencies and work output. So that's great. And so thank you for that. I mentioned earlier about our rapid flashing beacon program under CSA 9A, this current fiscal year we did complete four locations. Three of them were on the Portola corridor and then one in the Aptos village area. So that's a great success. We expect even more this coming year. So watch for that. That's good work that serves the public directly. And then our staff has done a great job transitioning to remote work and we've seen good efficiencies there and that leads us to process improvements which forced us into it but it's worked out very well with paperless time cards and paperless invoicing and digital signatures and that's been a nice transition and has really improved our efficiencies as well. So with that, I'll close with the recommendation. We are recommending approval of the proposed budget as recommended by our CAO. Reference pages are here and I can answer any questions you may have. Thank you, chair. Thank you for the presentation and I appreciate the ongoing work of your office. This year, as I mentioned with planning, doing this temporary permitting program for small businesses, I know that public works and real property was involved with that when it came to the Soquel parking lots and I just appreciate the efforts that everybody made in order to help make that work. It's very helpful for those businesses and I talked with tortilla flats just yesterday and things seem to be going pretty well. I also appreciate the work of your office on the CSA 9A and getting those pedestrian lighted crosswalks in place. That has made a big difference in the community and it's a great use of funds and it helps with our overall goal which is to reduce traffic fatalities and make our community safer for people biking and walking. So I really appreciate that can do attitude and the measure D SB 1 efforts have also the way in which we're going about going to certain areas and doing all the work at the same time. It seems to be yielding some good benefits and I appreciate it thinking about that differently and I appreciate the work that Steve Wiesner does all the time to partner with us and to think about these things creatively is to make sure that we have the best projects possible and your real property also involved with all library projects. I know we have one queued in Live Oak for 2021 and the office has been very helpful to me in terms of providing information. I'm really excited to find out whether we're gonna get this major grant on Soquel Drive that will make a huge difference an immediate huge difference to all modes of traffic if we can get that grant. Bicyclists will be safer, buses can get through hopefully a little bit easier and signal changes will help automobiles. So that would be a big win for us and I look forward to those things happening and I know that we're gonna be affected by lower gas tax revenue and lower sales tax revenue for the Measure D and the SB1 funds. That'll be momentary I think and it'll go back but it's unfortunate that we'll have to, we'll have less in order to get things done and lastly the storm damage repair work. I know there's a lot of work going on right now up in the summit area with a bunch of different projects. People who don't usually see action on public works are seeing a lot of action from public work. So thank you for that. Appreciate the work of your office. Thanks. Supervisor Friend. Thank you, Sharon. Thank you, Mr. Machado for your presentation. I just want to share some words of a compliment for your team which really has been able to do a lot with very little and every single year as costs increase and the quality of our local roads and infrastructure declines I think have really found creative ways to focus on the most important locations. And additionally under your leadership and Mr. Wiesner's leadership as was noted by Supervisor Leopold, they've also found new creative ways to find additional funding including encouraging our board and the Regional Transportation Commission on the reallocation toward a formula-based funding which has made significant improvements in my district including in Coralitos which hadn't seen road work done in the Pioneer Varney area for 30 years and I know that there's other districts that are experiencing the same as a result of it. Your advocacy work in Washington DC which I've witnessed firsthand on storm-waded damage and in fact, I had learned yesterday the day before that Congressman Garamendi's language was inserted into the legislation that had been encouraged from you and from the county in regards to the timeframe and storm damage repair. So I think that these are significant improvements that don't just benefit our county but benefit the state and the country. And I think that a lot can be said to the leadership of your department and I just wanted to compliment your entire team for your work. Supervisor Coonerty. Sure. Yeah, I just, I wanna first thank the Public Works Department my six years of being on the board. I find the department's more responsive and more efficient at