 Bruce, are you ready to go ahead and start? You are, okay. Oh, thank you. Good morning, Bruce, I can handle it from here. Good morning, it's a welcome to the October 6th meeting of the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors. Our chair, Greg Caput is stuck in traffic and so we're gonna start. I've checked with the vice chair who's checking in remotely and I'll lead the meeting until Chair Caput, oh, he just walked in. Give it a second. Maybe we could just do the roll call, why we're, why we're... I'm gonna call the roll. Supervisor Leopold. Here. Friend. Here. Coonerty. Here. McPherson. Here. And Chair Caput. Why don't we start with just a moment of silence and the Pledge of Allegiance, please join me. Allegiance. Through the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, the nation, and the God, the physical, the liberty, and justice for all. Yeah, we didn't know how long you'd be. Chair Caput and members of the board, we do have a number of revisions and corrections to the agenda. On item 44, we have additional materials. There's a revised memo packet page 100 and 1115. There's a correction. The item should read defer to November 10th, 2020, consideration of a proposed contract for consulting staff and resources to process building and related permits for reconstruction of structures affected by the CZU August lightning complex fire and accept and file status report on two implementation activities as recommended by the planning director. For item 46, we also have a correction. The item should read ratify approval of contract with Cal West Construction General Building Incorporated in the amount of $438,580 for the Cathedral Drive PM 1.21 2017 storm damage repair project is recommended by the deputy CEO director of public works. We also have an addenda to the consent agenda. Item 29.1 is asking the board to adopt 16 resolutions appointing the unopposed special district candidates who have filed declarations of candidacy for the November 3rd, 2020 presidential general election and adopt two resolutions accepting applications and appointing candidates for two vacancies as recommended by the county clerk. There's a board memo printout and the 16 resolutions are attached. And I believe that's all we have. Okay, thank you. Do any board members wish to pull a consent item to the regular agenda? Okay, we'll move on to public comment. And we'll go right before this, we're gonna allow Supervisor McPherson to make, to say something. We can't hear you. Supervisor, you're on mute. I should be unmuted now. I were okay. You're okay now. Can you hear me now? Yep, yes, we can. Okay, well, good, okay. I have some very good news from our personnel director, Ajita Patel, about the layoff notices that we had to go through. I have our budget sessions because of COVID and so forth and the difficult budget situation we were in. At that time, for October, there were 37 positions that needed to be addressed. And I am very happy to announce that 26 of those positions that had a date line for October to be addressed have been. And there have been some retirements, about eight, I guess, but employees have been, they've been placed in alternate county positions or have avoided the layoff notices. 26 of those 26, 24 have been placed. Two of those others are going to other positions outside of the county. So that is excellent news. And the remaining 11, their deadline date, as so to speak, is in December. And I hope we can fill those. So it is very good news to know that those positions that we needed to have, that were going to be laid off in October, they have been placed. 26 of those, of the 26, 24 have been placed in county government and two others are going to someplace else in the private sector. So congratulations to our personnel department for working with our employees to have them continue employment. It's great news. And we hope that we can have welcoming news for the remaining 11 come December. So thank you very much to our personnel department and for the whole county staff. Very good news. It was a very troubling time when we had to lay off some positions, eliminate some positions during our budget sessions that we just completed. So thank you very much. You're welcome. It is good news. I'll just ask for the 26, that's wonderful for the 11. They're okay until December now instead of October. That's correct. That's correct. Okay. So right now we're still looking at the 11 and trying to place them. That's correct, Supervisor Caput. Personals working to place the remaining 11. You bet. Okay, thank you. Thanks a lot. Thanks Bruce. Supervisor Caput. If I may, if I may, if I may remind everybody, we have a lot of outside people joining us on our team's call today. If you would please remember to mute yourself. Otherwise, we hear you in our chambers. Thank you. Okay. And how many people wanna speak on the public comment? Okay. If you want the whole three minutes, can we do the, and then we'll go to two minutes only because we got a full agenda today. The first ones that really wanna speak for three minutes come up and line up now, that'd be good. Okay. Hi Gary. Gary Richard, our old chairman, Supervisors and Bruce McPherson here. Talking about the Red Chinese influence in our particular area. We have in a magazine here and talking about organizations that are involved in the violence and they talk about the Revolutionary Communist Party, Indivisible Antifa and California Forward. Both Bruce McPherson and Fred Keely are integral parts of Leon Panetta's organization, California Forward. Turns out that Leon Panetta's co-founder is Lenny Mendonca who advocates getting rid of 80% of the local government. I've also got the news release from AP in which Willie Brown said to get rid of all, all counties and governments. Right now, Bruce McPherson is the man in charge of Ambag, which is a cog, a council of government. It's no more than a Soviet. And we see that CalCog has put out literally a parallel government with the California bear replacing what is supposed to be going on in front here, but it's really hidden behind the machine, behind the newspapers. 93% of the newspapers are controlled by the council on foreign relations. I think I've given you information on that. Also new information about Leon Panetta and his friend Hugh DeLacy. It turns out that the community foundation that is making all the orders, the stand-ins and setting up trackers and tracers inside this county that is no more than anything that Mao or what they did in Cambodia, they're being trained in this building at least last week when I was walking by the meetings. Hugh DeLacy was honored by the community foundation. It shows here that Hugh DeLacy went to Red China and he visited Solomon Adler. Solomon Adler was a veteran Soviet agent. There are emails back and forth from Hugh DeLacy to John's service in the Amarasia case in which he had stolen many secret files from the US government to support communist Red China. So we see not only the California Forward, our community organization that has been paid, Margaret Lepez, who makes all the policies being paid by a secret donor. And this includes conspiracy by the general council by we've got pictures of Palacios here together with Susan True. You cannot have authority given to this lady without your conspiring against the people. And I ask you to take care of that as soon as possible. Here's the article, Brown seeks to abolish local governments. That's exactly what you're doing behind the people's back. Thank you. Thank you. For the people standing in line to speak, if you towards the back could please push out further into the hallway, you can hear the meeting in there that way we can social distance and keep six feet apart. Thank you. Hi, good morning. My name is Drew Lewis. Farther of the line, if you wanna sit down. I would like to give some of my speaking time to have a moment of silence to honor the victims of the illegal unscientific and draconian lockdown measures imposed upon our people and community. Many people have suffered increased suicides, job losses, business failures, domestic violence, increased homelessness and societal collapse. We are now seeing the outcome of this policy spreading out on our streets in the form of homeless destitute families, all for a disease that has a mortality that is less than half that of the seasonal flu, according to the Center for Disease Control. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Hi, I'm John David. I'd like to talk about the consideration of extending the lock, the emergency or not. I don't care what you have to say, it doesn't matter anyway, whatever it is, I'm against it, no matter who conceived it or commenced it, I'm against it. That was a Marx Brothers song and I changed the lyric. Well, we've been spun to arguing about this crazy COVID thing by media bought by corporations. Let's come together in cooperation to heal our nation and social media as well has led this contentious hell where many are stuck in echo chambers. So many who were friends now act like strangers, increasing danger to disagree with COVID rules is called the mark of crazy fools who simply don't care since they're deluded. But most have studied evidence and concluded someone colluded, corruption is running wild, the money trail that was left behind in 2000 starts with Bill Gates, mastermind of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization. That's UNICEF World Bank, The Who and Bill's Foundation working for the creation of healthy vaccine markets. Warren Buffett in 2006 gave 85% of his fortune, get this to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 85%. It's a 20 to one return says Bill with elation to invest in vaccination on April 4th, 2009. The Who announced the flu called swine on their website a month later, they changed the definition of pandemic by making the omission of two conditions. They kept the virus that had to be new, which humans have no immunity to, but took out the several epidemics and high death numbers are no longer a yardstick for a pandemic. Then what does that mean? Is that my end? You won't believe the answer they gave when asked the reason for the change they made, the Who called the definition quote a rather bleak picture that could be very scary, so they prefer a definition less scarier. When January 2010 came around, Bill Gates called out the time is now and promised to give 10 billion to the Who to bring a decade of vaccines to be ready for new pandemics. At the end of 2019, MIT, a new way to record vaccination history, smartphone readable quantum dots that penetrate and embed within your skin through tiny needles, the brainchild of Bill Gates, he funded it and asked for it. What do you think of that? Okay, I'm done. Thank you. Thank you. Monica McGuire continuing on this year when March 11th rolled round the Who's directored issues of sound we have therefore made the assessment that COVID-19 could be characterized as a pandemic. Not is a pandemic? An interesting turn of phrase. It's also interesting to note the day before the Who declared their vote. It's partnered the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator got a 125 million dollar promise to forget me not. From the Gates and from Mastercard, what? On the 20th of March, the Who guideline implementation of global surveillance of COVID-19 defines confirmed case as laboratory confirmation. No matter what the clinical signs and symptoms, that's a new definition. No one ever used before. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Trust manages assets the foundation invests in the companies that are given the grants. So often grants return to the pockets of bills, pants, quite a slick dance. As Dr. Lev at Stanford's owned who won the Nobel Prize has shown Sweden achieved herd immunity without a lockdown wrecking their communities. Yet with impunity, you officials say hunker down. Seeing more lockdowns, you're predicting to ensure that COVID's really through but so much of what we're told makes no sense. We need a public debate about the pretense that lockdowns make any sense. More like too much misery. Why does big business get a password smaller when's get kicked in the ass? Those survive my social distance that bleeds us dry and soon out of existence. We can't pay our rents. The global lockdown has destroyed tens of millions of jobs many now unemployed and greatly disrupted the global supply chain. Millions of small and medium-sized businesses up in flames whenever, wherever a lockdown came. The fear and isolation drive us overdose to suicide. Violence at home, depression and anxiety. For children and the disabled there's more suffering. Worldwide there's more poverty. Worse than the virus could ever be. By keeping apart and hiding our face. Our right to assembly gone, kept in our place and declaring us all bio hazards. This unelected power place manufactured and our health freedoms shattered. The children have to suffer most with fear of friends they're forcefully dosed. Humanity hid behind platforms, petitions, what kind of kids will come from these conditions of division? Let freedom ring. So, hard act to follow. But I wanna commend the members of our community who have utilized their creativity to communicate the things that need to be communicated. We just said the Pledge of Allegiance and my name is Jay Rosella Myers and I am a member of the First District and an ex-employee of the County of Santa Cruz in the personnel department. And I commend you all for all your hard work of trying to find placement and jobs for people who have probably been working here for some time and hopefully stay eligible for their retirement at some point. And that's really important to a lot of the employees here. But in the Pledge of Allegiance the final lines say liberty and justice for all. And that is such a primary part of the Santa Cruz community as individuals to think for ourselves and to be able to have the free choice to live the kind of lives that we wanna live. And all this pandemic stuff has made criminals out of people who wanna still have free choice. We need to stay passionate about the idea that we have the possibility of people being able to think for themselves and to have elected officials who allow for that and listen to us. So I plead with all of you to listen to our incredible community about all the amazing input that we have about other choices that might be available to us in terms of how to deal with something like this. And I thank you all for your public service and your abilities to help us all achieve what we need as an independent thinking community. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. Hi, I'm here to talk about something totally different. My name is Anne Thrift. I'm a recent evacuee from the CZU complex lightning fires. And I'm here to talk about two things. One is the fact of what happened that night on the 18th with the supposed emergency warning system which is not working, I'm gonna tell you about. And second, the subject of homeowners flood insurance does not usually cover earth movement. And this, what I'm gonna talk about here is also relevant to evacuation, having to do a debris flow. I live on lower 230s. My name is Anne Thrift. I think I said that I live on lower 236 near the fourth Acorn and Boulder Creek. My house is still standing between ashy slopes of the Acorns and a fallen leaf, both of which were mostly destroyed. I want to thank the county for responding quickly to coordinate help for all of us after we evacuated, but you need to know about a couple of problems that would also affect the debris flow issue. The emergency warning system we kept hearing about last year at all those wildfire preparedness meetings I attended did not work for everyone. I speak for others who didn't know on August 18th what fires were happening, where, how close, how urgent, if we had orders to evacuate, what that meant, how to do it, where to go, or who to believe about any of this. We all had different expectations or didn't know what to expect. And this went on for hours and hours and hours. The only emergency warning system that night in much of San Lorenzo Valley was social media, next door or Facebook, not code red, which we were all told to sign up for, not reverse 911 if that's even still around. Many of us signed up for code red and never got a single alert. I haven't not in two years. Some got alerts for areas in other counties. One said a Cal Fire helicopter hovered over the golf course, yelling something they couldn't hear and then found out it was in the wrong neighborhood. No sheriffs came knocking door to door or down the street with a loud speaker. Even they didn't know what was happening until late that night. Now the county's discussing warning the same people about debris flow. I'm trying to imagine just how you expect to do this when those things move a lot faster than fire. So you have several problems. The first three are there's no emergency warning system that actually warns everyone in an emergency. We just experienced this. If you build one that actually works, you need to communicate exactly what it is, how it works to everyone proactively, not passively. And you need to make sure everyone knows exactly what to expect, what to do and where to go. My last comments have to do with financing and also how you evacuate people with no cars who don't drive, who have nowhere to go. My insurance paid for a hotel. It won't for earth movement. I just checked. No flood, no homeowners insurance pays for that. You guys have a big problem ahead of you. I have other comments I will submit. Thank you. Thank you. Hi, Marilyn. Hi, Marilyn Garrett, part of wireless radiation alert network. And today, first of all, I wanna thank the people who spoke before me and putting facts to songs. I'm thinking of a book I have called Living Downstream. An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment by Dr. Sandra Seingraber. She is a biologist, a poet, a cancer survivor, a mother, an author. And the title Living Downstream comes from a parable where a community living downstream got very good at rescuing people who were just about drowning coming downstream. And they got very good at it. And she says, no one looks at who's pushing them in the stream. Her book is the journey upstream to see the powers that are destroying people. And as I listen to the song today, I'm thinking how we are all downstream, we are all downwind, and we are being inundated with corporate propaganda pushing us to our deaths. And we need to be stopping this. As I was, I read the county document called Protecting Public Health from Fire Ash. And there was a tiny list of the toxins in this fire ash. Oh, also in her book, she says it's a form of homicide when people are dying. And she said it's intolerable that corporations are putting known and suspected carcinogens into the environment instead of prohibiting their generation in the first place. We need to be prohibiting toxins from being put in forcefully into our environment and our bodies. And as I looked at the list from the county of metals and arsenic, and it's only a partial list of what's in these ashes. If it had just been trees burning, we wouldn't have all these carcinogens and PCBs and fire retardants and pesticides and also the pollutants from all the utilities and microwaves. Your job is to genuinely protect public health, not the corporate wealth. Thank you. Good morning supervisors. I'm Mary Jo Walker. I live in the San Lorenzo Valley, Lompico specifically. I'm here to talk about emergency exit routes out of the county roads. But before I do that, I wanted to say two other things. My experience during the evacuation is very similar to Ms. Thrift. I just wanted to say that she's not the only one. And I got all my information off the internet. However, many of us live in areas which are so rural we don't get cell reception. So my internet comes off of a router and if there's no electricity, no router and no information. And the second thing I wanted to mention also is that I know you have a, my heart goes out to the thousand or so families that lost their homes. Fortunately, I'm not in that situation. I don't know what I would do, but I do feel for them. I know you have a lot on your plate right now what with the recovery and rebuilding effort from the fire. There's a lot to do. But I wanted to say immediately after the evacuation ended when people started moving back into Lompico and right away there was a lot of discussion about the exit routes out of Lompico. You may or may not know that there is one road in, one road in and out. And the last evacuation we had during the fire was very orderly, was well managed by our fire department. But we had 24 hours. If we only had 15 hours, if there was a fire that started there, 15 minutes I mean, if there was a fire that started there and we had to get out pronto you can bet people would be burning alive on that road. I'm pretty sure of it. And it's not just a problem in Lompico. I'm sure there's areas all over the counties, probably areas in other areas in San Lorenzo Valley is probably Bonny Dune, probably Bonny Dune. There's people that have limited access in the case of emergency. Maybe at the summit. Corralitos, maybe at Mount Madonna. All over the county there's problems with emergency exits. And I know that your county, you were dealing with putting together a long-term recovery, rebuilding effort. I'm not sure what to call it in response to climate change. And this should be part of it. This should be part of emergency exits needs to be part of your climate change response. There are emergency exits out of Lompico that could be used in the case of emergency. I'd like to see those developed and announced so that people know that we have a plan for us up there rather than hundreds of people burning alive. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning supervisors. Pardon me for the hat. It's a little easy to wear this mask with it all on. I came down here to address the same matter my wife did. This issue has been discussed for a long time in Lompico Canyon, but it seems as though this is the time to really talk about it. There are two, Lompico has a bulk of housing right in the center of a three and a half mile long canyon. Most of the people live on the east and west side of the central core of that canyon. All the roads are too lane. The exit road is too lane constrained in a channel with a creek on one side and a mountain side on the other. So if there's a traffic accident in that road in the midst of a rush evacuation, it's going to be a mess. So from the eastern side, there's an existing road alignment. Apparently the landowner wants to subdivide the property through which this road passes. We've spoken to the fire chief, John Stives for Zianti. He's fully aware of this. It's got a gate on it right now. This just needs to be formalized so that there's a process set up and the roads checked for its width and so forth. It doesn't need, because it would be an emergency only use road, it's not going to have to conform to ordinary construction standards. On the western side of the canyon from what's called West Drive, there is another series of road alignments that exits all the way out to beyond the Newell Creek Dam. This road could also be converted into an emergency gated exit under the control of the sheriff and the fire department. So anyway, I would hope that this could be put on the public works schedule to get into sometime within the next, I don't know what the schedule is. So I won't propose a time, but it's really not going to be as difficult. Right now I'm working on matters that involve the Public Utilities Commission, the Board of Forestry and Pacific Gas and Electric. These are vastly more complicated than what I decided to come down here to speak about this morning. And there are a few legal issues associated with road right-of-ways and so forth, but the county has all the authority it needs to establish these escape routes. And as my wife said, there are likely to be other box canyons in the Santa Cruz mountains all the way from Watsonville to Davenport that could benefit from better escape access. Thank you very much. Thank you. Hey, good morning. My name's Shalak Kavanis. I love Santa Cruz. I love Santa Cruz. I have a thank you for your service and thank you for your support. I am the chairperson for the Santa Cruz County Mental Health Advisory Board. And I'm here to address the very last letter in your correspondence, which is a support for the Recovery Cafe. And I have another member of the Mental Health Advisory Board who's going to say a little bit more. Thank you. Good morning. Thanks for giving us all a little time to speak. The Recovery Cafe started in Seattle as a nonprofit and there's about 12 independent nonprofits around the country. And we formed a nonprofit for Santa Cruz. It's pretty much just a drop-in center. People are expected to be clean, but they get recovery groups each week, get a cup of coffee, maybe some resources and maybe some classes. With COVID as we were about to start, we've had to rethink it. So we're looking at maybe doing some group outside groups, COVID safe at either the shelters or outside at a food pantry, something like that. So just asking if at some point in the future, whether we could do a 10-minute presentation for you guys to get your support too. Cool. I think your microphone's not on. I wanna thank both of you for your help and dedication to the Mental Health Advisory Board. You guys have done a wonderful job. Thank you. Thank you. Greg comes to almost every meeting. You have not missed a meeting and it's so great to have your support and it's great to have the rest of the support. The Board of Supervisors who's been here, who know the system, know how important mental health and behavior health is and you guys have continually and consistently supported it at the beginning of last month when we had the Disease of Addiction presentation with amazing speakers here. And it's one of the reasons why Santa Cruz is so beautiful and such a wonderful place and thank you for your guys' service. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, thank you for all your support with COVID, with eviction protection, with the fires, the amount of support that you're giving the community. We appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning. Good morning, supervisors. The citizens of New California State are issuing this notification of presentment and recognition of New California State. We, the citizens of New California State are determined to live under a state government in the United States of America and under the Constitution of America. New California Declaration of Independence, January 15, 2018 states, whenever any form of government becomes destructive, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it and to institute new government when a long train of abuses and acts to seize and hold the people's power without legal authority and pursuing invariably the same object that clearly demonstrates a design to reduce them under absolute despotism. Our vision, a representative government for citizens adhering to the United States Constitution, our mission, formation of New California State, statement of intent, the citizens of New California have decided to remedy the abuse of power by the Constitution, Article Four, Section Three and Section Four. The United States Constitution, Article Four, Section Three states, new states may be admitted by Congress into this union, but no new state shall be formed or created within the jurisdiction of any other state without the consent of the legislature of the states concerned as well as of the Congress. United States Constitution, Article Four, Section Four, the United States shall guarantee to every state in this union a Republican form of government and shall protect each of them against invasion and on application of the legislature or of the executive when the legislature cannot be convened against domestic violence. Respectfully, Mark Doring, Senator Pro-Town. Thank you. Thank you. I'm Julie Kelly. Could you pull it down? Oh, thank you. Thank you. I'm Julie Kelly with New California State. Order of the day. Arrest the Senate President. Well, we, the people of the unified counties of New California seek the approval of California State President of the Senate, Tony G. Atkins, born August 1st, 1962, is an American politician serving as the 51st and current president pro-temporary of the California State Senate since 2018. A member of the Democratic Party, she previously served as the 69th Speaker of the California State Assembly from 2014 to 2016. Upon her election as Speaker of the State Assembly, she became the third woman and first acknowledged lesbian to be elected into the position as well as the first lawmaker from San Diego holding the office. She served on the San Diego City Council from 2000 to 2008, including a term as Acting Mayor of San Diego in 2005. She also served as Acting Governor of California for nine hours on July 30th, 2014. In 2018, she succeeded Kevin de Leon as State Senate President pro-temporary. This made her the first woman and the only LGBT person to lead the California State Senate. Katie Grimes of the California Globe reported on March 19th, 2020. While most of the California public and news media was focused on the coronavirus, the California State Senate worked into the evening, Monday and past Senate Resolution 86, allowing the Senate President pro-Tim Tony Atkins to assign, remove, and replace. Is that my time? You have one minute. Okay. You must wear your mask over your nose. This made her, Senate Tony, to authorize one or more members of the committee to participate by telephone, teleconference, or other electronic means. This means senators do not have to be in the Capitol or on the Senate floor to vote on legislation. Atkins said this resolution provides her with the flexibility to function during the time of crisis and allow Senate to be more nimble and responsive during emergencies. Atkins also said allowing senators to participate remotely, authorizes the public to participate remotely, but would never be, or would be used rarely, if ever. SR 86 was introduced March 16, 2020, and adopted through a voice vote. Okay, thank you. Okay, thank you. Good morning. I'm here today to talk a little bit about common sense, honor, and courage. And I'm talking about this today because it's come to my attention that someone I know has severe health issues and went to a facility to get help with these health issues, specifically digestion and malnutrition, only to find out that this facility, which is not cheap, I'll tell you, they don't even serve organic food. They don't even serve anything of quality. It's literally these packaged meals that are devoid of nutrition, which is the absolute opposite of what this person needs. So it comes to common sense. This is insane. This is Santa Cruz County, California, the United States of America. This is basically one of the brightest jewels of the world as far as the beauty that's around us and the amazing resources that we have, not only natural resources, but also human resources, the minds here, the research that's done here, what people know here is amazing. And yet we are in this place where we're doing completely insane things. We had plastic straws banned, and yet I have myself, I have about probably 70 little plastic containers that I've taken home as to go things from the restaurants and washed them out to reuse them because I'm not gonna throw them away. Each one of these things is at least a straw or two straws. It's insane. What are we doing? Look at the amount of trash that's being produced by this lockdown, which as you have all seen with numerous different sources of information in this room, week after week, month after month, is not appropriate at all. And it's time for you guys to really decide where do you stand? Where do you stand in history? Do you wanna go down in history as people who just caved in to something that makes no sense whatsoever, hurting your very county that you live in, the county where your family is growing up, where you live? It's time to be brave. It's time to take a stand and do the right thing. Use common sense. Have honor. Have courage. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Hey, good morning. Dave Willis, I wanted to come and ask if somebody, some people can start like a program, a letter writing program to like the fire. I wanna call them fire, I'm gonna say fire fighters because there's many women. I don't wanna say fire men. I don't want to be misunderstood, fire fighters. Right, a letter writing campaign so that they can like be given the thanks and appreciation that we should have or think we have, you know what I mean? I would do it. I don't know how. Wrote a letter, tried to send it to them. I don't know if they got it, but it bothers me and I hope that somebody can do that, can start some kind of programs to let these fire people know that we appreciate them greatly because we see the work they do in the fighting and all of that. And like I got $200, I wanted to buy them some water or something, but I wouldn't know what to do or how to do that to get it to them. So my request is that if somebody, some people can start some kind of programs where as we can let those people know if we appreciate them or how great we do. And I wanted to say, as far as voting, we can start voting right now today. You don't have to wait till November. I used to think that, but it's not that way. We can start voting right now. Definitely go out and vote. Don't let nobody lie to you, telling you to try to steal your vote. Many, so many people have suffered and died for the chance to get to vote. This is our time, it's serious to stand with them so we can, we have to fight for our rights to vote. Fight for our rights to vote. Now's the time to stand up and be counted. Definitely go out here and vote. We gotta get these people out of these offices. They are harmful to America. They have not helped America. Let's hold them accountable. Get them out of there. It's time to vote. If you've got questions, you can call, contact voter registration wherever you are. They can answer all your questions, any questions you have, they can answer all of them. They have safe ways to vote, vote online, boxes throughout the county. Definitely do it, stand up and vote. It's serious. It's time, thanks. You're welcome, thank you. Hey, good morning. Hey, good morning. It's really nice to be able to show up somewhere and look people in the eye and talk and have it be recorded. I'm not really sure what to talk about because there's so many things to comment on later. There's over 1,100 pages of information today. Three weeks ago there was over 980. I would so rather talk about all the fun stuff I'm doing and all the people I'm actually helping in youth with activities and making some really, that's not really crazy food. I'm just processing a lot of food and it's pretty good. So I just really don't know where to begin because we have a population that is really living in a state of fear and they're not reaching out to each other and there's just ridiculous, such non-common sense things going on. So possibly I'll just wait to speak on other matters. I mean, I was gonna contemplate thinking about so you think you wanna attempt to take down the deep state. That would probably take a little bit more time than three minutes to discuss but one would need to kinda go back to how we got here and just go back in time and look at really our food supply and how everything has been so centralized and constrained into machines taking over things instead of the farmers. 80 years ago, 100 years ago, over 40% of the food that people ate, they grew in their own gardens and it's all been really controlled. More than 100 years ago, individuals knew a great deal about medicine because they were just taught that and now we are dependent on largely Western medicine which is petrochemicals. I could go into some more detail about that but I'll talk about other stuff later. Thank you, it's really nice to be able to be here. I will say that I haven't been engaging with law enforcement as much as I usually do but I had a delightful, maybe it's hard to say delightful but it was a really respectful conversation with two officers about 10 days ago. So thank you all. Hey, thank you and do we have anyone downstairs or online? The community room is closed today because we don't need to have, there's, we have plenty of room up here today. However, we do have four web comments. So the first one is from Karen Erlich. I am a Lompeco resident. It is a wonderful that a section of Lompeco Road that took three years to get repaired was indeed ready to use during the August evacuations. That said, I believe that wild buyers have pointed out that Lompeco is vulnerable to catastrophe. We might well have other closures on our only roadway that would make it a lethal situation. There are possibilities for emergency exits to be put in place at the order of this board. Mary Jo Walker and Kevin Collins have explicit suggestions for how to develop emergency road access that would be under the control of our sheriffs and the Ziantifier department. Then in case of dire emergencies, residents could be evacuated over routes that are open up only in the case of dire need. The grand jury report that so thoroughly criticized the county for deficits in protecting Santa Cruz citizens, specifically pinpointed Lompeco as the area of the entire, excuse me, specifically pinpointed Lompeco as the area of the entire county at the highest risk for fire disaster, that we only have a single narrow road that is at risk of outages at all times must be included in the board's deliberation about how to mitigate the risk to approximately 1,800 residents of our Belks Canyon. We must have alternate escape routes secured so that my neighbors and I can get out at the same time that emergency responders can get in. I hope all of you, but especially Supervisor McPherson who represents Lompeco will make this a highest priority among the priorities that you must address. The second one is from Jessica Peters, Dear Board of Supervisors. I am asking you to pull item number 28 from the consent agenda and do not approve as written. The response, ready, aim, fire, Santa Cruz County in the hot seat, report should be further evaluated. These responses were never, these responses would never fly in the private sector and are not acceptable here. To simply copy and paste answers from one document to another is appalling and shows a clear lack of engagement from this board as well as its administration. It doesn't even appear that the time was taken to proofread as our typos and errors within. Given with your, our community has just gone through, I urge you to treat this report as a valuable tool. It was designated to be. Thank you. The third comment is from Zia Isola, Dear Supervisors, I'm sorry I cannot attend the meeting today, but I hope this message will reach you. There are over 1,000 residents living in the Lompeco Canyon, yet only a single two mile long narrow road that leads in and out of the canyon. The road is bounded on one side by a creek and the other side by steep cliffs. There is no driving on the shoulder because there is no shoulder. Fall residents had to evacuate. The road would be hopelessly clogged, blocked to egress as well as ingress by emergency vehicles. This is a disaster waiting to happen. Please consider what would happen if a fast moving fire were to sweep through the canyon. It would be a scenario similar to the Paradise Fire, where the line of cars was so long and slow moving that evacuees could not escape the fire. I strongly urge the county to add additional routes out of the canyon with the intensity and frequency of fires only increasing in California. This course of action is both sensible and urgent. There are already existing road alignments that could be developed. One begins off of Upper Lake Boulevard. That would allow emergency exit down to the intersection of Lompica Road and East Sianti from West Drive. There are considerable connectable road sections leading out an exit into Newell Creek Road near the Loch Lomondam. It would be far safer to have three exits rather than a single narrow road. In addition to the residents of the canyon and non-pandemic times are dozens of visitors at Loch Lomond during the summer. The county has a moral obligation to establish additional roads out of the canyon. Hundreds of lives are potentially at stake. Please take action. Thank you for giving this matter your attention and consideration. The last one is from Satya Orayan. I was shown a letter from Whole Foods manager, Seth Wayland, who has employees which states, we got some clarification on mask wearing in stores. So here's your new standard operating procedure on front door mask monitoring. There is no longer a medical reason not to wear a mask. Here's the direct verbiage from the Santa Cruz County health officer. Seth Wayland goes on to quote, Debbie Kessler, county environmental health specialist. Regarding the medical issue, there are no provisions in the state of California mask requirements for a medical condition. The health officer for Santa Cruz County is also a doctor and she has stated that there is no respiratory condition that would prevent anyone from wearing a mask. Even COPD or asthma. As far as the state and county are concerned, everyone should be wearing a mask while shopping. No medical exceptions. I've written twice to Gayle Newell to ask if she had in fact made the statement and why she would do so. Given the fact that medical exemptions are included in both the state of California and the Santa Cruz mask guidelines, I received no reply. Why is the county allowing a staff person to give false misleading medical opinion and legal advice to businesses who has authorized the environmental health specialist to make public policy? Is the county willing to assume liability for the consequences of this action and why has no one responded to these concerns? And public comment is complete now. Thank you. Okay. That concludes item number five, public comment. Next we have item number six, action on the consent agenda. And do any board members have comments or additional direction for items on the consent agenda? Thank you, Chair. Just a couple of comments that I'd like to offer on item number 26, I'd like to just thank the second harvest food bank for their ongoing work, being hunger fighters and providing food to people most in need, especially during this COVID-19 crisis. They've been incredibly helpful in making sure that people who have never sought food before from the food bank have been there. And I just want to appreciate the good work that they do. On item number 28, which is the grand jury reports, I think that the reports bring up some significant issues and I'm ready to support the recommended actions. I do want to note that our system just went through a real time stress test. And in that stress test all the agencies in Santa Cruz were able to work together with the mutual aid agreement under a unified command to be able to fight the fire when no one else was available to help us out. They did an amazing job. We call them heroes. And we will learn much from the after incident report that will help improve our county fire system. But I think that it will be important to look at that, what actually happened during the biggest fire crisis that we have as the best test of what is going on with our fire system. On item number 33, I look forward to having a public discussion about the possible expansion of the Live Oak parking program. The program as it stands right now was created many, many years ago. I look forward to working with the Department of Public Works and the community to redesign this program to be more effective and to reach the neighborhoods that are most greatly impacted. On item number 36, this regular report on measures to reduce the number of people being held in jail before trial. We have seen a lot change, obviously, since the COVID pandemic, but these numbers about concurrences, about an effective tool that has proven its effectiveness over 14 years, still seems remarkably low. And we could do a better job and make sure that people aren't held longer than necessary in jail. I look forward to the election and hopefully the passage of Prop 25, which will allow us to get rid of the bail system. And I think we could have more people that don't have to serve time in jail for just the fact that they don't have enough money. And with that, that's the end. Thank you. Any other board members, feel free to comment. This is Cheryl, briefly comment. This is Supervisor Friend. I'd just like to thank the parks department on item 41 and congratulate them on their work with the Coastal Conservancy regarding Hidden Beach Park, which is in the middle of some community-based fundraising for much-needed upgrades, but also this will help bring our permanent restroom for those young families that use that park. Also on item 46, I wanna continue to always provide my gratitude to Public Works who are continuing to work on the storm damage projects from a couple of years ago, while other projects still continue to add up on to their plate. This Cathedral Drive project, I just appreciate Mr. Wiesner in Public Works and Director Machado for your continued work in regards to that. Those are the only two items that I wanted to speak on a consent. Thank you. You're welcome. Okay. There's no other comments. Mr. Chair? Yes. Yeah, Supervisor McPherson, there's a couple items I wanted to comment on. Number, first one is item number 28, the grand jury responses. I know that we're all very appreciative of the work by the grand jury. They put in hundreds of hours of volunteer time for this valuable public service. These reports add to our accountability and transparency and how we function as a county. So I wanna thank them for their service. And regarding the fire report specifically, there are many challenges that have been built up over the years and it's important to acknowledge those proactively. We, before the next fire season comes upon us an emergency. There's vegetation management, reducing fire fuels, evacuation plans. As has been mentioned, and I'm well aware of the Lompeco situation, I can assure you of that. And the adequate resources to fight the fires, just to name a few of the issues as we need to prepare for the next time, if God forsake us, if it happens again. But we will be addressing some of those issues on our regular agenda today. On item number 29 on the coronavirus relief funds, I wanna thank the CAO and the staff for bringing this item forward. I appreciate the financial information on the spending to date, but the report does say that we plan to spend the majority of the remaining $14 million before the end of October. And what can you tell us now that will be funded? I don't think this needs to be taken off the agenda, but that's less than a month from now. And I just wanted to get a general overview of the plan of attack about the remaining $14 million. Supervisor McPherson, I believe Christina Murray might be on who helped put together this item. We do have the allocations that the board approved as part of the budget actions for the revised budget. And we're happy to provide that information. There was a predetermined plan for spending the funds. So we could get you that information. Okay, I think that'd be great. So we could specify too in the next meeting that we have as a board, just where it is by the end of the month, what we're doing. Thank you. There's an additional item on the consent agenda, the fire district board appointments. Just want to note that there's a vacancy, the vacancies on the Bendelman Fire Board and the Power Road Dunes Geological Hazardous abatement board. And those applications need to be into the board by October 29th. If anybody's interested for appointment by the Board of Supervisors, that which will be done on November 17th. I just think it's important to know that there's some deadlines and dates that need to be met for somebody that might want to serve on those boards. On the item 36 on free trial services, I want to thank the probation department for bringing this item and for managing this important work on behalf of the county. Because of this work, it's so critical to meet our goals to reduce recidivism and the number of people held in our jail is I would like to provide this additional direction on that issue. When this item comes back for another report in March of next year, I'd like to have it scheduled on the regular agenda. So the board has benefited discussing the analysis more fully. And I think that was mentioned by Supervisor Leopold as well. I think it's a very promising program. And I just would like to have more information when you come back for a report in March of next year. On item 37, the harm reduction grant, I want to thank the Health Services Administration for seeking the additional resources to support a better public health outcomes around syringe services. But I'd like to add another direction on this. As the Health Services Agency applies for funding for its syringe services program, it should be operationalized in a manner that is consistent with the previous action and policy by the board. That's an important commitment we need to keep to the public. I know there's a lot on the plate of the Health Services Agency, which gets me into item number 38 on the syringe services deferral. On that note, I know the COVID pandemic and the fire response has no doubt taken as toll on the Health Services Agency and all of our county departments. And it's been an enormous effort, a response effort of the two major incidents at the same time, something like we've never seen before here. That said, the prevalence of syringe later in our community is also a huge public health problem and it's existed for many years without much improvement. To the extent that our syringe services program could have greater role in managing that problem, the community needs some solutions now. And I can understand the situation, as I said, with the departments and how much they've had on their plates. But we have deferred this item over and over again in a way that could lead members of the public to reasonably conclude, we don't believe it's a problem, but in reality it is. So I would like to make some addressable direction that we move the deferral from the next report from May, 2021 to February, 2021 and accept no further delay beyond that point because I know that this is going to be coming up front and center for a lot of people and it's something that we have deferred, understandably so under the current circumstances, but I think we need to really get at it sooner than May, 2021 and I'd like to see us have a more direct action of what we can do by February, 2021. That's my comments on the consent agenda, Mr. Chair. You're welcome, thank you. Mr. Chair, this is Brian Coonerty. I just wanted to add a couple of comments. First time, I have number 26, which is additional funding to second harvest. I was at one of their food distributions a couple of weeks ago and the lines of families were long for people who were seeking food assistance in these difficult times and I'm incredibly glad that we're able to add additional resources to help second harvest and meet that need in our community. Item number 28, which is the grand jury reports, I want to thank the citizens for their efforts to raise awareness around fire and homelessness response and I take those reports seriously, read them closely and we'll be working on those going forward. Item number 34, Supervisor Friend and I are asking the Board of Supervisors to write a letter to Senate leader McConnell asking to wait to fill the Supreme Court nomination until after the election, until after the Americans voices have been heard. And finally on item number 37 and 38, I wanna support Supervisor McPherson's additional directions on item 37, it's important that any additional efforts be in line with what the Board has directed and item number 38. We just took a call last week in my office from a woman who found eight needles in a park adjacent to her home and now she doesn't. Supervisor Coonerty, we missed the last few sentences that you were breaking up. Supervisor Coonerty, we've lost connection with you. I think he was ending by saying he supported what Supervisor McPherson had done on items 37 and 38 and if the chair is okay with it, we can let him comment again later if he comes back or when he comes back. Okay. Yes, we'll go to, yeah. Supervisor Friend, do you have anything? He already spoke. Well, I'll just number item 28. Thank the Santa Cruz County Grand Jury for all their work and dedication. I know it's a job that it includes a lot of hard work, a lot of investigation, and you do it pretty much on a volunteer basis. You get a small stipend, but other than the honor of serving on the Grand Jury for your time and effort, the only thing we can actually do for you is say thank you very much. And Supervisor Coonerty, if you had anything else to add and if you're able to get online again, is there anybody would like to make a motion? I would move the consent agenda with the additional changes. Okay. Second. We have first, second. Clerk will conduct the roll call vote. Come on, Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Okay. Supervisor Coonerty, vote on the consent agenda. Supervisor McPherson. Aye. Chair Caput. Aye. And Supervisor Coonerty, are you there? I am, aye. Okay. Okay. We have a unanimous roll call vote and the motion is passed. We'll move now to the regular agenda starting with item number seven. A 9,646 presentation on the CZU Lightning Complex fire by representatives from the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, also known as FEMA, as outlined in the memorandum of the County Administrative Officer. Thank you for all being here. It's been a tough time and I wanna thank you for everything you're doing. Thank you, Chair Caput. Elisa Benson, Assistant CAO and I am gonna kick us off today in our presentation around recovery frameworks with specific focus on the importance of our residents, businesses, individuals, signing up for disaster related programs. So I'm gonna ask Christine to man the PowerPoint and I will introduce our partners from FEMA and the state and we'll go through today's presentation. So our purpose for today, as I mentioned, is part of our continued effort to provide updated and current information around the county's recovery efforts to the board and the public at every possible meeting and opportunity. Just as a reminder, at the 915 meeting we focused on our efforts to streamline planning and environmental health processes and lower fees to promote efficient rebuilding in our fire affected areas. On last week's meeting we focused on debris flow and mudslide hazards and the importance of evacuation and our efforts along there. Today we're gonna be focusing on recovery more broadly and the criticality of all our residents and businesses affected by the fire whether in the burn zone or outside of the burn zone to sign up for federal assistance programs both FEMA and Small Business Association. Can we click, here we go. I'm gonna quickly go through our agenda. I'm gonna provide a very brief snapshot of the sort of broadest disaster recovery framework and how we're organizing ourselves here at the county to meet the mission. And then I'm gonna hand it over to deputy director of Cal OES, Ryan Burris to talk about the state's role in recovery and recovery more broadly. And I think Robert, one of his deputies will also be speaking as part of it. And then we'll be handing over to Mr. Willie Nunn, our federal coordinating officer for FEMA to talk about the federal framework and specifically us getting into those questions of individual assistance. So with that, and then we'll have questions of course for all of you. Before you is actually a very straightforward, probably one of the most straightforward, simple depictions of recovery, the federal recovery framework after a disaster. And we shared this with board members early in the incident. So as we were trying to get ourselves organized for what would come after initial response. And you can see this framework really focuses on what you would think first and foremost. Those questions of rebuilding, but it also has a broader focus on natural resources and cultural aspects that you wanna think about as you recover. The economic implications of both lost businesses, lost homes and issues around what does it mean if we have people leaving the community? How do we take that into consideration both short and long term as we think about recovery and rebuilding? Obviously there's in our public infrastructure and our housing, but it really is a comprehensive approach that starts at the beginning, but actually takes a much broader view of rebuilding a community. And as we've been thinking about it, we see our recovery effort is really a moment to live our vision in the strategic plan. And I just wanna read that out loud that Santa Cruz County is a healthy, safe and more affordable community that is culturally diverse, economically inclusive and environmentally vibrant. So we're trying to take that vision that we adopted for our county overall to heart as we think about recovery in the specific communities affected by the fire. So next slide please, Christine. To that end in organizing ourselves for the recovery work ahead, we have taken those six pillars and sort of stretch them across what we're calling three domains. Front and center is our rebuild and recovery really built environment focused multidisciplinary team. And we have asked Matt Machado to really be the lead for that effort with department support from planning and environmental health. And we see that as a place where we're really gonna have to put a lot of focused resources initially. We also of course have our human care and recovery branch of this framework. And we have Emily Bolly, our assistant director of human services to lead that along with support from Marcus Pimentel, Suzanne Issa from planning on the housing side and then Kimberly Finley for real property as we think about that. And then the other component is really around that emergency preparedness and community resilience. We heard a lot about that today in public comments. You know, how do we look at evacuation? How do we look at access? And then we also see in there that's where you get to some of those secondary considerations in terms of longer-term questions of economic impacts and how do we address those and community planning more broadly. So I'm gonna pass it to Mr. Bures, our visitor from Cal OAS who's been incredibly helpful and bringing his team already multiple times to visit us. And then Mr. Nunn to really walk us through that broader recovery framework and the importance of signing up for programs. Thank you for being here today. Thank you, we can go to the next slide. I would like to thank you for having me here today. Again, it's nice to meet some familiar faces again and nice to meet you, myself. Just, you know, this is a complex time, not just for Santa Cruz, but for the state. I just, yesterday I was with the director and we traveled the Zog Fire and the Glass Fire and there's additional 1,000 homes destroyed, several businesses, the ag business there is just gonna be extremely tough for those counties because they lost most of their production. The only reason I say that is, I just wanna give you confidence that the team is still dedicated to Santa Cruz. I've been with, since day one, we've been dealing with your local leadership. Disasters are local, they're lead local and we're here to support you. I do have a team here today. I have my state disaster recovery coordinator, Robert Troy, and I'm gonna let him speak more today than I normally do, so you all get to meet him. I did promise several weeks ago that I would have a dedicated branch director here for Santa Cruz. That's gonna be Kendra Boyer, who's in the back, she just arrived yesterday. She'll be here for the entirety of the incident. She will be your point, not just for individual assistance, IA housing, but also debris, anything that deals with this branch. Our branches are gonna include Santa Cruz, San