 The closed session of the November 12, 2019 meeting of the Santa Cruz City Council. And this part of the meeting, the council will receive public testimony. Thereafter, the council members will move to the courtyard conference room for the closed session. I would like to ask our clerk to please call the roll. Thank you, Mayor, Council Member Cron. Here. Lever? Here. Myers? Here. Brown? Here. Mathis? Here. Vice Mayor coming? Here. And Mayor Watkins? Here. Are there any members of the public who would like to address the council on our closed session agenda? Please come forward and you'll have up to two minutes. Hello council members. My name is Dania. I live in Santa Cruz and I'm here because I received a letter a few days ago that said that I should address the council for my issue. My car was towed in front of my house. I live at 315 Ocean View Avenue and I park in front of my house. I've lived there since April, April. And I've had no problems except in September, I went out to my street to go get my car, to go have a surf, and it was not there. And I called the police department and the police department informed me that it had been towed. I thought it had been stolen. I don't know why, so the police department informed me that there was a neighbor that called in my car, that a warning sign was placed on my vehicle and that because it was moved, it was towed. Here's the warning sign, the car, so I checked the laws of the state of California and it seems that legally I have three calendar days to move my car. The car was moved before the three calendar days. I don't know if you've received any paperwork for this, I should say I have filed a claim with the police department and I filed a claim with the city of Santa Cruz and with all kinds of copies and documentations and do you have that with you? We'll go ahead and pause. This is an opportunity, since it's on our agenda, we have the documentation. But this is an opportunity for us to hear from you, we don't really engage with dialogue in terms of questioning. I see. You can share your thoughts with us forever. You have received it, great, because I wasn't expecting to address the city council, happy too. So my wish is that the towing fees would be refunded. Because the car was parked legally in front of my house, I was sleeping while the car was towed, and the towing fees were considerable. And I only realized the car was towed when I went out to use it and found it gone. So you're not allowed to ask me any questions. You have everything that I submitted to both the police department and the city. I think that's my two minutes. Thank you. Great, thank you. Thank you. I had a quick question. Councilmember Cronin. You saw the thing on your windshield for a couple days before, or you just have never seen it? Good question, the reason that I have it is because it was, it did this. Because otherwise, these signs are pasted on windows and you have a fun time removing them. But here's the original warning sign with, so it was like when I, so I picked up the car at the tow company and this thing was sort of inside the. Thanks. Is there any other member of the community who wants to address the council before closed session? Okay, thanks guys. Okay, Mr. Condati. Yes, we may have a subsequent need item. I was asked prior to the meeting if the council could add as subsequent need consideration and initiation of litigation relating to the Ross encampment that's sprang up over the weekend. Under the Brown Act, the council can add an item to the agenda if at least two thirds of the council determines that the item arose subsequent to the posting of the agenda and that there's an immediate need to take action prior to the next regular meeting. So that would be the process should the council wish to add that to the closed session. Is there any council member who is interested in making a motion to add that? Council member Matthews. I would be interested in adding this to the agenda for the purpose of a discussion. A session. Okay, I'll go ahead and second that. Any further discussion? And I guess I have to say making the appropriate findings of urgency. Okay, council member Connell. Can we say why it should be closed session and not an open session discussion? That would be my recommendation both because it's authorized for considering initiation of litigation and due to potential liability concerns surrounding the Ross camp in general and related issues. Any other questions? Seeing none, all those in favor, excuse me, is there any member of the community who wanted to address or could they address, would that be appropriate for community input at this time? Please come forward, you'll have two minutes. In the general sense, right, of this event happening. It shows that people in dire need, without you judging them, people in dire need will do what they feel is necessary. When I'm talking with such people, I try to ameliorate any tendency toward extremism of any kind. And I always encourage them to be good neighbors, respect every official of the county, work things out in a court if they have disagreements, or come here and sort it out. I guess that's the role I'm trying to play. There will be probably more of these things happening. People setting up camps spontaneously, as far as I can tell. I don't like that too much, personally. I'm part of a coalition, and that includes people who want to do these camps. But I want the camps to be better organized. I want the county and city to have a definite policy. I want all the neighborhood groups to work on this as well. The Chamber of Commerce, the police, we can do this. Thank you. Mr. Zinni, for the discussion, Council Member Clever. Thank you, so yeah, I think it's important for us to have the conversation. I will also just point out for the record while we're in public session, that this, I believe, is a direct result of our policies back in May to close the camp without adequate shelter space. And thus forcing people that are in need of service and or shelter to find their own means. So I think we should take that in consideration as we enter into closed session and make conscious and forward thinking action. This is just a discussion, but moving forward to address the situation in a compassionate, constructive, and generative way as opposed to a degenerative or destructive way of criminalizing. Thank you. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay, that passes unanimously, so we'll now adjourn to our closed session. And I'd like to ask our clerk to please call the roll. Thank you, Mayor, Councilmember Crone. Here. Clever. Present. Myers. Here. Brown. Here. Matthews. Vice Mayor Cummings. Here. And Mayor Watkins. Here. And if our clerk could please lead us to the Pledge of Allegiance. So jumping right in, we'll go ahead and move right along into our introduction of new employees. And I'd like to invite up our acting director of finance, Cheryl, to introduce her new employee. Good afternoon. Today it's my pleasure to introduce Molly Vang. She's our new, the finance department's new purchasing technician. Molly's lived in Monterey County for the past 13 years, but originally comes from the Central Valley. She moved to Santa Cruz two years ago and is happy to be part of the community. Her prior work includes CSUMB, CSU Monterey Bay. And she worked for an international sports summer camp where she spent part of the year on the East Coast. Molly's interests include farming and harvesting and salsa dancing. She's known for a positive and helpful attitude and keeping a keen oversight over purchase orders for the city. Thank you. Very nice. Nice to welcome Molly. And now I'd like to invite up our assistant director for our libraries, Eric Howard, to introduce his new employee. Hello, good afternoon. I'm very happy to introduce Sarah Jones, who is our new assistant to help out with our volunteer office. This is an coordinator. We have over 200 volunteers for our libraries. If you're interested or know anybody who is interested, Sarah is the person to connect with. She's had lots of experience in many different fields, including software companies. And also motivating and organizing PTA parents. So some of you may have an appreciation for the challenges there. So we are very, very happy to have her. Thank you. Wonderful. Welcome, welcome. Next, I'd like to bring up our director of economic development, Bonnie Lipscomb, to introduce her new employee. Good afternoon, Mayor and members of the council. It's my pleasure to introduce Andrea Inouye, who is our housing program specialist. Andrea is a California native. She was born in San Francisco and grew up in Emoryville. She went to UC Irvine for undergraduate school and USC for grad school, where she earned a master's in urban planning with a concentration in social and community development. She has a work history and direct services and a number of nonprofits during graduate school. She has a lot of relevant housing experience. Her most recent job was at UCSC as part of the employee housing office. She's also worked in a nonprofit in housing. And some of her past experience includes being a housing analyst for a nonprofit working on the homeless stabilizing team in Alamina County, which provided emergency services for housing. So she has direct and deep relevant experience on sort of a housing first model and a relevant skill set for working in housing in Santa Cruz. She really likes working for the city. She loves being part of our housing team. She's currently learning about measure O for sale units. Monitoring will be working on our CAPER. That's our Consolidated Annual Performance and Evaluation Report. Community Development Block Grants, Home Basic Information will be engaged in invoicing and creating systems. She's extremely organized, so it's been really fun having her as part of our actually very organized housing team, but working on checking security deposits for programs. Her favorite job, past job, was a rec leader in Emeryville while she was in high school. So her civic experience runs deep and long. And the most surprising thing she's learned since she's joined the city is how much the employees really care about their work and community. And she loves being downtown. It really makes her feel more a part of the community too. So please join me in welcoming Andrea. Welcome. Welcome. But last, but certainly not least, we'll invite our Director of Public Works, Mark Dettel, to introduce his new employees. Good afternoon, Mark Dettel, Director of Public Works. It's my pleasure to introduce two new employees. Next to me is Miguel Aguirre. He's in a sanitation division, a solid waste worker. He's born and raised in Watsonville and currently lives in Watsonville. He has two sons, 13 year old and a 10 year old, and a dog named Kermit. So, it's a little Sesame Street there. Before joining the past work experience, he worked as a solid waste worker, aid one for the city of Watsonville, gave him the experience to join our team. He also worked for Santa Cruz Bicycles, and he worked as a plumber for six years. When he's not working, he likes to spend time with his kids and enjoy outdoor activities, work on his truck, video games, and watch movies. So please join me in welcoming Miguel. Next to Miguel is Kenny Jetho. He's our new engineering technician. And he works in the transportation division. He was born in Santa Clara and grew up in Santa Cruz Mountains off Soquel San Jose Road. Currently lives in Seabright. And his past work experience includes working in Apple Maps as, for Apple Maps as a GIS technician and data analyst. He had a brief stint in PG&E also as a GIS technician. He attended Cabrio College for three years, and then went to the University of Santa Barbara and graduated with a Bachelor's of Arts in Geography and GIS. And when he's not working, he enjoys rock climbing at Pacific Edge during the weekends and tries to head up to Tahoe or the Sierras during the weekend. So please join me in welcoming Kenny. Welcome to all the new employees. Okay, we'll go ahead and move right along. We have a series of presentations. The first of which is our City Government Academy graduation. I'd like to invite up Director of Parks and Recreation, Tony Elliott. All right, good afternoon, Mayor and City Council. For the record, my name is Tony Elliott, Director of Parks and Recreation. And we've got as many folks as we could get today from our City Government Academy in the middle of a work day here. But yeah, I wanted to talk a little bit about this program. So over the past two months, we've had about 20 participants in the inaugural City of Santa Cruz City Government Academy program. The participants met eight times with various city departments, including the city manager, public works, the police department, fire department, economic development and planning, the water department, the library system and parks and recreation. Each department through the program was responsible for crafting a curriculum and a hands-on learning experience for the participants in the program. And really the purpose of the program is to gain, for students to gain, participants to gain a better understanding of how the city government works here in Santa Cruz. So some examples, the students sat on the dais where the city council sits right now as they learned about the council manager structure of government from the city manager and assistant city manager. They worked together to solve a mock crime complete with a lot of packets of ketchup at the police department, which was fun and engaging and they toured maybe one of the most fun experiences which was touring the wastewater treatment plant with public work. So a variety I could go on and on of different experiences that the group experienced throughout the last couple months. Again, the purpose of the