providing services and getting answers back. There's not always all the resources we need or there's definitely not the resources we need but I really appreciate your team's efforts to try to reach out and be proactive and respond to needs in the community to the extent possible. And yeah, like Supervisor Leopold, I expect, like Supervisor Leopold said, I expect we'll see some downturns in our gas tax and sales tax funds, but hopefully it'll be temporary and we can get back to making long overdue investments in our infrastructure. So, but thank you for, thank you to you and your team for your work. Thank you. Supervisor McPherson. And thank you, Chair. And I too, I can't overstate my appreciation of Director Machado, Steve Wiesner and the team for their work this past year. District five from the Santa Rosa Valley in particular represents a perfect example of the positive impact public works is having or has had in this past year. You've led the charge to try to correct some very serious damage of three and four years ago. And I too want to thank the state legislature for passing SB1 for the voters upholding that measure and for our county voters approving measure D. Without that, we wouldn't have the resources to do this. Also, the Felton Library is just a real gem, I'll tell you, in Santa Rosa Valley and the park next door, it is really something and we really look forward to having Boulder Creek Library being approved this next year. Also, I really want to thank the Public Works Department for its work to restore the CRB services at Ben Loma Transfer Station in partnership with Gray Bears. This service has reduced the amount of recyclable material in our waste treatment provided support for our lower income community members. It's a win-win-win all the way around and I do appreciate it. Director Machado, did you say that as far as road maintenance or improvements, there was $84 million in total need and we've done 24 or was that just part, that's just a segment of what needs to be done, isn't it? The annual need is really at 24 million to keep our PCI where it is and we're projecting the ability to invest about 8 million a year over the next 10 years per year. So we do expect to decline in our pavement condition index. So that's unfortunate, but we're doing the best we can with the resources we have. Thank you and I want to say too, it's been a pleasure to work with you as Supervisor Friend said as well to work with state and federal representatives to have more attention paid to our infrastructure and particularly our road repairs that are needed. It's been great, I think we've got an ear there and so in both places and so it's really good. I want to thank you and your department again for your consistent work and working to get Santa Cruz County included in some funding mechanisms although there's a match usually included but it's really important and I appreciate your efforts there. You've gained a lot of respect in both Washington DC and Sacramento so it's much appreciated. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Okay, yeah, thanks for all the work. We're gonna be meeting pretty soon I think in the next day or two and Hula-Hannon 152 will be meeting and it looks like we're making a breakthrough there that'll be really nice. And then Murphy Road, we'll see what we can do. That's a big concern for a lot of people. And then we have gotten some things done. Supervisor Friend and myself, we kind of share roadways and when they were in disrepair and people would call and say that it was in district supervisor friend's area now that it's being fixed up and it's looking better, I'm telling people it's in my district. So it's... A lot of people love politicians. We're finally making a breakthrough and it's really good. You guys are doing a good job and a great job. And thank you for everything. And we hope with the budget coming up we can keep going forward. Thank you. Thank you. And we'll open up for public comment. If there's anybody here in the room, we're willing and waiting to hear. Nobody here? Anybody down in the community room? No. We have no one in. Okay. And then no comments online. That means we can open it up for a motion. I would move the recommended actions for the public works department. Okay. Second. We have a first and second. Supervisor Leopold, Supervisor Coonerty. Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. Clerk Fersen. Aye. And Chair Caput. Aye. Passes unanimously. Thank you. Let's see, we'll now go to closed session. Are there any reportable items from closed session? Not today. Not today. Okay. And we'll now recess and we will resume in the budget hearings at 7 p.m. this evening here in the board chambers. So 7 p.m. we'll be back today and we'll do another review. And if people wanna provide testimony tonight, but not be here, is there, do they do that through the? Web comments. The web comments. We will not be having phone in this one, but yes, web comments will be acceptable. Okay. Okay. We'll recess. Thank you. We will now resume the continued budget hearing for Tuesday evening, June the 23rd, 2020. Will the clerk please call the roll. Supervisor Leopold. Can they hear me? Supervisor Leopold. I'll call the roll. Supervisor Leopold. Supervisor Leopold. Here. I'm on. Hello. Can you hear me? Hi Bruce. How you doing? How about Supervisor Friend? Good to see you again. Here. Okay. Okay, it's now seven o'clock. I will call the roll. Supervisor Leopold. Here. Friend. Here. Coonerty. Here. McPherson. Here. Chairperson Caput. Here. Continued public hearing on the 2020, 2021 proposed county budget overview remarks and presentation by our county administrative officer and public testimony on the 2020, 2021 proposed county budgets. First, the CAO will present an overview and following that we'll have public comment and then that'll be an opportunity for members of the public to address the board on topics related to the proposed budget. And also topics not on the agenda, but are within our jurisdiction of the board. You'll have three minutes to speak for public members. And that'll be it. So it's all yours, Carlos. Okay. I'm gonna be giving a brief overview of the budget. We've already presented this a couple of times. And then I'll be turning over to Assistant County Administrative Officer Nicole Coburn, who I'll be talking about our operation plan. We've entered a very difficult time in the county, both the community and the county government. And our revenues have also suffered greatly ever since the state homeowner. Fortunately, we entered into this public health emergency in a very strong fiscal position. The board over the last number of years had tripled our reserves to over $56 million today. We have a triple A credit rating, which is the highest rating for our bonds. We've reduced our pension obligations over the last decade, reducing our unfunded liability. We actually have controlled our employee growth, having less employees today than we did a decade ago, even though we've greatly expanded services and we've made improvements in our deferred maintenance of our buildings and our infrastructure. This is just a very quick overview of our reserves balances. And you can see that from 2014 to 2020, we tripled our reserve balances. The 21 estimate is because we're gonna be using some of that to get through the current fiscal year. During the last decade, we have greatly expanded our behavioral health services. This includes mental health services and substance use disorder. We've also expanded our health clinics and dental clinics. We've brought online new parks and new recreation programs and we've made significant improvements to our county infrastructure, including making repairs from the 2016-17 county storms. We've done all that while having less employees today than we'd have in the past and while maintaining the growth of the county budget. All while tripling our financial reserves. So the good news is that we entered into this pandemic in a very strong financial position. And now we will be faced in the coming months with balancing the budget for the following fiscal year. I'll now turn it over to Nicole Coburn, Assistant County Administrative Officer to give a very brief overview of our operational plan. Thank you, Carlos. So I'm Nicole Coburn, Assistant CAO. I will just briefly go over our strategic initiatives. So the county has adopted four strategic initiatives that laid a foundation for achieving the county's vision and mission. We have the strategic plan approved by the board in 2018, which provides our North Star and says sets the way for why we exist. Our operational plan approved by the board in 2019 says how we're going to achieve our strategic plan and what we're going to do. We also have Primo Santa Cruz, our continuous process improvement initiative, which tells us how we're getting better each day. And finally, performance measurement, which tells us the impact we're having and how we can tell. So here again, we have our county vision and mission. We talk about our strategic plan as our North Star. After the turbulence that we've currently been facing with the COVID-19 pandemic, this North Star has become more important to guiding our work and our priorities. The vision, the mission and values represent the voices of our community, our service partners, our clients and our employees. So the operational plan is only a two-year action plan in December of 2019, we were looking pretty good, but halfway through our plan, we've been knocked off our course. Both department strategic plans and the county operational plan have guided us through this work and our ongoing work to revise the budget process. These plans provide the foundations for staff. We've been focused on our major initiatives and goals for improving our mandatory services. The objectives in the operational plan are measurable. And in some cases, we're going to be able to see directly the impact of the pandemic in a way that we would not have been able to see in the absence of the plan. So the two charts here, look at the impact of COVID-19. The purple sections show the impacted or amended objectives and the green sections show the objectives that are complete