 Good morning, everyone. Before we get started, just wanna announce that face coverings are required at all times and should fit securely over your nose and mouth. Please keep your face covering on as you speak at the microphone. Thank you. Okay. I will now call the August 10, 2020 special meeting of the Board of Supervisors to order. Will the clerk please call the roll? Supervisor Leopold. Here. Friend? Here. Coonerty? Here. Caput? Here. Oh, pardon me. That's okay. Supervisor McPherson. That's okay. Here. And Chair Caput. Here. Thank you. Okay, we're all here. Please join me on a moment of silence and prayer followed by the Pledge of Allegiance. Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation brought invisible with liberty and justice. Thank you. Thank you. And Mr. Palacios, do we have any revisions? There are no revisions. Okay. Next, the County Administrative Officer will present the overview and that's item number four. Okay. Good morning, Chair Caput and members of the Board. The documents before you today include the CAO supplemental budget, which revises the June proposed budget and includes the accounting light item detail, unified fee schedule on the continuing agreements list. All of the budget documents are posted on the County of Santa Cruz website and on the online interactive tool, sccbudget.com, which is updated for the 2021 revised amounts. This is our agenda for today. And for the overview, I'll be giving the presentation along with County Budget Officer, Christina Mowry. Today we are presenting to you the revised budget for fiscal year 2021, which amends the budget you approved in June. These revisions address the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on our economy and on our County budget and operations. Due to significant revenue losses in fiscal year 2019-20, that's the fiscal year we just finished. And those which are projected for fiscal year 2021, many difficult decisions had to be made in order to present to you a balanced budget that focuses on the continuation of essential services. And it's an important note that by law, we have to balance a balanced budget. Unlike the federal government, which is allowed to deficit spend, we in local government have to make those difficult decisions to balance our budget and our expenditures with our revenues. We have already implemented the negotiated staff furloughs and we have implemented hiring and spending freezes. The revised budget before you today incorporates these and other changes. We have also received additional funding allocation from the state for the Coronavirus Relief Fund or the CARES Act. These funds, which we'll talk about later in the presentation must be used by December of 2020. And can only be used to reimburse ourselves for COVID pandemic related cost incurred in the last and current fiscal years. Thus, these funds from the federal government that the state has allocated to us cannot be used to solve the loss of revenues that we are experiencing doing to the pandemic. More details will be provided later in the presentation about how we're proposing to use these funds. It is important to note that these revisions and contained in the budget represent our best thinking at the time, but there are many uncertainties which remain. First, should the pandemic continue beyond December, there's currently no state funding allocated to local governments, which means we would have to absorb the ongoing costs of our response to the pandemic. It's a very significant risk that we are currently facing because of what I view as lack of leadership at the federal level. Second, the status trigger cuts built into their budget should they not receive federal funding. That's another, so we are not only at risk from federal funding, but also from state funding that is also due to the lack of leadership at the federal level. Third, our revenue projections that support this budget are based on our most current information available at this time. However, the longer businesses must remain closed or partially closed, the less predictable these revenue streams become. In particular, our sales tax and our hotel tax are very volatile and we have built into this budget better estimates based on the earlier reopening which we undertook in June. Remember originally we were estimating that we wouldn't reopen until September. That's what our original thinking was and what the state was signaling. However, the state reopened most retail and hotel businesses tourism as of June. So that allowed us to project better revenues than we had anticipated. But with the pandemic surging in our state and across the country, these revenue estimates are very uncertain. There is some good news however. Due to excellent fiscal stewardship by the board of the supervisors over the past years, we are better prepared to manage through this crisis than we would have been a decade ago. The board has exercised fiscal discipline in our expenditures and then setting aside reserves which is helping us to deal with this current emergency situation. Over the last few years, your board has tripled our reserves up to $56 million and we have met the board's goal of 10% of revenues. We have also improved our credit rating to triple A. This is of course before the pandemic. We have reduced our pension obligations in partnership with our labor partners. Implementing a second tier of retirement and then there was a third tier implemented by the state. We also approved health benefit vesting for our retirees over the last number of years. We have also reduced our structural imbalance to less than 1% of expenditures. We have controlled employee growth over the years. Today we have less employees than we did 10 years ago despite providing more services. We have also started to tackle some of our deferred maintenance issues with improvements here at the 701 building and at our campuses on Amaline and on Freedom in Watsonville. We have placed new solar installations to reduce energy costs. We have put new roofs on and new boilers, new windows and other needed deferred maintenance. Much remains, but we have made progress. So with that, we are talked about our use of reserves. The revised 2021 budget includes the use of $14.2 million in reserves out of the 56 million total balance we had entering this fiscal year. Since fiscal year 2011-12, the county has increased reserves by $29 million. So over the last decade, you've added almost $30 million in reserves. And this has allowed us to increase the financial stability of the county's general fund. And that is part of the reason we have improved the county's credit rating to AAA. I want to emphasize, however, that the one-time use of reserves now leaves us with about 7.5%, which is close to the minimum required per bird board policy. I want to emphasize three things with regard to the use of reserves. First, reserves are one time. They aren't recurring revenues. And yet the current recession may be ongoing. We don't know yet. And may extend, some economists are saying that the recession may extend for two to three years. And yet we are using reserves, which are one-time funds to solve our budget deficit. Normally, I would never recommend this, nor would any government professional recommend it. However, this is such an unusual situation. It's not a normal recession. And there's the thought that once the vaccine is successfully implemented, that the economy will quickly recover. But that's an unknown. Second, we need reserves for other possible emergencies, such as fires or earthquakes. So the idea is that to go much lower than this would be dangerous, I think, because of the need to maintain some minimal reserves just in the event something else happens. The other third thing is that we don't know what's gonna happen in January when federal funding for the pandemic relief ends. Will we receive new funding? We don't know yet. And yet we will have ongoing costs for our homeless response, our public health response, and our education response. So with that overview, I'd like to present Christina Mowry to talk about the revised budget in more detail. Good morning, Chair Caput and members of the board. Ever? Okay, so first I'd like to go to the next slide. Here you'll see our budget hearing schedule for the week. Today, we're covering human services. Tomorrow will be public safety justice. And you will have a new public meeting at six o'clock. And then followed on a stick, check the government. And Thursday will be land use community services. And then we will summarize everything and provide last day reports and concluding actions for the following Tuesday. And then the auditor's office and our office will work together to incorporate all your changes and the revised budget changes into the adopted budget which will be presented on September 15th. So here you'll see the revised budget, the total county has expected about $8.74 million. It's broken down here by the various categories. The revenues are $815 million. See, we lost the break and take. I'll pause here. Yeah, your audio is breaking up a little. I'm trying to correct the echo problem, so bear with me one second, Christina. Okay. Okay, go ahead and try. Okay, we can go to the next slide. So here you see the county budget is $874 million, broken down the categories. Revenues make up about $815 million with $59 million coming from that balance of funds versus. The revised budget maintains a simpler distribution of extended-risk network as the proposed budget. And the budget was balanced. Carla said earlier using some one-time sources which we normally wouldn't do. We've got our available fund balance which is carried over from the prior year, some use of some one-time funds, and of course the use of our reserves. In addition, one of the major changes is of course we reduced various costs throughout the departments and for non-essential costs and services. And of course we had the agreement with our bargaining units to do a furlough. Next slide. So here's the table with the breakdown of the county budget. Here you can see the general fund makes up the majority of the county budget. The revised amounts about $571 million which is about a $12 million reduction over the proposed budget. This includes a decrease of the $12 million which is primarily from the revenue losses of 23 million offset by the furlough savings, general fund furlough savings of about $11 million to maintain operations. And there's a reduction in all other funds of about $8.2 million primarily from available fund balance and the use of reserves. Staffing reflects a decrease overall of almost 89 positions in addition to the 10 positions that we eliminated as part of the proposed budget. Next slide. This chart shows the proposed staffing for funded positions by budget category. The details of the personnel can be found in the appendix of the revised budget document. The proposed staffing includes about 2,388 of funded positions. 2,049 of those positions are funded by the general fund. Almost 340 positions are funded by our enterprise or other funding sources. Overall, we have some increases in positions and some decreases in positions due to reorganizations with a net change of less than one. We're unfunding 52 positions that are vacant and we do have approximately 37 positions that are slated for elimination that are filled to address the financial constraints due to COVID-19. This reduces the county workforce by approximately 3.6%. As a result of the retirement incentive program, we have received at least four additional applications for retirement, which will reduce the number of filled positions slated for elimination. And after the eliminations and unfunding of the vacancies, each bargaining unit still has the same percentage of the total county staffing before the reductions. SEIU being the largest, representing 69% of the workforce, will still have 69% of the workforce after the reductions are completed. It is anticipated that many of the filled positions will find placements elsewhere in the county, limiting the number of layoffs necessary. Next slide. Here you can see a staffing comparison. During the Great Recession, we had four consecutive years of staffing cuts. And here you can see the 2020 line is a comparison to the adopted budget. So we had 2,512 positions, total positions in the adopted and the revised budget, all right, I'm sure I can't quite see the slide there. The 2021 revised budget is 2,512 positions, which is a reduction of about 44.7 positions compared to the original adopted budget, 1920. And of course, many of those are unfunded. That we have a total now of 123, almost 124 unfunded positions. Next slide. Here we wanted to review with you some of our revenue assumptions. So in our previous communications with the board and the staff in our town hall meetings, we had made estimates of $20 million in revenue losses in 1920 and likely could have doubled that in 2021. We also anticipated the use of $20 million in reserves to solve that. And this was based on the information available at the time. And as Carlos said, we thought we would be in a shutdown mode for several months. And then we did reopen and we have some partial reopenings, not fully. And things could change as we've had surges, which will impact our estimates. So we've done our best to sort of account for that. As a result, we do have some slight improvements in our revenues. We are using some one-time funds and we did receive the coronavirus relief funds from the state, which allowed us to reimburse ourselves for some of our 1920 costs, which did improve our bottom line at the end of fiscal year 1920. So in 1920, our revenue losses overall, we're now looking at $12.4 million offset by expenditure savings of 3.8 million, which results in a deficit of 8.6 million before the use of fund balance of 4.1 million, leaving about $4.5 million shortfall, which we were utilizing reserves at the end of fiscal year 1920. And then in 2021, the revenue losses are now projected at 23 million, offset by expenditure reductions of 17.9 million, which results in a deficit of about 5.2 million. And we have no carryover fund balance because we were in a deficit in 1920. So we're short about 4.5 million there, leaving us with almost a $10 million use of reserves at the end of 2021. So between the two years, 1920 and 2021, we're recommending to use 14.2 million, leaving about 7.5% of revenues and reserves just slightly above our policy. Next slide. So here you'll see some of the actual revenues. Before COVID, we were expecting a modest growth in the county revenues totaling about $8.3 million or 5% property taxes make up the majority of the revenue growth at 5% or about $5.2 million. And then we had some slight changes projected in the other revenues. Of course, with 2021 as a result of COVID-19, our property taxes are still relatively unaffected that this time, although we have some slight decreases in our delinquencies and the revenue that we received from that. And we are estimating overall reductions in our revenues, as mentioned before, of about 23 million. Here you can see some of the major sources of that 23 million. And you can see some slight change in the cannabis business tax, sales tax. We're still projecting that we would lose about $3 million, transient occupancy tax about almost $5 million. That one's very volatile. It's really hard for us to tell. Some of our smaller businesses are doing a little better now that things have opened up, but some of our bigger hotels are unable to do some of their larger group reservations and that has an impact on their ability to have our revenues and for us to generate the transient occupancy tax. So the losses are a little better. We could still see surges. We've hoped we have enough built into our estimates to accommodate that. And at this time, as Carlos mentioned, there's no stimulus funding to provide us with any of our revenue losses. And on the next slide, you'll see the adjustments we made to our expenditures. Before COVID-19, we decreased the general fund departments anywhere from 2.5% to 12.5% in order to reduce the net county cost expenditures by over $4.2 million compared to the year two projection in order to balance the budget for the proposed budget, 2021. This included some minor reductions in staffing, as mentioned before, and had very limited changes and impacts on our services. Let's see. So as a result of COVID-19, you can see there in the revised changes, the revenue loss is estimated. It was necessary to utilize multiple reduction options in order to balance the budget to offset the revised estimated loss of 23 million. Agreements with all the bargaining units allowed for a five to 10% furlough, saving the general fund approximately $11.4 million. Departments reduced their general fund contribution anywhere from five to 20% for a total reduction of $12.6 million, which is equivalent to about 14% of the county's most discretionary general fund contribution. Total expenditure reductions of the $24 million is offset by an increase in contingencies of $6.1 million in order to address any further changes in the expenditures or revenues and allow for some limited restricted contingencies for emergency repairs. Now that we've reduced our reserves so much, it's important that we carry enough in our contingencies to be able to adapt to any further changes to our expenditures or our revenue estimates. So we are recommending the 1% of our expenditures in general contingency. So we needed to increase that contingency $3 million. We need to have some funds for mid-year adjustments. Many of the departments will have a very difficult time making their salary savings. We don't budget 100% of salaries, we budget roughly 98%. And now that we've unfunded many of our vacancies, it will be difficult for us to maintain that. So we need to have a little bit for our sort of mid-year realignment that we do every year. As I said before, we need about a million, we're setting aside a million dollars for emergency repairs. You'll recall last year, we had multiple culverts fail and we needed to do some emergency repairs. And then Carlos, as he mentioned, the state is proposing some trigger cuts. So in the event, they did backfill and put funding in the state budget to cover the majority of the realignment revenue losses, which are based on sales tax. They funded about 75% of the loss, but there's still 25% of the loss. And we will incur that loss in the event the state does not receive additional federal funding. So we've set aside a million and a half to cover that loss in contingencies because the departments have budgeted the full amount of realignment revenue in their budgets and we have to have a way to adjust for that. And then of course, the change in staffing, the general fund change is almost a little over 83 positions and the department budgets will go into further detail on that. Next slide. So we mentioned earlier, so the general fund, the majority of the revenues in the general fund budget are restricted for health and human services, but the most discretionary funding in the general fund comes from our fund balance savings and comes from our general purpose revenues, sales tax, transient occupancy tax, property taxes make up the majority. So here gives you an analysis of the change and our most discretionary financing. So originally in the proposed budget, we had a fund balance that we expected to carry over from 1920 of about four and a half million dollars. And of course, that wasn't available as a result of COVID to carry over for 2021. Our general revenues, we originally expected 168 million and as a result of COVID, we've got a reduction of the 23 million. Of course, we didn't plan any furlough savings in the proposed budget. And as a result, now we have 11.4 million dollars thanks to the agreement and cooperation of our bargaining units, which helps offset at least almost half of the loss. And then we are utilizing almost 10 million dollars in reserves for our financing. So overall, when you compare the two, our financing is reduced by six and a half million dollars. Next slide. And here you can see the general fund contribution broken down by category. The solid bars are the revised budget and the outline bars are the original recommend or proposed budget. And you can see public safety makes up the majority of our general fund contribution. And in this case, health and human services or public safety, I should