government academy is to open the doors to the city and to provide a transparent, experiential opportunity to learn about the inner workings of local government. And our hope really through this program is that residents will gain a better understanding of how the city functions and ways they can also get involved. And that could be from board and commission involvement to volunteerism opportunities, so many, many different ways that could be a follow-up or an outcome of people being involved in the government academy. The program is free. It was free and will continue to be free to the community moving to the future. And we look forward to hosting this program again next fall of 2020 for class number two. So on behalf of the parks and recreation team that coordinated the city government academy, I just want to say thanks. We're very grateful to the city council and the city manager for the support of the program and certainly to all the different departments, department leads and department heads who helped us put on the program. And also want to say thanks to the students. This was a two hour commitment each week for each of the last eight plus weeks. So it's a big commitment from them, but we're very grateful to have a really excellent group to kick off the program. So with that, I'd like to just ceremonially read off the names of the folks in the program, some of which are behind me here. And then after that, I would ask if we could come up to the dais and take a photo with the city council. All right, Amanda Armstrong, Amber Burke, Anna Costa, Kendra Dawson Bach, Jane Doyle, Renee Golder, Serge Cagno, Claire Ken, Caroline Lamb, Jane Mio, Jared Moon rising, Alex Nielsen, Ada Popkey, Andrew Raz, Phillip Rosenblum, Don Scott Norris, Cindy Smith, Kim Smith, Rafa Sonnenfeld and Seth Suresh. We're the participants in the inaugural city government academy program. So please join me in giving them a round of applause. If we may, can we come up? Yeah, yeah, yeah, please. Thank you for your presentation. Thanks to all those who are here today for your interest in engagement with our city government and to those who aren't. Please extend our gratitude to them and please come on up to the dais if you'd like for the picture. Can I also just thank Director Elliott for coordinating this. It's a really great program and so glad it's happening and welcome everybody. You're here. Amen. Great job. With us. Yeah. To see if you're fast. That was wonderful. When at first of many. Okay. Thank you. One shot, that's daring. Thank you very much for the presentation and for the work. And really quickly, Tony, before you head out, if there's those who are either in the audience or watching at home, they want to be part of class two. They should visit the Parks and Recreation website. Okay, sounds like that's the best place to access this opportunity in the future. Great. All right. Well, I'd like to invite up our mountain bikers of Santa Cruz to come forward with their presentation for a brief update on the work they've been up to. Hello, Mayor and Council. Thanks for having me here today. Just going to pull up our presentation here real quick. All right, here we go. Yeah, so hey, I'm Matt Young, Executive Director of Mountain Bikers of Santa Cruz. Today, here to talk to you guys a little quick reminder, our introduction to who we are and what we do. And also wanted to tell you guys about all the work we've done in City Parks over our past season. We talk about our trail work seasons as June to June of every year. We do most of our work over the winter months. Yeah, so we're your local nonprofit trail advocacy and stewardship organization. That means we partner with our local land managers to fund, design, build and maintain sustainable trails and bike parks. What that looks like is we do a lot of trail maintenance. This is the Yukon Trail in Pogonip a couple of years ago over a pretty bad winter and the trail got really chewed up. So we coordinated a big volunteer effort to repair that trail. We had volunteers from the community and various businesses come out. They will bear like 30 tons of rock down the hill to repair this section of the trail. And this is what it looked like afterwards, so big improvement there. We also build new trails. This is in Pogonip near the old lookout trail. We rerouted that trail because there were some erosion and safety issues there. So we took this raw hillside here and built a new trail and decommissioned the old trail. We restored it back to natural habitat. We also do trail planning. We've been involved in the Santa Redwoods project up the coast with the Land Trust. We build trails for the demonstration forest up in Soquel. We worked for state parks. We rebuilt the Channel Loop rerout over there. Built them a McCurry Trail in the city of Santa Cruz Pogonip Open Space Preserve. Working in the city of Scotts Valley. This is the new Glenwood Preserve right behind Scotts Valley High School, which just opened up this past year. Here's another trail we did in Wilder Ranch this year. This is the West Engelsman reroute. But yeah, I want to talk to you guys specifically about the work we've done in city parks this year. We've done a lot of work. We've been working in city parks since 2012 with, sorry about that, with Emma McCurry Trail being our first project. And since then we've done more and more maintenance and new trail construction every year. So you guys have the full reports in front of you, which go into a lot of detail about the specific projects. I'll just give a kind of a best of and a high level overview here and show you guys some pictures and some video. Last year we had 204 unique volunteers come out doing almost 1200 hours of volunteer work. We had 375 hours of our staff time contributed to that work and $14,000 in direct cost MVOC. Some of our work is funded by the city. A lot of it's funded by sponsors as well. So we put in $14,000 on top of all that, all those contributions towards maintenance of city trails and pump tracks. So we maintain both of the city's pump tracks on the west side and at Harvey West. We built the Harvey West pump track a couple of years ago. So we have staff members go out there a couple of times a month and lead volunteer work there to keep those in good condition. We've worked with Parks and Rec and the Earth Stewards Program, which is a partnership between the Museum of Natural History and Parks and Rec, where they have high school students from Ponderosa High come out every Friday to do service projects and we jump in there a few times a year to help out leading trail work days. This is another picture of some trail work that happened on Yukon last year. We've been working on the Yukon Trail for years and years, but this last year we finally got that into the city's Adopta Park Program where we've adopted that trail in partnership with Specialized Bicycles and they contribute $5,000 every year directly towards the upkeep and maintenance of that trail. So the city is no longer paying for that cost. Specialized is paying directly for that. So keeping that trail in tip-top shape. We've done a ton of work at Dale of the Aega over the past year. We've had a couple of our big volunteer events, which we call dig days out there. We had our students dig day, which I'll show you some more about in a minute. We also had a group of volunteers who worked out there every Wednesday after work over the summer to do all the brush work and do some trail repairs there to be able to keep those trails in good condition. I'll show you guys the video real quick here. This is our student dig day at Dale of the Aega last spring, or winter or other. I'm also an environmental studies student at UCSC. We're out here at Dale of the Aega Park doing some trail work. Today we're going to be working on drainage and brushing some trails, so it'll be good to maintain these trails we use. Yeah, it's good. It's great at Curby. Hi, I got a good shepherd and I'm in seventh grade. I like riding bikes with my friends and working on trails. We've got a whole lot more fun than I thought it would be. Biggest dig day. We got to make from Santa Cruz. I forgot how to get out of this window, but that just gives you a feel for what our volunteer events are like. We do about 10 of those every year in various parks around the county, usually three or four in city parks. We've done one doing a McCurry trail on Dale of the Aega as well. We had our first ever pump track jam event at Harvey West a few months ago. It was a fundraiser for the maintenance of that park, and we had all-ages competition. We had the little kids out there on those strider bikes. Then we had professional riders as well. As you can see here in the picture, during the high jump contest, it was a great event. It was a part of the parks and rec. Forget what the event was called. Sorry, what's the word? The whole park was activated. There was events happening at the swimming pool and all parts of the parks. It was a great attraction. We did a lot of work at Arana Gulch over the last two years. There's some eroded sections of the trail there that we've improved. This is with the Summer Youth Trails Program. We also rerouted the Pogonip Creek Nature Loop this last year. So there was a section of that trail that was really falling apart. It was a great experience. We do a training program for our volunteers every year, and we use this project to train them about trail construction, trail maintenance, volunteer leadership, so we're able to complete that project just through that training program. We also replaced the failing bridge there. There was a very rickety old bridge that we rebuilt with the youth program as well. We do a women's dig day every year. It's been on Emma McCurry trail for the last couple of years. We've been really well attended. It's been pretty hard and people still showed up and had a good time. So that was a fun time out there. One more quick video to show you. Well, this is the first year that we took the step to partner with Mountain Bikers of Santa Cruz with the Summer Youth Trails Program because the goal for me was to bring in a little more focused skill set on trail maintenance and trail design and concept of trails and building sustainable trails. The funding was identified available by the Council in 2014 and it was a separate program along with the Summer Intern Program which are two programs where we wanted to focus on our community's youth. We've been asked to reduce our funding in certain areas but those two programs have continued to be fully funded by the Council and they do continue to see it as a priority to invest in our youth. So Mountain Bikers of Santa Cruz we're a 501c3 nonprofit initiative organization. The goal is to continue to provide meaningful work for the kids to do in some time and make sure it's worthwhile for the city as well that we're tackling projects that are high priority. So that's the goal and I think there will be opportunities to continue to grow the program. We'd like to get more kids involved. I'm Jacob Hyde. I am a trail specialist for Mountain Bikers of Santa Cruz. You know, we're trying to get new trails built and that type on the youth program but we're also trying to teach the kids about real life jobs so it's you know, teaching the kids about trail and having them outdoors and working in good work ethic but it's also about just general kind of like moving forward in life like out of high school. I've learned to just pay attention to detail and just like specific tricks on how to do certain things like invasive player removal like there's certain ways to do it so it's definitely opened my opportunities up to side work so I've acquired a bunch of skills you know to the point where I can go and work on my own for people. It's excellent. Sorry about that. Yeah, so we've been involved with that program for several years now. We're looking forward to doing it again this coming summer. It's been a great collaboration. So what's next for this partnership between MBOC and the city department of Parks and Rec. We'll keep on doing all this great work and hopefully do more and more of it. We're investing in training more volunteers so they can take on leadership roles as well so they can expand our reach in parks. We're planning our dig day season for the coming year as well. We're excited for the summer youth trails program next year and we're just happy to help continuing to help the city evaluate trail maintenance and reconstruction needs as needed. We do have an exciting new project that we're planning for this year which is the rebuild of the west side pump track. We're going to upgrade that pump track to the new trend is to have asphalt pump tracks. They hold up much better. They don't require any water. There's very little maintenance requirements so we are finishing up the plans for that with Parks and Rec right now and actively fundraising for that and plan to rebuild that this fall. So we're looking forward to that. So thank you for having me here today. I'm happy to answer any questions and yeah. Thank you ma'am. Thank you for the presentation. We're running a little bit behind on time here today but we'll go ahead and see if there's any urgent questions from the council but thank you for highlighting your work and the volunteerism and the partnership with the city and if council members also have questions for you or want to connect they can do so after the meeting as well. Any urgent questions? There's no public comment on presentations. Go ahead. Super quick. You guys do great work and these are wonderful videos. Do we link on these as Tony to our Parks and Rec website? I mean it seems like it's a good way to just take these these are very engaging so just suggestion. I just want to recognize your work and just make sure our community knows