or in progress. About 60% of the work is still expected to finish on time or is already complete. In June of 2020, this month, we've seen the biggest impact, almost two thirds of our objectives have been impacted. However, about half of the impacted objectives are still expected to be completed by this December. The full impact of COVID-19 is still not known and we'll be returning to the board with further information. On our operational plan website, it's been updated to reflect the current status. You can see the 61 COVID impacted objectives. And if you scroll through, you can take a look at which objectives have been impacted, which are complete and which are in progress still. The website's available at www.stcvision.us. So in terms of our plan for fiscal year 2021, we will be returning to the board in this December with another update. We're going to be working with departments to understand the full impact of COVID-19. We're also going to be breaking down the 61 COVID impacted objectives to reflect whether or not they've been completed are in progress and back on track. They've been amended and but with some delays or if they need to be discontinued. We're also going to be working with county staff and providing additional training on measurement, using our smart framework and the results-based accountability framework. And we're going to be working with departments to get better at measuring the impact of everything we're doing. We will also be working on a resiliency addendum to our operational plan. The original plan called for a new two-year plan and the new one-year addendum will take into account the COVID-19 pandemic and the uncertainty that currently exists. The CAO intends to work with departments on this addendum, which will enable us some planning flexibility as we move through this time of uncertainty. We'll continue to allow us to build on training, primo and performance measurement and will allow us to think about the key management challenges necessary to adjust to this new world. So with that, I will turn it back over to Carlos to finish. Thank you, Nicole. So we are facing both challenges and some opportunities as we enter into the new budget discussions. So here's the challenge. In the current fiscal year, 2019-20, we estimate that we face a deficit of over $20 million, which is approximately 12% of our general fund net county cost. That's a very significant deficit and it's the deficit we have to balance by June 30th of this year. Luckily, the county over the last decade has built up over $56 million in reserves. So we are recommending that the board use our reserves up to $20 million to balance this year's budget. This will reduce our reserves from 10% to about 7% or $36 million. We don't recommend using any more of the reserves as we view that as a minimal amount. We also have enacted a hiring freeze and a spending freeze for anything that is discretionary. For next fiscal year, that's 2021, we face the deficit of potentially up to $40 million. That is 23% of net county cost. The magnitude of that is hard to overemphasize. That's about double of the deficit we faced in 2008 and nine during the Great Recession. So we are going to have to be reducing department budgets through spending cuts, implementing furloughs. We also will be using some trust funds and other one-time sources of funding. At the same time as trying to control costs, we are spending more on the emergency. We estimate we've already spent about $18 million on cost directly related to the public health emergency. So that's the challenge we face. Here's some of the potential good news. One is that the state budget was just signed by the governor. It includes two wealth, actually a number of important pieces that apply to the county. One is CARES Act, this is federal money, passing through the state of $1.3 billion, of which the county of Santa Cruz, we estimate we will receive up to $28 million. Now these funds are for direct pandemic related expenses. They're not to backfill lost revenues, but nevertheless, they'll be of great assistance to us and will potentially also cover some of the costs we were going to use in the general fund to match some of the FEMA emergency funds we are using for the pandemic. So that's very good news. We also understand that there's a billion dollars of realignment backfill. This is funding that's especially important to our safety net programs that are in the health and human services, both behavioral health and also things like CalFresh and CalWorks and MediCal. So they're very important funding. We understand that there's about $750 million of that amount is guaranteed. The rest is subject to a new federal realignment. So all of that will help our budget. In addition, we reopened much sooner than we thought. The governor earlier indicated we wouldn't enter into phase three of his reopening plan until potentially September, late August. Instead we opened more than a week ago into phase three. So that means some of our revenues will also recover more quickly than we had anticipated. So we're hoping that all of that will