say cut about four million dollars or about 6% of their financing. Health and human services had reductions of about two and a half million dollars are almost 8%. General government included reductions of about two and a half million or 11%. Land use and community services reduced by just under a million dollars, although that's distorted because the parks department had revenue losses of over a million dollars due to COVID, which they offset with reductions. So that's really a reductions they made of close to two million. And then there were some minor reductions we made to the tech fund to reduce the amount of funding we have for equipment. And we of course reduced and deferred our facility master planning. And then offset by the increase, as I spoke earlier, of contingencies and what we need to have set aside. So after all the reductions, the distribution of the general fund contribution is relatively the same as before. Public safety is still receiving 60% of our available financing. Health and human services is receiving a total of 20%. General government is receiving 14% and land use 6% of the total available general fund financing which maintains equity in the distribution of the available funding. Next slide. So here you can see, prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, the five year forecast anticipated that the general fund would face deficits from rising costs and declining revenues. Expectations were that we would meet our obligations over the next five years and preserve the 10% if departments were able to absorb the majority of cost increases. And this showed deficits here, that the black line is the sort of our best case and the red line is sort of our worst case. So we projected anywhere from $3 to $12 million in deficits before COVID-19. And this was also before we had a recession. And we do anticipate at this time, due to COVID-19 that these deficits will be worse in the future. We do expect our health insurance and our retirement costs to go up anywhere from $1 to $3 million annually. So we need to be able to prepare for that. And hopefully, once we get a vaccine in place, our revenues will start to improve and we'll be able to offset some of those cost increases and solve some of our future deficits. Next slide. So we do have opportunities for relief as Carlos mentioned. In mid-June, the state adopted their budget and they allocated a portion of their CARES Act funding to smaller counties and cities like us that had not received an allocation of funding from the federal government stimulus package, which was released in March. Funding is based on our population and our county is scheduled to receive $27.6 million. And it's contingent upon our continued compliance with the health order. And of course, the departments were asked as a result to provide requests for the use of the funds. We received initially almost $30 million in requests in addition to the $7 million that we had already spent and allocated in 1920. To date, there has not been a decision regarding the additional federal relief funding since the CARES Act in March. The House and the Senate have proposals but have yet to come to a final decision and we'll talk a little bit more about that later. So, and then the next few slides, we're gonna see a breakdown of the recommended use of the $27.6 million in relief for the county. And we're gonna see it broken down by categories. Next slide. So the CARES Act is broken down into six categories for eligible costs for reimbursement with the coronavirus relief funds abbreviated as CRF. And here you'll see the majority of the funding is allocated to medical and public health expenses of a little over $15 and a half million. Medical expenses include COVID-19 lab testing and tracing costs. We estimate we spent, we did use, I should say, so in 1920, the CRF funds are eligible to use as our local match to FEMA. So there were both health services and human services in their response. We use the CRF funds as the local match. So that's where the 1920 actuals have come from. And the public health costs include, in addition to the public health costs, the majority of the public health costs is our local match for the shelter and care and food distribution costs, which was, is estimated about three million in the prior year and almost seven million, a five million in the 2021 year for the first six months. Because all of these funds do have to be spent by the end of December. And health services has some related costs. They have a small amount and for their public health costs and then there's some building readiness costs, and additional cleaning, communications, signage and security costs, some countywide public protection costs and some hands-free body temperature scanners that we're recommending. Next slide. So here you can see the, one of the categories is payroll expenses. We're recommending the use of almost $4 million, which includes costs to reimburse the county for the reassignment of staff, substantially dedicated to responding to the emergency, commonly known as our disaster service workers. In addition to the $4 million, in addition to a $4 million set aside for social distancing compliance, expenses, which include remote worker equipment, community vitality programs, including childcare for essential workers and distance learning programs, some office and technical equipment for health services. And also we're eligible to reimburse ourselves for our paid sick leave costs and some facility modifications and delivery services. Next slide. So the, you'll see here, we are proposing 15% of the total funding for economic support for our local community partners and we'll provide grants for our community partners, rental assistance and grants for small businesses and nonprofits that are our safety net providers. And we're hoping these will help them with relief. In addition, we're recommending in this category to offset some of our rising unemployment costs and some costs related to reentry and support programs. And then of course our other category, there's not much in that category, but we do have some increased costs related to fingerprinting for our disaster service workers. So during 1920, the county spent 6.7 million on COVID related unreimbursed costs from FEMA or other sources that are eligible for this coronavirus relief funds. The remaining 20.9 million will be discussed further in during the CEO department's presentation on Wednesday. And then we will have a last day report for your final approval. So more details will be discussed. And again, we have to spend these funds by the end of December in order to receive them. Next slide. So here you'll see sort of a breakdown in comparison of the two proposals presented between the House and the Senate, the HEROES Act and the HEALS Act. The House Stimulus Fund is known as the Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions or HEROES Act and recommends a variety of assistance measures to those impacted by the pandemic, including additional state and local aid, which would be very helpful for us. The Senate plan is the Health Economic Assistance Liability Protection and Schools or HEALS Act. While no additional aid is provided for state or local governments, it does allow more flexible use of the original CARES Act funding. 25% of that funding could be used to offset our revenue losses. And it does extend the deadline for the use of the funds past December 30th. So now I'm gonna turn it back over to Carlos and he's gonna discuss some of our operational impacts. Our revised budget details a number of operational impacts from staffing changes to program changes, which show increased demand for some services all the way to program eliminations in other areas. Our program changes will look different due to the COVID response and reorganizations to gain operational efficiencies. Many departments have had to reimagine new service models. For example, the use of telehealth, electronic plan submittal, or even changing business models such as parks and cultural services, moving from recreation programs to providing childcare services. Some program changes are the beneficiaries of new funding such as health and human services and homeless services. However, some changes are a response to budget cuts. State budget cuts for agriculture will result in fewer inspections for some commodities and mandated reductions for child support. These are state mandated reductions have led to reduce staff and increase caseloads. While the use of one-time funds to offset state and federal reductions in behavioral health, this may impact service delivery capacity for substance use and mental health needs. Non-mandated programs such as Cannabis Compliance Unit, the Recovery Center for Public Safety, the FIT program have been proposed for elimination in order to preserve some of our other mandated core services. Our most significant asset in serving our community is our staff. Burlows were instituted beginning in July with 5% for public safety, 10% for executive staff and department heads and board members and 7.5% for all other positions. This is expected as we detailed earlier to save over $11 million during the course of this fiscal year. Given that 52% of our budget is salaries and benefits, it is unfortunate that some staff positions would need to be eliminated in order to address the revenue decreases we are facing. Due to state mandated changes, we are required to eliminate 10 positions from child support. Jamie Murray, our child director of child support will talk more about these later in her presentation. Of the 88.6 positions that are proposed to be reduced, 52 or 58% are vacant and will be unfunded. 37 or 42% are positions which are currently filled and result in the layoff of some staff. We'd like to remind the board that staffing cuts are made on the basis of operational needs while trying to maintain our services as much as possible to the public. The staffing cuts nevertheless are proportionate to the bargaining units for the various counting. So when you look at the various cuts of positions, they are all proportionate approximately to the percentage of that bargaining unit in the county workforce. We wanted to reiterate the process and remind you that there are many steps that will occur before an employee loses their position. The layoff process is governed by collective bargaining agreements and the civil service rules. Seniority in a job classification governs the outcomes and layoffs within each department. All employees whose positions are scheduled for elimination were informed to be a written and in-person notification on July 28th and 29th by their departments. This was not an official notification but rather a notice to these employees prior to the release of the revised budget. Employees who are eligible can take advantage of the retirement incentive while other employees will follow the process as noted above. The county has established a practice of mitigating the negative impacts of position reductions by working with affected employees to try and find them another position within the county. We have had success in this process in the past and we will work diligently with all employees to try and relocate them to another vacant position. While we have crafted a balanced budget that preserves our mandated services, there are still many uncertainties that lie ahead for the fiscal year. First, the surge in COVID cases and the reshutting down of some economic sectors could result in greater reduced revenues than we have currently planned for depending on the severity of the situation. Statewide closures could impact economic recovery and affect especially our sales and hotel tax which are critical components of our revenue stream. So the first major uncertainty we're facing is the uncertainty of the economic recovery from the current recession we are in. Second, with lack of federal leadership, there's still not agreement to further stimulus funding at the federal level. This could result in state trigger cuts being imposed given the state's own fiscal situation which could impact our programs as well. Third, realignment funding is dependent on federal aid and the state budget may also impose further trigger cuts on realignment funding as well which would impact our budget. And fourth, there are currently no relief funds that are available beyond December 30th of this calendar year. Though federal negotiations continue, local governments may need to fund continue efforts such as testing or shelter and care even if there are no additional state or federal funds. And then finally, the November election and the result of the census could have long-term impact on the federal support for many of our programs. Hard to emphasize enough how important the census is for us and the census is currently being impacted by lack of federal leadership in terms of how it was being conducted and by the virus. This could have long-term impacts especially in California and on our own sources of funding from the federal and state governments. To address some of these uncertainties we have increased our contingency funds as follows. We have set aside 1% in a general contingency. Normally in past years we have carried a half of percent. We've done this because of the great uncertainty ahead of us in terms of our revenues. However, this is a policy decision up to the board. Ultimately we recommend, but you have to look at the whole budget and the whole needs of the community. So we think it's the best practice to increase the percentage to 1% in a general contingency. But again, this is more than we have carried in past years which has generally been half a percent. And this is about two and a half million dollars and to bring it up to that 1% level. We also have been careful because we know that the mid-year, there may be adjustments needed in various of our funding, especially for example, in our salary savings, which we think is gonna be lower than years past because we are eliminating so many vacancies. So that is also another unknown. We've set aside a million dollars for emergency repairs for our infrastructure. The last few years we've had bridges, dorm drains, culverts, wash out, and the road fund and other public work funds are at their max already. So we've had to make those repairs out of general funds. So we've set aside one million dollars for these kinds of emergency infrastructure repairs. And then finally the state trigger cuts for realignment which would happen in October, we've set aside one and a half million dollars in the event the state has to make those trigger cuts. And that is all dependent on federal funding. If there's a federal deal, then the state would not impose the trigger cuts and we would have that one and a half million dollars. But we've set it aside because it doesn't look like there's any agreement currently forthcoming. In summary, our revenue losses of 14% in the current fiscal year result in the use of reserves and other one-time funds in order to balance our budget along with the loss of 89 staff positions. Contingencies have been increased in order to prepare for further uncertainties and our general fund deficit is expected to increase over the next five years, warranting continued fiscal cautiousness. And you can see the various summary of all the different impacts that we have made in the budget. Chair Caput, that concludes our presentation for the overview. And if you have any questions at this point, I would be happy to take them and then later we'll move on to health services agency. Okay, and we'll open it up for the supervisors if they have questions. I just ask if we can ask the questions and just get a short response because otherwise we'll never get out of item number four. Thank you. So we'll start with supervisor Leopold. Thank you, Chair. Thank you for the presentation. It will be one of the few times in life where $23 million deficit looks better than the $40 million deficit that we looked at just a couple of months ago. I wanna express my appreciation for all the staff who have worked on recreating the budget for the first time that I can recall. As someone who's been on this board, this is my 13th budget process. This one is unlike any ones that we've dealt with before. And we're gonna be faced with some very difficult choices this week. I think it's important to recognize that I appreciate the efforts of staff to put resources out there even when we didn't know exactly what our funding was gonna be. Our response to the COVID-19 pandemic required us to allocate resources before we were sure where that money was coming from because that's actually what the community needed at the time. So I wanna express my appreciation to our CAO's office, health services, human services, and all of our departments for being willing to spend that money to make sure that the people of Santa Cruz had what they needed when they needed it. As we look at this coming week of decisions, it is distressing to know that this is not a priority for a portion of the federal government. The fact that the House of Representatives passed a HEROES Act in May that allocated resources that should that bill have been passed, we would not be faced with the difficult decisions that we have to make this week. And that the Senate didn't even take it up till about 10 days ago is alarming to me that at a federal level, they're not taking seriously the impacts that this virus has had, not only on the individuals in our country but the institutions in our country. I'm hopeful that someday soon that they might see that it's politically advantageous to do what their job is, is to take care of people and institutions during this crisis. I don't know whether that'll come soon, but I'm hopeful, especially as we get closer to the election, that the pressure on some folks may be enough to actually get something done. And that gives us, I'm glad that we have a long runway about any choices we have to make in terms of cuts because a lot can happen between now and then. So as we go into this process, I'm gonna be looking very closely at the suggestions that have been made. And I hope that we can make the best decision possible to ensure that the county has all the pieces necessary so when we move out of this difficult financial period that we still have the programs in place necessary to support the people of Santa Cruz County. Thank you for the work. Thank you. And we'll go to Supervisor Friend. Thank you, Chair. Thank you also to the team for presenting such a sobering presentation. We are faced with a remarkably difficult situation. I did have a very, very brief question in regards to the contingencies as well as to Ms. Mowry's point about some of the needs that we've had for emergency repairs. I mean, we can predict that these things are going to happen. It's not a wonder of whether they're gonna be failures in our road system and cold road system. If the contingency were reduced back to the point five, for example, where would this funding come from? Well, we'd have to take a look at how we're doing and we are gonna provide periodic reports and monitor our situation. But if we didn't have any cost savings elsewhere in the budget or any unanticipated revenue, the only place we can go is our reserves. Which would in theory bring us below the board policy number, correct? That's correct. Okay, thank you. I don't have any additional questions at this time, Mr. Chair. Okay, thank you. Supervisor Coonerty. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I don't have any questions at this time. I wanna thank the team for as Supervisor Leopold said, both making sure we live up to our fiscal responsibility but also making sure we're making the investments at a time when our community needs it the most. It'll be difficult week ahead, but I appreciate the work, the groundwork that's been done to put us in a position to make some thoughtful decisions. Mr. McPherson. Yeah, Mr. Chair, thank you. Some of my remarks are gonna be repetitive. You know, six months ago, I thought I couldn't wait for this budget session. I mean, we had a strategic plan that the employees and the public had gotten into. We had accomplished some of those things and operational plan to put it in order. Now, not so much, but I do, I too wanna thank the County family for putting together this, the budget for the coming year to serve our community. Certainly one of the most challenging times we have ever experienced. And we've done a very good job of managing the pandemic through our Health and Human Services Departments, as well as the County Administrative Office. And I wanna thank especially Christina Mallory for her budget presentation, and as well as our public safety partners and our community organizations. I really wanna thank the employees for stepping up and being on the front lines. Whether you work in a clinic or out in the field, you were very much appreciated by this board. And the general public itself in Santa Cruz County for its response and ever-changing edicts that come from the state or federal government about how we should respond to the COVID epidemic. But this number, this budget is much more than just numbers on a page. And it represents real people with critical services they provide to people who need it desperately. And while it's always difficult to eliminate positions and furlough our workforce, I'm grateful that the gap we need to close has been narrowed as much as it has been. Overall, I think this is a fiscally responsible budget that focused on essential services that we, the spreads impact across the department and the labor units. I think our mid-management and SEIU bargaining units are seeing the same percentage reduction. Others are seeing higher impacts. Ultimately, we hope to minimize the final layoffs to the greatest extent possible. But finally, the budget pulls our reserves in a manner that is proportional to the depth of this emergency. As was mentioned, since 2013, this board has in partnership with the CAO has added 29 million to our savings and I'm grateful for that. Otherwise, we were literally being dire straits right now and eliminating more positions that are proposed right now. I do support maintaining our reserves at seven and a half percent currently proposed because we are unprecedented in these unpredictable times. We don't know how the severity of the pandemic over the years to come or the year to come is going to be. And we really don't know the level of support from our federal and state partners. So that's a big question as was mentioned by other supervisors. But I think it's overall, it's important to remember that budgets are really our living documents. We can add and subtract to fit our needs and that includes adding services back when we can afford to do so. I really want to thank everyone in the county team for their role in this revised spending plan. And I know that we can weather this storm together as bad as it is. It could have been worse if we didn't have the response that we've had from the general population of Santa Cruz County and the excellent staff and employees of Santa Cruz County. So it's going to be a tough week, but we'll get through it. Thank you, Mr. Chair. We're talking about a lot of stress here. We're talking about pressure. And I want to thank the staff. I guess when you would go home, you're thinking about all of these different areas that we're talking about and working on. And I think that we need to recognize that when some of us got off work, we can go home and maybe kind of relax a little bit. But the ones working on this budget that is presented to us, you took this home with you when you left your job here at the county. And that's rough. That's really rough. I think what I like is the proactive work that we did with building up the reserves. And the big question is, and the big problem is the reserves are a one-time expenditure. They don't all of a sudden, after we spend it, if it's gone, it's gone. Meaning that if this goes on for a year, a year and a half, two years, there's a point where it will be zero. And then we're in big trouble. So I think the proactive part that we built it up to about $56 million, I think when we were all looking at this and building it up, we knew maybe one day we would have to use it. But I don't think any of us realized that we'd have to be using it within about a three or four-year period. It's just a shock that we, thank God we put it away and had it in the reserves. Real quick on the property tax delays, the other question I have is, will the property taxes hopefully not be going up? Or normally they go up every year. So do we have any indication whether or not they'll be stable for the people out there that have to pay them? So our property tax projections are based on the assessed value last January. And the assessors already finalized the role. So we have the benefit of the actual numbers for property tax revenues for fiscal year 2021. And that's been incorporated into the budget. So for fiscal year 2021, general property taxes are just fine. We still are seeing growth. What will happen in the future, however is really unknown. The assessor will have to take a look at where the assessed values are on January 1st of 2021. And that will be the basis for our property tax revenue for 2021-22. So it's really depends on where we're at at that time, whether it will affect us in the future. There is a likelihood that it could. Then on the job elimination, what number, I know we're trying to shift people from one position to another. And there are some that may lose their job and there's really no other alternative. What I'm getting is what is that number right now? And can we get it down to zero? Well, we have our personnel director who can comment about the process we use to help assist employees who are impacted by job reductions. Good morning, Chair Caput, members of the board, Adjida Patel, personnel director. At this time, we have, as Carlos mentioned in the presentation, we do have an extensive process that we need to go through. So it is premature for us to say to you exactly what that number is. As we have to look at seniority, we need to look at whether the retirement incentive applications will make a difference. And we also have to do a call for volunteers, which is very critical. It's in every MOU and it's an offering to people who are in the affected class to take a layoff instead of somebody else. So those elements have made a difference in the past when we were faced with these decisions in this process. So I'm hopeful that we may see some numbers that decrease and then as my staff works in the month of September to look for vacant positions throughout the county as we have before, I anticipate and look forward to telling you that that number has gone down quite a bit. But it's very premature to guess, but I will tell you that we've had great success in the past and we're hopeful that we will again. And of course, our goal is at least 50% but we hope to pass it way beyond that. And how about real quickly, how about this possibility? If there are a number, let's say we have 10 people that are gonna lose their job, is there a way of delaying the fact that they would lose their job? It's like going to the doctor and the doctor says either, it looks like you're really bad news. You got about a month to live. And then what if the doctor said you had like a year or six months to live? So what I'm getting at is I don't like giving short notice and if the worst case scenario, even if it's one person, how much notice can we give and maybe delay it rather than make it October 1st? I think it was the date October 2nd. So contractually we only need to give two weeks notice. However, based on the process that has been laid out, we will be giving employees four weeks notice. Delaying any layoffs is dependent on finances. So it really is tough unless something different happens with stimulus money and et cetera. However, one of the things that we do in our office is that if we are able to offer extra help hours, if there's some kind of holdover we can do, we always look at that. So that is certainly an option. An important thing to know also is that if a person is actually laid off under the civil service rules, they have a right of re-employment, which means that if we put a position back into a department, the person who was laid off has a right to have that position back. So there are some safeguards that we can certainly employ and we will be obviously looking, even if those employees actually do have to get laid off, they will have a right to come back to us first and we will continue to work with them if they're still interested. Okay, we'd like to get that number down to zero if we could. We absolutely would. But October 2nd is not written in stone then. As Ms. Patel said, we will work with each employee and the circumstances of that elimination to see if we can extend extra help hours or other accommodations. But in general, if we had a group of employees that we wanted to extend the layoff date, it would be a fiscal impact. So we'd have to use something, we can't cut other areas because that would result to other layoffs, right? So the only thing we could do is use some of the contingency funds potentially for that. But again, that would be up to the board to give us direction to do that. It's a very difficult situation. The budget, there's no room in the budget to do that at this point. So you'd have to make a decision to use contingencies. That's the only place we could potentially, in theory, you could use some more reserves to do that, to extend the date. But that would be a fiscal decision that the board would have to make. Okay. Well, hopefully we could, you know, keep them as long as we can or get the number down to zero. I mean, that's a human element we're talking about here. Absolutely. And I believe that in years past, our staff have worked very hard to work with each individual based on their circumstances. And we'll do that again this year. Right. Right. Yeah. Thank you very much. Yes. Okay. That'll be. So now we have the overview of the human health and human services budget. And after that, we'll have public comment. Okay. So I'll turn it to Christina Mallory for the overview of today's agenda. Hello, Chair Caput, members of the board. So I believe someone's gonna bring up the slide presentation. Is that true, Christine? There it comes. Okay. So I'm just gonna give you some brief overview of the health and human services category of the county budget. Next slide. So here you'll see a breakdown of, represents about 367 million in financing, or it's about 42% of the county budget, provides funding for health services, human services, core investments, homeless services coordination, and child support. Next slide. Here you'll see a breakdown in the table, the actual financing, showing the original proposed budget, and then the current financing for 2021, showing the revenues, other funds, and the general fund contribution. So, I mean, the majority of the revenues in health and human services are state and federal funding. And overall, the financing is increasing by 2.7%, primarily from increased funding for entitlement programs in human services, and grant funding from our HEAP grants for homeless services, offset by the general fund reductions in each of the departments. Next slide. And here you'll see a breakdown of the actual general fund decreases provided by each of the departments, which represents about $2.5 million, or about 7% of the net cost savings for health and human services. Next slide. Here you'll see the expenditure summary, and has a change of over $9.6 million, which includes eliminating funding for about 22.1 positions, and all of those, most of those positions are vacant, and health and human services comprises about 95% of the total of this category. Next, here you'll see the breakdown by type of expenditures. So there's overall reduction in salaries and benefits of about a million five, which is those 22.1 position eliminations, and then the savings are offset by increases in services and supplies of over $5 million, and other charges of over $5 million, which represents the entitlement increases received from the state for IHSS, and grants for homeless services. Next slide. Here's a brief summary of the operational impacts by each department. More information can be found in the narratives for each of the department's revised budgets, and the majority of departments unfunded some vacancies that will have minor impacts on services, and it does include the elimination of tent-filled positions, all in child support services, due to the state's required, state and federal required change in the caseload ratios, which reduces their overall financing. So in order to achieve cost savings and operational efficiencies, homeless services coordination is also consolidating with the human services department, and the departments will speak to that when they present their budgets, and everyone is on, we have one department on the consent agenda, which is the homeless services, and all others will present their overviews to you today and answer any questions that you may have. And that's it for the overview unless you have any questions. So Chair, you're ready to go to item five, which is public comment, and then on today's agenda, and then you'll go to consent and then the regular agenda. Okay, thank you. Thank you. This is an opportunity for the public to address the board, and it does say here on topics related to the items on today's agenda. So it's not a free three minutes or whatever. So if you have something to address with the items that are on today's agenda and the revised county budget for health and human services, you have three minutes. Hi, hi, how are you? With me for a second. I'm sleep deprived. My name is Kiara Miller. I'm currently a specialist with child support and I'm slated for a layoff. As a single parent, I sought this county physician primarily for the security it offered, as well as the growth potential. Since 2015, I've served as a liaison for Primo, represented my department at the Child Support Directors Leadership Conference in 2018, and though an essential worker volunteered for and served for disaster service, helping with the homeless shelter referral. In my position, I primarily assist clients navigating the legal process of modifying their child support orders. Following lean principles, and even before the process improvement initiative began, I had prepared and facilitated in-office trainings to promote efficiency and better serve our public. My Filipino mother grew up in temporary migrant housing, so I was raised on lean principles right here on our central coast. From 2004 to 2010, I was a public school teacher during No Child Left Behind at a Title I school. Regardless of state class size reduction mandates, my class size increased from 20 to 33 students. At the classroom budget of $300 per year never increased, nor did I receive a cost of living graze. Even so, I never denied the materials necessary for my students to learn. Instead, I dug deep to provide teaching them to be conscientious and resourceful. I committed myself to the responsibilities, inheritance, and my role. COVID has had a huge impact on our economy. However, it seems reasonable that we should shoulder the impact as equitably as possible, especially given the CAO's operational plan. Equal is not equitable. Reviewing base income data available on Transparent California. At my level, annual increases are about 5%. That's anywhere from $2,000 to $4,000. The 7.5% furlough reduces a $60,000 2019 gross to $58,000. At the level of the CAO's and many of the top earners, annual salary increases are about 10%. It's about $25,000. The 7.5% furlough actually allows for an increase at this level. For the CAO, his 300,000 2019 income would increase to 305,000. And my understanding is he can offset the loss by cashing out administrative leave. A 10% reduction would actually see the salary stall at 300,000. Layoffs may devastate families at lower income levels, increase the workload of our peers and decrease service for the public we serve. Our county family and our community deserve responsible, equitable, and sustainable stewardship of the public funds. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Is the timer set at two or three? Three, good, thank you. Okay, my name's Olivia Martinez, region two director. Let's be clear, these are not equitable. This is not an equitable budget at all, okay? And I think it's very important that the board of supervisors really look at this budget. You will be hearing from our membership throughout this week. Our membership is furious. Why? Because the 88 positions that are slated for eliminated, the 37 that are failed, 30 of those are from our SEIU members. This is not an equitable layoff process, right? Our members are being hit, the essential workers. From the beginning of this COVID-19, management has not responded in the way they should to our members' needs who are providing essential services. We are asking you that you carefully review this budget and that you see that our members are not being laid off, right? Yes, Ms. Patel talks about that, how they're gonna get jobs, but still they're gonna be eliminated from their positions, right? They might be earning less money, right? They might have an extra help position instead of having their regular position. Regarding the COVID-19 money that the county received, they're asking you to approve that they use certain funds, they are already using these funds. They contracted out services with Salud Palagente, right? Instead of looking at those monies to help the county workers first. And I know this because I represent Salud Palagente. So why are they coming to you after the fact that they've already decided to use some of these funds? They are getting extra help workers to work at mental health medical services. Why are they furloring these workers if they're now getting extra help workers to help, right? These are decisions that they're making that you really need to ask if they're making the right decisions. Why are we went into negotiations about the furlough? We asked that they exclude the sanitation. Carlos wanted equitable furloughs. Didn't allow us to exclude sanitation. Didn't allow us to exclude HSA clinics. They are in a serious issue with workload. Our workers are the frontliners. The clinic staff is overwhelmed and you're furloughing those staff instead of cutting top management. You do not need so much management. They are not doing the work like the essential workers in a pandemic. We are asking you that you not approve this budget, that you look carefully into this budget and that you make our members whole in this process. Who is gonna do the work of 10 less child support workers? Who is Jamie? Can you ask her then to do the work and carry 500 cases? Please do so, that would be great. Because she doesn't carry cases, our members do. Thank you. Thanks, board. Karen Colby, internal organizer with SEIU 521. There are a couple of points I wanna emphasize. I heard Carlos say that we represent the same percentage of the workforce after these layoffs and we won't afterwords. And I wanna remind the board that our members are the frontline workers who are delivering the essential services every day. Our members are the ones who are putting their lives at risk to be in front of our communities and be exposed to coronavirus. So to say that our percentage of services will be the same to me is callous and insensitive. And then I wanna talk, I heard a lot about financial responsibility. So there are a couple of points I wanna emphasize on a financial responsibility. Number one in June, this board was initially slated to spend $20 million a room of reserves to help cover deficits. And now that number's gone down to $14.2 million. That's $6 million is $6 million less that could be going to essential services in our communities. You know, we heard a lot about leadership and the lack of leadership in Washington, spending the reserves now allows us to get through this tough time and hopefully see through a change in leadership in Washington so that we can get further essential services in the future. With regards to furloughs, the county initially agreed to a 10% furlough with every bargaining unit except for SEIU. And then when we as SEIU agreed to a 7.5% furlough, funny enough, the next day all of a sudden the further reduction for every other bargaining unit was reduced to 7.5%. So that right there is an agreement that you as a board had with your other bargaining units for a 10% furlough and those savings are savings that you could be using to cover these deficits and avoid layoffs right now. And then I've just got one more word on finances. Over the last three years, the county has