that really without this partnership many of our trails would continue to decline and so the partnership and the volunteer and the training of the youth is just fabulous and we also get to hike on beautiful trails so thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Last but certainly not least our presenter is Tiffany Weiswest who is our sustainability and climate action manager and she'll be presenting on resilient coasts an update. Thank you Mayor. Good afternoon council members and Mayor Tiffany Weiswest sustainability and climate action manager for the city of Santa Cruz. So yes we are now six months into the resilient coast Santa Cruz initiative and I am delighted to give you an update on the progress of those projects. We are well on our way in on track just to remind you why a couple slides as to why we're doing this project we have the need to address a variety of things pertaining to our coastline as you can see on the left hand side box everything from access to transportation to sense of place culture identity and equity and while we're addressing those we're also trying to create an inclusive conversation which will together create a community vision for resilient coastal management that of course is a long-term solution and provides equitable access to the coastline. So there are two projects with this one goal of this kind of united vision community vision there's the west cliff drive adaptation and management plan and then the other project we just call our beaches project because it's a mouthful but it's development of local coastal programs sea level rise strategies and policies to support beach and public access protection so west cliff drive is really looking at the bluff top locations and the beaches projects really looking at the beaches namely sea bright main cow the pocket beaches on west cliff natural bridges and again why are we doing these projects well first of all they were called out in our climate adaptation plan that was adopted in October of 2018 but these series of images that I'm going to be showing these next two slides really illustrate the compelling reason sea level rise is exacerbating erosion and coastal storms in flooding and so forth as in addition to the rising tide so you can see top from the top to the bottom this is kind of a typical profile of west cliff drive where we have riprap also known as revetment as it's noted here those big boulders some of those boulders are up to five tons believe it or not they're protecting our bluff top location that has nice habitat our bike ped path as well as two ways two lanes of traffic as you continue out through time and you look at the center image you see that that ripraps become displaced it's no longer providing the protection that it's supposed to be providing and we potentially will have erosion of the bluff most notably the habitat that is adjacent to the riprap and potentially impacting our bike ped path so this is again this is like a do nothing scenario if we did nothing and in the lower right hand corner then we see what happens our pocket beach get squeezed out we no longer have a pocket beach our ripraps no longer functioning and we have potential erosion into west cliff drive we've already seen that erosion to our path it's happening and then in terms of our beaches same kind of sequence of evolution of coastal change we see in the left hand corner we have dense development backing our beach this is in this case main beach with a small seawall as you continue down lower you see that the intertidal and subtitle zones are encroaching on the beach we're losing some sand and eventually as you see in the bottom photo we will no longer have a beach and we could see overtopping of that seawall at main beach so these really are driving this conversation around what are we going to do and developing this community vision we are taking this unique approach it's called adaptation pathways and this is something where we identify could be physical or other kinds of triggers that have specific thresholds and at those thresholds we do the next sequence of whether it's planning or implementation this is an example visualization from imperial beach where you can see the trigger across the top is depth of sea level rise from 0 to 6.6 feet in this case and you can see along the left hand side the various types of adaptation strategies that have been called for and as you continue through time you get to 1.6 feet of sea level rise no longer is the existing armoring going to work at that point should have been replaced and they should begin planning for sediment management and retrofitting stormwater pumps the benefit of this kind of approach is that we do not lock in investments too soon or too late but whereas we only do those investments when we need to based on these kinds of triggers and here are a number of different kinds of triggers we're considering right now you can see they span temporal in terms of a specific time home rallies in I've already mentioned depth of sea level rise it could be repetitive losses and so forth and so this is something that we're actively working on right now and are developing our own visualizations to really enable the lay person to just look at okay I understand what we're doing this is this is clear okay and we did begin this project about in April we really kicked off and had all the contracts in June so we are well into this project the first phase that we're just finishing up now is benchmarking and data collection we'll be going into the second phase closer to the end of the year where we'll begin analyzing and identifying feasible adaptation options and then milestone three that really gets started next year is developing the plans and policies that we actually want to implement as a community that are both technically feasible and every stretch of the way we are checking back with the community that's what these red stars mean and I'm going to share a lot more about community outreach with you in a moment because this is crucially important for this project so West Cliff Drive funded by Caltrans we have a $44,000 match we've spent a $140,000 to date on this grant and $31,000 in match right now we are in the process of reviewing deliverable number one quite an extensive existing conditions inventory and future hazard projections so getting a little more specific than the existing modeling that's out there that is really too large of a scale for us to use for the West Cliff Drive project that will be finalized by the end of the year and then we will go ahead and turn into our next deliverable which again is identifying those adaptation alternatives that are feasible and checking into the community and so forth we do have a 17 person technical advisory committee for this project and the beaches project Vice Mayor Cummings and Council Member Myers are on that technical advisory committee along with a number of other community experts and residents the beaches project is funded by the coastal commission with some supplemental funding from the American Geophysicist Union we have an $82,000 match $8,000 cash and the rest is labor we also are delivering currently I'm sorry reviewing right now deliverable number one which is the policy and strategy analysis we will then be turning into our socially vulnerable populations impact analysis and I'll share with you how we're connected with the community on that and then again getting into the adaptation strategies so the scopes of work are somewhat similar on both these projects and we really have benefited from aligning the public outreach together on these projects as well as the TAC involvement in terms of community outreach we've really just finished up the first part of our outreach where we have completed our community visioning we've introduced the project begun to build some relationships and as you can see there are a number of other touch points with the community I'm going to share more about that in a moment one thing I failed to mention are the consultants on these projects so Dave Revell, Revell Coastal is leading the West Cliff Drive project we have Charles Lester, Central Coast Wetlands Group Gary Griggs, Harkasunich Associates Farron Peers Groundsville Coastal Ecology and Middlebury Institute on the Economics so it's quite an all-star team that very same team is being led by Ross Clark and Central Coast Wetlands Group on the beaches projects we have a lot of alignment between who's working on this as well we're really fortunate it's a really expert team this is the outreach we've been doing we really have been doing an all out strategy you can see the top line is the outreach that we've completed to date we had talked with over 200 people at open streets although they estimate 10,000 were there we know 2000 came by our booth because the number of stickers we put out we completed eight focus groups include one with underrepresented groups who were also included in two of the mixed groups we've conducted 600 West Cliff Drive surveys looking at questions like willingness to pay trying to get a value for coastal tourism and how that could be impacted by any of our adaptations we've conducted 105 interviews in the beach flats and lower ocean area really diving in a little deeper on how how flooding is occurring how that's changed over time and trying to make that connection with sea level rise and we've done over 30 talks in the community we are turning into our next phase in the near term with some one-on-one meetings in December with underrepresented groups again getting into kind of the socially vulnerable communities how would they be impacted really trying to engage them and helping us to develop the methodology and tell us how they think this should be done I know you all have received an invitation our virtual reality app is launching this weekend I'll share more on that in just a moment and we'll be having two community workshops and then we'll talk about that later on you know we have identified at least 57 potentially affected interest groups in this project that we have committed to making an individual touch point with every single one of them and are very far along on that we have over 200 people on our email list and that continues to grow we've worked very closely with beach flats community leaders on developing this really tailored outreach for those communities and we have four academic partnerships one with the UCSC coastal science and policy grad program on the focus groups they helped us develop those facilitate them and are now turning to doing a quantitative statistical analysis of the data we have partnered with San Jose State University for the beach flats and lower ocean work and Santa Clara University is doing an erosion study that we're feeding into and taking the outputs from so that's specifically called out also in our beaches project in terms of what are people saying so when we entered into this first phase of outreach we really wanted to build relationships give understanding of what the project scopes are and start to have a conversation about coastal values priorities concerns and uses so one of the questions that we asked are we use some kind of dot activities what are your top coastal concerns what you see almost unanimously across all of our focus groups were erosion and transportation and transportation in a lot of different flavors so that was very interesting we also asked what's the best thing about West Cliff Drive interestingly transportation the bike pad path is one of the best things that were cited as well as scenic views and access to or watching surfing we asked this question in one word what does resilience mean to you this is a little guy looking at our adaptation plan at open streets which we just thought was so cool and these are the universe of words that folks both at open streets and our focus groups have said so we really see that folks are engaged in this process in terms of the VR that's coming up I'm super excited about this this is these are some of the panels that are going to be accompanying our virtual reality headsets here's our fire chief and emergency operations manager at the recent disaster event at the civic where we debuted a kind of beta version of our VR this is very immersive experience that shows what we're projecting in terms of coastal storm flooding and erosion and it starts to build in solutions we're really fortunate to work with Gary Griggs did the narration for the English language version and Ernestina Saldano voice to the Spanish so it will be available in English and Spanish and it will be at the downtown library in a feature exhibit at the front of the library between November 18th and February 18th so again we really think that this has the potential to reach a lot of people it will be out as a mobile phone app in both Spanish and English after the first of the year in its next phase and then last we also are using another creative way to reach people we've been playing our card game that we developed with rink on car called cards against catastrophe in the community really giving people a feel for the trade-offs and the decision making and climate action planning and resilience planning and that's been I've been getting a lot of good feedback about that everything that we've been doing we've been putting on our website so summaries of focus groups we've been going back to the folks that we talked to and say is this did we capture this correctly and correct whatever we didn't hear correctly and post that at our website you'll be able to find this slide deck and many other things including our outreach materials at our website so our next step is identifying feasible solutions for the community to consider and I will be back to report to you after the first of the year on that I'm happy to take any questions you