help to reduce that $40 million deficit as we get into having to reduce departmental budgets. The other opportunity or good news is that we have been very productive despite the stay at home public health order. We've transitioned very effectively to telecommuting and remote working. And we hope to continue that throughout the next year due to the pandemic, but even after that as a way to reduce our carbon footprint and as a way to reduce traffic and the need for parking, so forth. So with that, we're going to turn it back to the public. We will be asking the board to approve this budget which is a pro forma budget. We will be returning in August, August 10th through 13th for new budget hearings to review our budget amendments, which will take into effect all of the reductions we are going to have to make to balance our budget. And then we will be asking the board to approve that amended budget on August 18th. With that, I'll turn it back over to the chair so that you can now take any public comment. And you members of the board, would you like to ask any questions or make any comments? Not here. Okay. No comments, questions? Well, I'll ask a couple of them. I know it says reserves up to 20 million. Does that mean we can't spend all 55 or 56 million? We can only spend so much in one term. We could spend more than 20 million, not probably not the whole 56 million. Some of the money is very restricted in how it could be used, but we could potentially spend more, but we are not recommending that because we need reserves in the event of another emergency hitting us such as fires, or such as the pandemic getting worse again this winter, or an earthquake like just happened in Mexico today. So we are not recommending spending more than the 20 million. As that gets us down to a 7%, which we think is minimal. Yeah, and if we had to, we could, but if we had to, and then trust fund reserves, is that sort of a different reserve fund? Yeah, those are other one-time funds that are held in various departments. Those are not true county reserves, but their fund balances and various trust funds held throughout different departmental funds. And so we're recommending that we are gonna use some of those one-time funds, which normally we wouldn't, but this pandemic is so serious and impact on our budget, we feel we need to. Okay, and then I did notice, it said state and federal funds that come in are limited, I guess, the 28 million to COVID-19 expenses. Almost everything we're going through is related to the coronavirus. So, but I guess that money would have to go to the health department, basically, or what? Yeah, it's only for unbudgeted new costs that we're incurring. So it can't be for existing budgeted positions. It's supposed to be for new costs that we are experiencing due to the pandemic. Okay. And that's it. That's my questions. Anybody else? Mr. Chair, we had made this presentation yesterday, but we all made a couple of points. But one thing I wanted to point out to the federal public is tremendous effort that our county employees have been in the pandemic and the crisis. They put in hundreds, not thousands of hours to help send this effort, to respond to this unforeseen tragedy, really. So I just want to put a shout out to the county employees and there are hundreds of them who put in countless hours to help people in need under this unforeseen tragedy that we're experiencing today. That's it. I just wanted to make, mention that and just let the general public know that our county employees went to the front line to make life better for a lot of people. It'll be actually, they're both gonna be on the same day. Next Tuesday, we'll have our regular board meeting at 9 a.m. And then at 1.30 in the afternoon, we'll continue the budget hearings. So basically we'll be here June 30th at 9 a.m. for a regular meeting and 1.30 p.m. June 30th, Tuesday for budget hearing continuance. And open it up to the public and there, I don't see anybody in here. I see one gentleman, do you want to speak? Okay, any waves and nobody anywhere else? We have one web comment. Okay. From Celeste Gomez, lost budget cut sanitation workers were forced to choose to have their breaks and lunches taken away. Now you're for furloughing them and cutting them 10%. Make it make sense at least offer them hazard pay they're working in the middle of a pandemic. These people cannot afford their rent. Some of them live in their cars, defend the defund the police budget of 29 million, allocate funds to public works, do not cut the sanitation department. I'm a resident of Santa Cruz County and a business owner. I pay a ton of taxes to have a business in Santa Cruz County. I'd rather that money go to sanitation workers than the police any day. There is no reason someone working 40 hours a week during a pandemic should have to choose between paying rent or buying groceries because your 10% cut is taking away $500 a month from these hardworking people. And that's it. That's great. And basically until Tuesday at 9 a.m., regular meeting, 1.30 p.m., budget continuance hearings. That's it. We'll recess.