projected deficits totaling approximately $14 million. So when the actual results came in of what was actually spent, there was a net gain of $18 million. That means over the last three years, there's been a whopping net increase versus projections of $32 million. Now the reason we do conservative projections when times are good is so that when times are bad, we have the money to spend to get us through crises. So I want you as a board to really look at this budget, look at revisiting those furlough agreements, look at spending down the reserves and using that revenue to get us through this crisis. There's never been a more important and opportune moment to really invest in our community instead of doing austerity. Thank you. Hey, how you doing? Good morning, Chair Caput. Supervisor Leopold, our TV friend supervisors. Jim Heaney, county employee, been here now for 21 years. In my time at the county, I've done a lot of volunteer work with SCIU and have served on multiple bargaining units and bargaining teams. And it was interesting today earlier when I was monitoring the meeting when I heard that the general rep unit now represents 69% of the workforce. I clearly remember in past bargaining as many years back where we were somewhere around 78 to 80% of the workforce. I think this is significant because I think you can see how funding of positions has shifted over years. And that's a lot of why, you know, the union comes before you today and talks about inequities. One of the reasons we see the furloughs as having inequities is many bargaining units, except for the general rep unit, have administrative leave. This is leave on top of sick leave, on top of paid vacation leave. It's, though, they're sick leave and vacations accrue at the same rate as us, but they have this additional administrative leave which they're allowed to cash out every year. And many of the bargaining units are allowed to cash out two weeks for that. That represents 3.8% of their salary. So even if they were at a 10% furlough, take 3.8% of that, our seven and a half percent furlough is still higher. That's why we come up to say things like this seems inequitable. Kind of curious about a process question. And this right now is public comment on as I understand what's on today's agenda. It's kind of odd to me that after each budget section we're gonna hear human services, child support and health services, that there isn't what has been there traditionally the opportunity at that point for public comment and or the comment from the union about the presentation because we're being asked to comment on what we think they're about to say. When it comes to making wise investments in our community, it's very clear that the County of Santa Cruz is absolutely a driver of economics in our community. We're the largest employer and we want to really remind and encourage support that if you end up laying off workers, you end up not only affecting their micro economy and their families economy, but the larger economy in our community. One thing we learned from the recession is that as we tried to recover from the recession with public employees slowly being added back because we always lag behind, it really extended the recession. So we're looking for you to again, invest in our future today, invest in our future this week with the budget hearing. Do all you can to set aside whatever layoffs don't seem reasonable. Do all you can to invest in the community by believing that yes, there is going to be stimulus funding that's going to come and we're going to be able to backfill our expenses. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Do we have anybody downstairs? Anybody online? Okay. That takes us to item number six. Approve the 2020-21 proposed budget for homeless services coordination office and take related actions as outlined in the reference budget documents and as recommended by the county administrative officer. Chair, I will just say that I'm glad that we are increasing resources for this very critical part of the budget. It's one of the things we've heard very clearly from the community that they want us to spend money on. And in this days when we think about where we put our budget dollars, making sure that we can support some of the most vulnerable in our community is very critical. So I would move the consent agenda. Okay. Oh, that's right. Okay. Yeah, you're right. And I'll call for the roll. Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Chair Caput. Aye. Passes unanimously. Okay. Chair, just a point of clarification. We are allowing public comment after each of these budget segments. Is that correct? I mean. Yes, that's correct. Okay. I just wanted to, it's, it would be a definite change of practice. So we're, well, we're still on item six, which is part of the consent agenda. There was only one consent item that is number six. We're now on item number seven. Do you want me to read it into the? I guess so. Yeah. Consider the 2020, 2021 supplemental budgets for the health services agency and take related actions as outlined in the reference budget documents and the memorandum of the director of health services. There's the supplemental budget pages, the supplemental line item detail and the supplemental continuing agreements list. Okay. So we're, okay. We're having a presentation, I imagine. Yes. Oh, there's a disembodied voice. Okay. I don't know if you can hear that. Maybe the chair, maybe the CAO is going to introduce who's speaking and everything. This is director Mimi Hall, who'll be presenting the health and human, health services agency supplemental budget. Thank you. Good morning chair Caput, honorable members of the board. Hi, Mimi. Good morning. So just a pre-opter, I'm not sure who can see me, but I am having some connectivity issues this morning. So I may stop my video to ensure that you can continue hearing my voice. So this morning I'm here to prevent, present the health services agency fiscal year 2021 supplemental budget. And as a reminder, I'd like to let the board and the public know that the health services agency budget presentation that we provided in June, detailed much of the response work of the department operation centers, our partners and all of the divisions. And we noted a lot of the successes despite very incredible challenges to keep our community safe. Today's budget presentation focuses on the theme of resilience, which you've heard so much about in terms of the way the county makes their decisions to ensure that we're looking out for the most important needs of our community members. Resilience has been demonstrated by the board, the CAO's office, all of the county departments, our county staff who are incredibly resilient community partners and every single one of our residents because we've all resolved to work together and rise to meet the challenges and the changing needs of our communities. Resilience also requires clarity of purpose and the ability to plan a clear path that will serve our communities well, not only this fiscal year, but in the challenging years ahead. The health of the cruise residents as a shared responsibility and no one entity could achieve a healthy and safe community alone. As I have said before, budgets are a statement of our values and with the thoughtful and strategic planning that HSA is presenting budget that HSA is presenting today with the support of the county and the CEO's office as you have seen in the budget presentations earlier today, we are sure that our budget aligns with the values of the county as the consequences of disease and poverty would be felt even more deeply without the budget we are presenting today. The budgetary approach that our agency with the support of the county and our partners is truly making an investment in optimizing our resilience for the challenging days ahead. Today I will be discussing our vision, mission and principles as a reminder for how we developed our budget. I will review revisions to the proposed budget, discuss the operational impacts as well as have a brief overview of opportunities and uncertainties. Are you all able to hear me now? Yes. There we go. Okay, there was a brief something. Okay, so as you can see, our vision, mission and values which we have presented numerous times to the board are definitely the North Star that guide our work. As we developed today's budget in this year's presentation and the many months that led to this point we always followed these principles in conjunction with our human service partners to use the county vision, mission and values as our guide, ensure that we continue to meet federal, state and local mandates and prioritize retention of our essential services for our community, always incorporate principles of equity into our budget actions and also use data to inform our recommendations. Next slide. So as I present the revised budget to the board today, I want to talk about the fact as that change is something that definitely is a constant. We were already facing challenges in our budget prior to this current recession and structurally the state and federal systems have not kept up with the growth in service demands. Additionally, COVID has presented the biggest challenge of possibly our lifetimes and as our economies worsen and our funding decreases during these times we are faced with figuring out how we will continue to provide the most important services to our community members. Next slide. So the budget that we present to you today, as you know represents a 10% general fund reduction from what we have previously provided. I'm proud of the health services agency staff who have all worked together to ensure as well as the contributions from the general fund and the thoughtfulness in planning from our partners in the CEO's office that preserves as many core health services agency services as possible. So we present to you a budget with a reduction in general fund contributions of $1.2 million over what we had previously come to the board with and that is happening without any loss of positions for HSA although we do have a loss of funded staffing. So in other words, HSA is not has been able to navigate the next year without any laid off positions. We also hope that we can serve as a landing spot because we do have nearly 600 FTE in our agency. So we look forward to continuing to be a supportive partner for the rest of the County. Next slide. A summary of our revisions to the adopted budget. I'd like to review our staffing changes first of all. So we do have 7.5% furloughs across all of HSA and that includes positions such as physicians, psychiatrists, nurse practitioners and our SEIU members. We have 14 FTEs taking advantage of the early retirement program which has helped us to make room in our budget and reduce the impact on other staff. We have unfunded our vacant positions to make sure that we can help meet our budget reductions. As Mr. Palacios mentioned earlier today we must have a budget balanced budget. Not only HSA as a whole but across each and every division. These furlough reductions have really helped in having us meet our budget goals. Although it is not without stress and pain for many of our staff which we acknowledge and we acknowledge the amount of work and the resilience that they have had to demonstrate in order to continue the services to our community. In terms of program changes, we took advantage of the opportunity for departments to present alternative furlough plans. And so our most important direct services provided by our clinics division and our behavioral health division have chosen to remain open during county building closure days and have an alternative furlough plan. One of the things that we note is that addressing COVID-19 for many months to come will require long-term resilience and a reliance on local solutions. So we have worked hard across each of the divisions to do just that. We do have some relief from not only the CRF funds that budget manager Christina Mari discussed but also some limited one-time funding specifically for COVID-19 public health response. This funding comes at an opportune time as the state has had problems continuing to fund our testing and tracing and we're unsure of how long the state support will last. In addition, HSA in the meantime will continue to provide behavioral health services in the jail. Next slide please. So this slide here is modeled after when you will see later today from our human services department partners and I need to give them credit for providing the slide. You'll see a similar one when you hear their presentation but in a nutshell, it's important to review the funding impacts overall that are impacting the HSA budget. Realignment is a source of funding as budget manager Christina Mari mentioned earlier today. It comes from sales tax as well as vehicle license fees. It is the primary discretionary source of funding for health, human services and public safety because it relies on indicators in the economy such as sales tax and vehicle license fees. When the economy takes a dive so does our valuable realignment dollars that allow us to bring down federal match. MHSA is the Mental Health Services Act. As some of you may know, this is called the millionaire's tax and it is a 1% additional income tax on California's millionaires. Again, as indicators in the economy further push our revenues down overall, the state has projected a dramatic decrease in Mental Health Services Act funds and Mental Health Services Act are a key portion of our behavioral health services and really fund not only our own programs but many programs that we support our community partners with. With some good news that Thrive by Three program, particularly the portion implemented by public health will remain static and Human Services Department has pledged to use some of the dollars from the state that have been designed to stabilize their CalWorks programs to ensure that our Thrive by Three programs remain sustainable. In addition, our clinics division is a federally qualified health center that gets reimbursed by MediCal at an enhanced rate. So we are grateful that we have the capacity to continue serving our community and maintain the revenue in the clinics. I had mentioned earlier that there are CARES Act dollars and there are a number of different funding streams labeled CARES Act. So we are benefiting from the board allowing health services as well as many other county departments to utilize these funds to improve our COVID response as well as assist community partners and nonprofits in supporting the needs of our community. Mr. Palacios earlier today talked about realignment trigger. We're also grateful for the county to have put aside contingency dollars in the case that the federal government doesn't come through with the $250 million that our state budget is relying on. So our state budget has approved $1 billion to backfill all of the county's realignment dollars. However, $250 million of that $1 billion is dependent on federal dollars coming through which are yet to be undetermined. If those federal dollars do not come through, HSA will still be protected with the forethought of our own county in putting aside contingency dollars. So on the right hand side of this slide is really a pictorial of what I've recently described. Realignment is divided into two different pots of dollars. One from a methodology that was implemented in 1991 and another one from a revisit of the realignment methodology in 2011. Together, those two pots of public discretionary funds for health and human services are incredibly sensitive to the economy. So what I wanna make note of in this particular slide is that although our state and our county has taken really, really important measures to ensure that our realignment dollars are backfilled for 2021, if the economy continues to take the direction that we anticipate it will in the months and the years to come, that this important source of public funding for health and human services will also continue to decrease and it's important for us to plan around that. Next slide. So now I'd like to talk a little bit about the operational impacts of the budget that you see before you and emphasize that these are the reasons why we're focusing on resilience. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines resilience as an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change. My only caveat is that I would say that this hasn't been an easy road, but I know that it's a road that none of us have given up on. And for that reason, I feel like all of the staff at HSA, the CAO's office, the board, and all of our county departments, along with our community, have definitely demonstrated resilience. She's calling in right now, she lost connectivity. Oh, who's the guy in the picture there? Yeah. That's strapping young man. Okay, here. Hi, everybody. I apologize. You warned us. Yep. You weren't able to hear me? Yes. Yep. Yes. Okay. So I cannot see because I'm calling in, but I believe that we are on slide eight, operational impacts. So if you would forward to slide nine. We're on the slide that's titled, Saving Lives Together. Oh, wonderful. Okay, great. This is just an opportunity to just have a pictorial of all of the work that we have done together and the fact that although we have had some delays to some of our operational plans, we also have a lot of important ones that are continuing. And so much work has been done by every facet of our community, including our board members, our community partners, our essential workers. And I just wanted to take a moment in this slide to acknowledge and show gratitude for all of the work that's been done because it's not the health services agency alone that could possibly address this pandemic and all of the impacts of it. Okay, and then would you please forward to the next slide, please? And so it was important for our agency to just remind the board of what we had come to you in June regarding our operational impacts and delayed objectives. Although there are some things that we have had to put on hold, we feel that it's really not going to be an issue for health services agency as we have had to pivot and really, really focus on what is at hand for the day and that really has been preparing ourselves financially, programmatically and principally for the future. Next slide. So moving forward, we do plan on continuing some important operational plan objectives. These include access to care, continuing to improve clinic wait times despite COVID, ensuring that we bolster child crisis services, continuing to optimize our resources, including the ability to draw down to the maximum federal funds for much of the work that we do to serve the medical population and continue to improve our systems around oral health. Next slide. So as we draw to the close of my presentation, I wanted to ensure that we had the space to discuss opportunities as well as uncertainties that we face in the future. Many of us have talked about equity. I want to assure your board that equity is at the forefront of everything that we do in health services agency. As we have addressed the pandemic, we've looked at the social determinants of health and invested heavily in our communities, particularly in South County, most impacted by COVID. This is not a departure from how we work every day, but it's also a reminder that going into the future, equality does not mean equal. So you will see over the course of the year that we really make investments in those who most need it based on the data of who's impacted by health disparities, who's most impacted by all diseases, not just COVID, and that we are seizing this moment to bolster our equity lens and put some measures in place to ensure that we have a strong foundation to continue with that lens. I think a few of us have talked already today about the CARES Act and local investments. I just wanted to let the board know that going forward, many of the requests that we have made as departments, not just health services agency, but the human services department and many other departments have an eye towards providing these essential funds to many, many community organizations and partners to help bolster the health and wellbeing and the economy of our communities. We plan to continue to address these disparities in health for vulnerable populations. But as I have discussed before, much of our discretionary funding, public funding is tied to the economy and we