might have on these projects wow well thank you so much for your presentation you're welcome and this is very important work and we look forward to hearing about the updates along the way so we're really grateful to have you here Tiffany in doing this work any brief comments or questions from the council Vice Mayor Cummings I just want to say thanks for all the hard work you're doing on this because it's something that people really care about in the community and have been having conversations with folks and making them aware that we are actually working on this how we're going to preserve west cliff and what sea level rise is going to look like in coastal erosion the one question I did have and I think members of the community might be interested is what day and time is the kickoff to the virtual reality session the virtual reality is going to open we're having a soft launch this Sunday but it officially opens when the library opens on Monday the 18th yeah and just to respond to your comment we hear that very often people are saying we're so glad the city's thinking about this and doing something about it we had no idea that the city was thinking about this so that's great it's also given us the opportunity to hand out the little reverse 911 sign up cards that the police department and fire department has so that people can get alerts for flooding on their phone and so forth so we're really trying to kind of double up on things where we can and achieve some efficiency and making sure people are personally prepared as well I think you should have a superwoman logo on you but Tiffany can talk about reaching out to groups but I heard her present maybe a few months ago to a chamber community affairs committee they were so engaged so impressed and so with the program and so it's the acute interest in this is absolutely across the spectrum and the thoughtfulness and scientific validity of what we're doing is impressive and will help us get to the decisions we need to make thank you for saying that and I should say I'm not doing this alone I have a grad student who's working with me and I have a team of five to ten interns at any one time we could not do all those surveys and interviews without those folks so I'm really grateful for them to them Councilmember Brown colleagues comments and add that I really appreciate the efforts made in the beach flats and lower ocean neighborhoods where the impacts of sea level rise will be really strongly felt and I know that that's a concern and there's a lot of worry and not necessarily understanding about what that might mean and so I appreciate that that's happening and kind of using the scientific study and all of that knowledge and translating that into language and kind of way of addressing the topic in a way that's understandable and people can really engage with is so important and so thank you for all of your work and thanks to your team thank you here here councilmember yeah I just want to recognize your work and just your continual commitment to really just be a leader you've brought the city to a place of real prominence I think in this subject matter I just hear from colleagues around the state they're excited about what you're doing I think specifically with this tie in with our beaches and our recreation area is really it hits people we're literally at home because they use these areas all the time and so to the vice mayor coming point if you spend any time out on west cliff or other places you see the effects of the erosion and so people are really relieved to know that we are participating and doing this kind of cutting edge work so thank you you're welcome thank you Tiffany I'm glad folks are chiming in I'm not going to repeat what they've said but this is like an overwhelming for a lot of people most people as you know both of us being up in environmental studies and seeing all the information constantly coming into us over the years but thank you for taking the lead on this and for continuing to show up and I just urge you to keep the council informed on stuff that takes place changes and everything as soon as possible thanks you're welcome thank you very much right so that then concludes our presentations for this afternoon's agenda I have a few announcements and then we'll move on to our regular meeting so today's meeting is being broadcast live on community television channel 25 and is streaming on the city's website at thecityofsanacruz.com our rules of decorum are on the window edge to my left and it's my job as the mayor to keep the meeting running without disruption and we ask that you respect your fellow citizens when you are inside and outside of our council chambers I'll go ahead and ask if there are any statements of disqualifications today from council members item c none I'll go ahead and see if our clerk has any additions or deletions to our council meeting agenda yes we have two department pulled items from consent number 12 which is the purchase of tasers and associated licenses and number 17 the purchase of two new pieces of heavy equipment so we have item number 12 that is being pulled on our consent agenda by staff as well as item number 17 which is being pulled by our consent agenda by staff so those items will not be heard or discussed they'll be postponed to another meeting okay thank you very much okay I'll go ahead and share briefly that oral communications is an opportunity for members of the community to speak to us on items that are not on today's agenda oral communications will occur at or around 7pm this evening I'll go ahead and look to our city attorney at this time to report out on closed session thank you mayor Watkins members of the city council this afternoon the council convened in closed session at approximately 1pm in the courtyard conference room before going into closed session the council added as a subsequent need item one item of consideration of initiation of litigation circumstances that gave rise to the need occurred after the posting of the agenda and the council determined that there was a need to take action on that item or to discuss potentially taking action prior to the next regular meeting that was a motion adopted unanimously council also heard three liability claims the claims of Roman Felix James Giannopoulos and Donia Maria those are also listed on your open session agenda as item 11 I will be requesting as part of your consideration of the consent calendar that you remove the claim of James Giannopoulos and take no action on it at this time the claim will likely return to the council in the future meeting lastly there were two performance evaluations on the closed session agenda of the city attorney and city manager there was no reportable action thank you we have now an opportunity for our council members to report out on any external boards committees or joint powers authority meetings that they have been attending on behalf of their role here as city council member we had a specific request to hear a report back on some of the work that the vice mayor and myself have been doing in regards to a sort of a matrix flow chart for agendizing items we'll go ahead and share a report at this time on that but we'll go ahead and reserve that after we hear from the colleagues so I'll start to my left council member Brown thank you so the regional transportation commission was established in the 17th in Watsonville and at that time the RTC adopted its public participation plan a final participation plan for 2019 and this is something that we're required to do by state and federal law under our authority to establish the process but I just want to highlight that the RTC staff spent a considerable amount of time and will provide opportunities for the public to engage in programming and project implementation for the RTC including development of our 2045 Santa Cruz County regional transportation plan it seems like a long way off but transportation planning as we know takes these are long term projects very large scale long term projects so we're getting started in that process I encourage the public to check out the Santa Cruz regional transportation commission website for further information on opportunities to participate we also did approve some just for your all of your information moving forward on some repairs related to the Santa Cruz branch rail line particularly in the south county area where major disruptions occurred during the 2017 winter storms and kind of ongoing so that is going to be a major undertaking to make the line the whole line usable in the future and so we're moving ahead on that so as we new segments come online can keep moving forward and I think that's all I have the revenue subcommittee met again we don't know that we have any major updates report to come report to come and same with the high health and all policies report to come on the measure you implementation group which is the city county partnership regarding lobbying around UCSC growth impacts there was as I think you know a proposal to hire a part time organizer that has been on hold for a while but I do want to point out that UCSC is holding some community and campus meetings regarding their long range development plan two of them on Monday December 2nd will be held in the city of Santa Cruz one at the lunch hour one in the evening so I'll give these a city clerk maybe these could go on our they're certainly relevant to the city so maybe those can go on our council or the city calendar the mid county groundwater agency which I've reported on in the past is achieving a major milestone the board will be asked to approve and I believe will approve the groundwater sustainability plan for the whole mid county groundwater basin that was prepared under state mandate that will be adopted at the end of this year and it was due by the end of January 2020 and we are ahead of schedule and it has been brilliant so that's been a great committee to work on regarding the downtown management corporation a couple of things our downtown businesses participate in the think small promotion that happens I think it's November 20th kind of kicks off the holiday season and that's in partnership with the county economic development staff and agency also we met some council members and staff met with people at the county regarding a possible program for livening up some of the vacant windows downtown so that we have some combination of pop ups, art whatever just to get some interest in the pedestrian level so I think that's on a fast track low budget get it done and interested on the part of the merchants to take a real role in that as well visit Santa Cruz county some of the points of interest the tourism income reached a billion dollars this year in the county so that's significant the policy at the hotels is softening we got a report on that the visit Santa Cruz county has launched a new initiative they adopted direction for two new marketing initiatives about a year ago one was for heritage tourism that's been initiated very well received and they are gearing up for an LGBTQ initiative they'll launch in January they've been doing a lot of training and comparing with what other communities do and that we expect to also be very well received council member browne thanks I just one other item that I overlooked but wanted to highlight is the so I'm on the area agency on aging council and the and our director has been really actively engaged I mean one of the kind of most engaged in our team in Santa Cruz in the work that happens in Sacramento and so I want to publicly acknowledge Clay Kent for that work and also let you all know that the state is now undertaking a master plan on aging and so most of the meetings that are the public meetings that are happening are in Sacramento but there is an opportunity for public engagement so if folks are interested that information the draft master plan is available and you can go to the California State Department of Health and Human Services website to go to a link to either read it and review it and also make comments and learn more about other opportunities for engagement this is a really critical issue the goal and the governor and the legislature have made very public that they're interested in producing a plan that really envisions an age friendly California and increase the diversity the number and diversity of older adults and families and opportunities for quality of life enhancements and other projects to acknowledge that we are an age friendly community and an age friendly state thanks for sharing Vice Mayor Cummings so it was last week the downtown library subcommittee met and we discussed kind of next steps with I think we all agreed in order to make a decision about the library and where we're headed with that we'll have a cost assessment kind of design of what a renovation of the current library would look like but I think many of us felt that we would also need an update on what a mixed use structure would look like since that's something that other folks in the communities are interested in so we're looking into trying to find a contractor who can give us what the cost would be for that and what that would look like so that's forthcoming December 13th we don't have the time set officially yet but Jason Arctic Protect will be providing their final report to us on what the cost would be associated with the remodel so we'll have those times on site so that if people want to come to that it will be public there won't be public comment but the public will be able to come and see the presentation and that will be similar to the previous presentation that Jason Architect provided on what the design would look like in addition to that LaFCO the last meeting of the commission unanimously approved the draft service review and staff recommendations for midpen regional open