Mateo, Monterey, Santa Clara. So that's gonna be her branch, but she's essentially located here in Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz, just speaking of recovery, y'all lost over non-hearted homes. We have, it's not when, I mean, if it's when a debris flow happens. There's potentially some rain coming up this weekend and that's something we have to be in front of. We have set up several task forces here in the state to include watershed task force. And I've asked Mr. Bob Troy to set up a call with the county with all task force leads. And that should happen tomorrow the next day with each individual county to start with, to start here in this particular county. Just bring this up in this little short here. It used to have actual days under it. And I told everyone to remove that because people start getting stuck with day 90 and they think they're over the hump. You know, before COVID, I mean, before the fires with COVID, with civil unrest, with PSPS, we had extreme heats. And it's just a very unrelenting year, I think is the best way to say it. And it's only October. Fire season's not done. The waters, the rainy season's about to begin. And we have a lot to do, particularly in the short term. In this particular map, I would say we're in between the short term and intermediate. This is probably the first time here in California that we move this fast with recovery during the response days. One thing I was, when I was appointed to come here and help out the state of California, one thing I made clear is recovery starts day minus 180 from a disaster. We should be in preparedness. We should be working with everyone here for those mitigation efforts. And this is just a testament of that. In long term, there's a lot of interest in phase two, debris and when's phase one are gonna be over and then the needle is gonna move to housing. I will say housing. The needle right here is from zero to a hundred. It's probably five or 10, because when it gets to housing, it just pegs at a hundred and it's just, it's unforgiving. Housing is very political. It's very personal. And it's something that we have to be out in front of. And we're working closely with the Frederick Quaidan officer to get, to try to turn some programs on like direct housing and others for your constituents here in this beautiful county of Santa Cruz. One thing we've done here in California, we started in 18. I'm gonna turn it over to Mr. Troy because we had the California Disaster Recovery Framework. We had the recovery support functions, which was on the previous slide. And when I got here last year, I made all that operational before it was like this standalone planning section. And to me it made zero sense. So we put that under operations and they actually report through ops who reports up to me to ensure things are moving rapidly. And we stay lockstep and barrel with the county and we don't get in front of anyone. We were so dedicated to this effort. I can say the Federal Emergency Management Agency is starting to even look at that model for a national model. And in two, I was able to get another position within Cal OES to have assistant directors focus solely on long-term recovery. And I'm glad to say that the gentleman next to me, Bob Troy, we were able to recruit for that position. He applied and I'm confident that we have the best long-term recovery person in the U.S., not just California in the entire U.S. He's dedicated to you. He's dedicated to us. And like Kendra, he'll be here throughout this process. This process will not be months. You don't build a town in a year. You're not gonna rebuild it in a year. But we hope that we can at least stay in front with you and eliminate or alleviate any risk or gaps. And if there's any risk or gaps, working with the county that'll work through me and we'll make sure we stay in front of that. So with that, I'll turn it over to Mr. Troy. Thank you, Ryan. Good morning, supervisors and chair Caput. So first of all, I'd like to acknowledge that the recovery structure we just saw at the county level matches very well with state and federal doctrine. So thank you all for adopting that. It makes everyone's recovery efforts more efficient when we speak that we have a common structure and a common language to begin with, from which to start. And of course to craft then craft the recovery efforts of Santa Cruz to fit the needs of Santa Cruz, but to start from a common place is certainly beneficial. With the graphic in front of us, really the key point is, as Ryan said, is that recovery really ideally should begin prior to the event. And if you look at the top line there, it's called the National Disaster Recovery Framework. And that's the concept that recovery is always here. Unfortunately, we're almost, we're always recovering from the last disaster. And it's still in place as we move into the next disaster. So that's a concept that we bring forward that recovery doesn't have a starting point and an end point. You can see also we have the response framework. And as Ryan said, we're concurrently, we're winding down response, but also working recovery at the same time. So that's a process that will be ongoing. And what we've led here today is state and federal partnership with the County of Santa Cruz to support your recovery for the months and years to come. Next slide please. This next graphic I get is a bit of an eye chart. And I don't expect you to be able to read all the details on it. This is a model, a visual model, another way to kind of demonstrate the multiple lines of effort for an organized recovery effort. So on the left-hand side, you have the different lines of effort and structures to help support recovery for individuals and households of Santa Cruz. And so there are the different elements there, whether it's financial or whether it's housing or other types of recovery needs. And then on the right side, we have the structure, which is based off of those recovery support functions to identify the needs of the community or the governmental level, right? And so whether it's the housing needs or whether it's concerns about debris flow and the impact of the threat to human life or the threat to the water infrastructure for the County of Santa Cruz, there's a structure there to help us work together to help address that and support that as much as possible. And then the center is that recovery structure here based in Santa Cruz, right? And this is just, you know, notional of the different potential partners that can be a part of that effort, right? It's certainly government and it's certainly effective feedback and partnership from the community, all other elements of the community as well. Next slide, please. We're also fortunate within the state of California to have something called the State Supplemental Grant Program. And essentially, our FCO will be speaking shortly about the Individual Assistance Program, but we're fortunate enough in California that if there are individuals that receive the maximum grant eligible under FEMA, we can also then help bolster that on the state side for up to $10,000. If somebody has maximized all the different elements of that and we'll learn a little bit more about that, but just wanted to make people aware of that, that the state also tries to, you know, partner with FEMA to help provide similar support to the survivors here. Next slide, please. And this flow chart here, again, I don't expect people to be able to read the details, but it's us trying to work to provide with our partners on FEMA, the FEMA and federal side to provide to help the County of Santa Cruz navigate recovery here. And a couple of points that a couple of issues I'd like to point out, and FCO none will speak more to is just as the individuals in the households here in Santa Cruz apply for and register with FEMA, a couple of things to bear in mind is even if they have insurance and they think they're fully insured, we still encourage them to apply for FEMA anyway, because what they may find later is that they're underinsured. There may be elements that aren't covered and we don't want them to be too late for them to register later. So we very much encourage people to go ahead and err on the side of registering that those same registrations also drive eligibility for other types of federal recovery resources as well. That should we be fortunate enough that Congress appropriates disaster supplemental funds that may be driven by some of these registrations. So it's critical that everybody within, even if their home wasn't destroyed with everybody that's been affected by this disaster in Santa Cruz, please register with FEMA. It drives a lot of different elements of recovery. And then the second issue that we'd like to point out is even if somebody registers with FEMA and receives a denial letter that we really ask an FCO and I will talk about this more that they read the full letter and find out exactly what it is and make many times it's simply a case of necessary documentation. And then there could be help to get that necessary documentation to get them to make them eligible for different types of assistance. So just because they receive a denial letter to please read it and there was a process for appealing place that we encourage people to utilize. Next slide, please. Could you slow down a little bit? Sure, sure, I'd be glad to. Next slide, please. So with this slide, I will go ahead and turn it over to federal coordinating officer Nunn who can talk a little more about these programs. Thank you for the opportunity to be here, Mr. Spiesers and anyone on the video. As he said, my name is Willie Nunn, I'm the federal coordinating officer. And when this disaster was declared on the 22nd of August, I became the federal coordinating officer. Santa Cruz was included. We had the individual assistance at that time. And as my colleagues have said, Santa Cruz up to this date, we have over almost 5,000 folks who have registered for Santa Cruz. And it's important that they register because that gets them into the system. And so looking at the sequence of delivery, calling that registration number, registering on the mobile app, doing it online, however they can do it, we wanna make sure that they do that. And I'll speak to that a little bit more later. But once they register for the individual assistance program, we have grants and we have a grant. And that grant is 35,500 as the max grant. But we also have rental assistance as well, which is not included in that max grant. If you qualify for rental assistance, that can go up to 18 months for rental assistance. However, individual assistance, individual and household and household assistance program, that is a maximum grant that goes up to 35,500. As I talk about those grants, to date we have about $4.1 million already been approved. We also just wanna let you know, average award in this County has been about $5,262. And when we start talking about, I do understand that there are about 900 plus homes destroyed in Santa Cruz County. So far in our registration out of those 5,000, we have verified 80 destroyed homes, which is 37 owners and 43 renters. And that is why that registration number is very important at 1-800-621-3362 number is important because the next mission is to call back. As Mr. Troy said, when folks get that determination letter, it's not deny a letter, it's a determination letter. Please read it thoroughly because that determination may need one thing, as Troy said, may just need one thing that you have to correct and it may make you eligible for assistance from us. And so it's important to, one, if you got a question called back, two, if you get a determination letter, please read it through and you may answer one question and you may qualify. And you also have an opportunity to appeal. And we also have, we work with our partner SBA, Small Business Administration, and they will talk a little bit at the end, but in order to get assistance beyond my grant, you must go through the SBA process and once you go through that, you may qualify for other needs assistance that can also go towards that max grant. And I want to empathize that 35,500 grant does not make people whole. We understand that, but it also gets them into the system and gets them along the way to survival, to back on the road to recovery. And we want them to utilize that. And as my colleague said, once they go through our and max out on our side of the house, there's fortunate that we have the state side of the house as a max grant for that as well. But I go back to determining what those 5,000, almost 5,000 registrants mean for Santa Cruz County. That's where we get our numbers. That's what we determine is that can we do a direct housing mission? So that's, it's important that the citizens call back, make sure that they get a determination on where they are. And I also say from the, we also call ourselves back to survivors. If they have an unknown marker on their registration, we called them to ask them questions as well. So it's a two way street. The bottom line, as you said in the marker at the bottom of the slide, we got to keep in touch. Next slide, please. And I'll close my part with service is disaster assistance. I must say we, yesterday there were only 17 county wide folks that registered yesterday up to that point. So it's slowing down to registration. That means most of the population has registered. However, that I just can't sympathize enough to say enough, call back if you've got questions. Our call center is open from 7 a.m. to 10, 30 p.m. specific time. And normally our answer has been less than a minute. If people start having problems with that, make sure that I get with the call center to make sure that we're answering questions after them promptly. And we also, we assisted with the local assistance center that was here in town. We still have registration folks on the other side of the street in the parking lot. They will be there through the 21st. But we still want to encourage people to contact us to make sure that we're having all that's in need. So pending question at the end, sir. Thank you for the opportunity and standing by for next time. So I think our next speaker is Kevin Wynn from SBA. He will be speaking remotely. Thanks to Mr. Nutt, good morning supervisors. After floods, earthquake, hurricanes, wildfires and other disasters, SBA disaster loans are the primary source of federal assistance to help private property owners pay for disasters, not covered by insurance. SBA disaster loans are available to businesses of all sizes, private nonprofit organizations, homeowners and renters. When disaster survivors need to borrow to repair damage, the low interest rates and long terms available from small business administration make recovery affordable. A disaster loss is unexpected. For most disaster survivors, it is beyond their means to pay for disaster damages with their own resources without a hardship. The law gives SBA several powerful tools to make disaster loans affordable. Our low interest rates, long terms up to 30 years and refinancing of prior liens in some cases. SBA's disaster loans are a critical source of economic stimulation in disaster ravaged communities, helping to spur employment and stabilize tax bases. And as Mr. Dunn said, and I will emphasize this, register, register, register everyone in Santa Cruz County, both renters, homeowners, private nonprofits and business owners should register with FEMA, get that federal recovery process going. SBA disaster loans, we offer disaster loans for primary residences up to $200,000 to repair or replace for homeowners and renters up to $40,000 to repair or replace your personal property. For businesses, we offer up to $2 million at low interest rates to repair or replace the physical damage of a business, including machinery and equipment, inventory supplies and those things that go along with businesses. We also offer economic injury disaster loans, not only in Santa Cruz County, but in the contiguous counties that touch Santa Cruz County. These are working capital loans to help small businesses, small agricultural cooperatives and most private nonprofit organizations meet their ordinary and necessary financial obligations that cannot be met as a result of the disaster. SBA looks at three criteria, that you are in a declared county, that you have a credit history worthy and acceptable to the SBA and that you have a repayment ability to repay all the loans. Current interest rates are for home loans and renters 1.1% and business loans are 3%. As I mentioned, terms up to 30 years makes recovery very affordable. Almost 80% of loans go to homeowners and renters and declared disaster from the small business administration. A couple other things that SBA does offer once you're approved into the program is that we can refinance your current mortgage and bring you into the 1.1% interest rate to help you meet repayment ability. We also offer terms in which you can relocate as well should you decide to get out of the disaster zone also. Some of the current numbers are we have, as of 7 a.m. this morning, approved $17.5 million and Santa Cruz County is bearing the brunt of that. Almost $9 million have been approved in SBA disaster loans for Santa Cruz County only. 77 homes for $8.8 million and six businesses have been approved for over $200,000. SBA, as you can see on the screen where you can go to apply, register with FEMA as Mr. Nunn said. Register, register, register. We can't emphasize that enough. That opens the entire federal recovery process. Once you're in with FEMA, they'll refer you over to the SBA to fill out an application. And once you're into the SBA, we've got a lot of programs in which to help you on the road to recovery. There's our 800 number on the screen, 800-659-2955. You can also email us at focwestassistanceatsba.gov. And I will be available as well to answer questions following the presentations. Thank you, Alyssa. Thank you, Kevin. So that it concludes our prepared presentation for today and everyone on the panel is, it would welcome any questions from the board. You bet. We can start the questions. Supervisor Friend. Thank you, Chair. And I'd just like to thank our state and federal partners for taking so much time to not just be here, but to also provide us with designated people within our community and to commit to being here for the long-term. I think that not only did we experience a disaster, as was noted by our state partners, it's not if, but when we're gonna have our next disaster in regards to the debris flow. But we're also early in our disaster season in regards to other issues throughout the entire county. And so we know that our county has a history of natural disasters. Having these points of contact specifically designated for our area with people that have that knowledge is really essential. And so I just wanted to appreciate the fact that you've made that dedication that time. I know that we have an item on our agenda following this that deals with the creation potentially of a more designated team internally as well and how that will interface with the state and national delegation would be important for me to also understand in here. But a lot of this is just a gratitude component to know that our local constituents have these points of contact locally and that you're committed to being here for the long-term from both a staffing and funding perspective. So thank you for that. Okay, Supervisor Coonerty. Thank you, Mr. Chair. First of all, I want to thank like Supervisor Friend mentioned our partners here. This is going to be a team effort of federal, state and local in order to get people the resources they need both in the short term, but also over the long term. I have two particular questions that I wanted to focus on today. I've appreciated the responsiveness of this team to the questions as they come up. The first is for Cal OES. We're looking for phase two approval. We have a lot of people waiting to find out about that stage of debris removal. And I'm wondering when we might have a timeline and what kind of debris may be included in that removal process. Thank you for that question, Supervisor. This is Ryan Buras. We're still working closely with FEMA confidence. Well, let me back up a little bit. Phase two, when this starts, there's a lot of complexities that happened even before that approval letter and that's already happening. So I don't want you to thank, or anyone in this room to thank, that we're waiting on some permission from FEMA to be looking, working with our partners at Cal Recycle, working on the contracts. Our team diligently worked on the contracts last week. So as soon as this approval is received from our federal partners, we can quickly get on that on the street. Timelines are always difficult of when things start. I can tell you, we have a very short timeframe to get this debris going. We have a lot of counties to get this debris moving. And we really want to focus on some areas first, particularly with watershed issues like here in Santa Cruz. So there's a lot of things happening. As you know, phase one started last week with the United States of EPA. I do want to thank my partners at the federal government to allow that to happen with so many counties impacted. Our partners at Department of Toxic and Substance just have the capacity to be, throughout the state of California, removing debris. So I'm glad that started here, particularly in some of the areas that are tough too. As far as what's going to be removed, I'm assuming you're speaking about vehicles and other things to that nature. We're still working closely with FEMA on the vehicle side. I did drive and understand that vehicles are going to be an issue. Regolas, who pays for it, these things are burnt. And they have to be removed for the recovery of Santa Cruz to occur. So we'll work closely, regardless what FEMA's approval is. We'll work closely with other state partners, including the county here, to see what we can do to assist on that. As far as all the other debris should be removed, slabs is a little different story. We're working closely on that. And I'm confident over the next week or so we'll have some information back from FEMA that we can report out to the Board of Supervisors. I just don't want to get too ahead of the approval letter for that. But I will say that we're constantly in meetings with FEMA. We have a great working relationship with our Region 09 office. We have a wonderful FCO here. And this is something that every single day I'm on the phone with, is focusing on the debris mission here. And I will say, the branch director here that we've brought on board, and also we have Brian Baker behind me from Hagerty who's been his expertise in that consultant firm, helping us get the right people in place for this county. But Kendra Boy has been doing debris as a contractor and now as a state employee, removed a lot of the debris down south, which is similar to the complexities we're gonna have in Santa Cruz. So we wanted to make sure that we had somebody that was seasoned and removing very difficult debris here. So I hope that answered your question somewhat. Yeah, I think just let us, I understand that once we get approval, it's still gonna take. Well, I think he's still talking, it's just his connection is, Supervisor Krueger, or do we lost you there? So you might wanna repeat your comment. We'll go to, we'll come back to you if you want. Supervisor McPherson. Yeah, thank you, Mr. Chair. And I wanna just repeat the thanks to FEMA and OES for their cooperative efforts and their team effort to get this done here at home. I'm just holding up with a former framework of part of a tractor that I saw when I went up to San Juan's Valley. That's what it looks like and it was all over the place. And this is some of the materials that they're gonna be removing, unbelievable of how hot that fire was. But that's part of a tractor frame right there. But I wanted to also repeat the thanks to them and also to give thanks to our own departments in human care, water, transportation, and economics for what they've done. And I also wanna add too, that our state representatives, Assemblymember Stone, Senator Monning, Congress members Eshoo and Panetta have been really great in our communications that we've had with them and they are doing what they can to address this issue. It's a, we know that this is a statewide issue now. It's over four million acres, the size of Connecticut. But we, I can just assure our residents that our members that are in the state legislature in Congress have our ear. So that is really good to hear. I think the takeaway from this is be sure to register with FEMA. And I guess that is open until October 21st. I believe that's the deadline. They need a deadline so they can see, okay, this is the framework we have to work with and what we're doing. So people be sure to register if you are in need. And I do appreciate the welcoming that we've had from OES and FEMA. It's been a great team effort and long haul, but it's gonna be a good team that we're gonna get this done and help as many people as we can as soon as possible. I think it's important for people to know that there's a time, there's a phase one, there's a phase two. That's difficult for some people to comprehend or understand, but it is the way that we need to work to get the hazardous materials first and then work on the other remaining materials that are laying out there for the result of this disastrous fire. So thank you to OES and FEMA and to all of our representatives in the state and federal levels. Chair, we might wanna see if Supervisor Coonerty wants to make any final remarks. Okay. Yes, thank you. I'm back on, I apologize. I don't know why every time I wanna speak, the internet goes down. Anyway, so I guess first, thank you for your response and let us know what we can do to accelerate phase two. As you know, once we get approval, it takes time to get the contracts and staging and everything else. And we're worried about rains and debris flow and getting people back to their lives. So we wanna make that go as fast as possible. The second question is for a smaller community, this community of Davenport, to 300 people in their own water district. We've had to truck in water since the beginning of the incident because the fire line burned out and we're seeking FEMA reimbursement for that community for that truck didn't water. If we don't get the reimbursement, it'll be a huge financial burden because that cost will be only on those small group of people. So whatever we can do to support FEMA reimbursement for that community as they get the water they need just to live would be appreciated. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. Supervisor, just one comment. I'll make sure that's the first I've heard of the shipping in the water. So I'll make sure that my team is looped in with Willie's team and water is essential. It's one of those lifelines. So I'll work closely with the federal government to ensure whatever we can do to ensure that's reimbursed properly. And also to get any sort of fast fix and that we can work with you all as well in that. Okay. Ms. Supervisor, I'll just add that community is under the program of category B public assistance program. And that's something we work closely with the state and with that area to make sure that they can potentially get reimbursed. And the only other thing. Thank you so much, I appreciate it. Yes, sir. And the only other thing I would like that I was remiss to say, we also have people here in the county with a division supervisor and a branch director to go one for one with our counterparts and to make sure that we're lockstep with the state and with the county. Okay. Great. Supervisor Leopold. Thank you, Chair. Thank you for the presentation. I really appreciated it very early in this disaster. The director Galladucci was here to tell us that they would that that OES would be here for us, would stand with us and having dedicated staff member who will be here will be certainly helpful. I also appreciate the contribution of FEMA having dedicated staff also makes a big difference. Santa Cruz is a very small county, but this is the 11th most destructive fire in California's history because of the large number of homes that we lost comparatively also do our to the just stock of housing that we have. So your assistance with debris removal and assistance with funding so we can work as quickly as possible to move people back into their homes will go a long way to not only helping those roughly 1,000 families, but actually the entire county because the impact that has on our housing stock. So I appreciate you being here. I appreciate the collaboration you have with the county and I would expect that we will continue good relations as we move through this through all the difficult phases of rebuilding and recovery. Thank you. Thank you. I noticed there, well, we've had like 950 approximately homes that have been destroyed. And the report showed I guess that 80 have actually come forward for assistance. Are some just dealing with their insurance company and they won't go to FEMA or they won't go to state for aid or how does that work? So it may be more than 80 have come for FEMA. Those are the 80 verified that we have destroyed right now. And that is the reason for the call back for the survivors to call back. And that's all the reason for us to call them if their registration is unknown. If we have a question from them that could put them in the category of destroyed or major damage or minor damage. And so that is one of the big purposes of call back. And so that number may go up from 80, from 80 to whatever number it comes out to depending on the call back of the survivors. Okay. Yes, sir. And I did get one phone call from somebody that was mentioning they didn't have any insurance on the home. Is FEMA gonna be able to, you know, I don't know how much of it is true as far as I guess a few homes can be uninsurable. Something to the effect insurance companies won't ensure certain homes in certain areas or something like that. I don't know. I understand when that survivor calls in and they let us know that they don't have insurance. And then we go through their whole process with them to determine if whatever we can give them. And again, unfortunately a grant is only 35,500 max grant for household assistance, home household assistance and rental assistance. If they qualify that can go up to 18 months. So we can assist in that respect. But if once they call and they say they don't have insurance, that puts them in a whole new category. And so they should continue to make sure that they get that case to us. And that person, all they have to do is when they call back make sure that they give their registration number and as a person on the phone will be talking to them through what they're eligible for. Okay. Yes, sir. Can I just follow up on that, Chair? If it's an unpermitted home, would that fall into the same category? You know, in some of these places, there are homes that may not have been fully permitted. And unfortunately, that goes along with what the local requirements are, what the home ownership, going with home ownership. But if they go proof of ownership and we go through that whole case study, we can determine whether what they, what they qualify for. And that's something we can assist you all with. I mean, you know, part of recovery after disaster is telling the story and everybody has an individual story. We have to make sure that we capture that. We have to make sure that we put it in a place that we can put it into a federal regulation that's a bonded, that the FCO is bonded by so we can get certain things approved. Also, you know, speaking to people that are uninsured, I mean, let's, you know, unfortunately, this is a disaster and even people with insurance are gonna be underinsured or not insured. And there's gonna be a lot of gaps here. So the more that we know what that story is here for Santa Cruz, there's a lot of people in the US that wanna help, whether it's voluntary agencies or whatnot and we do coordinate a lot of this effort. So the more that you can let us know and we can assist and you know, we have a, y'all have a wonderful district, wonderful electeds, wonderful county. I think we can get a lot done here very rapidly. I would like to say I was speaking to FEMA yesterday speaking of recovery and you know, we have mitigation dollars that we have every year and counties apply for it and we get it approved. I do wanna meet with your leadership here in the county to look at some potential mitigation projects that we don't have to wait for a year or two to discuss. Let's actually get something approved, like something that you and I, the state and the local is gonna agree to. I can work closely with FEMA region nine. Let's get money on the street now that we know that's coming in, not have to wait a year, particularly if it's gonna be a life-sustaining project on watershed or et cetera. So I look forward to those conversations with your team. My last comment, but you don't have to answer it, is we're still in a critical fires situation. If another fire breaks out, we might have you guys back here. Hopefully not, but anyway. Yeah, October with everything being dry, another fire can start very easily. Okay, we'll open it up to the public for public comment. Each person will have between two and three minutes. If we can make it fairly quick here, we can get through this. You probably wanna give a clear information to the clerk about two or three minutes. So it'd be two or three minutes as they set the comment. Okay, we'll get those comments too. I want to go first. How long do you want public comment to be? Do you want it for two minutes or do you want it for three minutes? Oh, I see what you mean. Are you gonna take Becky, do you need all the three minutes? I don't know. I would appreciate three. All right, go ahead. Thank you very much. My name is Becky Steinbrunner. I live in rural Aptos. My home and my area was not affected by the fire, but many of my friends were and have lost their homes. Their homes were model places for fire defensible space and their home burned to the ground. So I have some questions. And I want to know if FEMA and the state will help support financial assistance for erosion control measures that these people can take around their properties to secure them for the winter and hopefully prevent debris flows. And to protect the watershed and other areas of their property and property owners downstream downhill. I want to know if FEMA and the state will help support small water companies like the San Lorenzo Valley Water District that has suffered extreme hardship and needs help desperately. I hope so. One issue about the insurance is that insurance cancellations have been a huge problem in this county. And many people were in transition. I've been getting messages from people who had just had their insurance canceled. And so they were in transition looking for others. What about those people? And some people are still getting notices of cancellation from their insurance companies. And I think that's illegal. So I hope that you will look into that and encourage Commissioner Laura to really nail down on these insurance companies because it is illegal for one year to cancel anybody. I hope that the insurance companies just don't run around that and increase policy costs to the point that they are unaffordable. I wonder what regarding, I'm surprised with 5,000 people who have been verified that only 80 have fallen to the category of having lost their homes. I would like to ask the supervisors in these districts to please reach out to everybody in your district and make sure that you get this information. Supervisor McPherson has been doing a stellar job with his newsletter, but I don't know how far reaching those are. And many people have had to leave the area entirely because they have no place to go. I want to know if FEMA and the state will cover replacement costs and repair of communication towers. There have been some amateur radio towers that were completely devastated. They provided huge emergency communication service to this area, they're gone, as well as some of the county's infrastructure. I want to know if people are going to be forced to relocate and if your funding will predicate them, relocating in order to get any money, if the county deems that they can't go back to their property. And finally, I want to know how your money would cover livestock, not necessarily for businesses, but for people's livelihoods. Thank you very much. My name is James Ewing Whitman. I won't need three minutes. It's just great that we can all sit and look at each other and listen to what's going on and that it's been recorded. What is it? From the slides, about 5,000 individuals have reached out to FEMA to get some assistance. I think that that's fabulous. That's about 140th of the population of Santa Cruz County and Santa Cruz County is one 10,000th of the population of the world. There's a lot of things going on and I'm not really quite sure what to say, but the ability for the government to help who they choose to help and the ways that they help them is truly fabulous. I wonder if there's, how many other strings are attached to this? I wish that I had taken some notes on some stuff I was listening to before about some kind of, you know, you get a loan from FEMA. They actually, now they own your house. They're the bank. Just where we headed this winter. I mean, I started hinting about things as soon as there was a supervisors meeting after the fire started and the next day after that it was not, the fire wasn't mentioned at all. And I don't know what day that was. Maybe that was August 21st or 22nd, but the next day an emergency was declared. And a few weeks later, we had fires all over the West Coast. Now, you know, I've spoken about what's going on with these fires. I didn't have an opportunity to personally go up to places I used to live until a couple of weeks ago, but I took pictures of the houses that were still standing and the two buildings that I lived in that were burned to the ground in a very interesting way that is really quite unnatural. I guess what I wanna say is there's a lot of information about how Lloyds of London will not cover any insurance claims for wireless damages. And that's, I believe, to property and to persons. So I'll close in saying that although I have literally hundreds of links, this one from CNN is really quite interesting. It refers to 60 gigahertz, which is just a frequency. And part of 5G, which is over 3000 frequencies, is a weapon. It describes on CNN in 1985 how the militaries are using lightning as weapons. It talks about the different frequencies and how they can affect almost any mood in a human being like a pharmaceutical pill. So it's just interesting to observe what's going on. I wonder what's gonna be going on this winter. So I guess that's enough for now, thank you. We have, hold on, we have some additional comments. We have three web comments. The first one is from Lee Samuels. The Human Care Alliance would like to have a representative attend meetings around disaster recovery efforts and coordination that affect and involve nonprofits. Please let us know who should we be in touch with. Thank you, Lee Samuels. The second one is from Christina Salinas. When do you think the public will have the info for phase two cleanup plan for the 925 homes that have burned in the Santa Cruz Mountains? I understand you are planning stages and are developing this plan. And the third comment is from Ken Davenport. I agree with Supervisor McPherson and Coonerty's proposal. If FEMA won't cover the total cost of new positions, reallocate non-essential county workers to these positions. And that's the end of public comment, thank you. Your microphone's not on. I'll bring it back to the board. Well, I don't think there's any action. We're just considering the presentation. I just want to thank you for your work and I look forward to the continued partnership. Okay, do we need a vote on this? No, Supervisor Caput, there is no vote. Just sit here, okay. I'm just curious, where'd you have to come from to get here? Either one? From like where I was born or? No, Sacramento. So we drove from Sacramento, my office is in Sacramento, California. He works in Sacramento as well. We drove, we got here last night around midnight and I'm just welcome to be here. And once again, just thanks for, I really do appreciate the partnership, but thank you. How about yourself? Yes, sir. I work in Sacramento alongside them deployed to the Sacramento and I drove down this morning. Great, thank you, welcome. Yes, sir. All right, that concludes our presentation. Thank you very much. Should we take a little break? You're welcome to take a break at this point. Okay, we'll take a 10 minute break. 10 minutes? Okay, and we'll come right back. Mr. Nunn? We'll start with item number eight. Consider the, I'm on, you can't hear me? It's on. Now you can. Okay. Consider the establishment of a county office of recovery and resilience, O-R-R, in the county administrative office to coordinate the county's response to the CZU, August lightning complex fire, respond to future disasters, and increase resiliency of the county overall in response to climate change, direct the CAO to return in November 10th, 2020 with the funding recommendation and take related action as outlined in the memorandum of supervisors, Coonerty and McPherson. And if we can have the presentation, will it take long? Supervisor Coonerty and McPherson. Mr. Chair, this is Ryan Coonerty. I can briefly introduce this item if you wish. Okay. So this is obviously as it relates to the fires, but it's really about accepting a new reality that we're in where we're gonna have more intense storms, droughts, fires, and really trying to both build a system to recover quickly, to coordinate across different departments. So we don't have issues where we have different departments giving conflicting information and where we can get answers to property owners or residents who have been displaced quickly. And then also, as was mentioned in the previous presentation, there's FEMA hazard mitigation money available. There's likely a resiliency bond coming from the state of California. Hopefully there's a change in Washington DC and we have a real investment in climate adaptation and a green new deal. In all those ways, we really need to have our community prepare for this new reality and make sure that we have the systems in place that we're applying for appropriate grants and building community support that we're looking at places where we're vulnerable and we can make a big impact with a little public and or public private investment. So it's really trying to look at what we can do to prepare for the future. This is a model that we've taken from Sonoma County who established this after their first fires since then. They've had more fires, more floods. They have a fire going right now. And what we heard from their supervisors was this was an incredibly important way to help speed recovery for not only the current disaster but future disasters as well as start to plan and work with the community to build resiliency. This is a smaller effort than what they've established because we have a difficult budget situation but we think that this is a good investment in use of our time. And then finally, I just wanna clear up one thing that the County Council brought to our attention which is that we need to change one of the recommendations to be clear that the Board Committee would be an ad hoc committee to monitor and oversee implementation of the County's recovery and resilience work related for the duration of 2021. And that Supervisor McPherson and myself would be on that. And then obviously we'd wanna look at a governance structure going forward and getting other supervisors on that committee if, and hopefully it doesn't happen but if there are events or resiliency projects in their districts that they wanna work on. Thank you. You're welcome. Supervisor McPherson. I'm very pleased to include a coordination effort with the Sonoma County counterparts and in particular Supervisor James Gore who even on a national level has been known to address this issue of resiliency recovery from the many experiences Sonoma County had and they just experienced in another one. I think they've had five in the last four years in fact, but they were very clear to us that having a full-time dedicated staff to manage this recovery and rebuilding process was critical in creating the culture of trust and understanding that we can have between the County and our residents. We know that there's gonna be a financial impact some of which will be reimbursable but we really can't afford to get it wrong either. And the livelihood of our residents are at stake and we collectively manage as we collectively manage our efforts to we're gonna be better for it. I can't overstate the importance of the resiliency aspect of this. We are not just working on recovery from this one event and this County has had several over the years but we are laying the groundwork here for being more prepared for the next disaster as well. Should it be a mudslide or wildfire or extreme weather events driven by climate change. It's upon us, we wanna address it as directly and compassionately as we can to serve our residents as best we can. And with that, after we've heard from other board members and the public, I'd be prepared to make a motion to accept this recommendation with the modification that was mentioned by Supervisor Coonerty. And I just wanna say that I can't say enough for our staffs that we have had Rachel Dan in Supervisor Coonerty's office and Andy Schifrin, Jam Brown and Jenny Johnson and my staff and the CAO's office and the agencies throughout public works in particular and planning. I just can't overstate how much I appreciate and we all appreciate the cooperative effort and the directness we wanna go about to make this recovery effort as quickly as we can. And I hope that our residents here have some patience, but with that, we're gonna try to get at it as quickly as we can to serve you in the best way we can. And I'd just like to hear some comments from the public or what they have, but I'm really excited about this effort that we're going about to endeavor. Thank you. You're welcome. Okay, any questions or comments from board members? Supervisor Leopold. Thank you, Chair. First of all, I'm very supportive of this idea. I think this board just a year ago actually voted to establish a climate action manager because we saw the dangers of climate change and its effect on our community and that we needed to start adapting and figuring out those adaptation strategies. We started the hiring process but we put it on hold when the COVID affected our budget as badly as it did. But over this past year, it's really seemed to me, as I've looked into it, that we're really talking about resiliency and that's always was a key part of that. And so I'm glad to see this moving forward. I'm gonna support this measure because I think it's important for us to not only support the thousands of people who've been affected by these fires, but prepare our county for the resilience necessary to be able to deal with what might be a regular part of our lives because of extreme weather events. If you would have said even 10 years ago that we would have the 11th most destructive fire, that we would have storm damage that would take up half of all the damage to the state of California and a storm. If even if you said that we would be suffering $26 million for a tsunami, all those things seemed inconceivable just 10 years ago and in the past 10 years they've all come true. And so we need to start preparing our community to be as resilient as possible. And I think that there will be resources at both the state level and the federal level as policy makers at those levels of government start recognizing that we have got to prepare, we can't just endlessly recover and do things the same. We have to think about how we strengthen our communities and build the infrastructure necessary to protect ourselves. I did have one question, just sort of a technical question. It says that this would direct the CAO to a point a full-time manager and is can we appoint someone? Do we have to go through a hiring process? Are we gonna go to the list of people who applied for the job before? I mean, what's the sense about that? So Supervisor Leopold, we're looking at staff internally within the county. There've been a few individuals who we've thought of who may be able to serve in that role. So we're looking internally. We're also exploring how we might need to supplement that office with other positions potentially based on financial resources that might be available. But we're working on that and we'll be coming back with some recommendations to the board. Okay, because this person would obviously be part of the civil service and everything like that. So I just didn't know, I didn't know whether we had to go through the hiring process or whether we can just appoint someone. If we end up ending hiring or establishing a new position that would have to follow the civil service process. And we would of course have to come back to the board for any recommended actions and approvals. Okay, thank you. That's all I have, Chair. Okay, any other questions, Supervisor Friend? Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Provisor McPherson and Coonerty for bringing this item forward. I am supportive of the creation. I do think that we've due to necessity have already started down this framework with as our last item with Cal OES and FEMA showed with Director Machado and others. We've created this OES group within the CAO. And so I think that we've started down a process. I think that this helps formalize it, but I do believe that we can take that talent internally that we have and break down the silos that we've been working on in the last couple of years to do as Supervisor Leopold was mentioning, going down a direction, not just of resiliency but ensuring that this interplay between the departments, things don't get stuck between departments but instead have these positions within one place so that that communication and influence and outcome can occur without the silos is very important. I just want to ensure that the flexibility is left to the CAO's office and those that are already operating in a county OES structure to come back to us in the coming month or so as I know that the direction has a budget item coming back or a budget structure coming back to create this framework as well. I mean, I think that the board's job should be to state that this is something we want. I think that there's universality on that but there should be flexibility within the county structure to determine exactly what that looks like within the CAO's office, especially given our current budget constraints and the way that it is. And I think we do have a lot of internal talent that can be used for this. But I am supportive again of the item and I appreciate the work of Supervisor McPherson and Coonerty on this. Okay, we'll open it up to public comment and if we can, okay, hi. I think I want three minutes. Hi, I listened to most of this, some of this outside. I just needed to listen to some music because this is kind of daunting. Yes, we have this plan to take care of these things that are immediately upon us. It may have been June 23rd, 2020 that I talked about this. Santa Cruz County Local Agenda 21 final draft, June 3rd, 1997, it came into this county March of 1993 and the Board of Supervisors endorsed the DENJA 21 proposal in January 1994. You know, I mentioned this because this really shouldn't be such a surprise about bringing people into the big cities and getting people out of the wilderness. It's not just happening in Santa Cruz County. It's happening all over the world. And this is a plan that I've spoken about and you can verify this stuff. There's a lot of information to what I took pictures of. Those are direct energy weapons. Now, since then my learning curve has kind of improved a little bit because the Rand Corporation also has some influence and ability to use underground lightning and start underground fires. I have photographs on my phone where there are root systems that have caught on fire and those root systems were put out and the rest of the tree is alive. That's fresh, that happened during this fire. So, you know, what was it? Bush Senior, September 11th, 1991, talked about a new government plan for the entire world where everybody would get along according to the laws. And that's the new world order. You know, it goes a lot further back than then. There are some leaders in the United States who have been profiting on both sides of the war. And what we're heading for is like a really serious Bolshevik winner. These individuals funded Adolf Hitler, and that includes Prescott Bush, Rockefellers with Standard Oil, and many other people. So here I am wearing a mask and boy, I chose the wrong thing because this is thick. This is hard to breathe out of. And I guess if somebody wanted to grab me, I bet this thing would hold 2,000 pounds of force. So I'm here because I actually care and I would much rather be talking about a lot of other things. I'm here because I'm selfish. I'd like to live another 40 years. And I don't think unless I speak out publicly that many people in this room are gonna be, and on the planet are gonna be around in 40 years because that's not part of the plan. So it's great that we're going over this stuff, but it's really kind of sad what I see going on. And I wish I didn't have to come up here and I could talk about other things, but thank you very much because I've been stopped cold with this at the city of Santa Cruz talking about stuff. So thank you. Thank you. Hi, Becky. Hello, Chairman Caput. Thank you. My name is Becky Steinbrunner. I'm a resident of rural Santa Cruz County in the Santa Cruz Mountains. And the question I have about this is how come we suddenly have money to start a whole new department, but we didn't have money to fund Rosemary Anderson's full-time position. The County Office of Emergency Services Manager. How come her job got cut? There was no money for that, but now there's suddenly money to create a whole new department. This makes no sense. I don't understand why this is happening. And I think that this very department should go back to the emergency services manager. They're the ones that are focused on planning and that's what this is all about is planning. She did a great job planning and establishing the relationships that are critical when a disaster happens, that are critical in reaching out to the people. So why is her job cut? And here's a whole new department being established. It makes no sense. I listened in last night on the Santa Cruz City Water Commission and they're going through much like this too with trying to figure out what to do to plan for climate change. I suggest that rather than this county reinventing the wheel and the City of Santa Cruz Water Department reinventing the wheel that the two partner because it's all related, they're working with the University of Massachusetts to do some modeling that will help address various climate scenarios. Why don't we team up with them? They have a very interesting approach. Their point is vulnerability. When do we start worrying? What are the triggers that get us to start worrying? And when we're at those triggers, what action do we take? This is the level of information and action, planning that we need to be doing. And I think that the County Office of Emergency Services Manager was doing a very good job of that and there is no need to establish a whole new department to do that very thing that that one person and her assistant were doing very well. I wanna bring it now to the grand jury report because the ready aim fire, Santa Cruz County and the hot seat, I read through those replies, those responses and they were not at all substantive. And the one that talked about roadside mowing, along evacuation routes, putting the onus back on the people. No, it's not that the County has to fund it. Thank you for turning off my microphone, but this is serious business and we need to put our money to helping people do the work. Thank you. Thanks for turning off my microphone. Any comments? We have no further comments. Yeah, I'll bring it back to the board. The only question I have is, is this replacing? We had a position a few years ago and maybe right now, emergency response manager or whatever, years, a couple of years ago, it was- I think your microphone's not on so we can't hear you. Supervisor Caput, your microphone. Yeah. I think supervisor McPherson wants to say something. Yeah, I want to make it clear that we're not establishing a new department. We're doing this with personnel that we have now to be overseen, be centered with this administrative officer, but this is not a new department. We are going to do this with existing personnel. And so I think that needs to be made clear. That answers the question. And we can entertain a motion unless we have other comments. I'd be glad to make a motion, Mr. Chair, that we accept this proposal with a modification that was mentioned by Supervisor Coonerty. Okay. Second. Second. Okay, we got a first and second. If the clerk will conduct- Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Friend. Aye. Coonerty. McPherson. Aye. Chairman Caput. Aye. And the motion passes unanimously. Takes us to item number nine, public hearing to consider a report on the year 2021 growth goal. Refer the matter to the Planning Commission for consideration, continue the public hearing to December 8th, 2020 and take related actions as outlined in the memorandum of the Planning Director. Hello there. Good morning, Supervisors. My name's Natisha Williams and today I'll be presenting on the year 2021 growth goal. You might want to be closer to the microphone. Oh, sorry about that. Bring it closer to you. Is that good? Yeah. So as you know, the county's growth management system was instituted in 1979 following the adoption of Measure J to address the resource and public services impacts of population growth in Santa Cruz County. As part of the growth management system, each year the county is- Can I get a room to nap? Sorry. Okay. We're just trying to make it as hard for you as pop. Oh. Each year the county is required to set an annual growth goal for the upcoming year that represents a fair share of the state's growth. The 2021 growth goal report is before you today for consideration prior to referral to the Planning Commission. So this report examines various factors used in establishing the year 2021 growth goal for the unincorporated area and it includes analysis of population growth trends, resource constraints and the status of this year's allocations. The report includes analysis of the county's housing needs including progress towards meeting the county's required regional housing needs assessment as well as demolition permits and density bonus projects approved in the past year and the ADU annual report is also included. This year's report also includes a discussion on the permanent room housing project applications that are in process this year and the impacts of recent state law on the county's growth management system. As noted in the report, the unincorporated area of Santa Cruz County had an estimated negative 0.24% growth rate last year. All jurisdictions except Scotts Valley saw similar negative growth rates. The county as a whole has seen declining population totals in recent years and while the state's population continues to increase, California's growth rate has also slowed down in recent years. Recent population estimates for the county indicate a continuing downward trend of population growth rates in the decades since the 1960s and 70s when the county grew much faster than the state. The 2020 census is expected to provide more precise and up-to-date population numbers for a county. However, the data is not set to be released until the spring of 2021 at the earliest. So if it's available in time, staff hopes to include these figures in next year's report. The growth goal report also summarizes the current status of the 2020 residential building permit allocations. This