are in this incredibly ironic situation that we experienced with the Great Recession in that because so many of our discretionary funding streams are tied to how well the economy does, when the economy takes a dive, our funding takes a dive. Yet, that is the time when health services and human services and public safety are most needed more than ever before and the demand for our services rise. So looking forward, we have a budget that has been difficult, but keeps in mind that we want to preserve services, especially for 2021, much like the county overall budget, what we have done is chosen deliberately to utilize many of the tools available to us and much of the funding that is available to us over two or three rolling years and invest it in 2021 so that our staff remain as stable as possible so that our partners do not experience dramatic decreases in funding and that at this time of uncertainty in a year that's definitely going to be the most challenging for all of us, that we don't pull the rug out from our own services or our partners and ensure that services are sustained as much as possible. We wouldn't be able to do that without the support of the county and the county budget manager and the decisions that have been made for the overall county budget and for that, we're grateful. I do want to say very briefly that the measures that we're taking for 2021 don't mean that we have a rosy picture for beyond. So we'll have lots of work to do this coming fiscal year to plan for what we anticipate to be even more funding decreases if nothing happens to bring us some longer term relief from the state and federal government but we're prepared to do that work and we're prepared to revisit our budget principles that I talked about in the beginning of this presentation and be guided by our vision, mission and values. Next slide. So finally, we are requesting for your board today to approve the supplemental budget for the health services agency, CSA 12 funds including additional materials and take related actions as recommended by the memo submitted by myself. And you can see the reference pages for that budget. And with that, I would just like to close with an opportunity for the board or others to ask questions and also just express a huge deep gratitude for all of you but especially all of our staff who have shown incredible resilience and fortitude and will need to continue doing that. Much appreciation to everybody. Thank you. Okay, I want to hear someone and know that I'm still connected. You're still connected. Ms. Hall, this is Supervisor Leopold. Thank you very much for your presentation and thank you for your leadership during these truly challenging times. You've proven to be not only an effective administrator but your ability to be out in the public, to talk to residents, to talk to other elected officials, to talk to state officials, have benefited our county and has helped improve our response and make sure that we're doing all we can to limit the spread of this virus. I appreciate all the work that has gone into the budget. I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit about and a little bit more detail about our substance use disorder services. I have some concern about the reduction in positions here and what that means for the program. And I was wondering if you could just say what you think that's gonna look like and where are we getting the money to to be able to continue that work? Sure. Well, first of all, I'll start with where are we getting the money to continue that work? If you don't see the detail in my presentation but we are taking one time dollars from a trust fund of intergovernmental transfers that is really like our savings account to specifically for substance use disorder services. In addition, there are over $2 million, I believe it's about 2.3 million that we're doing the same for mental health. We're doing this because we know that it's so important to preserve these services. However, I think that the biggest challenge to substance use disorder services and expansion at this time isn't money, although that's an incredible challenge. We're challenged by the environment presented by COVID and it's been our experience so far has been that COVID is limiting access to substance use disorder services because there are so many changes needed and we fear that many people who may need these services have additional barriers because of COVID to seek them out. So we've put the money in place to help continue these services but there'll be more thinking and more work that we'll have to do to think in innovative and different ways to reach the people who need these services. In thinking about using these as you said, the savings account at times in the past, we've been criticized about not tapping these reserve funds. So what's different now that we're tapping some of this MHSA funding that we haven't done in the past? Oh gosh, what's different now is that we're not alone. This isn't a budget crisis that impacts counties only. Every facet of our community is impacted. Every nonprofit that does work on our behalf, our healthcare system, our schools, this is the kind, what we expect is a kind of recession that we may not have experienced ever before in our lifetimes and will be worse than the 2008. And so during COVID, when we're all hampered in terms of providing services in a new way, as well as having all of our funding streams decreased, we decided that now is the time to pull out all of the stops, both in mental health services at dollars, substance and disorders and public health. We are probably going to experience a lot of pain in the coming years, especially the next two fiscal years, but we decided that we would take this year to keep our staff and our community partners who provide services on our behalf as well as possible and ensure that they can sustain their services through this fiscal year, buying us time to plan for the coming years. Well, I appreciate that. As someone who's been on this, was on this board in 2009, when they said that was the worst ever that anybody had taken, I worry about what the future holds for us all because this is worse than that and who knows what happens next year. I think it will have a major impact as who gets elected as president in November. So it's something we should all keep an eye on. I appreciate the difficult choices you've made here. And I just admire the work that the department's doing every day to meet the various health needs of people in our community. Thank you very much. Thank you. Supervisor McPherson. Thank you, Mr. Chair. My question is similar to Leopold's. First of all, I too want to thank the health services team for its response to the COVID-19. It's something that we have never experienced anything like this. They've really performed extremely well under some very trying circumstances. Similar to what Supervisor Leopold mentioned on the, we're proposing to fund about 15 and a half positions from behavioral health to other divisions. Can you anticipate or just highlight the anticipated impact on behavioral services that we're providing? Sure. First, I'd like to provide some background. So in order to balance the behavioral health budget prior to, even prior to COVID and prior to the 10% general fund reduction, we planned on unfunding a number of positions because we were impacted financially not just from the county or the county general fund but from the multiple funding streams that I discussed. So what we really did was we're not taking positions away from behavioral health to provide to other areas. However, when COVID came and it was clear that we did not have nearly the public health capacity, we're able to use some of those positions that we had previously unfunded and kind of swap them for much needed positions for pandemic response. So I want to make it clear that we didn't cut positions for the sake of providing positions but we had to balance our budget and because so much of our budget is salaries and benefits there aren't very many places to take from. And we did it in a manner where we looked at positions that were already vacant. We continue to have vacancies in nurse practitioners, medical assistants, psychiatrists. So much of the stress that our staff are feeling and the overwhelm is because we had staff being shortages prior to COVID and COVID has not made them any better. And we continue to seek bilingual staff to serve our South County populations in the language and the culture that they have every day and it continues to be a challenge. So I wouldn't say that that loss of positions creates any tangible loss in our services. We still have very, very important positions that remain vacant and we're desperately trying to fill. Okay, really you're doing an outstanding job of shuffling the deck the best you can under some very trying circumstances. So thank you very much. Thank you. Supervisor Coonerty. Thank you, Director Hall for you and your team's work during these many months of crisis and looking forward as we continue to navigate it. First of all, thank you for your efforts to continue the Thrive by Three funding and to invest in our youngest population with an equity lens that will both support moms and babies and the community going forward. I had a question. If you could provide an update for the community on the challenges around COVID testing and the plans and how to address them. You've been doing heroic efforts to try to figure out to get more capacity even without federal leadership or support, can you give an update to the community about COVID testing? Sure, I'd be glad to do that. So as many of you may know, the state and federal government has really fallen short in being able to provide local counties with the testing capacity that they need. And these are infrastructure challenges and shortfalls in the state and federal system. So what we've decided to do in Santa Cruz and we started work on it a little over a month ago for a couple of months we've been working on this is create our own system of multiple redundant ability to test. And so we are using some of the CARES Act dollars slated for public health to do two things. Invest in UC Santa Cruz and their recently certified lab to triple their ability to provide testing. The other thing that we're doing is we're buying lab equipment that is not popularly used by the federal or state government and doesn't rely on the supplies and the supply chains of typical equipment and providing that to our healthcare system partners as well as the online clinic. So what we will have in what we hope to be a short amount of time but it will take several weeks to build up to that point is the increased capacity to test locally in a manner that has backup systems in case one of the hospitals, lab equipment or increased capacity to test breaks down and vice versa for UC Santa Cruz. Additionally, some of you may have heard threats of the OptumServe site at Ramsey Park potentially being closed by the state at the end of August. The state has let us know that they will continue those contracts through the end of September. And one of my roles at the state is to sit on the steering committee of the state testing task force and I've been really vocal with my two other local colleagues on that task force for the state to continue the OptumServe test sites however re-imagine them in a way that really, really serve our communities. So it's possible that we will maintain our OptumServe test site beyond September but it's also highly possible that if the state takes our recommendations into account they will better serve our public health needs. One important thing I wanna say about OptumServe is that right now it pretty much tests the worried well. We have about a 1% positivity rate there meaning a lot of asymptomatic people who have no risk and don't have COVID are going to that site while we have our hospitals and our healthcare system folks struggling to test patients. We're struggling to test those who are known contacts sometimes household contacts of those with COVID. So I'm confident that as we navigate through the coming months that we're going to build this local system of testing that doesn't rely on the state and federal government and that this is also not to replace the OptumServe site but to look far into the future. We cannot go back to school we cannot go back to normal unless we have a robust system of testing for our teachers, our students, our workers. So my hope is that this work that we're doing right now sets us up to reopen our economy in that way because we want all of the sectors of our communities and economy to be safe and that's going to depend on our ability to test. Thank you for that question. Thank you. Okay. Supervisor Friend. Thank you, Chair. I don't have any questions to add because my colleague is asked and I just have a quick compliment to Director Hall and her entire team. I think that across the country many people really didn't know what public health did in actuality. They just had a concept except for those that had already been receiving direct services from them for so many years. And this has really highlighted the massive lack of investment in the world that you exist and that we all exist in but also to me it's really highlighted the talent that we have here in our county, the team that you put together including yourself to really help guide us through this difficult time. The board has complete confidence in you and your team and the work that you're doing and we just appreciate your continued commitment always guided by the right principles even when they're not always popular or easy to do but guided by coming good is something that we appreciate your work for. Thank you. Okay. Thank you very much maybe and thank you to everybody in health services agency for all your hard work. Good job. And we'll open it up for public comment. Anyone would like to speak on this topic. You'll have three minutes. We have no one here. We have anyone downstairs. Chair, one last comment I'd like to make to Ms. Hall to express my appreciation to Dr. Newell. Today there was an article on the New York Times interview with her and it detailed just some of the attacks that people have made against her and I just want you to share with her how much the board stands strongly behind Dr. Newell and her work. We very appreciative of her efforts to lead us through this very difficult time. And with that, I'd be prepared to move the recommended actions. Okay. We have no public comment online. Okay. We have a motion. Do we have a second? Second. I'll call the roll. First. Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Chair Caput. Aye. Passes unanimously. We'll go to item number eight but can we have time for a 10 minute recess or no? Okay. We'll take 11 minutes. Okay. Thank you. We'll be back in 11 minutes. Consider the 2020-2021 proposed budgets for the child support services and outlined in the reference budget documents and memorandum of the director of services of child support services. Thank you. I worry, yeah. Join well. Thank you. Thank you, Chair Caput and board members. Jamie Murray, director of Santa Cruz, San Benito County Regional Department of Child Support Services. This is Justine Wilkop, my administrative services manager. Today I will be presenting our fiscal 2021 supplemental budget. So I will be walking through our revised budget, operational impacts, recommendation and expressing appreciation to the departmental staff. The 2021 supplemental budget revises the proposed budget for the Santa Cruz Department of Child Support Services in the amount of $5,914,000 and reflects a 13.6 decrease in the amount of $936,000 from the proposed budget to address financial constraints as a result of reduced state and federal funding. DCSS is fully subvented by state and federal allocations and does not receive any general fund contributions. The expenditure reduction of 936,000 includes a decrease in the amount of 984,000 in salaries and benefits and an increase in services and supplies from increased legal tele-services due to COVID, network charges which is offset by decreases in training and travel costs. The proposed elimination of 10 full-time equivalent staff include the following positions. One child support attorney three, six child support specialists, two supervising child support specialists and one senior accounting technician. State Department of Child Support Services commissioned a level of effort study which provided guidance to local child support agencies on the number of full-time equivalent to caseload ratio. New statewide allocation methodology considered salary and benefits, operational overhead and expenses, cost of living and caseload to full-time equivalent ratios. Santa Cruz is considered overfunded compared to some other counties and is receiving a reduced allocation. This will cause caseload ratios to increase. We will continue to support ongoing staff work to ensure the children and families in Santa Cruz County receive our services, which include locating parents, establishing paternity and establishing, modifying and enforcing court orders for child support and health coverage. Staffing reductions and furloughs will have an impact on our service delivery. We are currently strategizing on how to best address these impacts. We have started to look at a more even distribution of workloads, re-aligning the program team assignments for establishment, enforcement, interstate and legal. We plan to support additional in-house training for staff and provide additional resources. We are planning to expand the use of computer technology to increase efficiencies, specifically using TextPro, Tableau, DocuSign and we've ordered webcams for all of our staff. We know we will have to look at ways to redesign our business processes and reimagine the way we work. We are supporting the continuation of telework and online collaborations through the use of Microsoft Teams. We have four operational plan objectives, number 59 through 62. The first, number 59, the client satisfaction survey. We have developed a survey and are currently tracking client satisfaction responses. Number 60, child support payments and 61 unpaid child support. We expect both of these objectives may be impacted due to COVID-19. We've had court closures. We had reduced customer service hours in our lobby and the proposed workforce reductions. We will continue to do our best and monitor progress. The last objective, number 62, parent employment. Due to the economic environment caused by COVID-19, we do expect this objective to be impacted and are looking at a completion date extension to 2023. I ask your board to approve the 2021 supplemental budget for the Department of Child Support Services and take related actions as outlined in the reference budget documents. At this point, I would like to extend my appreciation to the employees of DCSS for their continued dedication, professionalism and commitment to serving the children and families of Santa Cruz County. For the federal fiscal year through June 2020, we have distributed over $11.3 million in child support collections to the families of Santa Cruz County. I would like to thank the staff involved in the unfortunate position eliminations necessitated by the state funding reduction. These 10 employees have provided a collective long-term amount of service, years of service to the citizens of Santa Cruz County conducted with exemplary dedication to duty, operational excellence and heart. I extend to them my deepest appreciation, respect and gratitude for their time as part of our DCSS team. I would like to also thank all DCSS staff for sustaining significant furlough reductions to their salaries and for bearing upcoming challenges to address impacts of reduced staffing. I thank our collaborative team for being well able to rise together to find new strategies for enhanced teamwork and efficiencies to create new ways of providing caring and effective public service. Wow, this is tough, really tough. I'm gonna open it up for questions from the other members, but I'll make a comment right at the end, yeah. Supervisor McPherson. Yeah, thank you, Mr. Murray, for delivering the problem, the toughest budget situation we have in the county of our multimillion, hundred million dollar budget. I wanna reiterate that these cuts originate from the changes in state funding formulas. And I really appreciate any efforts being made to support these valuable employees with possible reassignments. I know you're trying to do that to the best of your ability and any other steps you might take. So thank you very much. And this is one that I hope we can really lighten the load or lessen the critical cuts that are taking place. The service is very much, thank you. Supervisor Coonerty. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I guess my only question would be based on this state study. One, do we have a sense that they would do any reconsideration? And what's the process or timeline for that? And two, for the counties that are providing similar case management with fewer staff, what have we learned from them about their process, processes to ensure that the families in need are gonna get the services they need over the coming years for us? So this level of effort study was conducted over the past two years and it's been done in conjunction with a statewide overhaul of the methodology for the child support program. We've been flat funded for 20 years and each county had the budget that their DA had at the time we transitioned out as family support into our own independent departments. And so that methodology had never been looked at. So those counties that had very strong DAs started with, not substantial, but with a solid budget and there were many counties, particularly like in the Central Valley that were severely underfunded and have been for many years. So this effort was undertaken to try to more evenly distribute the statewide allocation across the entire program in California. The guidance that was provided took a look at, as I mentioned, the cost of living salaries and benefits in each county, the overhead and expenses. And they took a look at the number of positions in each category within our department that they felt each department would need. So I don't anticipate that that will change again anytime soon. I think there may be some adjustments to the allocation methodology, but I don't foresee us getting additional funding in any time soon at this point. I think that, sorry, the second part of your question was taking a look at how other counties are doing, they're doing more with less. And many counties in California right now are going through similar situations. I know Sonoma is looking at layoffs. They started that, I believe July 1st. And so I'm gonna be working with my colleagues to try to develop strategies to share resources, learn from them, share tools if we can, and try to figure out how do we can provide uniform services throughout the state of California for the child support program. Thank you. Okay, Supervisor Friend. I think that you actually, Supervisor Coonerty asked the exact question that I was about to ask. So I don't have any additional questions to ask right now. Thank you. Yeah, Supervisor Leopold. Thank you, Chair. This is indeed a difficult budget to share. And it is distressing that especially at this moment in time that the state would be looking to make such big changes in a program such as this. The loss of 10 staff members is significant. I don't think that anybody felt like they were, they had low case loads in your office. There are definitely people, the families who will be impacted by the loss of staffing. And it's just distressing to me that the state would choose to make this radical of a shift this quickly instead of winding things down and picking things up in other places. Do you have a sense of, in terms of numbers of counties who are seeing funding go up versus numbers who are seeing their funding go down? There were 21 severely underfunded counties and those were the ones that were getting the most level funding. Some counties remained relatively static within a 5% or so reduction, but we're probably bearing, you know, one of the largest brints. In terms of our case load, our case load for the number of staffing that we have is one of the lowest in the state. So they're trying to get us to a more level playing field. But it sounds like about half the counties are gonna experience some kind of loss. Yes. And the last time that the county general fund funded these positions was like 1991. That, I mean, I don't know whether that's when this change happened in terms of the year. I know we transitioned out of the DA's office around 2001. 2000, 2001, I think Santa Cruz did. So prior to that, it was family support and it was under the district attorney's office. But I don't know if that was general fund. Yeah. It's a very difficult situation. We've been trying to work very closely with personnel to try to support our employees and it's a very, very difficult situation. Yeah, I mean, it's unfortunate that we didn't take the time to work with our assembly members and state senator to try to get them to recognize the impact that this would have on our community and to try to get them to be our advocates up in Sacramento. Because, you know, at least for me, the first time I heard it was when this funding severe cut was happening and it was a missed opportunity to do some lobbying. I hope that we can work hard to find other places within the county government. As we heard from one of your employees this morning, very talented, committed public servant. And it would be great to still have that as part of the county family. Yes. I'm hoping that as well. Yeah. At a time where you're getting more pressure to do and people are suffering out there, especially the children, you're talking about cutting your staff, you're cutting your budget, everything. I had it written down, but I can't find it. How many positions are you gonna lose? 10. 10, right. 10 filled positions. That's huge. It is. It's 24% of the staff. I know. I mean, we get pressure and criticize for cutting. To me, 10% is the limit. And you're talking about 13% or a little bit more. And is there a deadline on those 10 positions? Is it an October 2nd, like at midnight, the jobs are limited? We've budgeted according to proposed layoffs effective October 2nd. If that were to shift, we would have to make some adjustments in our budget. So Chair Caput, this is this is Carlos. I just wanted to emphasize again that this decision is not being made by us. I know. This is a state decision. This budget is fully funded by the state and federal sources. There's no general fund funds that go into this budget. This cut is being made by a state decision. And we really don't have any alternatives given that it's a fully supported state and federal budget. So I just wanted to just re-emphasize it again that this was not our decision. This is a state decision. And this is not part of the positions we're talking about on people losing their jobs. It is part of the 39 positions we're talking about. So out of that 39, 10 of them are these positions. But again, it's out of our hands. This decision was made at the state level and we did not have any discretion about it because it's a fully funded state and federal program. Okay. But the people that are facing losing their jobs we're trying to find other positions for them. Yes. Okay. Then the other one is, are we able to, well October 2nd is the, it seems to be the date where the hammer falls. Yes. Can we make that like November 2nd? Well, we'd have to cut somewhere else. That's the problem. There's no funding. This does not receive any general funding. This is state money. I know. So the state has made the decision. We have to balance the budget. There's no money to extend those positions. You would have to cut somewhere else in the general fund to do that. Yeah. Well, okay. And later on, where I'm trying to figure out is where we can say instead of October 2nd, November 2nd, giving people some time to, for the most unfortunate ones in the worst case scenario where somebody loses their job that they can at least try to get their finances in order before a deadline shows up. Does that, would that be now or is that later? That we talk about that? Well, the decision to do something like that you could make on the 18th of August when we approve the final budget. And that would be a decision of having to use general fund contingencies or general fund reserves for that purpose. Because we're talking about two paperings basically. By, by, by monthly, they would get two more checks until they, okay. Thank you, Carlos. You want to open it up for public comment? That's it. Public comment. Open it up to the public. We'll open it to the public for comment. Thank you. Good morning again, Chair Caput, members of the board. Jim Heaney, Chief Shop Steward for the SCIU with the general representation unit. I think this is the absolute definition of a lose, lose situation for our community, for our workers, for the services the county provides. And I know, you know, it is a rock and a hard place. There's nothing easy about this one. Thank you for the illusions of trying to think of possible solutions, Chair Caput, and be that general fund backing, which is unusual but not impossible or be that federal funding, or as Supervisor Leopold pointed out, you know, this sort of slipped by all of us. We have good advocates at the state level who strongly support these type of programs and have this come, you know, just as a rush without a lot of warning is very unfortunate. So, you know, I just wanted to, you know, so pretty much stand up and agree that this is a terrible situation and we will continue to work hard to, you know, work with you to hopefully find other funding. We'll be pressing at the state level and we hope that we end up with a different outcome because the serious loss of services to such vulnerable families is just intensely heartbreaking. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Anyone else in the chambers here? Anyone downstairs? Do you know that we have one web comment? Online. Okay. This is from Jeanette Hilton. Can someone clarify the need for the following increases cost projected in the child support budget for the 2021 when totaling $945,271 when they are cutting 10 employees, postage increases of $4,950, legal service increases of $20,000 when you're cutting one attorney, other miscellaneous benefit increases of $249,199 and county overhead a 87 CP an increase of $671,122. These four line items total an increase of $945,271 and eliminating 10 full-time equivalent FTE positions resulting in a decrease of $984,169 in salaries and benefits. This doesn't add up. Okay. Well, if we have a little closer public comment and if we have a motion and a second. I would move the recommended actions. We have a first. Second. We have a second. Okay. What's that supervisor friend? Yes. I think. Thank you. I'll take the, do the roll call vote. Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. McPherson. Aye. And chairman Caput. Aye. Motion passes unanimously and thank you very much. Thank you for your time today. Okay. We'll go down to item number nine, consider the 2020-2021 supplemental budget for human services department as outlined in the reference budget documents and memorandum of the director of health services. How you doing? Well, you, you came to us just about the time a little bit before the pandemic hit and welcome to Santa Cruz County and all the problems. It's his fault. Well, I guess a little levity after that presentation. That was very heavy. Chair Caput, you are correct. I started on February 3rd. And I think about three weeks later, everyone started talking about what to do given COVID in about a week or two after that, the health order. So yes, here at about my six month mark and almost all of it has been adjusting to COVID and supervisor Leopold, I wish I had that much power because then I would undo it. I know you would. I know you would. Okay, so good late morning. Chair Caput, board members into the public listening. I'm Randy Morris. The human services department director. Yes, as of six months I started in February. Sitting with me today is Emily Bolly, the deputy director, 30 years tenure. And she is also the supervisor of all our administrative functions, including our finance office. So I want to thank her deeply for her and the finance team's work in preparing today's budget. And I also want to take a moment to thank the county administrator's office for those who don't know. Any county government budget is done in concert and in collaboration with the CAO and they have helped us. Oh, thank you. Okay, is that going through better? Yeah, you're okay. Okay, and they have helped us tremendously in preparing this budget. And I want to give a special thanks to Christina Mallory, the budget officer who has been tirelessly responding to not only our department's questions, but many department's questions during a very difficult time. I actually have the pleasure of being here to present two budgets to you. And this one is the human services department. And the second one is the budget called core, which I'll present separately. And I just want to share that with you now. So you understand that core will be separate and that won't be a discussion item in the human services department. That's a separate budget index and that's your general fund Monday. So we'll talk about that separately. What I'm going to talk to today is revisions to the proposed budget as had been submitted in late June. And as I had the opportunity to present at late June, the pro forma budget, I'm going to walk through some of the changes that occurred. We were heavily impacted by state and federal funding. So the changes that occurred with the state legislature and governor that led to the revised budget we have in front of you today. Going to walk through a few operational impacts, some of the operational plan changes also have some very good news on the heels of the very depressing news. The state has made some very differing actions as child support just presented. But for us, we have some opportunities to increase service capacity with your board's actions, which may actually end up helping our child support colleagues after that process plays out. And then I'm also going to talk about the homeless services office that is going to be transferred into human services. We are not talking today about that budget. That's going to be a last day item, but because it is in this fiscal year it seemed appropriate to share a little bit about it as we prepare for that transition. And then going to close out with referencing what health and the CAO mentioned all these uncertainties, but there are some opportunities. So budget revisions. The picture of a puzzle here is intentional. County human services like health is a very complicated puzzle when it comes to a budget. Federal funding streams, state funding streams. The state funding streams are a combination of allocations and this thing called realignment, which our health director mentioned. And county matches and county activities. So on the left, I'm going to talk to you the two activities that have happened since the June presentation that led to the revised budget, the county actions and the state actions. But then off to the right, as I mentioned earlier, I do want to preview for you what's coming. And the last day, which is the transition of the homeless service office for the reasons I described. So starting with that first bucket, the reduction strategies here at the county level, county general fund. So number one, as was mentioned by the CAO and by health, furlough agreements were entered into with the unions. And for us, that's predominantly a seven and a half percent cut SEIU 521 and the MMA management union. And then we were also given a 10% net county cost reductions strategy. And I just want to walk through briefly how we reached that 10% net county cost reduction. First, and this is what links a little bit to the interesting news of the ins and outs and the tugs and polls in the state budget. We were able to fund two manager positions, no SEIU represented positions in our 10% net county cost reduction. However, there was a series of machinations, including some allocation increases, which I'll get to you later. So you will see in the revised budget that we actually have an ask of two new positions. So we were able to add four SEIU represented positions after losing the two to hit our target because of new allocations, which I'll walk through later. Second, we were able to eliminate some one time only costs and some discretionary funding. Those were things like that make complete sense in COVID non mandated travel and training. Almost all trainings are now on video. So we had a budget that had us having staff go to regional and statewide conferences. It was certainly a lovely thing to do, but in COVID we don't need that budget. We also looked very closely at our memberships and subscriptions and we eliminated some national memberships and kept our state memberships that do a lot of bidding for us at the state level and a few other discretionary items that allowed us to actually achieve the 10% net county cost reduction. And I wanna underline with no layoffs and no adverse impact on services to the community. The things that were listed here were administrative functions. So this is the slide that my health colleague Mimi gave us lots of nice credit and this is not me. This is our team that kind of put this together trying to figure out how to describe that complex state puzzle is not easy to do. So if this resonates with you board or the public watching big kudos to my team who kind of came up with this picture in a way to simply describe something very complicated in the state budget. So on the left, we are a very complicated division and department that has a number of different programs that come from various state buckets. And all of these listed to the left are CalWorks program, are CalFresh formerly known as food stamps, MediCal or Medicaid at the federal level, all our child welfare foster care services and all of our adult and aging services in the May revise the budget that we had to propose to you in June. There were a number of cuts and a number of things that were flat that we are pleased to report here when you look for the human services budget throughout California, they were either restored so they remained flat or the good news there were increases. So there were some cuts to adult services that were stayed. MediCal remained flat, but we have very good news that a number of child welfare cuts came back. And then in particular CalFresh and CalWorks. And this is a recognition of the state legislature and the governor who made some very courageous decisions looking to the future where they're gonna have to brace themselves for some potential cuts forward. We got some pretty significant allocation increases and I will soon talk about what we propose to do with that. And then realignment, this is a subject that is often, you know, many hour plenary sessions at state conferences trying to explain this. So to give you a 60 second version, essentially in 1991 first and then 2011 second the state made decisions to take funding allocations that came to counties doing human services work and also health. And that used to have a very high state share and a very low county share. And then they quote unquote realigned that formula and they had the counties take a higher share, but they replaced it with a funding stream which was vehicle license fees and sales tax. So that means the county's ability to run these programs is heavily dependent upon the economy. And when people are buying less vehicles and spending less money, those funding streams go down. So what happened in the state budget was the legislature proposed a $1 billion backfill and some of that's tied to federal trigger cuts. So the feds need to come up behind it. And that was very helpful for us in the county because it means there was less reliance on the reserves that as Mimi mentioned earlier, we're very fortunate to have a county administrator and a board that's willing to support the safety net. So we don't have to absorb any of those cuts, but now we have some realignment money from the state thanks to the action of the legislature and governor. So this all funnels into the budget that is in front of you today and the two things I wanna bring to your attention are in the green band in the middle, the general fund contribution, a combination of the ins and outs that I just walked through with you means we are asking for $727,000 less general fund, almost three quarters of a million, which is almost a 5% less ass