space district the commission unanimously approved the multi-year work plan and the commission unanimously approved the meeting scheduled for the next year and the meeting times will change LaFCO meetings will now be at 9am and the next meeting for LaFCO is going to be January 8th at 9am and I think that's all I have to report maybe I'll just go ahead and we can go ahead and weigh in together on the other items so at the retreat when we were discussing the work plan the vice mayor and myself signed up to take a look at how the agendizing process flows and recognizing there's areas for improvement for everybody and looking forward to having some consistency in expectation on how you get things on the agenda or what that flow would look like so we're working with our interim city manager Laura on a flow chart and essentially looking at sort of the types of coming forward how it will move forward in terms of urgency workflow time of staff to work on the item and then how it would be moving towards a larger kind of broader initiative which would require more than eight hours of work which is essentially consistent with the council policy at this time but more consistency on the criteria essentially of understanding of the types of items forward and so what we're doing is trying to have that consolidated into a consistent kind of approach and protocol that would then go to inform updating our council policy handbook so that we have a better process in place I mean, I'll see if the vice mayor has anything he wants to add to that but it should be coming soon. I think that's a great summary where we've been at and what we've been working on with regards to the agenda so hopefully we'll be able to repair some of the areas where it feels that there isn't consistency or transparency. Thanks, good to hear about the progress on it. Just a little wavery on the timeline soon is kind of subjective so do you have like a specific timeline associated with it because I know that myself and two other council members submitted a gender report to try and get this on an actionable discussion item on the city council agenda for the reason that there wasn't a very clear timeline associated within a lack of information so do you have any timeline associated with it and we can expect to see that report and have it come back for action? Not, I mean, I likely within the next couple of months but it depends on the items that are also on the agenda but ideally it wouldn't require a lot to get on there so if all goes as plans depending on how the agendas open up we'll hopefully have in the next couple of months. Thank you. It's kind of tangentially related to this because we all realize that a new demand for dealing with something displaces some other activity and I wonder if we could just, it doesn't need to be an agenda item we get just kind of report on where we are in city staffing because I think now we're short a planner and I don't need the answer now but I mean we recently had a report on staffing in the police department and I'm aware of some gaps so that would just be helpful. I think the process is intended also to incorporate some of that discussion as part of items coming up and how they relate to the work plan as well. I didn't see the agenda item that Council Member Brown, Council Member Glover and myself put forward talking about agenda review process what you just explained was not really related to some of the issues that we spoke about in our agenda report and I'd still like to see that report appear on our agenda at the next meeting or first meeting in December. There was many other issues involved in what was just reported on. I would just say that you know I think that as we're kind of working on this process if there are recommendations from other members of the City Council with regards to and putting items on the agenda that you know we recommend that you provide those to us so we can incorporate your feedback into this because personally I think that having two separate committees working on a similar item really doesn't make a whole lot of sense but I think that if Council Members have recommendations that they would like to see incorporated into this process that we can incorporate those and continue to work on that as we develop this agenda review process so that would be my recommendation for our colleagues that everybody agreed when we established this committee that it would be comprised of myself and the Mayor so if there are concerns that my colleagues have I would just encourage you all to send us information so that we can incorporate it into this process. And essentially I'll just also add that that was essentially the response that I had to the agenda report that since this work was already happening that the information that was provided by the colleagues that wanted to bring that would be incorporated into our next meeting agenda for consideration. Council Member Glover. Thank you. My concern is just the process and how out of the public eye that it is. This was the first that we have heard about a report back and that is only because we submitted an agenda item to be on the agenda. It also is very indicative of the problem that there will maintain an issue of agenda building according to your timeline months as opposed to being able to move and have any kind of representation or community involvement in that process for months. So I will just echo my concern from before the timeline is very loose and there's no accountability really associated with it and in those months leading up to that it will still have this problem of certain council members feeling like their agenda items are not being prioritized or taken in consideration with the urgency even if they're co-signed by two other council members. So there's a lot of problems associated with that. It's a much larger issue so I would encourage that timeline to be sped up and especially what you mentioned in your report about there being a limitation on staff time to be able to apply it for those in the community that don't know, for a staff member to invest more than eight hours on any specific project that needs direction from the council. So to not agendize the conversation but then to cite the need for additional staff hours as one of your re-evaluation and an actual discussion and conversation like was originally requested then we would have had the opportunity to provide that direction to staff and then giving you that extra staff hours in which you could work through it. So the reasoning doesn't make any sense, the timeline doesn't make any sense and it really is worrisome to me because there are council members here that feel like their issues are not being addressed. I have one additional report back that we met last Friday and essentially there was just sort of a review from the various jurisdictions on some of the progress they're making on housing and some of the updates that they had for us to kind of hear about as well as an update from LAFCO and then lastly I shared that the City of Santa Cruz was supporting the Santa Cruz County Civic Summit as a co-sponsor and encourage the other jurisdictions to do so as well if they were available any little bit would help and it's essentially looking at how we can get our youth involved in the democratic process as well as understand sort of the work of the local elected official and that's going to be happening countywide in January and was proud that the City Council and the City of Santa Cruz offered co-sponsorship and I'm hopeful that the other jurisdictions may as well. Additionally the upcoming meeting that I will be taking place until Thursday and then lastly the Health and All Policy Subcommittee will be returning with a proposal and recommendation soon and so that's all I have. I just have a couple of items let's see I'm on the finance and audit committee for the Santa Cruz Metro we did meet last week and we did pass the 10-year CIP unfunded CIP plan and also a revenue a revenue policy that will be coming to our board this coming Friday one item of interest in the work that we did as the finance committee is we continue to support and put forward $4 million for the Pacific Station project so that will be planning money that is utilized for Metro to continue to work with the city on developing a plan for the Pacific Station affordable housing and combined projects and so that's exciting news the other item I will quickly look at some of the other members have updated some of the items or some of the meetings I was the last one I'll update is next week to talk about further activities surrounding the water quality at Calis Beach we did premiere a short video regarding the work done to date that was shown at the Save the Waves surf movie festival last week at Patagonia several hundred people 200 people I think were there and so it was nice to see our work demonstrated with other stories from around the world with people working on protecting their beaches and water quality and working with communities to to provide clean water for people to enjoy I have asked Save the Waves they are planning to also come give us a similar review of the movie or the video and probably after the first of the year we'll get that scheduled then I think that's it for me Councillor McLeaver none of the committees I've been on have met since our last meeting when we did a report back but just a reminder to the community that our next Public Safety Committee meeting I believe is scheduled for December 2nd Councillor Peruzza our next community committee that it's called the CAG community advisory group it's going to meet again on December 19th but I thought it was instructive that the Chancellor reached out to staff and faculty in a public meeting and she talked about a few things that I thought were interesting we have more Pell Grant recipients who graduated in all other institutions in the United States which I thought was just a really great thing we have 70% of first year students 49% of this year's classes first generation students what the Chancellor stressed was in her own work with the university she wants to improve efficiency and align communication in the organization data informed decision making and I was really happy to hear that she wanted to talk about budget transparency and accountability because we know that UC has had some problems in that area she just mentioned not being caught up in litigation and really had no insight or when we might see some building on campus as far as new dorm space people brought up to her the issues of students sleeping in their vehicles and being ticketed for that she said that that is not in the plan to allow a safe parking area on campus for students and I was able to speak at the meeting I wasn't going to but when she talked about that I thought it really intersected with a city issue and I asked her to reconsider that and she said she would but that's within other committees and she'll take it up the staff the same thing as far as compensation for staff she's talking about staff turnover it's very constant and of course we all know that it's about rent and that's people paying 50 to 70% of their salaries in rent there's actually students and staff relying on food banks and students also getting EBT which used to be known as food stamps but I thought it was a really productive meeting she said that the strikes will continue because there's periodic strikes up there all the time and I know our police department works with the university police on that so that's like an expenditure that we do and it really screws up a lot of things on campus they happen like two to three times every quarter but that's all for that and we have our next CAD meeting December 19th just a couple of updates first with respect to the library joint powers authority a couple of items to note that the board has been discussing one is relates to the staffing model with the library system a couple of reasons that are driving that the fact that the current model is implemented during the recession and driven largely by the need to make a budget adjustments or a deficit that the library was facing and also with the new libraries that are coming online here pretty soon there's really a need to really look at that because some of the library branches are expanding in terms of size and capacity like for example the new Felton branch and even some of the Aptos branch and some of the other branches and so we're having conversations about developing a more appropriate model for the library that has implications on the budget which drives us to the second topic that we're discussing which is our financing agreement with the county which we have one that's been in place for approximately five years will expire pretty soon and we're in a place now where we need to really negotiate that and I think the conversations are going really well with the county our last agreement where the county sort of held back some of the library fund monies we're talking about really changing that back to we're all contributing in a proportionate and appropriate fashion so that it makes the library systems more sustainable so there's progress on that too so those are probably the two bigger issues that we're discussing at the library we had a meeting recently I think just to highlight there we had actually our own fire chief Jason Hayduk to a presentation on the South Bay management incident team and camera call with these discussed here but it's basically a team of volunteer primarily fire personnel but other personnel from Santa Clara county and Santa Cruz county who are available to create these response incident teams to jurisdictions or special districts or entities who face a major event so for example when Gilroy had that shooting incident the team was quickly put together and they make