year, 63 allocations have been granted as of August 1st, including 45 units from six PRH projects which are currently in process. If demand continues at the current rate, 76 allocations will be granted by the end of the year. If PRH units are not included, only 18 building permits have been allocated so far in 2020 compared to 42 building permit allocations at the same time last year. Demand for allocations has remained low compared to previous decades and staff anticipates there will be more than enough permits available for the remainder of 2020. Based on the analysis detailed in the report, staff recommends that the growth goal be set at 0.25% for calendar year 2021. This would be consistent with the state's recent growth rates and constitutes our fair share of population growth as dictated by measure J. This would result in an allocation of 131 market rate units available for the year 2021. Allocations will be distributed between the urban and rural areas of the county at 75% to 25% ratio in order to recognize the greater potential for infill development in urban areas. The 2021 growth goal report also recommends as in previous years that the unused market rate allocations from 2020 be carried over to 2021 in accordance with policy 3.2 of the general plan housing element. This would result in a projected total of 310 market rate allocations available for 2021. Staff has found that the establishment of the 2021 growth goal is exempt under the California Environmental Quality Act and a categorical exemption will be prepared. In October, 2019, Governor Newsom signed into law SB 330, which established a statewide housing emergency and implements the Housing Crisis Act of 2019. A key provision of this law prevents jurisdictions from limiting the number of housing permits or population within affected county areas. Affected county areas are defined as census designated places that lie wholly within census-defined urbanized areas. In Santa Cruz County, this includes the following CDPs. Live Oak, Paso Tiempo, Paradise Park, and Amesti, as shown in blue on this map. In accordance with the Housing Crisis Act of 2019, it is recommended that Santa Cruz County not enforce the Measure J growth goal limit on residential allocations within these areas while this temporary statute is in place. And that will be from January 1st, 2020 to January 1st, 2025. Other aspects of Measure J unrelated to limiting building permit allocations will not be impacted by this bill. And staff will continue to track Measure J allocations and subsequent building permit issuance in these areas for reporting purposes. As noted previously, in recent years, the number of building permits for new housing units has not come close to the county's growth goal. So it is not expected that the provision of SB 30, that this provision of SB 330 will impact the county's volume of permits for new housing. Staff therefore recommends that the board open the public hearing to consider the report on the year 2021 growth goal. Refer this matter to the Planning Commission for consideration and recommendation to the board and continue the public hearing to establish the year 2021 growth goal to December 8th, 2020 with direction to planning staff return with the recommendation of the Planning Commission and a resolution for final action by the board. This concludes the staff presentation and I'd be glad to answer any questions you might have. Okay. Are there any questions from board members? We can go positively up hold if you'd like. Thank you, Chair. Thank you for the presentation. I just had a couple of questions. This question about SB 330. Since we've since it's been years since we've been anywhere close to the allocation limit, why would we not count? I mean, it seems odd not to include those in the count. Is that a legal requirement? Or is it just, are we trying to get more permits? It seems odd to me. So we will still be counting and recording them in the presentation of the growth goal report. However, if we find that we're reaching that ceiling in these specific areas that we mentioned, the county would not be, according to SB 330, would not be allowed to enforce the limit in that area. But we're still recording it in our data collection. Yeah, no, that's, that makes a lot of sense to me. The growth goal at 0.25% is lower than we've had in the past. Correct. And that is because the population is going down rather than going up. Although most people in Santa Cruz don't ever feel like there's less people here. Is this the first time in the 40 plus years that we're doing it that we set it at 0.25%? So the growth goal has been set at 0.5% for basically since around the year 2000, around that era. But it has been much higher in previous decades and going back to the 90s and especially in the 80s. So I'm not actually sure about the exact number of times that if it was ever set at 0.25. But the goal is to make sure that we're accounting for our fair share. So we're trying to be commensurate with the state's growth rate. Yeah, and that part makes sense. I just wanted to get clarity on that. The confusion I have is at 0.25%, it doesn't really seem like it really changes dramatically the number of building permits that we would make available. Just trying to figure out exactly how that works to reduce it by half, but not see those allocations go down by half. Right, so part of it is the number of carryover permits that are about carried over from last year. And last year we set it at 0.5%. So there's a good amount of carryover allocations available. I believe the total allocations from last year was in the 460s. I don't have the exact number in front of me right now. So it is a substantial decrease, but the carryover and the low number of allocations that we've given this year is probably why that large number, yeah, is there. Thank you for clarifying that. Appreciate it. Yeah. Supervisor Friend. Thank you, Chair. Thank you for the presentation. I do have one question, possibly something that I had missed in the report. I recognize that we have not used these permits and that the carryovers cover it. But given the fires that occurred and given the number of unpermitted structures that were lost, which is kind of an unknown exact number at this point, I just wanted to confirm that should those be rebuilt in 2021 and come into compliance with permits that we would still have an adequate number of permits to meet those rebuilds that are needed. Yeah. So that is something that our staff has been looking at. Obviously we don't know exactly how many unpermitted, as you mentioned, we don't know how many unpermitted structures are out there. And we don't know exactly when people will be coming to the county to request building permits for replacement units on those properties. But the staff wants to share the board that the growth goal will not be an obstacle for any property owners that might want to request an allocation in the next year. And one of our recommendations is that the board can decide to exempt these permits from the county's allocation system by resolution or ordinance, specifically for properties that were impacted by the CZU lightning complex fires. So that would be in accordance with Santa Cruz County code section 12.02.029, which states that such other building permits as may be determined consistent with chapters 7.01 and 7.04 of the SCCC can be to be exempt from the residential permit allocation system by resolution or ordinance of the board of supervisors. So all we need to do is to demonstrate consistency with our county's growth management plan, which I think is self-evident since many of these properties will be essentially replacement units. We will not be increasing the population in this area, but rather maintaining the population. So that would be our suggestion. Thank you, that's excellent, I appreciate that. Committee, Supervisor McPherson. Thank you, Mr. Chipper. I have to pull it, I didn't get it. The book will reception on the presentation, but I have read the report and I really do want to thank the planning department for putting together a real succinct report about the work bar. And it's really important that we track our goals relative to the outcomes we see here and here and look critically at the obstacles that stand in the way. I think people are shocked at a few permits we do issue every year, but I have a couple of questions and maybe you had these or somebody did it in the process, but what role do our zoning regulations continue to play in a low number of permits issued? Is it our planning staff think we are still too restrictive? I don't know if you can answer that or if the planning director would have to do that, but just wanted to get a sense of if we're doing this in our process overall. Yeah, I think I would refer you to the planning director on that. I know that, as we've included in our report, there are just a number of different factors including the stats of the economy as well. So yeah, I think the planning director would have a better answer for you on that. I understand, thank you. How does our missing these targets impact our RENA obligations? I say that as a member of AMBAG, the Association of Monterey Day Area Governments. And next year we're gonna have to come up with our new projections and the state and the governor are really pressing for us to build more housing in this state. And my understanding from a review of a five county regional group that is looking at housing from Santa Cruz down to San Luis Obispo, the Santa Barbara County it's updated RENA numbers and the state tripled the number that they're supposed to reach. I don't know, I just, it's certainly not the planning department's point for this, but I think we gotta get real about what we can, with the state or the state needs to get real about some of the limitations we face, housing prices, whatever the case may be, and not meeting our RENA obligations, we don't get punished for it, but I think we ought to get real of what's going on. And this question is really more, is directed more to the state, I guess, but how does our missing these targets impact the RENA obligations? Right, so I mean, the growth goal allocations are a very specific set of units that we're looking at. We're only looking at market rate units, so it does not count the affordable units, which are also required as part of our RENA obligation. But we did include a brief summary of last year's housing element annual progress report on page 47 of your packet. And according to that, that summary there, right. So, we're within the first six years of a nine year planning period for this RENA cycle, and the county has permitted a total of 503 units, with still 811 units to remain. So, these are two sort of separate calculations for the numbers of units that we're permitting each year, but certainly it provides a small picture of at least the market rate units that we're trying to achieve. Right, I get it, and I'm not trying to put you on the spot, it's just trying to get what the state wants and what can really happen in a realistic world. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Supervisor Coonerty. I don't have any questions. Thank you, Mr. Chair. And my only comment or question would be, it's like a moving target, trying to predict what the population is. We're gonna find out probably in about six months or maybe a little longer, with the census taking place and everything. I think even the census will be a little bit off because of the pandemic and also the fires and everything else that's happened. But my understanding is actually the population of Capitola when I was talking to a couple of council members, this was over a year ago. They were saying that the population of Capitola was actually going down a little bit rather than going up. Right, so in our population estimates, shown in the earlier part of our report, I can get you the exact page number if that's helpful. On page 33 of your packet, we do include department of finance demographic research on population estimates that show that the city of Capitola did see a slight decrease in population in the past two years. So yeah, you're right. And we'll open it up to for the public hearing on the item number nine and well, Becky. Thank you. Becky Steinbruner, resident of rural Aptos. I wanna clarify something that I heard and I heard you say that you recommend measure J is not implemented in the three affected areas a live oak, paradise park and a musty. That doesn't make a lot of sense to me and maybe supervisor Leopold, that's what you were asking about. This is to me very confusing information that we would not want to make sure that there would be 15% affordable inclusionary housing in those areas when there is, when there are building permits issued. I also note that in the report that it is anticipated that ambag could possibly double our RENA numbers and supervisor McPherson referred to that happening in Santa Barbara. That makes no sense to me either if the California's population is decreasing, why would the RENA numbers increase by two and three fold? And I hope you can help us understand that. I am also concerned as was a supervisor McPherson about what happens if we don't meet our RENA numbers. We've seen that governor Newsom sued the city of Huntington Beach for not meeting these numbers. So how big is the stick? And what effects could it have on our community? Especially if we're going to be telling a number of people in the CZU area that they cannot rebuild. Are they gonna have to be forced into the town? Is that the plan? And is that part of it? I'm curious about the numbers that are reported in terms of building permits. And I think I heard you say that affordable units are not included in the RENA numbers. That, and please help me understand that if that's not, if I didn't hear it right because that would explain why the number of building permits do not reflect the number of the 57 units in the 100% affordable housing in Supervisor Leopold's district that was approved on Capitola Road and the 11 units in Habitat Humanity. And there are many others like that, that those numbers, if you add them in, would far exceed the numbers that you've reported here. If affordable housing is not included in the RENA numbers that makes no sense to me because it's development, it's increase in population. I also wanna point out that in the county growth goal it points out and has for the last few years that infrastructure is the most limiting factor in growth namely water, but also roads. So how will we incorporate those needs into our growth goal? Thank you. All right, so first I want to clarify that the RENA units are set by the state. They do include affordable units. They are separate from what we're talking about here which is the growth goal. These are specifically about market rate units. So the affordable units are included in our RENA obligation. I also want to clarify that as I mentioned the only impacts of SB 30 on our Measure J growth goal will be we cannot limit the population and thus we cannot limit the building permits in those specific areas. The affordability requirements as the other aspects of Measure J are not gonna be impacted by SB 330. It's just the population and building permit limits. Okay. Do we have any comments from? Thank you, Supervisor. We have one by Ken Davenport. The negative population growth reported by Kathleen Malloy's report is concerning Wyeth Santa Cruz County so far below the state average. Wyeth Santa Cruz County performing below Monterey, Santa Clara, and San Mateo counties. I have the problem is the problem of your planning department and land use policies. What can you learn from more successful counties around you? Thank you. And that's the end of public comment. Thank you, Supervisor. I'll bring it back to the board for either discussion or motion. Chair, I think most people in Santa Cruz would like the idea of having limited growth and are not alarmed by the decline in growth. But I think we should set these growth goals and I would move the recommended actions. Okay. Second. We have a first and second. Second. Any other discussion? We'll call for a roll call vote. Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Chair Caput. Aye. The motion passes unanimously. That'll take us to item number 10 to consider a report on cannabis licensing off officials, unappealable authority with regard to exception requests and options for appellant review of such decisions as outlined in the memorandum of the County Administrative Officer. Blow. Good morning board. At the June 2nd board meeting, staff was directed to provide a report detailing areas within County code where the CLO has unappealable authority regarding licensing decisions. Staff was also asked to provide options for an appellant review of such decisions. With regard to non-retail cannabis operations, the CLO has limited authority to allow exceptions to setbacks in the rodeo-gulch zoning overlay. This area was seen as the most appropriate area within the County for these types of operations and in an effort to streamline the use permit process, this area was selected to provide CLO discretion. The basis for this was there's one non-conforming home in the area which was causing all use permit applications to be level five in this area. As a refresher, this is the rodeo-gulch zoning overlay where the CLO has the authority to approve setback exceptions for cultivation, distribution, and non-volatile manufacturing operations. With regard to retail cannabis operations, the CLO has limited authority to allow setback exceptions when they make a finding that the general public benefit outweighs concerns regarding intensity of use, land use compatibility, and public health and safety. Staff has developed three options for the board to consider moving forward. The three basic options include maintaining the current process, scheduling a public hearing prior to approval, or lastly, creating a public notice and appeal process for the general public after the CLO makes a decision. As we move forward and review these options, the board should consider that these options can be independently implemented for either non-retail or retail operations or both. Now, the second option noted in the board memo is to have a public hearing in front of the CLO. This process would effectively mimic a zoning administrator public hearing where the project would be reviewed, the public would be able to provide written and verbal input, and the CLO would make a decision. The public could then appeal that decision to an adjudicative body who would be responsible for hearing the appeal in a timely manner and their decision would be final and only appealable to the superior court. The third option noted in the memo is allow the CLO to make a decision and provide the public an opportunity to initiate an appeal. The appeal of a CLO decision would be to an adjudicative body who would be responsible for hearing the appeal in a timely manner and their decision would be final and appealable only to the superior court. As you consider these three options, you must also consider who the adjudicative body will be. No matter who the adjudicative body is, the process allows the public to have a complete understanding of the CLO's technocratic decision. As the CLO will be tasked with explaining their decision to the public. Options for an adjudicative body include an administrative hearing officer who is an independent lawyer and effectively acts as a judge. An assistant CAO could be the decision maker as they have a unique perspective on the county. And lastly, yourselves as the board collectively are an option because you represent the voters. Now moving forward, staff has presented the three basic options for you to consider for either the non-retail process or the retail process or both. Please let me know if I can answer any questions about these options. Okay, we'll open up to questions. Hopefully this item doesn't take up too much time considering the agenda that we do have. Anyway, I'm leaning towards leaving things the way that they are right now. But anyway, will any other questions or comments by board members? Yeah, the chair doesn't supervise her friend. I had actually requested that this item be folded into the previous update and I appreciate the CLO and county council and others coming back with a process. This, I think there was an unintended consequence of us not having any sort of review or public process on this exemption process. We don't have this by the way really anywhere else that I can think of in the code where you would have a unilateral authority without any public input or appeal capability. So in my district, which helped bring this up, there is a retail location that has received a lot of pushback from an affordable housing development next door as well as some of the surrounding businesses but there hasn't been any possibility for input into the appropriateness of the findings of these exemptions. So I'm supportive of creating an appellate process and this is no statement actually or a lack of confidence at all on the CLO's decision that CLO was granted this exact authority by the board. And I think though that now seeing what it looks like in action, I think that the board should just modify this. For me, I think that option number three which creates the ability after a decision has been made by the CLO would make the most sense. That's pretty common in how we do things anyway and appellate component. I think it should be an administrative hearing officer and not an accounting employee. I think that the administrative officer should hear the information de novo and actually have the capability of specifically making a determination on that. I also believe though that as part of this that the county supervisor whose district this decision is being considered should be notified in advance of a decision by the CLO. There isn't a current requirement on that and unfortunately what could be considered a large decision made in this capability. We are notified of everything from vacation rentals to even when construction equipment is going to be cited in our district but there's no process now to currently notifying the board. I have no issue with the current rodeo Gulch overlay. I think that this should be specific to retail. So I would be supportive of that. Obviously I want to hear what my colleagues have to say but when it becomes time for a motion what I would be supporting is option three with a little bit of the additional clarity that the board item had requested from the board as to how we see that structure. Thank you. Okay. And option three is the CLO approves the setback exception use and administrative hearing officer and assistant county administrative officer the board of supervisor or whichever individual body the board prefers to use as the body to hear appeals to implement this option. Okay. Go ahead. Any other comments? Supervisor Coonerty. I have no comments at this time. I'll afford a public comment. Okay. And Supervisor McPherson. Yeah, I would be supportive of what was stated by Supervisor Friend. I don't, I wasn't, the vocal is on and off for me but I'm not sure. I think we should use an administrative hearing officer. That's my only point that I think gotta be specified. Eric. Yeah. As we've gone through this process of figuring out how to license both retail and non-retail cannabis my memory of we got to this place of having the CLO be the sole person because the board in a lot of ways was tired of spending hours on cannabis related items. The idea of having some other appeal process is not necessarily a bad one but one of the things that we have experienced in the past is that there have been members of the county staff who don't wanna get involved in this activity. Now that's in the past some members of the planning department haven't wanted to get involved. And things have changed in terms of the legal nature of cannabis and now we see that as a county business and they contribute to our bottom line in terms of taxes. But I just wanna make sure that the administrative hearing officer doesn't carry any biases or reluctance because mainly these are land use choices. This is a highly regulated retail business. I'm not sure that there's any retail business that is as highly regulated in terms of what you could do on the premises, what kind of security you have to have maybe gun shops, maybe bars to a certain extent. And so we're talking about a very highly regulated business and sometimes it needs an exception because we have very narrow economic districts. And so just making sure that if we have a process that's appealable that someone takes that into consideration that would be useful in any process that we create. Okay. We'll open up. Well, this is brought up because of district two, I guess, something coming up. But if we decide this one way or the other, it has ramifications through the whole county, right? Yes, it would. And per supervisor friends, per what he discussed, he's thinking only to consider this for the retail operations. And my understanding is Supervisor McPherson was also in favor of that. I think staff is really seeking direction from the board on this item. Our main concern with the adjudicative bodies is we're placing all of the power potentially in either an assistant CAO, an administrative hearing officer or the board itself. If we go with either the first two options, it's a single individual who may or may not completely understand the county regulations and requirements associated with these businesses. So I just wanted to make sure that staff was clear to the board and the members of the public that our main concern with choosing the first two options is all the power rests within that one individual who we don't know if there is, we don't know how well they understand the code and how well they understand the state requirements and things of that nature. So we just want to clarify that. Okay, I'll open it up to public comment. Thank you, by case Steinbruner, I live in rural Aptos. Thank you for the presentation. What I want to know is how much the appeals would cost because if it comes before the board of supervisors, it costs the people $1,800. That's prohibitive to a lot of people. So what would an appeal process cost? That needs to be very clear. I would actually favor an administrative hearing officer. The county already contracts with such a person for the assessment appeals board. This person, I don't know who it is now, used to be Mr. McSpadden. I went to some of those appeal hearings and they were very fair. They were very good and very well run. And I think that if you've got a certain level of mistrust regarding county government, having a completely independent legal person there would instill a better level of confidence in the appeal process for all sides, perhaps. So I would favor that as well. And I would ask that the board consider using what we've already got on board with our assessment appeals adjudicative officer and just expand that. That person was very knowledgeable about county land use policies and would be a good choice and already under county payroll. Thank you. Okay. How's it going? My name is Kirk Nelson. I'm a local contractor who deals with both cannabis and non-cannabis clients. And to be honest, I am absolutely 100% for the appeals process. If not, at least, if not also including the ability to bring it to public notice. Because as you mentioned, if a gun shop, liquor store, or bar were to open an area, they would have to announce publicly to the general public and allow them to input whether or not that would potentially be allowed to happen. Especially if the offset is zero feet, which there is a proposed construction site which has a zero foot offset to a low income housing or a formal housing unit. So with that, there should be at least the ability to appeal. If not, as per public input to whether or not there is truly a greater good for that. In this case, a retail dispensary to be brought into that neighborhood. Thank you. Thank you. Bring it back. We have any other comments? I just like to clarify, some of the businesses discussed wouldn't necessarily have a public notification if they're principally permitted use. Is that correct? Well, what we're envisioning is that we would go and create some draft ordinance amendments to come back to you regarding chapter seven. And it would only relate to those instances where the CLO was about to use their formerly unappealable authority to go to make a decision different from what the setbacks normally are. But in the question of the gun shop or the bar, they don't necessarily have, we don't always do notification on those. On a gun shop or a bar? Yeah. Yeah, I would have to look further into that. I'm not aware off the top of my head if that's the case. Yeah, I mean, they were just a couple of years ago, principally permitted uses. I know we changed the rules on gun shops that they have a much more involved, but it has to go through the sheriff's office and we don't actually have any gun shops in the county at the moment, but they have to go through a much rigorous level of review before they're allowed to open, but I'm not sure it necessarily requires public notification. I think that I'm comfortable with the way things are. I understand that my colleagues are interested in having some kind of appeal process. I would be willing to support that. I think that I just want to make sure that it's someone who actually understands the rules because we now have, I don't know, 10 years of dispensary operation here in Santa Cruz County and the unincorporated area. You could look at the information. These are generally not problem locations that because of their security and other requirements, and people just coming and going, they're not problem locations, but there is a fear because it involves something that used to be illegal, and I understand that as well. So having some kind of appeal process is, I could support, I'm not sure it's necessary, but I understand the need. Okay, on the option, option three would make it more difficult to get an exception to let's say a setback or whatever from like a school or from somebody's property or whatever. It would not make the process more difficult. Option three would allow the CLO to review the application, make a determination, and if it's, if it were an approval determination, the findings that are required by code would be made. The public would be notified of those filing or of those findings via mail. The applicant would have to mail out to everyone within 600 feet, similar to what's done with the level five process for a zoning administrator hearing. So the public notification would go out, including the findings, the public would be given 14 days to file an appeal. If an appeal were to be filed, it would go to an adjudicated body. So it doesn't change the process, the internal process within the building, it just allows the public the ability to file an appeal based on the technical decision made by the Canvas licensing official. Okay, option one, it stays the same. And what's the process? Let's say you give a, you grant the exception. Yes. The public doesn't have to be notified that you've made a decision or does the public have input or they don't? The public is not notified of the decision and there's no public input made, it's simply a technical decision. Okay, so I'm gonna go, I'm leading towards option three, like Zach Frens said, okay. All right, so any questions? I'll move the recommended actions with the direction that we follow option three and that the specific adjudicative body be an administrative hearing officer. This includes the written notice, the proof of mailing, the deadline for 14 days and that an appeal time be set. Additionally, I'd like to ask for additional, oh, that they be able to consider the information de novo that the administrative hearing officer and additionally that the County Supervisor of the district where the exception is being considered be notified of the application in advance of the CLO's determination. Okay, we have a motion and do we have a second? I'll second. Sound like Supervisor Coonerty second. Oh, Supervisor Coonerty said yes. Chair Caput, may staff request clarification from Supervisor Friend on the motion? Is this only to apply to the retail process? I apologize. Thank you, Mr. Coonerty. Yes, for the retail operations. Thank you. That accepted by the seconder. What's the current rule on the cultivation right now? The current rule on cultivation, Chair Caput is the CLO only has authority within that rodeo Gulch zoning overlay to approve a setback exception. And that's based on that the previous issues we'd run into with a nonconforming home in that area changing all of the use permits to level five. So it's the CLO's authority with regard to cultivation is limited to the rodeo Gulch zoning overlay only. Okay. So only in one district is it's my district. We've talked about it. It seems entirely appropriate. Okay. Okay. We have a motion and we have a second. So we'll call the roll. Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Chairman Caput. Aye. Motion passes unanimously. And that takes us to... Chair Caput, I think we're gonna break for closed session and then return at 130 for item number 11. Okay. Can we break for lunch? I mean, it's not realistic to think that we're gonna go the rest of this time without eating. Yes. No, we can break for lunch. Should we return at 145 or two? That would be great. I think at 145. Is that enough time? 145. Yeah, that's fine. 145. Okay. 145 with the public defenders number 11. Are we going into closed session? We are. Yes. We do have a closed session right now. Okay. Then we're gonna come back at two o'clock. I'm sorry. I should have said that. We can't have time to eat. So we should come back at two o'clock. Let's return at two. We'll do closed session right now. We have some folks waiting. Okay. We're gonna have closed session right now. Is that correct? Yes. And then we'll return at two o'clock. That's right. And there's nothing reportable from closed session. Okay. Okay. And we'll return at two o'clock for the public defenders. Number item number 11, consider assessment of indigent defense services in Santa Cruz County. Consider approval and concept of ordinance adding chapter 2.13 to the Santa Cruz County code to establish a public defender's office and the position of public defender schedule the ordinance for second reading and final adoption on October 20, 2020 direct the County administrative office to transition services and return in March of 2021 with an update and take related actions as outlined in the memorandum of the County administrative officer. So we'll start with the right to council evaluation, a trial level indigent representation services and ordinance adding chapter 2.13. Okay. Good afternoon, Chair Caput. And members of the board. So I'm Nicole Coburn, acting County administrative officer. I'm joined today by principal administrative analysts, Ben Stafford, who's been working with me on the public defender transition and he's going to be helping deliver a portion of today's presentation. So this is our agenda for the presentation. First, we'd like to cover the transition timeline and give an overview of key findings from the assessment of current indigent defense services. We're going to follow that with the proposed framework for the future of indigent services. And then lastly, we'll summarize the recommendations and next steps. I'd also like to note that the Sixth Amendment center consultants who worked with us on the assessment are joining virtually today by teams and are available for questions after the presentation, if you have any. Before we get started, we'd like to acknowledge Mr. Larry Bingham and Mr. Jerry Christensen with Bingham, Christensen and Menzloff for more than 40 years of service to the county. And I should note it's actually 45. Their contribution to justice and dedication to the residents of the county cannot be overstated. Their work and the work of the conflict firms has made the county a better place to live. We look forward to their expertise and collaboration as the county transitions to a new service model. And we'd also like to thank the conflict firms, specifically Mr. Mitchell Page with Page and Dudley, Mr. Tom Walrath with Walrath and Associates, as well as Ms. Tamara Rice with County Council who administers the criminal defense conflicts program. All of them spent a lot of time working with us and the consultant on the assessment and we thank them for all their collaboration. So just as a reminder of where we've been and where we're heading, a possible public defender transition has been under discussion since 2016. In 2018, the board approved amendments to the current public defender contracts and these contracts memorialized that these discussions on the transition. This included a three year transition beginning in fiscal year 1920 and ending in 21-22. In the contract renewal, the county also committed to prioritize staff employed with Bigham, Christensen and Menzloff and provide them with the right of first opportunity to work for the county as part of a transition. A transition process was subsequently approved by the board in 2019 when the Sixth Amendment Center was hired to conduct an independent and objective assessment of current services. Over a nine month period, the assessment included a review of federal and state law, analysis of case data, two site visits, 50 hours and 50 interviews with law firm and panel attorneys, 12 hours and 17 interviews with superior court judges, 13 hours spent meeting with probation district attorney and county administrative office staff and 15 hours of court observations. Today, we're bringing options and a recommendation for the board to consider as the next steps as we with the goal of transitioning services by July 1st of 2022. So now I'm going to turn it over to Sven who's going to address the assessment. Thank you, Nicole. Good afternoon supervisors. So to move forward, we have to understand the current system where it performs well and where we can make it better. As Nicole mentioned, we worked with the Sixth Amendment Center to conduct a nine month review of indigent services. And on that team was a group of six indigent defense experts, including the 28 year director of the King County Defender Association up in Seattle. And a steering committee member of the National Association for Public Defense. So the key findings of the assessment really reveal the root deficiencies in the flat fee contracts that were issued by the county. This type of contract isn't best practice and did lead to both some theoretical and some actual findings in the indigent defense system. The assessment really does reveal an opportunity to make our indigent defense services better, particularly in terms of being able to establish local caseload standards. The assessment uses national caseload standards to draw its comparisons, but it really highlights the need for us as a local community to establish those standards for ourselves and revealed some need for more investment in technology and training. So I'm gonna spend the most of my time today talking about the framework for future indigent defense services. So guided by the findings of the Sixth Amendment Center assessment. The CAO does recommend transitioning to a new public defender's office. And in this section, we'll talk about the framework for the new public defender's office. Again, guided by those recommendations. So what we're building and then we'll present a transition plan. So defining how we exactly intend to get to that new office. So the county recommends a hybrid public-private system that builds on the strengths of the current system and allows flexibility for the county to build its indigent defense system over the next several years. As you'll see in this slide here, there are two proposed divisions, public defender division, which would be a traditional internal department comprised of county employed attorneys and then a conflicts division that would be modeled on the current fourth-party conflict panel program, which would be overseen by county staff, but staffed by private bar attorneys retained on a case-by-case basis. The public defender division would have primary representation duties for felonies, misdemeanors and delinquencies and the conflicts division would provide conflict representation for those same cases and also primary representation under for a number of different case types. The advantages of the system are that it locates transparency and accountability in one office. It provides for flexible staffing justified by local caseload standards. It creates a attorney salary parity with county council in the DA and also creates transparency within that staffing system. It centralizes investment technology and training and it provides for collaboration with other county departments including health services, human services and the probation department when appropriate. We did consider alternatives and alternatives are available for the board to consider. One option would be to remain a contract model county. We could issue a new request for proposals with outcome-based incentives and structure the contract in a way that alleviates potentially some of the concerns raised in the Sixth Amendment Center Assessment. The advantages of this would be that it could potentially provide for more efficient services and it would avoid certain one-time costs of creating a county department. The disadvantages would be that there would be again less transparency and accountability and that the contracts would again be diffuse and not centralized in one place and an open RFP potentially creates additional uncertainty with depending on which firms would be able to respond to it. The second model would be to adopt an all private bar model. This is currently practiced in San Mateo County near us. The San Mateo advantage is that that system has grown organically over a number of years. It does create a smaller administrative footprint and again avoids those one-time costs. The disadvantages include again less transparency and accountability and potentially more staffing turnover and the inability to create institutional knowledge. So how do we get there? There are basically two tracks. First is creating the foundation. So what can we do short-term in the next year and a half for the department to start and then the medium term? So what can we do building on that foundation in the first two to five years? The current indigent defense budget is approximately $13 million and we believe that within that same envelope we can provide similar staffing infrastructure and enhance County collaboration and partnerships. In terms of staffing, the indigent defense system currently handles around 11,000 cases per year across our entire system. At any one time we have about between 33 and 35 full-time employees within between the main law firm, the conflict firms and the fourth party panel. We believe that within our budget envelope we can provide between 15 to 20% more attorneys. We believe that we can provide dedicated social work staff and IT and administrative support. In terms of infrastructure, no matter what system the board ends up recommending a new case management system is going to be required. It'll be required to establish the local standards and local data that we wanna use. And we are currently working with the district attorney on an RFP that we hope will come to the board shortly. This will make it possible to have the data to make certain actionable decisions and working with the DA will provide for better data sharing and silos obviously where appropriate. In terms of training, we wanna maintain the good work that is done in terms of training locally. We'll also have the opportunity to apply for new state resources as money has been included in the state budget for indigent defense training and we'll be monitoring the state for grant opportunities and we'll need to bolster juvenile attorney training as well. In terms of collaboration and partnerships the new public defender's office will benefit from integration into the social and safety net services. So in social workers and collaborating with the human services department to connect clients to benefits stronger partnerships with health services, especially for mental health court and substance use services, better integration for clients with probation services where appropriate especially employment and education services and working with community organizations and advocates. And we do intend to have an advisory group in some form that will bring to the board later of criminal justice partners that would be able to guide the new department. So in terms of building a stronger system over the medium term, so two to five years we believe that building on that foundation will provide for transparency through our budget and finance process, through systems that we've set up currently with our strategic and operational plans through other initiatives supporting those plans such as performance measurement and process improvement. We believe that'll increase accountability that will be able to develop local caseload standards that'll produce timely accurate and relevant reports. That'll also be able to adapt to our local court practices and changes in state law. And finally on equity, we do really wanna be centering equity and decision-making, the new departmental benefit from work that we've done with the core community programs with the task force for justice and gender, with the community corrections partnership and also with the district attorney's new initiative on neighborhood courts as well. We wanna continue expanding our work in South County and then we fully intend to create a client-centered office that is culturally responsive and also trauma-informed. And with that, I'll give it back to Nicole. So today we're asking the board to approve the recommended action shown here, the first of which would be to accept and file the assessment of current indigent services. The second to approve and concept the ordinance establishing a public defender office and the position of public defender with final adoption on October 20th. This is really the first step of many in moving forward with the transition. We acknowledge that there's still a lot of work to do. Following this item, there are many actions that must be taken and brought back to the board to even start to establish and recruit an independent County public defender. This is an important step in the process so that that person can get to know key stakeholders and work on the large amount of administrative policy and many other logistics of establishing a new department. We also asking the board to direct the CAO to transition indigent defense services by July 1st of 2022, that to ensure a smooth transition and continuity of operations with our criminal justice partners, this is gonna require significant cooperation and guidance from the current indigent defense law firms and the superior court. The CAO is committed to working with these partners throughout the transition and we're prepared to define the roles and responsibilities of the transition planning team, which would include these partners and immediately establish a regular meeting schedule. What's proposed today is a big change. We recognize that that's gonna require a lot of hard work and collaboration. We currently have less than 21 months to complete the transition. So we must keep moving forward and making progress if the transition is to be successful. We would return to the board in March of 2021 with an update on these efforts. And lastly, I wanna note while the current system has worked well, we are really focused on how we can do even better and achieve a more transparent, accountable and equitable indigent defense system. And with that, we're happy to answer any questions that the board might have. Okay, I have a few things to say, but I'll let, we can start with Supervisor Coonerty. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'm gonna wait until I hear public comment before asking any questions. Supervisor Friend. Thank you, Chair. I do have a brief question, which is just in regards to, well actually there were two questions. One of them dealt with the Sixth Amendment Center's staffing recommendations, which are based on national standards. My understanding is that very few of any communities have met those standards. And so there was in the report, that it noted that there would be a local analysis that's being completed. But did you have a sense then of where we are versus where we would need to be? And what a realistic timeline in that transition would be in order to meet that increased staffing for the local analysis. Do you have sort of any free information on the staffing component? Well, Supervisor Friend, so I think we're hoping as part of giving a case management system and being able to look at the data and establish local measures and standards to do that work over the next couple of years. What we're proposing is to come back with a bait, what we believe we can achieve within the current budget of the public defender and really work on that over the next couple of years to get a better look and handle on what's happening, to see what else we might need to do in terms of augmenting or adjusting staff. Okay, and I would feel more comfortable. I saw that we did receive a letter from the current public defender as well as the presiding judge and others on the bench. I mean, I've had nothing but personal positive interactions both in my current job and previously when I worked at the police department with the current public defender's office and their staff. I think that there needs to be a role for that current staff within the new agency. I recognize when you become public employees, generally there's a probation process, et cetera, but has there been talks specifically about how those employees would transition over to a new public department? I need to be part of the transition plan. We did say that those specific steps that would be taken to offer employment and make that available to the firm staff would be known. And Agita Patel is here who can address those sorts of questions, but I believe that we still need to work out all the details on how that would take place. But we do have, we did offer the first rate of opportunity to the bigum employees in terms of becoming county employees. Good afternoon, Agita Patel, First Nail Director. I just wanted to echo that what Nicole shared, Supervisor Friend, is accurate. And while those details have not been worked out, we do have an opportunity through the transition to work out those details about probationary period and how people would transition over and what that process would look like. So certainly we've got an opportunity to work on that and also work with the stakeholders in establishing that process. Thank you, Mr. Patel. Maybe then I'll follow to you before you leave there. I mean, my concern, and I imagine that this is, the county's concern as well is I don't want to create, I don't want the board to take an action today and therefore next two weeks from now or whatever it is, with a level of uncertainty that would create an issue for sort of like a purgatory time in advance of April of next year when we would have a new PD in place. I mean, if the intention is to transition these employees over, I think there needs to be a pretty direct statement that's made and the details associated with that, I think the sooner that we had those the better because if the board is moving forward with the transition, the board would want to know how the staff is transitioning as well because a large part of this is an assumption that we can provide an additional staffing and staff support model, but that would be predicated on that we would have a basis of these existing staff. I mean, the staff isn't obviously going to manifest. So that detail I think is actually a pretty important thing for the board to have knowledge of before the board transitioned the model. And so how would we have that assurance I guess my question? So it is my understanding with discussions with the CAO's office that today any action you take certainly does not preclude us or prevent us from establishing that transition for existing employees. Today is really just the framework. My thoughts on this would be that I would sit at the table be part of that transition team and we would do what we have at other times, which is that we would really have an opportunity for the existing employees to turn in a resume and show us their interest. And then by at that same time, we also need to create a process where those employees can examine their interest to be a part of our county structure. There's questions about salaries and benefits. And at this juncture, we have not laid the complete foundation on that, but we would certainly, it would seem to me that we'll need to have established before we do anything to give your board a plan for what does that look like and what our screening tool would be. Of course, the main screening tool, of course, is that they're all lawyers. And I know they all are today and have an opportunity for them to examine their interests with us. And then also look at their background and experience, which I am very confident that many of those attorneys will meet all of our education experience standards. So I think it's really a matter of us connecting with them and allowing them to ensure that they wanna be a part of this organization too. And while we don't have those solid plans today, I'm quite clear, and so is the CAO's office, that we would want to work those details of a process out with your board. And as I have often come when we're doing some new things, I'll be coming to closed session to have detailed conversations with you all about that process. Okay, I completely respect the fact that there may be some employees who don't wanna come over. My concern would be that we would take a certain amount of time inserting an uncertainty to a situation that would mean some employees would seek employment elsewhere. And since we're recognizing and part of this transition in understaffed component of the current private contract, I think by definition, the degree by which we can preserve as much of the current staff is essential for us to have a successful public model. So therefore the timing, I think is essential when the board is moving forward today. I mean, look, I support this movement to a public model. I assume that my colleagues overall do as well. I think that at a 30,000 foot view we should recognize this is happening. The transition are the details here that I think are important because it's difficult to take a broad action without actually knowing some of these details. So some of these assurances really did matter to me both on the staff side as well as knowing who would be at the table part of the transition. And so that's where my concerns are. Thank you, Chair. Okay, Supervisor McPherson. Yeah, thank you, Mr. Chair. First of all, I want to thank the Office of Vigam, Christensen and Mislaw for the services they've provided for so many years, what, at 45, not 40, and through the conflict terms to handle other cases, some of which have been very high profile cases and done very well. The report discusses a transition period between the end of the private contract and the opening of the public office, which includes hiring the public defender and support staff. How do we envision funding that while still addressing our obligations to the current contract? Supervisor McPherson. So our current contract goes through June 30th of 2022 as part of the process, you know, between now and then we'll be classifying and establishing all the positions. We need to work out exactly who is transitioning over when, assuming that all the employees from the existing firm are going to be taking jobs with the county. Hopefully we could establish something relatively smooth where it's they're coming over to the county, you know, right around that transition day. Obviously we need to bring over those cases and those people so that there isn't any sort of interruption of service. So that is something that we're gonna be working out with the firms as part of this. Okay. And I know we're all concerned, this has been addressed partially about the budget cuts in future years to address the revenue losses we're experiencing with COVID-19 and the fires. How do we anticipate the office might do its part, so to speak, in children in the future cuts across the county departments? I mean, it might have changed since you've been talking about this for several months now and what you foresaw, what could be done, but I don't know the current financial situation that we're in and going to be in for the next couple of years. How do you, are you just gonna just take that and do a count, I'm sure, but how do you see that this new office shoulder into future cuts across the county departments? I mean, just being part of the overall plan, I guess? Right, so I think if there are future cuts to county departments, obviously, we'll have to look at how that might impact the public defender. We are looking to augment the budget with other resources. We're intending to apply for the BSCC grant funding that is available in the current state budget and we'll be looking towards other sources, both state and federal grants. We can take a look at how other public defender budgets are structured and potentially what they're bringing to offset the cost of their operations, but we fully intend to get creative and think outside the box and figure out ways that we can bring in more resources to offset any sort of reductions that might have to occur. Understood, okay, thank you, Chair. I might have more questions later after a public testimony. Thank you. Okay, Supervisor Leopold. Thank you for the report. I appreciate this. You know, as someone who's been very concerned about the state of our criminal justice efforts here in Santa Cruz been actively involved with many of these issues as we've gone through prison realignment and many other changes at the state level, this transfer of the format of how we do our public defense is very important to me and I think to the community. Our criminal justice system works best when all elements are working well. And so this report gives us a chance to take a look at the public defense system. We, you know, earlier today, we looked at a report about those people being held in jail and, you know, the pre-trial program, the recommendations. There's things I'd like the judiciary to be better at. We've talked in the past about the district attorney's office. I'm glad to see them moving forward to the neighborhood courts. There's things that I'd like, there's things that are just referenced in this report that I think we just need to talk about. From the, from just at the highest level, this report seeks to identify a standard in which we are not making here in Santa Cruz County. They make the case that the case loads are too great and that we need to increase the number of lawyers who are helping meet the needs of our public defense system. However, the proposal, at least using the existing funds that we have would increase the number, but it wouldn't meet the standard. So I guess the question is either for our staff or the Sixth Amendment Center, is which California counties are meeting that standard? I would probably defer that to Sixth Amendment Center to address, you know, who, which other jurisdictions either in California or elsewhere. David Carroll or John Moser, who's on the teams meeting. David, I don't know if you could talk about that. Sure. Good afternoon and thank you for the opportunity. And on behalf of the Sixth Amendment Center, I just wanna say, you know, we're sorry for all that you have been going through with the wildfires in the pandemic and we hope to be able to help you in this transition. The issue of workload is one that isn't well documented in California. There's certainly some places that have very stringent caseloads, places like San Francisco and others that use even more flat fee contracts that have people handle excessive caseloads for a single flat fee. And so the national standards that we cite in the report