because of all those positive actions that occurred at the state. And then if you look at the bottom under funded staff, that means we not only don't have to bring any layoffs, not only are we able to offset those unfunded positions, but we're able to come forward with some extra positions that actually lead to us adding staffing. And again, to some of the comments made earlier about our union colleagues and equity, these are SEIU funded positions. And we did that very intentionally for the same reasons that were discussed earlier. So operational impacts, I had the opportunity as one of four departments in June to give the pro forma budget presentation for human services. And I walked through this. So I'm not gonna take the board or public time to go through this again. All of the operational plan that human services manages on the county wide website only as a reminder, we are fortunate to have very minimal impact of the operational plan programs that we're running. The adjusted ones are things like programs that had targets to do home visiting, which couldn't do home visiting because of COVID, but we're predominantly on target. And we actually had completed one and the priorities as listed remain priorities as I had a chance to mention in June. This is the slide where I wanna walk through the opportunity we have in front of us to expand services at a time when so many of the budget cuts lead to a decrease in services. I do wanna highlight that two of these items, the top one and the bottom one, client support and human service staffing are folded into the proposed budget in front of you today. That is because under client support, these are predominantly the CalFresh and CalWorks allocations. So these funding streams that we have to help CalWorks families with emergency payments, help them retain their housing, which is more than ever important today and childcare support. We already have those buckets in our budget. So we are able to, in submitting our revised budget to you, just enhance those to have more of those available because of this CalWorks allocation increase. And on the bottom, as I mentioned earlier, we are able to bring forward a request to expand staffing of SEIU represented positions in those public assistance programs, employment services, eligibility services, and social worker support to help with home visiting, which tied to our CalWorks program. The two items in the middle are items that we will be returning to your board in the fall with formal requests to use some of this allocation increase. And I do wanna underline for your board to understand this and the public listening. These allocations are such that if you do not use them, they are services that do not get to the community. And they also then can be part of calculations that are done by the state looking to the next fiscal year, which then lead to a decrease in allocations next year because the county has shown that they don't need the money. So it is a kind of a complicated dance, but I just wanna underline that because it's really important that we get the service to the community and it potentially benefits to keep that allocation increase next fiscal year. The first of these two buckets is remote access given COVID is anticipated to be here for a very long time. We wanna do everything we can to take this money to help our CalWorks clients be able to purchase technologies that would allow them to not have to come to our office if they don't have internet or they don't have home computers that they could appropriately with this new allocation be positioned to be able to seek our services online wherever possible. And for our staff, we wanna do all we can to help keep our staff at home. And so as an augment to what the county administrator mentioned earlier that there's some efforts to be able to increase some technology services to support staff, we have this funding stream to be able to do the same to increase some technologies and purchase some equipment. So our public assistance staff can be at home providing services to clients. And then the last is partner services. You heard Mimi Hall, the health director. And just as a reminder, she mentioned that thanks to the human services department and some CalWorks funding, we're able to do an intermittent departmental transfer to help support some of their health service home visiting programs, which just helps them continue to provide that service to some of our CalWorks families. And also we will be coming back to you to a request to augment some of our CalWorks nonprofit contractors who deliver service to the CalWorks population. So summarize all that, we actually have some very good news and I wanna underline the importance of being able to spend this allocation while we have it available to us for the reasons I described. So the last on the area of sort of before I close out, the transition of the homeless service office. Most of this is a summary of kind of what's gonna be coming last day. But in addition, I do want to highlight some, what I hope is good news and hope that your board will agree with. So there are sort of three groupings here. So the first, we have two staff. This is the two staff who are working under Alisa Benson's leadership in the county administrator's office. This is Tatiana Rainey, who your offices have worked with, who will be transferred over to the human services department as the work transitions to us. Second, your board has already approved in a previous board action, the hiring of a new director for what we're calling the housing for health office. And we're in the process of hiring and anticipating new directors starting in the fall. But in red, the emphasis is to highlight for you that we are actually gonna be bringing forward last day a request for two additional full-time positions and the good news is we have been able to find funding for the next fiscal year within the human services department budget that does not require any general fund nor does it have any adverse impact on any staffing or any services. Very good news. In addition, we are in active conversations with the health services agency and the county administrator's office about a one to five year trajectory of how to move this office to a place that it has minimal general fund costs. And that's based on a combination of two actions. One is we historically have never taken any administrative overhead off of any state and federal grants we receive that we will thoughtfully do so to be able to keep this office running. But most importantly, and as has been spoken to at this board when the health office has just spoken, we are working to move the unit to a law claiming unit, the Medi-Cal administrative office. And by the volume of county funding and public funding we are having this program already, we're able to begin a trajectory to move this unit over the next few years to something that is then claiming the federal Medicaid dollar because of the population served. So this will be a last day item, but I just wanted to give you that preview and certainly can ask any questions now or on last day about this. The systems, the second bucket, the homeless management information system, which is a required program to use to track data of the clients being served and some data dashboards that are being run in the county administrator's office. Those will all be moved over to human services and sort of woven into the very effective data analytics team in human services. And finally, the funding, a number of months ago, the county administrator's office brought forward a list of all those different funding streams and all those different COC grants and all the different activities. All that moves over to us in a budget index last day as well. So to close, I don't wanna repeat what has been said the county administrator talked about this in his budget and Christina and her follow-up presentation as did Mimi, federal and state landscape is profoundly difficult to predict. We are predominantly almost 90% funded by federal and state activities and actions. So being able to keep up with our lobbying and activity and advocacy at the state and federal level, the unknown future of the pandemic is certainly very profound. The impact on the economy, which has that inverse relationship that Mimi spoke to in her presentation when the budget is good, when the economy is good, we have more resources, when it gets worse, we have less, and that's when the community needs us most. So it's a very delicate time. And then finally, with the transition of housing and homeless services, this is where I just want to end with a little bit of opportunity. You know, as this county has described to me in my six months, it's very similar to my experience in Alameda where I worked for 25 years, lots of finger pointing, lots of frustration, lots of who's doing what and who's not gonna do what. My experience has been there is certainly some tensions, certainly some confusion, but there is a tremendous amount of teamwork being done under COVID and all the work we've done as I've been described to the board. And I was here last week with Alisa. There's a lot of opportunity to build upon the teamwork that's been done. There's a lot of opportunity to work with the state and the federal government to look at how communities can do better by those experiencing homelessness when we have resources and support. And I feel very cautiously optimistic that we will be able to be in a much better position over the next year and beyond, given what this crisis has surfaced. So I end with the formal request of your board to adopt the recommendations that are outlined on this slide in great detail. I'm not gonna read through it. And I just wanna end with a thank you to your board. You've been very supportive and very candid in my tenure, including chair Caput, reminder and supervisor Leopold, your question if I started all this COVID stuff. But I also do wanna end with just making a comment. The human service department employees are unbelievably resilient. And I don't know, you know, chair Caput, when you asked me at the beginning, how are you doing? The answer to that is I'm actually doing okay because of how enjoyable it is to work with Emily, the deputy and the human service staff who just always find a way to keep going. It has not been easy. There's been some tensions. We're a little overwhelmed. But this budget presentation is just a small piece of what we're doing. And I just wanna thank the human services staff. It's a real honor to be their director. So thank you. And I opened up to any questions or comments. Okay. Let's go with supervisor Kunates. Thank you. Thank you, Randy, for your work and your whole department's work, helping people not only navigate this health crisis, but obviously this economic crisis. So first, let me just say on the homeless front, you know, in a normal year, this would probably be the headline coming out of budgets. This is the county really increasing its role in looking at the system to support people experiencing homelessness in the community. And so I look forward to working with you over the coming years to do some system changes and to improve systems and services for people in need. I want to ask you, and you and I talk about this, I'm hesitant to add something to the HSD plate, but, you know, as a parent of young kids, I know how difficult the online learning experience is going to be in a few days, but I know that CalWorks families that are really managing a number of crises will also struggle with that online learning. I'd like to ask that maybe for the last day reports that you work with the parks department on how we can support pods or other support activities for CalWorks families and online education. Thank you for the comments and Supervisor Coonerty, as I've shared with you privately and want to say publicly, we will do better by those experiencing homelessness with active partnership with all of your board members and I welcome your interest in having much more conversation publicly and in our discussions about that. And yes, we're happy to follow there is board discretion as to how to act upon that CalWorks allocation when we mentioned as long as it's within the allocation and it's audit proof, we'll take your directive to work with Public Works and I just need a minute after this hearing to figure out what we can present at last day versus what we'll bring back to you in the fall in terms of a formal contract, but we'll work with you and the full board on that request. Great, and it's okay if you can't get a plan at Tuesday, that online pool starts to be, anything can do that sooner or later would be appreciated. I've heard and we'll reach out to Parks right away. Supervisor Friend. Thank you Chair, thank you Randy for your work and also for just your general accessibility, I feel like I don't have a lot of questions because you're always available for me to ask them at any other time, but I recognize that we don't get an opportunity to thank your team enough and a lot of them work in remote locations that don't necessarily interface with the board as much as I would like to be able to do, but there's no greater need than what your department and health are doing right now. The net couldn't be more essential and unfortunately I wish I could say that there will be the rule above us from the federal side would be coming down with a great relief, but I just haven't seen that happen but yet you and your team on the ground are really making sure that people within our community have some of these stresses alleviated a little bit. It really speaks to the importance of the safety net which I know the board is always valued and this community is always valued but it needs people on a date basis making those contributions to ensure that human touches actually occur. So please do pass on to your team that their work is not just value we recognize how essential it is and we recognize how stressful it is working in those frontline positions right now when people are taking a lot of incomeings a lot of stress about the inability to get certain benefits at the lazy times and things that are outside of routine control but we hear nothing but compliments about the end product and I want people to recognize that that role is essential and your team's role is essential. I just want to thank you for that. Supervisor McPherson. Thank you chair and thank you Mr. Morris for your presentation on a self described complicated dance. You know that happens when you depend on 90% of your funding from state and federal sources. You're dealing with it in a remarkable way. You and the whole staff. So I couldn't give you more accolades than say thank you for a job well done and this was one place where I might even get better especially in these times of immense needs for jobless benefits shelter and food assistance and other services created by COVID in the shelter in place. We know that as you said when you need it the most we have less funding overall and we know this is disproportionately affected low income folks and I'm really pleased to see I know we all are to what you how you've been able to get ahead of the game and actually produce more services for some of these folks. There's one question I might have better asked it in the consent agenda on homeless services but can you tell me the status of the heat and cash funds? Are they are there unallocated awards and what is our timeline for redirecting the balance of these funds which I think has to be done by the end of the year. So Supervisor McPherson if you watch me talk slowly it is because Rainey Perez from the homeless service office let me know if there's any questions technically about and here she materializes that she would be available to answer these technical questions. So here she is. Thank you Rainey. Hi Rainey Perez, homeless services coordinator. Yes, there are unallocated heat funds. I believe they are in excess of approximately 2 million and we have just finished all of the fiscal 1920 invoicing and the liquidations and figuring out how much to transfer from the trust fund. So I am updating the tracker on that and we'll have that information probably within the week. On Friday the 21st, the HAP board and executive committee will be meeting and reviewing how much of the funding is still available and what our immediate needs are. And what I would say is that we now have 11 months remaining to spend down the heat funds in particular. So the priority will be to get those funds to work as rapidly as possible on something that's an unmet need. And we're looking at things like the armory and poly loft and ongoing salvation, army operations, et cetera. So we were going to prioritize the heat funds for rapidest, the most rapid spending. If there are questions, input or concerns ahead of that HAP meeting on the 21st, please contact me and let me know. And I'm happy to answer any other questions about it. Thank you for that update. You're welcome. Supervisor Leopold. Thank you, Chair. Thank you for the presentation. It's a great example of one of our deep benches here in the county. The human services department has always been able to give us good, clear, accurate information. I know that you review all your dashboards on our regular basis. And I just want to express my appreciation. The department made a decision a couple of years ago to really try to increase access to SNAP services. It was a conscious effort and it took a lot of work. And we're seeing the benefits of it now. And especially during this very tough time economically for so many people in our community, having a good program where it's easy for people to access these services really makes a difference in the lives of so many people. So I just want to, all that, what I call the spade work, which is all that work you have to do to put in so it's ready when times, when it's needed, really makes a big difference. So thank you for doing that. I also appreciate just the spirit to try to figure out new ways to not only help within the county family, but within, obviously within the community. My colleague brought up the issue of technology and CalWorks. And I've spent a lot of time talking with the superintendents of school districts and at least in the first district. And they've done a lot of good work getting computers out to the families, setting up hotspots, getting them connected. And so I would recommend also just reaching out to the COE or school districts to leverage what they've already got going on. It could be a good opportunity to partner with the schools on something that we all care about, which is breaking down that digital divide that separates so many families from the access to services. On the homeless coordination, I'm gonna look forward to the additional information that we get and also just the reconstituting of that effort. I think that we've shown during this time of crisis that we've been able to really increase shelter capacity. And we have to keep that drive so we can provide good housing opportunities, a variety of housing opportunities to really make a dent in the number of homeless that we have here in Santa Cruz. So I appreciate the effort and I know that we're counting on your department to both provide services to people in need to help with employment as they will work their way back into the workforce as jobs become available, as they need to retrain for those jobs. And I wanna express my appreciation to all your staff for their ongoing commitment to get that done, to meet the needs, as the governor says, to meet the moment of which we're in. So thank you for the work. Thank you. Thanks a lot for everything you guys are doing. Appreciate all your work and getting back to the staff and supervisors and answering all the questions. You got a lot of pressure on you. I'm okay. Maybe it's just the wording, but on packet page 71, item number nine, the agenda item. It says the following staffing changes were made to accommodate the expected increase in caseloads and result in a budgeted increase of two full-time positions. Then right below it says delete two full-time positions and unfund, I guess those are openings that are not gonna be funded, three full-time positions. So you were expecting an increase of two positions, but actually we're gonna eliminate two? Yeah, there is a very complicated set of machinations that to simplify what is, to be quite honest, taken us three or