themselves available to provide any number of services that that particular jurisdiction or incident requires like in the case of Gilroy they help put together the communications function but they're available to any jurisdiction to basically assist and come in in whatever is needed so that's just a brand new really needed new resource that's being implemented in our county along with Santa Clara county that's it thank you very much and thanks to everyone for sharing the work you're doing outside of our meetings here on Tuesdays okay at this time we'll move along on our agenda so we have next on the agenda which is the council meeting calendar and this is a time for our clerk to provide any updates to our council meeting calendar if you have anything Council Member Myers I'd like to make a motion to add an item to one of our upcoming meetings so I'm putting the motion up here so I'd like to move to direct staff to contact the county to identify immediate winners shelter opportunities with availability identified by date certain and to bring revisions of the camping as appropriate to provide an enforceable mechanism for addressing nuisance conditions on public property in a matter that is consistent with the night circuit court opinion in Martin versus Boise I'll second that we have a motion by Council Member Myers seconded by Council Member Brown my understanding is this is an item that stemmed from an earlier item that was brought to our attention in a closed session to be on the next council meeting agenda is that correct? I believe as soon as possible we'll make it happen okay so we have a motion by Council Member Myers seconded by Council Member Brown I'm just assuming that there will be a discussion included implicit in the motion is a discussion of what's going on with Camp Ross right now or Camp Ross 2 we've had a lot of people writing and calling us very briefly I think that's inevitable okay but also I just need to admonish the council that because this is not on your agenda for today you can't have a discussion about it it's just for the agenda you really just need to call the question but fair enough to say that I think is on everybody's minds and part of the discussion thank you for that so the motion would be to direct staff to agendize these and with this language agendize this for the purposes of this context under our council meeting calendar item Council Member Glover would that open up the conversation for other winter shelter options that could be enacted by the city during this agenda item or would that have to be a separate agenda item that would be used to winter shelter instead of just pressuring the county I interpret winter shelter opportunities to not just mean those identified by the county okay and then and you said that the conversation of the encampment behind the Gateway Plaza is implicit in this motion or it should be added specifically in this motion I've gotten to the point where I'm kind of nervous about implicit or implicit I would appreciate it if we could add language in there specifically to address the growing encampment behind the Gateway Plaza shopping center is that appropriate at this time Mr. Cundady in terms of the friendly amendment right without any discussion this is a very unusual circumstance that's how I feel about it I would suggest that you vote on the motion and there may be a subsequent motion after your interpretation of it being implicitly possible for a discussion to ensue at that time okay all those in favor please say aye aye any opposed okay that passes unanimously Council Member Glover yeah I'd like to make a motion to agendize for discussion and action the growing encampment behind Ross and the city's participation in supporting its success or whatever you want just discussing it I guess is there a second okay Council Member Kern Mr. do you have something you want to add I just want to add that we just for your information we did put out a statement on just right now on the status of the Ross encampment so that we can inform the community on where we're at with that and we'll continue to do that to provide information on that Council Member Mathews and then Council Member Brown obviously the Ross encampment is on everybody's mind but is not by any means the only growing encampment in the city limits there's Pogo Nip, there's Coral Street comes and goes all over the city we're getting complaints so I think we need to deal with the bigger issue and not just the Ross camp I don't I don't think so before we get into a discussion on this topic I think we've already kind of voted to agendize this as a topic that I think can encompass what the next motion this motion is about to come back ideally the next meeting in November Council Member Brown well I am interested in having that conversation as well so if the if this is about inclusion of a discussion about the Ross camp in that agenda item I would support that if your interest is simply in making it explicit so moved so the clarifying language is that the interest in learning about any updates around the Ross encampment would be included in the item that is was voted on prior to this now motion for the 26th the 26th correct Mr. Mr. Condani yeah okay without further discussion all those in favor please say aye aye I did I brought up the point of discussing the encampments that are occurring throughout the city I think it's fair to assume that in discussing an ordinance and winter shelter opportunities part of that discussion will have to at least be with the thought kept in mind that we have the unorganized homeless encampments interspersed throughout the city and that the situation seems to be becoming more and more visible so I think it's implicit that the council will have an opportunity to discuss not just the Ross encampment but others as well including the one on the other side of Highway 9 so the purposes of how we are right now for this meeting calendar agenda item without getting into discussion how would we proceed under the Brown Act in terms of is that just noted for consensus by the council I think the motion's been made and I believe it's been adopted okay any further comment any opposing okay so that was adopted unanimously okay alright thank you so first up is our consent agenda and we had items 12 pulled from the consent agenda we had items 17 pulled from the consent agenda and we had a recommendation from our city attorney's office to not incorporate the James right the item 11 does not need to be pulled but I would just request that subsection B that James Jeanopoulos claim be removed from the agenda okay so that's noted so only items 12 and 17 have been pulled okay so our consent agenda items are 6 through 16 now with item 12 omitted is there any member of the community wanting to address the council on our consent agenda items I see none are there any council members who wish to speak to the consent agenda Council Member Glover I would like to pull item 6 Council Member Mathews I have a couple of comments on 7 and 10 I don't need to pull them but I would like to make the comments okay any other items to be pulled Council Member Glover I just want to make a comment on 16 okay Council Member Brown I have a question on number 13 okay so we have item 6 pulled from the consent agenda I jumped the gun on the community public comment portion is there any member of the community who wants to address on either item 6 or any of our consent agenda items at this time item 6 or the consent agenda is at large 6 will pull 6 will deal with separately so you're not speaking to item 6 oh yes I thought you were asking if I wanted to speak to that okay why don't we go ahead and take that later okay we'll get you in a second okay so we had a question on item 7 is that correct that was me that was the minutes of the last meeting and it had to do with an item it's on our page 7 dash or hyphen 20 a family amendment this is the public hearing on 190 west cliff and it was having to do with being explicit about the affordable units pursuing a preference for those who live and that reads who live and work and a cruise but my intention and the way it actually goes on the tape is who live or work and that's a pretty important distinction so I talked with the clerk about that so if we can just when we make the motion incorporate that correction that'll be fine and is there any before we move on is there any objection to that change thank you for catching that okay go right ahead and then regarding item 10 just setting the dates for the annual advisory body interviews appointments and reappointments I do notice that there's an appointment for my appointee to the cpva w and I got a communication from my appointee lila kramer there been some just speculations out there about the motivation for her submitting her resignation and she did write to me and I told her I would read this and this has to do with the vacancy so I'm reading now her comment thank you so much for your understanding I'm disappointed more disappointed than anyone about not completing my full term on the commission you're right that I was reluctant to step down as I strongly believe in cpva w's mission and the work we are doing I submitted my letter of resignation from cpva w because my father has been in the hospital seven times this year and isn't doing well he's in palliative care and frequently in the hospital his ill health did not leave me with any available time to continue volunteering as vice chair on cpva w which is the only reason I tendered my resignation it was a very hard decision and not taken lightly so I wanted to share that with council members and the public thank you okay and then there was a question or did you have additional comments on item 16 and there's a question on item 13 13 yeah so this is for those who are watching an item on resolution to revising a resolution for a prior amendment to the general plan acknowledging our local hazard mitigation plan effective date and so I just the question that has been kind of on my mind is to try to get some and I know that the local coastal plan is something that the planning department has been working on for quite a while and is hoping to get finished as soon as possible and we keep giving you additional items which way lay the process so this is not any commentary on the the timing but I'm just wondering in as of now how is the how is this handled is when a coastal item is appealed what general plan applies when there is an item that's appealed I know this has come up as I read it where the local coastal plan is dependent on an outdated general plan so I'm just kind of wondering how you approach that if you could council I'm the planning director and that is correct the in the coastal zone the land use transportation diagram that is applied is from our prior general plan similarly there are a set of policies from our prior general plan that represent the local coastal plan component of our general plan and that reverts back to again portions of the prior general plan and not our general plan we have initiated an effort to update that and we've talked about that a number of times with the council I will say even with the many competing priorities this is something that is very important to the city in terms of getting the most up to date policies in place and the work that West was discussing earlier with the coastal resilience would be updating a portion of our local coastal program to address sea level rise policies in particular and coastal erosion and related topics our intended goal is to move those in parallel so that we can build on the work that has been done over the past few years and have those changes before the commission before the council and then if the council approves it then before the coastal commission at the same or very close timing the grant requires that it's done by the end of next year there's still a lot of work to be done particularly in terms of outreach and coordination with the coastal commission on our overall update certainly constraints in meeting that target but one that we're hoping to achieve thank you thank you is that answer your question? perfect last I have is a comment for item number 16 councilmember Glover yes great thank you good to see really appreciate the work that's being done in rejuvenating and restoring the revegetation work that's going on around some of the different projects associated with the water department so shout out to the water department making sure to revitalize and rejuvenate the locations I just want to make a statement on the record with regards to contracts moving forward I would just urge that we in all work plans of installing and doing revegetation work that is applicable to try and incorporate low income if possible unsheltered or unhoused folks to participate in that work if possible okay so I think that concludes the council comments questions in regards to our consent agenda items with item 12 and 17 being removed any further discussion? seeing none I'll entertain a motion at this time well I'll move the consent agenda I think six was also pulled so I'll move consent agenda with everything except 12 and 17 okay that's a motion by Council Member Matthews seconded by Council Member Myers that incorporates the modification that Mr. Kandadi brought up as well as Council Member Matthews and the correction to the minutes and item 17 I think did the clerk catch that all? okay great alright all those in favor please say aye any opposed that passes unanimously so we'll go ahead and revisit item number six which was pulled by Council Member Glover to go ahead and address this on that thank you so this has to do with the bail schedule associated with fines that are connected to citations that are given out I as the chair of the Public Safety Committee meeting was a little confused