are ones that are met in several jurisdictions across the country. They're not aspirational by any stretch of the imagination. My home state of Massachusetts actually has far lower caseload thresholds than what's proposed in the national standards. But I think the point here is that Santa Cruz doesn't know exactly how many cases are being handled and to what degree of difficulty. We mentioned in this study that the use of quarterbacks to handle a bunch of cases early on mean that the cases of most of the trial attorneys are much more difficult and harder and the national standards don't really apply in those situations, but even then you're far in the excess of them. What we've proposed and really if it wasn't for the pandemic and the wildfires, we probably would have had a more specific transition plan. But what we're saying is through a new case tracking system you need to have the information about what the criminal justice system caseload will look like on the backside of all of this. There's a great chance that through efforts and other things there will be less cases brought in the criminal justice system which means you would not have to need as many attorneys as you do. There may be a need for even more cases if people are out of work in crime increases. Let's hope not. And so the main thrust here is that you don't have the information currently there's not enough transparency in your system to accurately project what the workload should or should not be specifically for Santa Cruz. And that's why we're proposing this sort of transition period to start getting the data to know exactly how many attorneys you will need. I appreciate that. You mentioned Massachusetts as a place where they maybe have lower caseloads but are there many other counties in the country that meet these national standards? That information's in the report. Yeah, there's no doubt that Indigent Defense is a crisis in large swatches of the United States. You can look at situations in Missouri and elsewhere but there are a number of places usually in urban centers that have very stringing caseload standards. The workload standards in Seattle and throughout Washington, for instance, are very good. And so places like D.C. and New York and others, there's places that really do meet these standards and in fact go quite below them because they think the national standards are way too high as well. So I appreciate that all the examples you gave were big cities and not counties. That would be interesting for me to know about what counties are actually meeting that standard. You know, the report also talks about the case management system and I know there's a need for case management because the Justice Reinvestment Initiative which happened what, seven, eight years ago, identified data as a big problem. I was surprised during that process that it was hard to get even data about who was in our jail. It's taken us several years to do a better job of just collecting who's actually in custody let alone how the process works. In that process, the consultant at that time identified that court processing plays a big role. The role, how soon it can get on the calendar, is there a continuance asked, who asked for the continuances? We have no way of actually knowing that because so much of this work is done on paper in all parts of the system. So case management seems to be important, whatever system we go with. But I don't know much about this. Obviously we haven't invested in it before. Do we have an idea? Do we get an off the shelf case management system? Do you have any idea what the costs are there? I mean, or a range of the costs there? Supervisor Leopold, there are a few systems that the DA has explored already. There is a group that's been working on trying to scope out as part of working towards an RFP, what might be available. I know that we had a recent conversation with another county, I believe it was King County. They just implemented a new public defender case management system. So we were able to learn a few things from the person who led that effort. But in terms of which product we might get, there are some that are existing already that might be customizable based on our needs. I'm not sure we're looking at generating something entirely from scratch. I think we're looking to a company that has a proven track record that we can bring into our county. And then in terms of the cost, we're still exploring what that might be. But it could be a significant investment, but it would be a one-time infusion into both our district attorney and public defense systems that would have a long-term benefit. Yeah, the investments make a difference, but we're trying to figure it also out what the costs are here. That's what I'm trying to get to. You bring up the DA. There's a part of this report that I just wanted to reference. I don't see them represented here today. I don't think that they are. In one of the recommendations about reducing criminal prosecutions that carry the possibility of incarceration, thus reducing constitutionally required in urgent representation services, it ends with short of advocating that the legislature reclassify appropriate petty and or regulatory offenses to non-jailable violations. Local decisions of the district attorney could decrease the number of cases in which the Sixth Amendment requires appointed counsel, but I didn't see the district attorney as part of this report. And I'm wondering if we had conversations with the district attorney about these issues. David could speak to that more fully, but they did interview and sit down with members of the district attorney's staff. I don't think, based on their conversations, anything they discussed rose to the level of a finding or was explored in depth to result in a finding, but there were conversations with the DA's office as part of this assessment. To put it in there as that we need the DA to act differently in terms of scaling up the size of our public defense seems to be a critical part, right? It's something that I would support a conversation and I would be glad if that conversation took place, but I really think that we should get a little bit more information from the district attorney about his willingness or desire to do something like this. I guess there's one last area to talk about and that's the overall question of funding. To me, when we started this process, I understood broadly about the value of going for a different model. And one of the things that I felt was important was that I saw this as an opportunity to invest in our public defense system. In the 12 years that I've been on the board, I cannot think of any time in which we've made a particular investment in our public defense system. We have made investments in our district attorney, but I can't remember anything in particular. So I was excited about us moving forward and maybe making an investment to do that. But this seems in part just moving around the chairs, taking the same amount of money, hoping you'll get more out of it, although we're not sure we'll get to the standard that's been identified in this report. And you talked about funding, that the new funding possibilities were through grants. So that's how, so there is funding set aside in the state budget that the state was required to make available for indigent defense. And so all of that funding is being administered by the BCC. And I believe they're establishing it and will be authorizing it through grant programs. There's funding for training and I believe there's funding for some technical assistance. There's also funding, I believe available at a national level in respect to the technical assistance area, or at least some support that might be provided. Well, I think that's great and I'm glad that they're putting the money into it. But I think we as a board have got to start asking ourselves what kind of investment we're willing to make because funding public defense through grant programs seems to be an inherently risky feature of a new system, especially a system in which we are 100% responsible for. And so knowing how much, what our aspirations are and how much it costs becomes super important. I may have more questions. There is also some inconsistencies that I've identified in this report. At one point it says that even though there is the possibility of interference with systems, it doesn't, they weren't able to find evidence where the request for things like experts was denied or held back. And then later on in justifying some other system, it said, well, but they could hold this, hold the use of experts back. So it didn't jive with what our experience had been. And so there were just some of those inconsistencies with this report. I was deeply troubled by the letter we received from Judge Volkman and I see that there's member of the judiciary here, so I look forward to hearing that and I may have other questions after that. So thank you. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. You know, I want to thank you for your report. You're not the enemy. When I'm going to speak here, I understand that you're putting a project before us and a proposal and I appreciate the work you've put in for it. But, you know, I couldn't help when I was reading over this being a little upset, more than a little, like the opening lines of the tale of two cities, the best of times and the worst of times. You can't get much worse than the times we have right now in Santa Cruz County. And this is changing something that's been stable and it has been in place for about 45 years. And all of a sudden we're supposed to deal with this when we've got COVID-19, we have fires raging everywhere. We're trying to house homeless people all over the county and take care of them and save them. So basically, I think the timing is very poor on it, which it really doesn't reflect on you because everything that has happened should have delayed all of this looking into. See the word transparency that comes up quite a bit. We can, there's common stuff in here when you're talking about firing somebody, you tell them, hey, Charlie, you've done a really good job, but we have to let you go. Well, what we're saying here is that they haven't been transparent. We're saying, if they are transparent and if they're doing a good job, we should keep them. So I guess this kind of polite wording for such a tremendous decision that we're making, it's like, hey, goodbye. We have to look at what's the reasons for anything. The cost, I looked into it, I saw 13 million there. It's actually about 12.5 million. I think I'm correct on that when I looked up how much the cost was per year. And then the other comes down to quality versus cost. I haven't heard one complaint from judges or anybody about the current way we're doing things with the public defender's office. And all of a sudden I'm reading stuff that makes it sound like it's a crisis. Well, a crisis doesn't happen overnight. It would have happened over the last 45 years. And so we have a track record of 45 years. I haven't read anything in the paper where a lawyer, a reversal for being inept. I haven't read anything or heard anything from judges telling me that the poor people are not getting represented. So the other part is independent. For example, if I got picked up and arrested, I'm gonna get arrested by a public employee. That would be a deputy sheriff. I'd be taken to a jail that is run by the county. It's a county jail. I would have a district attorney and his staff going after me and those are all public employees of the county. The last thing I wanna be told is, hey, we got a lawyer for you, but he works for the county also. So what I'm getting at is independence. I want a lawyer that's gonna be independent. If I had the money, I wouldn't need to get a public defender. I'd go out and hire Clarence Darrell, right? Or Effley Bailey or something like that. But they don't work for the county. So the point is, I want my lawyer to stick up for me and not look over his back, whether or not the county is gonna keep him or let him go, or she or her let her go. And then the fear of losing a contract. I don't know what that is. It's the word chilling. It has an effect on the way employees interact and how they perform. So independence and chilling factor. And then South County, I saw that in the representation. There is a public defender's office right there in Watsonville, one block away from the county and city courthouse. It seems a little big. I think it's about 3,000 square feet. It could probably be smaller. But the fact is we do have a public defender's office in Santa Cruz and in Watsonville. And so we're not adding or making things better. We're duplicating what's being done already. So South County is being represented. I haven't heard one complaint in what nine years from people saying, oh, I can't get a hold of an attorney. I'm not being represented by a quality attorney. I've never heard that. I haven't heard that from any judges in conversation. So, and plus I don't see too many lawsuits being filed against the public defender's office. I mean, we deal with a lot of that stuff in closed session. I haven't seen one in nine years. Or I don't know how many court cases have been reversed by the current staff that we have. Have there been any? I don't know. So we should have answers for that. And let's see. Again, if I was in trouble right now with the coronavirus and the fires, the last thing I would want to be told is we are going to try your case in the middle of all these crises. But at the same time being told, we're gonna transition over to another law firm and we hope you don't get lost in the shuffle. I mean, it's not gonna be a perfect scene right there. We're not gonna just go right in with somebody else. It's gonna be a very difficult thing. And we're also talking about, are we gonna get the quality that we know we have now? We have a proven group for 45 years. We know how good they are and how bad they are, although all I've heard is good. And then we're gonna change over this whole thing in the middle of the worst of times and hope we don't lose somebody in the transition. Let's see. South County, I mentioned that. And access to an attorney. I've never heard of anybody that didn't have money that couldn't get access to a public defender. And that's really important for South County. So I'm just trying to find out where this came from, where all these complaints came from that I haven't heard about. Can anybody tell me where all of a sudden? I can address some of your questions. So this has been going on, we started this talking about this back in 2016 and memorialized a potential transition in the contract renewals in 2018. So this preceded all of the current emergencies we're in. This has been, looking at this has been part of succession planning is because the contracts are coming to an end. And so we've been looking to figure out, should we move to a new model or should we go to out for an RFP to continue to contract? So those were some of the options before us. And looking at this, we determined that switching to a public department is something that we're interested in trying to do and to put those investments into our incident defense system. And so that is our recommendation to the board and the framework we're proposing. There are alternatives, but this is what we're recommending to the board. Okay, but you're talking about 2015 or 16? 2016 is when we started talking about this. What brought about the whole thing back in 2015? Was it a public outcry? Was it a string of lost cases? What is it? No, there was no outcry or controversy. It was that our contracts were coming to an end. So it was a time to think about how we wanted to proceed into the future. And so we decided that we would examine this and figure out what options we had. And so in the course of that, we decided that this would be switching to a public model, would be something that would be desirable and beneficial to the county. And that is why we're recommending this to the board. To be clear, we voted to investigate what this model might look like. And that's why they hired the Sixth Amendment Center to do this report. And it's ultimately our decisions about what we wanna do with our public defenses. That's correct. You're recommending that we accept the option of changing. That is our recommendation. That's where the argument comes in. We're gonna decide whether or not continue as is with a known quality and a known entity before us, compared to something we're not really quite sure of. During probably one of the worst times in Santa Cruz County. Okay, we'll have, are they able to speak on their behalf? Of course. They are. Of course. Yeah. They don't have to give them a time limit, Chair. You could have them make their case. Yeah. Are we on a three minute time limit? They can talk. You can make, let them talk as long as they want. All right. Go ahead and see what you can do. Here we have five, Mr. Chair. Take the time, take the time you need. Yeah, you can all, and I'll let, it'll be open mic. Thank you. Just so you don't go for an hour. I totally promise I will not do that. Thank you for allowing us input in regard to this, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the board for allowing us the opportunity here today to speak to you. My name is Jerry Christensen, along with Eric Bigum, my partner, and John Menzloff. We have been your contract public defenders for 45 years. It's been a great and, and, and a wild ride, but a very successful one. And it's now a time period that we always, always imagined we would be here in front of you and we would be hand in hand with the CAO and with the judges, it would be very, very supportive. It would be a unified front and we would figure out together and present to you how we move forward and give energy to this new entity. And that's what we had always imagined. That's what we had always hoped for. But we come to you with concern. Maybe even alarm is a better word in regard to what the process has actually turned out to be. We would not have imagined that we would be here at this point in time, where we essentially have the knowledgeable people that is multiple judges who are down here and us as a public defender is for all these years who have essentially been sidelined in this process. We've not been kept in touch in any real significant fashion and all of a sudden there's this report, not a flattering report for us, a very unfair report that comes out. Now, we would assumed but know that someone would take advantage of the 90 years with in California law, criminal law, Santa Cruz County law and in the vernacular of where we practice in the trenches in the courtrooms. We thought that would be something that would be really, really valuable to this process. Also, every time we've been reviewed for the entire time we've been in the business, including by some grand juries that can be critical, we've always found that we do a very good job, very good, not just good. So we're in a situation now where instead of bringing us into this process, the idea comes, let's spend a bunch of money, let's bring in some people from 3,000 miles away who know no California law at all, certainly no law in regard to trial work, what it really means to be in those trenches that I'm talking about, no knowledge. What's the result? The result is relatively predictable and you read it in Judge Volkman's letter that this report was so bad, so full of inaccuracies, so full of opinions that in Judge Volkman's words, the assistant presiding judge who's sitting here today, the people who wrote this report should be ashamed of themselves, ashamed of themselves. So, here's where we are now. We haven't had input in regard to this process and we have a tremendous lack of trust and we really just have a somewhat of a big mess here that was highly, highly unnecessary. It would be best at this point in time if this board was to find board with a lot of knowledge is to basically press the reset button and bring back in those people who are knowledgeable of the process that's actually happening, not some ivory tower type of group who don't have this kind of really down and dirty experience. That would be the best thing to do at this point in time and bring in us, bring in the judges, bring in the sheriff. The sheriff doesn't want their jail to be completely overcrowded and go the numbers to go crazy. Bring in the DA, they don't want additional cases. We all should be involved in regard to how we do this and how we do this in the best way without a harm to the system and to the clients. Now, in regard to your actions here today, ultimately we all agree that we're going to go into a public office. That's something that we're all in agreement and it's okay, we'll get there as long as it's done in the right fashion. But the last thing, the last thing in the world that you should do is to hire a public defender at this point in time. That would be disastrous. And why? Well, essentially just the hiring alone. What's it going to do to the staff in our office? Well, wait a minute. I thought Larry was the public defender. But who's this other public defender? And we all haven't, which they haven't, been offered jobs in the new department. And so the people there are really, really concerned. You had the additional thing of a public defender currently hired who may be hiring staff and everybody's going to wonder is that going to be us? Is that going to be us? Really disastrous. And if we lose people without the guarantee of jobs with the county, we can't hire anybody who's going to come with us with a year or less than a year left. So, again, the suggestion strongly from us and we've been involved and we know the system is that essentially today we do somewhat of a time out and we bump this case over into the first part of next year, allow the knowledgeable people to get involved and get involved in guiding this process because that's something that has not been done up to this point in time. I do want to say one thing that we feel the public, the Boston group. Sixth Amendment. Yes, Sixth Amendment. Got right. They got one thing right and it was a point that you were making earlier. And what they say is the new public defender must be independent. Independent, which means they get a four-year contract and they can only be terminated for good cause. That is really, really important. Public defenders speak truth to power. It's not a popular position. It's a position that can be subject to political influence. And so at the very least, you still get your transparency. It doesn't matter whether they're at will or for good cause. You have that no matter what. But don't have someone up there who is looking over their shoulder all the time in regard to, wow, did I say something or did I step on the wrong toes? I'm going to lose my job. I better draw back, forget the client for a moment and preserve myself. If you chop off the head, and if this process, you're allowed to chop off the head, the body ultimately is going to go. And this is really, really an idea that must be rejected, the idea that the CAO, the CAO who seems to like the Sixth Amendment report when it rips on Larry and Jerry, but when the Sixth Amendment says they should have a good cause termination, oh no, no, no. We're suggesting that it be at will. It should not do that. Should not hire the current public defender now. Take a time out, put your thing over. But Larry and I would like to suggest something additionally that we think it would be really a great idea if we're looking for an independent public defender as the Sixth Amendment project has suggested that Santa Cruz County, with its progressive valued board and its overall progressive values, should have its public defender be elected. San Francisco, does it? And San Francisco, interestingly, got really, really positive remarks in the Sixth Amendment report, okay? The DA here is publicly elected. Why not the public defender? And especially at this point in time in our lives when we have this strong social justice movement and Black Lives Matter. Well, a wonderful way of supporting Black Lives Matter would be to have a truly independent, elected public defender who could stand tall and maybe, maybe, maybe help Black and other lives matter even more. Thanks. Thank you. Good afternoon. I'm Larry Bigum, the contract chief public defender. I think preparing a succession plan for the next generation of indigent defense services is responsible public policy and you should all be commended for that effort. But right now the transition needs, as my partner said, a timeout and a reset so that myself and all of us who are affected by these decisions can have a voice at the table. I like and respect staff from the CIO's office, but they know far less about the business of public defendering than we do. The devil is in the detail in these matters. And rather than pick our brains about what are the pitfalls going forward in a transition or bridge to the new office and what ideas do you have for improving our services in that public new office, they didn't walk the three blocks to my office to ask me that. They went 3,000 miles to Boston who came in and the Boston people never asked me those questions either about how do we get from BCM to a public office or if we had a public office, Larry, how could we improve services? No, the Boston group focused on the history channel. They focused on and critiqued our current operation and didn't get into the discovery channel, if you will. And then they write a report which is predictably biased and misleading. And I use the word predictably because if you read their earlier reports wherever they go the sky is always falling wherever they go. Now in fairness to the Boston people, many parts of our country, the sky is falling when it comes to indigent defense services. The promise of getting has been underfunded and unfulfilled in many parts of this country and including parts of California where there are public public defender offices. The delivery system is not the answer. It's who's in the system? What are the resources and political support? But I do agree that we should go to a public model eventually and I can discuss that at some greater length. But, and I do agree we can improve our services and I do agree we can use more staff if that's what you want to give me. And we're always responding to new laws and the growth of collaborative courts with a public health paradigm which is good and we're responding to new technology that cops have so now our routine burglary has a lot more discovery in terms of audio and video and gigabytes of evidence. And yes, we do need social workers and paralegals and I have other ideas but I was never asked. Look, going forward, the system needs stability. The system needs continuity. People's lives are at risk here. We need to mitigate the disruption to the system in that bridge period from BCM to a public office. We've got to make sure that our clients don't unnecessarily lose their relationship with their personal lawyer. And as you said, get lost in the shuffle which is difficult enough under COVID because they're already getting lost in the shuffle and to put a transition into this period would be chaotic. We need to keep current staff down on the farm for the length of this contract so that I can service the contract. We need to delay the recruitment of a new public defender. Number one, that will trigger unnecessary anxiety and confusion and uncertainty but more than that, that new public defender will then staff up and poach my players. So then I lose lawyers. Now let's game this out. So then I've got to go hire but how do I hire when I can only offer someone a six month job? What quality will you get? And then that lawyer comes in and has to ask for continuances in the court because they don't know anything about the new files and then the jail gets backed up if those clients are in custody and the shelf life of that case gets doubled and tripled. There are consequences in an ecosystem, justice system. You push a waterbed, you push it here. It has ripples over there and the cases get delayed. The client doesn't get reasonably due process. The DA's victims don't get access to the courthouse or justice as they would argue and the sheriff is betting more people than necessary in the jail if we don't all do this together. What we need to do before we hire and rush to hire a public defender and believe me, anyone you hire could have no more local management experience than he and I and you know that. So you might as well leverage our guidance and wisdom here. As they say, we know a thing or two because we've seen a thing or two over 45 years. So you should leverage the wisdom in the room and in the courthouse going forward. So we should develop an outline of a new public office and I support the public model when it's ripe. I do that. We should have input into the building of that model and the blueprint of that model. We should build that cart before we go hire the horse. You just don't go hire the horse and build the model because no horse is going to have more experience and wisdom locally at least than we do. You've got to guarantee all staff members jobs. Guarantee not hope for wish for weasel words guarantee. You've got to make it so that I can backfill positions. If there's a position of vacancy I've got to promise that new recruit who may want to relocate his family to Santa Cruz. I've got to promise him a new job in the new office. I've got to have that ability or I can't recruit. And finally we need to discuss our current case load. I've got a lift here right now of 15 homicides right now in my office. Some of them very serious including the new capital case we just got and we can't get jury trials out because of COVID. So most of these cases are going to be alive and well in June of 2022 at the termination of my contract. On top of this I've got about 3,000 live cases right now in the office and we can't get resolution because of COVID. So that number is going to go up because we don't have exit ramps now, we don't have jury trials now. Those cases are our cases and without communication and cooperation the county will end up paying for two public