four times to walk through with our budget office, it's all very clean. The 10% net county cost reduction target we had, we made a choice to unfund two management positions. On top of that, due to a different action, we had one employee that asked for the retirement incentive, which requires us to freeze that position for two years, which we also accepted because that was the one position in our department that was in a unit that was being consolidated. Those actions were one set of actions. On the other hand, the opposite of what child support just talked to you about where the state underfunded Santa Cruz child support, we got a dramatic increase in our CalWORKS and somewhat our CalFresh allocations that deliver services to those populations which allowed us to add positions. So the end result of those kind of moving parts are the addition of two positions in our budget. Okay, so it's an actual loss of two positions? We have unfunded two management positions, but because of the increased CalWORKS allocations, we're able to add more than that in the math and landed on two new positions in our budget. So some deletions, but more additions than deletions. So the sum total is two additional positions in our budget. All funded by the increased allocations. On the unfunded positions, this is probably true with all the other departments. Did we actually tell anybody, hey, you've got a job right before the pandemic. And then, you know, they go home and they go, hey, honey, I got the job. And then when the pandemic became very, very real, that we actually then called them back and said, well, we're not gonna hire you. We are very fortunate that that did not happen. The two positions I just mentioned that we unfunded were both vacant. So when the pandemic hit and the recession hit, as our County Administrator Vasa said, they put a hiring freeze in place. And once that happened, we paused on all hiring. Then we got the 10% net county cost reduction target. And we'd went ahead and looked at two management positions that we realized we could function without. So no human beings were offered jobs and then delayed or impacted because they were in a job. Yeah, that's just a question, the human impact. Did it happen at any of the departments where we said you got the job and then we called them back and said, sorry, you're out of luck? Not that I'm aware of. Okay, thank you. Okay, we'll open it up to the public for public comment. Anyone here in the chambers, none? Anyone downstairs? We have one web comment. Okay. This is from Leah Samuels. Thank you for your hard work of your staff in creating this budget. And now your work in a difficult budget year. This comment is being submitted by Leah Samuels, Executive Director of the Human Care Alliance. On behalf of one of our members, there is, on behalf of one of our members, there is a $224,000 slated to go to Salinas Yellow Cab. Would you consider using courtesy cab to keep the dollars in the county? Can't some of these trips go to lift line? Are these 5150 trips? Our understanding is that budget may need to be reexamined through the year for the county to give the uncertainty of federal funding sources. We hope to be part of the conversation as to how you could spend less money managing core funding so more than the money for the direct non-profits providing essential services. This comment was apparently put under the wrong agenda number. So when I missed that, I apologize, but for the next meeting, the next item. I'll open it up for a motion. I would move approval of the recommended actions. Okay. I'll second that. This is good. This is right. If you want to add the additional directions that you just come back with the, with the potential programming for the forming of pods for online schools for CalArts families. Yeah, happy to do that. Sorry for leaving it out. Yeah, that's fine. And I'll do the roll call vote. Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Cooner, or excuse me, friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye, did you, did you hear my additional direction? Yes. We got your additional direction. Right, thank you. Okay. McPherson. Aye. Chair Caput. Aye. Passes unanimously. We now go to the last item on today's agenda, number 10, the core investments. And consider the 2020-2021 supplemental budgets for a collective of results and evidence-based investments and take related action as outlined in the reference budget, the documents and memorandum of the human, of the director of human services. Okay. Okay. So the reason this is a separate presentation is though the human services department administers this budget, this is your board and the county administrators general fund money that way before my time and for many, many years has been funding to help support the safety net and it lines with the work we do in human services. And we have our contract team to help administer it. So this is a standalone separate budget index in the human services department, but we need your board's direction in order to execute whatever decision you make. So that's why this particular budget item is separate and it's also deserving of its own attention. The agenda is really just to take a minute. Everyone is so very busy with so many things going on. This has been such a complicated and controversial program before my time to put in context a couple of board decisions and things that kind of set up where we are today. Because in June, I was not asked to present on core. I did not have the opportunity to talk about our operational plan impact. So I'm just briefly touch on that. But really that leads to the decision in front of your board today, which is the proposed budget revision, which was shared publicly, which is a 10% cut to the general fund core contracts. So here's the context. In November of 2019, your board had directed the human service department to align its procurement process, which my understanding before my time was separate, which says there was the core base funding. And then there was these set aside programs to align them together. And that was gearing up before COVID to put out an RFP for all of that and one big procurement. Second context setting point is that then your board, since I got here because of COVID and the struggle for us administrative really for our nonprofits with everything they were going through to remove them from having to deal with the procurement process with the precarious budget challenge, you're approved in May, a delay of the RFP. So therefore in front of you today is nothing about procurement that will be put forward another year where we have ample opportunity to talk about what to do and what to procure in the process given the history of this program. And then finally, the purpose of putting this last one up here is to let you know unless your board requests, we're not planning to sort of talk a lot about the policy and the status of the program because we are slated to come back to you in October for our yearly report, at which point we fully expect there'll be lots of policy discussion. So just wanted to make sure these reminders were in place. The operational plan impacts, we do have three operational objectives. And again, because we're coming back in October, if your board agrees, we would plan to walk through these in more detail so we could spend our time focusing on the budget discussion. But we did want to just let you know of these three, we are pleased to report that all of the objectives are actually on target. So anybody who is listening to this on archiver live, you can go to the Santa Cruz website to see the specifics, but we'll plan to talk about them in more detail when we come back for the annual report in October. Okay, so the budget revision. The core budget, which has been your board's general fund budget that we administer as of this fiscal year and as was executed at the beginning of this fiscal year sits at 4,405,000. As the county administrator announced, there was a proposal to cut that by 10%. So our job as administrators of the program was to walk through how to do that. The first two budget items are just a 10% cut to the base, a 10% cut to the Meals on Wheels program. And then there were 7,000 in carry forward. And then I wanted to just highlight for a minute, set aside, because set aside actually had two programs that stopped functioning. And those two programs totaled $10,500, which turns out to be about 9.8% of the set aside budget. So rather than cutting all the set aside programs, we're just cutting that, which wasn't gonna go forward anyways. And so the grand total, if you see 436,000 in core reduction and you do the math, it's slightly under 10%. And that was to make sure that we didn't just apply that 10% to the set aside, given those are the small programs that are kind of the smaller operations. So what's in front of you is a proposal to reduce the core budget as listed above by $436,000. I wanna take a minute to recognize that this is a very interesting program that I actually heard about in Alameda that has a long history and I'm very humble in understanding that I have not had an opportunity to understand the interest your board has, the interest the community-based partners have, the advocates have. And this is a very important decision in front of your board. I consider my responsibility to just put some information on the table so you have the information that as I was preparing for this seemed very meaningful and relevant to the context in front of you. So I hope it lands that way that this is a neutral presentation about some facts that I became aware of. So number one, it does look as if this has been a program that as the budget got better in Santa Cruz County, this board has made increases to the program over time. And when we look back in 1415, the general fund that your board put forward was 3.875 million. And today, even with the proposed reduction to 436, that's still over 17% increase. So there's been some meaningful investment in advancements over the years. Second is that when your board spoke very early on when the recession hit and the budget was getting bad and there were statements about making sure everybody took their share, that's when the 10% proposal was put forward to cut core programs. At the same time, county departments were asked to take two cuts. One is furloughs, which landed at 7.5% and the other for health and human services was 10% net county cost reduction that I spoke to earlier. The last one I wanna speak to is health and human services recognize that the ability of our clients to manage a difficult time like this is somewhat dependent upon the health of our nonprofit community. And nonprofits are under a tremendous amount of stress right now. They have a lot of revenue streams that have dried up philanthropy donors. It's a very tough time for them. So as we were looking at making a statement to the nonprofits to take their share of cut when the corona relief funds, coronavirus relief funds came forward, we felt it was important if we were gonna ask the nonprofits to take a cut that we should make it an opportunity for them to benefit from the relief funds. So you have in front of you today one very specific action and that is to deliberate on this proposed 10% cut. I wanna tell you have a separate action which is gonna come forward the county administrator as I understand the dates, they will talk about it on Wednesday and it's a last day action. And that is that health and human services proposed that there be money set aside for nonprofits, including core to apply for those relief funds in recognition of the challenge that they are facing. So they are independent actions but we do wanna recognize it does benefit the clients we serve to have a healthy nonprofit community. So with that, I hope that overview was helpful and I would just ask that your board consider adopting the recommendations as outlined on this slide and open it up to any questions or comments. Okay, let me, I'll get right to you. Supervisor Friend. Chair, I actually don't have questions right now to bring from the community on this. I think some of my colleagues might, I have a different opinion. He's done. Yeah, okay, Supervisor Leopold. Thank you, Chair. I know we're not gonna get a deep into this today. I look forward to our conversation in October and some might describe that the core program is controversial. Some might consider it as an appropriate reset after 40 years to look at how and why we funded everything. And I think it's something that the county can be proud of. I'm grateful when I saw the list of those that could receive care fundings and what's is gonna be proposed by the CAO is that we can keep our community-based partners or in the core investment program whole. Because my experience in having gone through this before at the county is these are the time when we need these organizations. They are our partners helping people who are vulnerable and at risk maybe seeking services for the first time. So I understand that today we would be, if we accept the recommended actions, it looks like a 10% cut, but we're coming back on Wednesday to make everybody whole again. And so I'll be supporting that effort and I appreciate the work. And I think that Mr. Morris says as things return to whatever normal will look like in the future and you have more time to spend with these community-based organizations, you will also see the good work, a great effort and deep commitment that they have towards meeting the needs of the most vulnerable here in Santa Cruz County. And may I just say, Supervisor Leopold, just in full disclosure, the Human Care Alliance did give me the courtesy of a meet and greet, which got rescheduled or scheduled because of corona and we actually have a second scheduled in a couple of weeks. And as I shared with them the first time, I am a humble set of open ears. I'm a new set of eyes. And I think the looking forward is the part, how to continue to partner with them. They do a lot of good work into some community. Here, here. You bet. Supervisor McPherson. Yeah, again, the need is greatest when the time is tough as before. So I just want to say thank you to all of our community service partners and what they've provided for so many thousands of county residents. And I know that the 10% cuts are gonna have a very big impact on the services they provide. But we've also asked for cuts for employees and furloughs and layoffs. And I also recognize the effort to restore some of those cuts through our CARES Act money. And I look forward to that in the previous discussions. But I want to thank the hundreds of nonprofits that we do have here in Santa Cruz County for providing the services they do. They're invaluable and they really do provide services for thousands of our county residents. Thank you for the presentation. And Supervisor Coonerty. Hey, Mr. Chair. Yeah, just a recognition that I think our core funding is a real effort to try to get resources in the most effective way possible to those in need. And I look forward to our conversation on Wednesday. I'm gonna look at how we can allocate CARES Act money to help reduce the impacts on both these organizations and those in need here on community. Okay, that's fine. And I guess that's me, right? Okay, yeah, this is a tough one. At the time, we're having a hard time providing all the services that we need to do. And at the same time, we're cutting people that are helping us that they do a lot of work that reduces the load that we have with the county, reduces the amount of money we would have to spend in order to provide the services they do. So, and just something that sort of stood out there, meals on wheels, we didn't mention any others as far as, as far as this one was specific, 8,500. What gets me, the reason it jumped off the page is, with elderly people that are either in a rest home or they're holed up in their houses and they're asked not to leave, they're, it seems to me that meals on wheels for 8,500 dollars to be cut. It seems like we're punishing a certain group of people, the older people in the community. I know we don't intend that, of course, but it almost looks that way. We're shutting them off from going out. We're shutting them off from people going to visit them and people that are in their homes and trying to stay out of a rest home. I think we should be doing all we can to keep them in their homes without forcing them out. And if they don't have those meals and that personal contact that comes with it, just seems like a too heavy of a burden we're putting on them. I'm gonna turn this over to Emily to talk about the technical, there's a technical reason why meals on wheels is separated in terms of how we organize the budget. And I would just say this is why your board used to deliberate about what to do, whether right now as proposed every program, but for the set-asides for the reason I describe is equally taking a 10% cut. But I'll let Emily speak to why the Meals on Wheels program stands alone. It's a technical issue. Yes, because they received the $85,000 augmentation specifically for Meals on Wheels. Are you on? Okay. I just need to adjust. That's why the $8,500 was called out in as part of how that we came about the, how we got to the reduction is because of this, they specifically got that $85,000 augmentation originally. It's 10%. It's 10% of the $85,000. But I mean, if we have to vote on this all or nothing, for $8,500, we could take care of them. At least keep them out even, okay. Well, we, if I could interrupt, we are proposing to come back with CARES Act funding on Wednesday to make those departments whole. So we're saving general fund money, replacing it with federal money, but to keeping the nonprofits whole so that they won't actually take overall reduction in funding. We're doing this because by saving general fund money, we're reducing the number of layoffs we have of employees. So we're using that CARES Act fund, we're leveraging it, and we're saving general fund employees. So on Wednesday, we are proposing to come back and restore some of this funding or supplement it so that there's a net no loss to these agencies. It's just struck me, I agree. We're gonna come and look at it, but it struck me with the pandemic. We're talking about mostly people that are in that vulnerable age group, like myself. Older, and a lot of them are in their 80s or 90s or shut off at home. And we're telling them, don't go out, but at the same time, we're depriving them of a meal that if they don't get that, they're gonna have to go out and get something to eat or whatever. So they got the pressure from both sides. Yeah. I also add due to the hard work of human services through the great plates delivered program, over 500 people who weren't previously in any of our programs are now receiving three meals a day delivered to their home. So what they're coming to us is with this cut that they are being asked to by the County Administrative Officer to deal with our financial situation. We are fortunate that we are gonna be able to fully fund all these programs if we vote for this CARACS resolution on Wednesday. So the action we take today should not be seen by itself. It should be seen as concert with this action we're gonna take on Wednesday. And I share with you the interest of not cutting off funding for organizations like this during our greatest time of need. But there is a plan in place that we're not gonna have to do that. Yeah, no, that's fine. And we'll look at it. It was just, it was set aside. It was one of the many that were helping that was specifically mentioned in the report. And that's the only reason I brought it up now rather than Wednesday. Thank you. Thanks a lot for everything you're doing. We appreciate everything. And you're in a tough spot. We need you and thank you. We love you. We'll take it. All right. We'll open it up to public comment. Any public comment here? Any public comment downstairs? No, there's not. Done online either. Okay. Open it up for a motion. I would move the recommended actions and look forward to the vote on Wednesday as well. Okay. Have a second. Second. Okay. Okay. The roll call vote. Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Friend. Aye. Community. McPherson. Aye. Chair Caput. Aye. Passes unanimously. And we will return tomorrow at 9 a.m. right here on the board chambers on Tuesday, nine o'clock in the morning. Thank you. And that closes the session.