to see it on the agenda today because the motion that was given and the direction that was given to staff at the Public Safety Committee meeting was to have the city attorney consider the addition of a study session and the item that would take a broader look at the impact and enforcement of fees and fines on homeless and low-income individuals so it seems I just want to get a little clarity as to why we're voting on this now since we haven't had the opportunity for that more robust study session and or to solicit more community input or involvement associated with that also in the agenda report that was submitted with this item there is reference to the Finlandian model from Finland that has citations and fees associated with an individual's income so I would be interested in exploring that implementation of the bail schedule as well especially pertaining to some of the costs associated with the fines that are listed here which include $1,000 of failure to appear and looking at the analysis that has been put out I think it was in an email by the police chief in a response to a community member but looking at the amount of people that don't appear so the potential impact that could have on low-income folks could be rather large so I just wanted to get some clarity on that as to why we haven't had a study session before this came back before the council or if you could kind of enlighten me on that. Thank you. Fair question. This item is one that comes before the council on an annual basis in which we take a look at ordinances that the council has adopted over the prior year and in order for them to be enforceable we need to provide the court with an update to the bail schedule which lists the amount of the fine that is to be imposed by the court. If we don't have it in the bail schedule when a case comes before a judge the case will just be dismissed because they don't have guidance from the city on what the amount of the fine is. We did talk at the Public Safety Committee about having a broader discussion about the impact of enforcement of the municipal code generally on people who don't have adequate means and in my view that was a broader discussion that I didn't interpret the direction as having it precede council action on the bail schedule which is really sort of just a ministerial action on the part of the council. So I think having such a discussion is a great idea. As the report points out the Finlandia model has not been implemented in the United States and probably or we believe has potential vulnerabilities to a legal challenge on equal protection grounds under both the United States and state constitutions but that being said perfectly appropriate for the council to have a discussion in a workshop or whatever form the council prefers we just think that that is a discussion geared more towards a broader discussion of enforcement of the municipal code generally than it is the bail schedule. So that's how I interpreted the council direction and I apologize if I misinterpreted that. Council Member Glover and Council Member Myers. Yeah, no, I appreciate that. Thank you. This is C. Attorney Kandadi. I think I as well as at least one other member of the committee was surprised to see it come back without it coming for a study session especially since that meeting took place on October 14th. So it seems like we could have if we wanted to potentially discuss structured some kind of a study session prior to this meeting of it coming back and I do want to acknowledge your statement of it just being a ministerial action which I totally understand. My concern there is that in moving forward and approving a ministerial action without adequate analysis of the impacts of people then in the interim after we passed the ministerial action those people that fall through the cracks in the meantime before we hit the study session and before we're able to adequately evaluate it to make sure that everyone is protected from disproportionate impact. So that's just my concern around here and I'm happy to make a motion for us to schedule or to prioritize a study session if that would give clear instruction or how would you like to approach that? Well, I think the council certainly has the prerogative of delving further into this question of enforcement and how we can effectively effectively enforce the rules that the council has prepared for a vast number of different issues and areas not all of which result in citations that are issued disproportionately to lower income or homeless individuals. So for us this is, you're right it's a housekeeping matter and I would just take direction from the council as to how to schedule that broader policy discussion. I would just remind the council that this is not the first time this item's been on the agenda I think it goes back to May or June. Thank you. All right, I would just say and then I know council member Myers has to, like one of the things that I see here is also the fact that we would then we now are adopting some new updates to some of our policies as you suggested for example the flavored tobacco. So I'd like to see this move forward I think adopting this now, correct? The courts would not be able to impose those fines for the vendors who are moving forward with selling flavored tobaccos products with our ordinance in place. Is that correct Mr. Kandadi? That's right. Okay, council member Myers. Yeah, I'll just reflect just as a member of the public safety committee. This is a ministerial action and there's many, many pieces to the bail schedule that have to do with other types of infractions and so I think it's important to move forward with what has become an annual update regarding schedules per new ordinances. I think that we also learned during the public safety committee discussion of this that the court does really consider quite extensively one's ability to actually pay these fines and so there's a pretty extensive program that the court does use with people who do come forward with hardship around doing the fines and so I think that there is programmatic approach to making sure people are able to continue to be successful without having these fines weighing them down or in conflict with their housing or employment or what other kinds of things that they're worried about. So I just want to make sure that that's publicly stated that there is ways that people can get relief from this but I think we're sort of falling out of the realm of the public safety task force or public safety committee when we're starting to move into homelessness and other issues or people who are lower income communities so I just, I hope we can get the bail schedule done and then I think maybe there's a larger strategic planning discussion about some of these other policy topics. I appreciate that, Mr. Condati. No, I think that was a great comment and it reminded me of a couple of things. First is that in many of the additions to the bail schedule that are presented here the fines are actually specified in the ordinance that the city council adopted so we're just taking the policy decision of the city council and implementing it into our schedule. The second point is that judges notwithstanding this technicality of having a bail schedule have broad discretion in imposing fines and penalties and if a person takes the time to appear in court and ask the court either for a payment plan which can be very manageable or a reduction in fine due to financial circumstances or the need to attend to a loved one or for work-related purposes, courts are very flexible and really do try to take that into consideration in imposing penalties. So the numbers that are listed here don't necessarily get applied by the court in every instance, particularly when someone takes the trouble to go to court and plead their case. The judicial discretion. Council Member Brown and then Vice Mayor Cummings and then Council Member Crown and then Council Member Glover. Yeah, so I was happy to hear that and it makes sense that the court does and they do consider hardship in paying fines. However, it is discretionary and I think it's worth pointing out that is discretionary and so that is up to individual judges. It's not necessarily programmatic. I like it to be. I would be interested in seeing if there's an additional conversation to be had with the court and maybe the Public Safety Committee could try to work on this to figure out what might be needed to consider an income-based fine method so that we can address those equity issues through some kind of means testing. I understand the concern about constitutionality, but if there's a way to do it, the report back is that they currently cannot do that and perhaps it's something that with some attention and commitment could be addressed. So I'd be interested in the Council, maybe the members of the Council who are most interested in this might pursue that. I also understand that this is a ministerial and cleanup item and so I am inclined to move forward on that today, but I don't want to leave it to just say, well, we'll consider the policy, kind of broader policy questions at a future date without some kind of commitment and I'm happy to work on an agenda item with other Council members to do that to bring it back, but I do want to not just say, well, we'll think about it later and then not go in that direction. I think it is a conversation that we ought to have. If I could just add a little bit more to that. I don't mean to take or make light at all of the circumstances that many people, lower income people, especially have with racking up fines that they're unable to pay and then having that be turned over to collections and we've read about not just in Santa Cruz, but in areas all over the country about what a vicious cycle that can become for people of lower or moderate income and how it really impairs their ability to function in society and so we take that very much to heart and partly as a result of the Public Safety Committee's discussion, I've begun to work with the Chief of Police on coming up with a program to try to rectify that situation in some way, whether it's an amnesty program or some other mechanism that we can use to help people get back on their feet if they are willing to step forward and take some reasonable measures themselves and so I don't have that in a digestible form yet because we've just started the discussion after the last Public Safety Committee meeting but I do hope to bring something along those lines forward in the coming year. It seems that it would be also really behoove us or you and your efforts to reach out to the courts to understand what they're doing, to understand what's available and then any potential partnership or gaps to be filled. We will be doing that and my Deputy City Attorney, Stephanie Duck, is here and she's been spending a lot of time in the courts lately and she's going to be part of that discussion and in part of the communication with the judges, public defenders and the District Attorney's Office so that we can hopefully have a productive discussion about how we can address some of these issues. Sounds like that will be forthcoming. Did you have additional comments to come? Vice Mayor? I'd just like to say that I agree with what my colleagues and the City Attorney are saying around trying to address this issue and look into it more and personally and I don't know how the members of the Public Safety Committee feel but I feel like that's a great forum for having these kinds of discussions and some reason why these types of committees exist for our community so that these discussions can be had by members of our City Council and they can bring back recommendations to us and so I really hope that something is able to be addressed in terms of kind of looking at our bail schedule and how it's set up and whether there are ways to see if we can make this something that isn't disproportionately negatively impacting low-income people. I do, however, looking through this, I've seen that there's a number of updates that I think that we really care about. We have violations for non-payment of relocation assistance for displaced tenants. I think that that's something that we want to see that if there's landlords out there who aren't providing relocation assistance to their tenants that they're held accountable. There's also having illegal short-term rentals. Additionally, as was mentioned earlier about tobacco, so I think that there are a number of things on here that it would be in our best interest and the community's best interest to update today and then we can continue working with the county to better understand how we can revise our bail schedule so that in the future we're maybe coming at it in a different way. So that's kind of why I'm feeling like we need to move this forward today and continue these conversations moving forward. President Wilkham. Thank you. Thank you for what you said, Tony, too. I appreciate that type of thought that you and the police chief are putting into it. I'm just wondering, looking at the thing, sometimes it says may be charged as infraction at discretion of city attorney. For example, that's 9.36.030. I'm just taking it as an example, and it's on page 6.3 of the staff report. So when it says 15075, is the 150 what the fine is and the 75 is the discretion of the city attorney or the 75 is a new fee? That is an addition. To just provide a little bit more background on this, the municipal code generally provides the city attorney with the discretion to charge any offense that is listed as a misdemeanor as an infraction. And so where we have maybe charged as an infraction at the discretion of the city attorney, that is the result of our office filing a charge as an infraction based upon a misdemeanor citation and having the court say that they can't process