defender offices well beyond July 1st 2022. We've got to work out these details together. All of this needs to be discussed before we go too far down the road before we get too far ahead of ourselves. These decisions affect people's lives. They should not be made in a silo. They require time and input and collaboration and trust. Thank you. Chair Caput, members of the board. I'm Paul Verdick. I'm the presiding judge of the Superior Court. I'm here to echo the concerns you've just heard from Mr. Bingham and Mr. Christensen. I'm here with my assistant presiding judge Tim Volkman and I think from the comments that you folks have made this afternoon you recognize the concerns that we have. Supervisor Friend observed that we'll have a crisis on our hand if we don't have folks guaranteed with jobs. Supervisor Leopold observed that there seems to be a significant disparity between what's contained in the Sixth Amendment report and what our actual experience is in the courtroom. And Chair Caput has recognized that if there is no crisis what is the purpose of this plan? We're not here to take a position on the wisdom of whether it's appropriate to move from contract provided defense services to an in-house public defender. That's a decision for you folks to make and whether you're willing to spend the significant amount of money that it's going to take you to do that. I guarantee you it will cost you substantially more. We are here to share our concerns with you about how we get from here to there. And Mr. Bingham has presented to you what he has shared with me that there's substantial risk he will lose his employees. If there's one thing the Sixth Amendment report got right what happens in the courtroom and what happens in our justice system is akin to a three-legged stool. The court, the district attorney and the public defender have to work together to ensure that this justice system works. And I have to say I felt tremendously disrespected by the county administrative office when they did not consult with the court at all about the transition plan they proposed to you today. We were informed on Monday, September 21st that a county administrative office intended to release the Sixth Amendment report the following Thursday, that Thursday the 24th. When we heard that we requested a meeting and it was for the first time, Thursday, September 24th that we learned of this transition plan. We were never consulted about the notion that they now propose to have you follow through with as to how we get from here to there over the course of the next 18 months or so. I will tell you, based upon your observations here at Capit that I've been the presiding judge for close to 15 years I'm sorry I've been a judge for close to 15 years I've been the presiding judge for three years now two years as assistant presiding judge. I was a practicing attorney for 25 years in Santa Cruz County before I became a judge and I think you will have to search your institutional memory as it relates to all county departments throughout this county whether you can find one other department over a 45 year period that has not had a single lawsuit filed against them that the county has had to respond to. I'm not aware in my 15 years on the bench that there has been a single case handled by the public defender's office or any of the conflict firms that have been reversed on appeal due to ineffective assistance at council. So in answer to your question Chair Capit as to whether there has been a crisis that results in the proposal in my view there is not what we're you're in risk of doing if you adopt this proposal and immediately open this position up for recruitment is you will create crisis. Uncertainty will undoubtedly follow I think it's starting to creep in now just by the idea that this is going to occur if they lose employees they will not be able to fill those positions in if they get understaffed our court system gets adversely affected the community gets adversely affected the jail begins to overcrowd there is a better way to do this and I think you can find a way to do this respectfully Miss Colburn if you involve the court in the discussion if you involve the court in the planning process if you involve Mr. Bigham in the discussion if you involve him in the planning process we have three things the court has three things we ask of you defer this proposal and direct your county administrative officer to meet with court together with Mr. Bingham possibly the district attorney to explore whether there may be an alternative transition plan we ask that you direct county administrative office to include either the presiding judge or the court administrative officer on its technical transition team and finally that an alternative transition plan be attempted before you adopt this proposed point Judge Roekman's come with me today so that we could convey to you how seriously concerned we are about the current proposal Judge Roekman is more familiar with the intricacies of the six amendment reports so if any of you have any questions about that report he's prepared to answer them thank you for your time good afternoon my name is Tim Roekman I'm a superior court judge I've been a superior court judge for 12 years I was in private practice in San Cruz County for 28 years before that so I've been involved in the legal system for 40 years all in San Cruz County I appreciate you folks giving me and the rest of these gentlemen the time this afternoon I'm not certain that I want to jump into Judge Burdick's offer that I go through the intricacies of 170 page report necessarily but you folks have my five page letter I thank you very much for reading that I stand on every single sentence I put within that letter separate and distinct from that letter I'm trying to move forward on this thing not move backward whatever you folks decide regarding the issue of the public defender's office that's your decision whatever you folks decide in terms of hiring of a different public defender who you hire in terms of folks to fill in for attorneys and staff that's your decision but this document that was presented by Ms. Coburn this afternoon is a glaring example of the concern that we have from the court's perspective she describes the creating of a foundation and we want county collaboration and partnerships and then she has the document collaboration and partnerships the court is nowhere in that document nowhere she has a lot of other entities listed not the court I don't know how you can proceed with this type of process without involving the entity that's going to be involved in implementing this process I'm going to take I think it was her second to last sentence as accurate I'm trying to move forward with this we're going to try to be positive from this point forward I think her second to last sentence was we look forward to receiving the input and the guidance from the court regarding this issue I'm going to take Ms. Coburn at her word in that regard I'm going to be the presiding judge Ms. Coburn and the CAO regarding this process but we need to be in the room we need to be contacted for our input, our guidance and that's what we're asking for today and I appreciate your time all these other gentlemen handled everything I was going to say up to this point thank you anyone else Chair if you mind I appreciate the testimony we received here today and it goes without saying I think the board is united in agreement that we value the services that we have received in public defense and as was pointed out by I think Judge Burdick that there's never been an instance where the quality of the representation was challenged in court that someone in Santa Cruz had received ineffective representation from our public defense firm so anything that we're doing here is not coming out of a sense of crisis there isn't we haven't had a series of bad cases or ineffective representation but I think our board has been interested in trying to think about the day past when BCM is going to be the public defense system and that's why we started this process and I think we're united in that because that's good management good thoughtfulness of trying to figure out how you change after something you've had for 45 years but it's a big change it's a huge change and there's been a number of questions that are raised I didn't read this report to this weekend I probably should have Mr. Bingham had sent me a draft copy that I hadn't seen but I didn't have a chance to read it because of everything going on in my life until this weekend and so there were a lot of questions I had about that and I brought that up earlier and so I don't think I'm not ready to move forward with this today I think that this is a huge change and we should work to get it right rather than just getting it done quickly and so I think that I'd like to direct our county administrative office to sit down with the courts and BCM and potentially the district attorney or the sheriff as was alluded to in the comments to talk about this plan I would like either the CAO's office or the Sixth Amendment Center to tell me who's actually meeting the standards that were set out in this report and to give us some idea of what the additional cost would be to do that there are good standards in here right I mean about making sure that you don't have lawyers who are overwhelmed or social workers and technologies are all good so I think to help the county make a clear motion is that we direct the CAO to sit down with the judiciary and the public defense firm and potentially the DA and the sheriff's office to talk about this transition and to come back to us with some recommendations to answer the questions about who is meeting the standards what would be the cost of meeting those standards and then I think we also need to have a policy for the hiring of at least first rate of refusal or something better when we did the garbage contract we had provisions in that contract that people in the existing firm would be hired by the new firm we should have that at least as good in our language here and the issue of attorneys that are at the firm now to know what their future is going to be like is important the ability to be able to recruit retain and promote become important so meeting standards costs and a policy on hiring that at least has first tried to refusal I would make that as a motion Supervisor Coonerty do we have any other public comments we have one comment that came through the web portal from Ken Davenport the assessment of indigent defense services in Santa Cruz County is well done I support the findings and recommendations thank you and that is the last one Supervisor Coonerty you wanted to speak after public comment Supervisor Coonerty we've been having trouble with that yeah he's had trouble staying on there we'll go with Supervisor McPherson we'll come back to Ryan I have a question that maybe the CAO himself would be best to answer but I'm just trying to in this process I don't see everybody seems to be agreed this is where we're going to be going to have a public defender but I don't know I'm just trying to get an idea of why the judges in particular were consulted in the process and I don't know if you're it's fair to ask Miss Coburn because this process has been going on for a long time before she became the acting CAO but can you give me any kind of an answer to that or any kind of an answer I think they should be somewhere before we make a decision they should have some definitive input on this more than they were provided up to now but can you give me an answer to that Supervisor McPherson there always has been a plan to include the judges and the firms on the substantive elements of transitioning to a public model to date we've been focused on the assessment and moving forward figuring out some of the administrative components of that there's still a huge body of work as I think I mentioned and was acknowledged by the court and the firms to complete so it's through all of that work that we still need to collaborate with the court and we acknowledge that and have every intention of sitting down with them well I I think out of the situation we have now this might not be the time to make a decision today as Mr. Leopold, Supervisor Leopold said I'm just concerned that going going at it forward from here I think we're going to be better served if we have some additional input and I know you've had a lot of input from one source or another up to now but I think it would do us well in the transition that it is to come I feel convinced of that myself in the future but I don't I think we need to get a timeline because I think this contract is going to be up in July of June 30th I guess of 2022 but I think everybody would feel more comfortable in general in particularly the judiciary if we gave it some more time and I hate to continue things on because I think we're headed in the right direction of what we're going to do ultimately but I just think that we're going to have a better plan in the end if we get more input and I wouldn't like to see this drag on for more than four or five months or something we could get something to report back with the input that we seek by say March of 2021 that's my if we do that if we're going to continue this I think we have to have some input and let's keep moving because I think once the decision is made finally that we're going to do this it is going to take a year to implement or to get in the process of establishing a public defender office so I would I would be open to adding more input but I would like to get a timeline on it so we can move forward with it so we can put this office in place if indeed we decide to do that in 2022 and that would be my suggestion so I think I don't know how Supervisor Leopold figures that I just don't want to have this going for another year so we're waiting until 2023 when the contract with the current public defender has already been reached the deadline so I just want to try to get the time of this of it done I think we would be able to meet with the court and BCM and the other partners soon and work towards responding to these requests and I would like to return to the board as soon as possible with some more information like I mentioned there are only 21 months if we do want to transition by July 1st of 2022 we have to get moving there's a lot to work out both administratively logistically policy wise there's a huge body of work so we really have to get moving if we wanted if the board is interested in making this transition if there was an interest in doing something else we would have to pivot you know in another direction what would be a reasonable timeline for us to do that I mean it sounds like the judiciary the judges are willing to get together to have their input and so forth I mean would you like it earlier than March and I'm speaking without even consulting Mr. Leopold if he agrees with this directive to get together with these parties as soon as possible so we can meet that timeline by June of 20 or July 1st 2022 what kind of a timeline would you like I mean we've got a lot of things on our plate now as we know but what would be a reasonable time Supervisor McPherson thank you for your comments I think what I hear today from the current presiding judge and the incoming presiding judge and from the public defense firm is that they would see this as a priority that they would make time to sit down and that we can move deliberately to address these issues that have been identified here today so we should be able to make great progress relatively quickly they could come back in November and at least give us a status update and then we could find out if we're yard, feet or inches apart and figure out what we can get done as quickly as possible to get this but the important thing is to get it done right we cannot have the defense of people in this county compromised by not thinking through this as well as possible that has got to be key to everything we do okay move I skip supervisor I think supervisor can you hear me now yes okay thank you I think my political opponents are messing with my broadband today so I just want to say I attempted the second supervisor Leopold's motion I agree with supervisor McPherson's concerns about not having this delay too long and the brief comments I want to make are you know I have Larry Bigum come to my classes speak to my perspective law students every year and I send my students to work at their law firm because I believe that they're the best lawyers around and the kind of lawyers I hope my students grow up to be and so I want to appreciate their 45 years of service and commitment and really amazing advocacy for their clients over this time as we make this transition it's important that we do it right it's important that we have partnerships and a sense of collaboration with all the different stakeholders in this and so that's why I support supervisor Leopold's motion to have those conversations I do think the Sixth Amendment report does bring up a challenge for our system which is a real lack of data about the number of cases, how long they're taking the case loads per attorney what that's what are and improved or staffing that meets these requirements look like how likely it is what the budget looks like and we need the data going forward I do think that the board both directly and through the CAO plays an important role here because in my experience we have each one of our partners in the criminal justice system does an outstanding job but in each of their silos and some of those silos are inevitable but some don't have to be we get some inefficiencies and we get sort of everyone doing their job really well but the outcome for the individual and for the community isn't as good as it should be and I think when we look at this system it's important that we aren't just replicating one piece of it or looking at a new element for one piece of it but thinking about how we can figure out a better system going forward that serves both those accused and the community and the victims well into the future so that's the I think when we have these conversations it shouldn't just be about it's important that we understand the staffing models and making sure we don't lose people along the way but it's also a little it's also about how we build a better system going forward so thank you I want to thank everybody for their work and for the comments today which I think will move us towards a better process okay anyway yeah this is a very serious decision with very serious consequences so I mean we do have another option when does the current contract run out it expires June 30th of 2022 so we have 21 months until they expire 2022 I mean we could put this to rest real quick by offering a new contract to the current uh uh stakeholders here we could offer a 3-4 year contract and then we can go on to other business that's pressing with the county anyway I'll make that motion that we offer a new contract that will extend it 2020 2025 26 whatever I appreciate your sentiments as chair you're not allowed to make motions you can only second motions so I'm going to try again now that we have now that we have everybody I think still on the line is that we direct the CAO to meet with the justice partners the judiciary the public defense the DA and potentially the sheriff to come back with information and recommendations from that group that we have a policy about the hiring the clear policy about the hiring that we get information from the 6th amendment center about who is meeting these standards and some idea of what the cost would be to move this forward okay well we got we got that I did make a motion though maybe it will fail for lack of a second we could ask the parliamentarian you're the chair so the motion would have to be from one of the other members of the board you could have stepped down as a chair and then you could make your motion that's correct may I ask I guess because we have the judges here that's why we had to have a parliamentary procedure so I appreciate that there is a motion and there is a second Mr. Chair could I for clarification on the motion did it include to return in November yes could I ask that you bump it at least a month or two John I mean I have a day job so do the judges we have a lot to work out I'm not trying to delay things and frankly Mr. Cabot at the end of the contract if you need a few more months come on I'm going to work with the county yeah whatever the county needs but my point is we've got a lot to work out and I have a lot of my play besides this issue so I would ask that you give me another month anyway and I think we all have a lot of stuff we're working on I can guarantee you I have a lot of stuff I'm working on for the next 27 days so what I would like is some kind of report back to see how this is going in November we may not resolve this in November but I'm hoping that by November there's been a meeting that there's some agreement about where we're going you know that as I say we may not have it all resolved but we got it I would like everybody to be working deliberately towards this I would go if we're not going to make a decision in November if we're going to make a decision in November I'm not comfortable I'm not committing to a decision I'm committing to getting a report back just to report back yes without a motion to we aren't committing to anything other than these people meeting and getting some additional information and getting a report back in November okay but we're not going to have a staff recommendation for changing we ultimately make the decisions but not in November yeah and on a day three votes do anything on this board but ultimately these are our decisions to make I agree and certainly not going to do it in December either because right before Christmas we're going to say yes or no anyway okay so read the motion it's clearly as you understand it there is a motion and by Supervisor Leopold to direct the county administrative officer to one meet with the justice partners and he named all three two with a policy about the hiring three get information from the Sixth Amendment Center and an idea of the costs and return in November with a report on the status the information is on who's meeting these standards that they've identified so Mr. Chair this is I just want to speak both in favor of the motion but also provide a little bit of additional information I mean one to your question about whether something would come back in November well if they have substantive discussions and reach some sort of greater understanding than it is possible in November that we could take greater action to I think it's important for all the parties to recognize that are present today that the board is moving forward with the transition to a public model so the operating of this discussion should be under that understanding and framework this is the discussion about how that transition should occur which are issues that have been rightfully brought up today on staffing as well as how it would impact current and future cases that occur between now and when that final transition occurs but also additionally we should also recognize that we may not be able to resolve every difference between or every desire between the current contract public defender, the Sixth Amendment Center other members of the judiciary and public safety partners realistically as Supervisor Leopold mentioned and I know was mentioned by Judge Burdick this is a decision that is made by the board the goal here though is to have as seamless and positive as a transition as possible because there is unique knowledge within the current public defender's office that doesn't exist within any other structure within the county there's unique knowledge within the DA's office there's unique knowledge within those that sit in the judiciary that none of us have and we need that advice in order to successfully transition this because we're taking the cases that we're talking about couldn't have greater magnitude or seriousness and the people that rely on these services absolutely rely on us to make the right decisions so what should be that should be the principle but additionally again we are moving toward that model so it hopefully everybody comes to the table with that understanding and that settled and with an open mind on how to get there in a seamless way as possible and I think that I recognize and totally understand Mr. Bigam that you've got a lot of other stuff going on but we are trying to move this forward in a way toward that understanding and to the degree that we can move a lot of this forward by mid-November would be ideal for everybody so I'm supportive of the motion can I just ask one thing you said November we have meetings scheduled for the 10th and 17th did you want to specify which one the one week difference I don't know what the schedule is for the meeting so November seems good to me rather than saying which meeting in November if that's okay alright I'm ready to vote on it but the only thing that I hear the language about transition that almost sounds like that means somebody might have made up their mind already that we're going to have a transition we're not talking about a transition we're talking about looking at something and it's possible we're going to stay with what we currently have the known entity we have is that correct Chair Caput what I heard from Mr. Bingham is he and Mr. Christensen support the idea of a public model and what we're trying to get to is figure out how to make that work well we decide on when that's going to happen that could happen in June 2022 could happen later than June 2022 that's our choice but our goal our goal should be that we have great public defense in Santa Cruz County and that those who can't afford their own lawyer still get the best defense possible in Santa Cruz County okay so the transition can also mean we go with what we have right now I just we are not committing to we are not committing to something today alright that's fine but I just don't like the word transition it sounds like we're going to change later than now but we may not change at all for the billing part the invoicing we already have the cover letter you know we have all the letters and I don't know really actually got those but the letters from our last year but okay okay and now for something completely different so ultimately it's our decision we're not committing to what it's going to look like today there's clearly interest on the board to move this but we're not committing to something today not committing to it okay good I'm ready to go alright unless we have other comments can we close public comment okay I'll call the roll Supervisor Leopold aye friend aye Coonerty aye McPherson aye Chairman Caput aye the motion passes unanimously and that'll take us to number thank you everybody for coming thank you number 12 consider approval and concept of ordinance amending chapter 2.126 Santa Cruz County Code relating to the addition of new representatives to the Commission on Justice and Gender to include a representative of the Black or African-American community and a woman who has experienced incarceration and schedule the ordinance for final adoption in October 2020 as outlined in the memorandum of Supervisor Leopold so we'll open with Supervisor Leopold sure Chair you may remember that we spent two years in the Justice and Gender Task Force and in January this board voted to create the Justice and Gender Commission obviously COVID has has set many things back and during this time we've also seen the real rise of the Black Lives Matter movement here in Santa Cruz and as part of that I've been meeting with the local NAACP who pointed out the big question that we the question of othering that we are lumping the Black community and with everyone else and when you look at the demographics of those who are in our jail the Black community is over-represented as compared to their demographics in our community so it seems important to have a representative from the Black community on there and I believe it was probably an oversight on our part to make sure that there was a woman who had experienced incarceration as part of the Justice and Gender Commission so I hope the board will support these two new additions to this commission. Any other comments from board members? Okay I would say I'm all for it the only thing that's difficult sometimes is when you try to acknowledge one group maybe we're leaving out someone of Asian descent or someone Native American, Indian so but at this time for this motion this is a good step forward and I'm all for it, thank you I would move approval I'll second we want to check if there's any public comment on the web well I I'll open it up for public comment we have no web comments okay bring it back to the board we have the Supervisor Leopold, I Friend Coonerty, McPherson Supervisor McPherson and Chairman Kepit Aye Motion passes unanimously it takes us to item number 13 consider approval in concept of ordinance amending Chapter 8.48 of the Santa Cruz County Code to extend the prohibitation prohibitation of commercial I'm sorry of commercial evictions arising from substantial income loss related to the COVID-19 pandemic through March 31, 2021 and schedule the ordinance for final adoption on October 20, 2020 as outlined in the memorandum of Supervisors Leopold and Coonerty we'll open up with Supervisor Coonerty thank you I think the ordinance speaks for itself and it's an important effort to help people respond to this pandemic and ensure our economic vitality states the legislature took care of residential eviction with legislation but did nothing about commercials properties and this helps protect our local businesses okay any other comments from board members members I move approval of the recommended actions okay I'll open it up for public comment we have no web comments thank you Supervisor Leopold friend Coonerty McPherson Chairman Caput the motion passes unanimously closed session nothing to report not a closed session no nothing reportable out of closed session from earlier this afternoon and we're all set next regular meeting of the Board of Supervisors is 9 a.m. Tuesday October 20, 2020 thank you everybody