that because we don't have an infraction listed in the bail schedule. Okay, so now the 75 would be the infraction? So it's what we do already, but the 75 would be the infraction, right? Okay, and the entering condemned property and failure to appear or post bail, are those new fines or are they all been updated? I don't see a previous, but they're the first two on page 6.3. I don't know if you have the same thing that I'm looking at. 4.02.080. One and three. Yes. In addition to adding municipal code sections that have been amended by the council over the prior year, we also almost every year identify violations that weren't for whatever reason incorporated into the bail schedule. So this is just correcting a clerical error. To me, those two aren't the kind of things that I would like to see go forward as far as what we're doing here. That's $1,000 on each offense, and I want to compare that to the... Was the surf school changed or has it always been 100, 200, and 1,000? The surf school penalties are specified by the municipal code. I know, but has it changed from... I thought it was 1,000 before, and now I see for the first offense it's 100 and the second offense is 200. It hasn't been changed recently. And why wouldn't we go for a entering, condemned property 100, 200, 1,000? Why would we just go right to 1,000? This is the circumstance that arises when the building department determines that there's an immediate hazardous condition, such as faulty electrical leaking gas that constitutes an imminent hazard to the occupants of a residence, and it gets red tagged. And so when that occurs, generally in the uniform building code, it specifies it as a misdemeanor with a $1,000 fine. And as with respect to the mayor and vice mayor's comments about, you know, maybe moving forward with flavored tobacco or with short-term vacation rentals or other things the vice mayor mentioned, can we just move forward with certain things that council members want to move forward with now and then later after our study session bring this back? I suppose that's up to the discretion of the city council. Okay, maybe we could pause and then entertain a motion after we hear from the public in the interest of time with that, unless you had additional questions that you needed to have answered. Well, I just wanted to say that I was hoping that the council might direct the Public Safety Committee also to meet with the courts and have that discussion as well to find out, because I haven't seen any numbers. I don't know how many people are, you know, that they're dealing with as far as infractions and then what the judges are deciding. It's not clear at all. It hasn't been made clear to the Public Safety Committee at least or to this body. Okay, why don't we go ahead and pause and then I know council member Glover wanted some to say and sort of advice from our comings. We'll go ahead and see if there's any member of the community who wants to address us on this item. This is item number six on our consent agenda. Please come forward and you'll have two minutes. Good afternoon, I'm Scott Graham. The problem I see here is what's been addressed is the, these fines affect people with very little means a lot more than somebody that has a good job and is pulling in, you know, working for Google or Facebook or somebody and pulling in big bucks. The other thing is that this bail schedule as listed in the staff report is kind of dishonest because it shows like say there's a $20 fine for doing something. Well, actually, if you go to court, there's all these court fees that get piled on top of that, which turn a $20 fine into a $200 fine and that becomes even more unreasonable for people with no means. So there's got to be some solution either that they could go to the finance office and pay this $20 fine and not have all these court fees piled on top of it or do something to reduce these fines and the court costs that are astronomical when you consider a $20 fine turns into a $200 fine. So if there's some way to alleviate that, it would go a long way to helping people with no means or very little means. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Seeing no other members of the community, we'll go ahead and read. Oh, would you like to speak to the council? Please come forward. Is there any other members of the community wanting to address us on this item? Please come forward. I mean, if there's others, you can welcome to line up to my left or if you're our last mic, you can be our last over there. Go ahead. Hi. Okay. This doesn't affect me personally but it affects a friend of mine. A friend of mine was accused of committing a crime of assaulting their partner and gone into a verbal argument and they were arrested for this crime. They went to court and they had issues with missing work because they had to go to the court case for this crime that they did not commit. Ultimately, my friend had to pay bail for the crime that they did not commit. That meant because they didn't have the money, they had to go to a bail bondsman and they had to pay them a percentage of this fee. Then later, when this person went to court and they were acquitted of this crime, they still owed the bail bondsman money. And this is a person who has low income who was previously a member of our community who is now no longer a member of our community because this person couldn't afford to pay bail and had to miss work for a crime that they did not commit and they were not recompensed for this loss. So, thank you for listening. Is there any other members of the community wanting to address this on this item? Christine, then you'll be our last speaker. Hi, excuse me. I'm Mike Rotkin, a citizen of Santa Cruz. I'm just responding to something that Scott Graham had suggested to you about the court putting its fees on top of the bail scandal that the city passes, which is definitely the case and it's many times more than the actual bail fee the city passes. I tried to address this issue when I was on the city council decades ago. The reality is you have no choice but to go to court. A person has the right to go to court to defend themselves or to be found guilty or innocent of whatever they've been charged with. So there's no way to have the city apply a fine that doesn't have ultimately the courts making the decision about whether it's fair to find them at all. And once you find them, the court controls what their court costs are. I tried very hard to sort of say, well, it's three times or 10 times as much for the court cost added on. We have no control over that as a city. And so while it seems like a great idea, it's ultimately not a fruitful path to sort of go down, you're going to have to look more at the issue of what kinds of things could be done in lieu of giving people fines or things like that, which are possible, but that's one that won't work even though I appreciate Scott's suggesting it because I thought it was a great idea myself. It just can't be done. Thank you for that. Okay. And seeing no other members of the community, we'll go ahead and return back to the council for action. Council Member Glever and then Vice Mayor Cummings. Thanks. So first, I want to compliment Mr. Graham on his shirt. That is a fantastic shirt. Super relevant in today's day and age. So I just want to assure it was mentioned by Vice Mayor Cummings. I totally agree that there are things on the bail schedule that we want to move forward. Absolutely. So I don't want to hinder or block our ministerial responsibility, especially to issues, say, like protecting renters and holding landlords accountable for some of the different things that may be taking place in our community. So if we can figure out a way to pass the majority of them, except for some of the more problematic ones, like the ones that Council Member Crone brought up and then refer them to the Public Safety Committee, I think that might be a good way to move forward, at least for those first two, which were inhabiting a condemned building and then, I think, failing to appear in court. Yeah. And then also, just to, I appreciate the perspective of Attorney Kandadi as well as some of my colleagues up here on the Council with regards to the courts and their willingness to forgive fines and everything. I personally went on the court website and kind of pretended like I was someone that was trying to find how to get my fines reduced and even getting to the page where you have to put in your citation information to find out your fine was a little confusing for, especially for someone that may not be used to using technology. So if there's a liaison or something, then that is another reason why I think we should have a clear conversation with the courts and as maybe not to change the fee system on their end, as Mr. Racken just mentioned, but to be aware of the amounts that, or amount of times or the frequency or the data just associated with the forgiveness. Also, there was the term used for someone they just have to take the time to go to court. And I was recently at a public meeting addressing the issue of homelessness where the main kind of coordinator of the event who works at Housing First or Housing Matters, rather, which formerly the Home of Service Center, said the quote that experiencing homelessness is very time consuming, which was very, it stood out to me because for what us might be a mourning in court, which isn't that big of a deal, if you're someone that's experiencing homelessness, you have to find a place to store your belongings for the time that you're in court, as well as having to potentially miss a food distribution or other kinds of things that are associated with someone that is surviving outside. So I think it's really important. And also something that Mr. Graham said doesn't affect people who work for Google. I think that's very relevant, especially with the entry and occupying a condemned building. Now, I get that it's reg-tagged for health and safety issues, and I get that that's there for a reason. But if someone is looking for shelter, say out of the elements, and then has to take refuge in a condemned building to immediately go to a $1,000 fine, which is not something that's going to affect someone that has a affluent income, should be something that we're taking into consideration when we're looking at these bail schedules. I'm happy with most of them. There are some that are concerning, so I would like to make a motion then, unless you have something that you want to say before then. I just want to point out that the entering or occupying a condemned building citation is almost always issued to the property owner who has a building red tagged and attempts to enter it to do work on it or something of that nature. I've never heard of that being enforced against a person who's seeking shelter because they're homeless. Totally. I think with the study session that might be amazing. But in general, then I could make a motion so that we move the proposed bail schedule as listed, but withhold the 14.02, 0.080, and 4.02, 0.015. So that is the entering, occupying a condemned building and failure to appear in court. But then move all the other ones and adopt them and then instructs, I guess it would be the city's attorney's office or to schedule a special study session in which to analyze in greater detail the bail schedule and also refer to the Public Safety Committee the opportunity to engage with the courts in a conversation to acquire the data associated with payment forgiveness. There's a motion by Councilmember Glover. Is there a second? Second. Second by Councilmember Cron. Mr. Condati, do you want to speak to the motion on the floor? I think I understand the motion. I'm a little bit concerned about direction given to the city attorney to schedule a study session because I think the Council can set its own schedule and I'll accommodate whatever schedule the Council decides. Mr. Condati. Just to add to, I think also the Councils will be cognizant of your workload and work plan as well as you'll be starting to put that together for the next year. So I think, again, considering that, depending on the scope and what you'll be reviewing, it could be quite a bit of time depending on what issues, not just the city attorney time, but the other staff time that's involved with respect to the various issues that you potentially could be discussed. So just to be considerate of that as well. Vice Mayor, did you, did you, Vice Mayor Cummings, did you want to speak or I had Councilmember Matthews. Well, I was actually going to do two things, proposed splitting the motion and also proposing an amendment that would include back those first two items. I think it's really important that we get this bail schedule on the record. We have heard explicitly about the existing opportunities within the courts to radically alter the fines in the case of low income individuals. But there are a whole lot of fines here. I would like to see us just pass the whole bail schedule intact and then we could come back and learn more. So that would be my amendment, is that we add back into the original motion items 4.02.080, 4.02.090. So that's a motion to amend the motion. And does that need, the amendment need a second? No. Yes, the amendment does need a second. Okay, is there a second to the amendment? Councilmember Brown? I'll second it. Okay. And then Councilmember Brown? In response to some of the information that, some of the things I've heard about the feasibility and I appreciate Mr. Rotkin your input into the potential for negotiating with the Santa Cruz County Superior Court on this matter. You know, that's helpful to hear. It's also helpful to hear what the city attorney's office is considering and also with respect to the staff time involved, I'm wondering if it might be possible to direct staff to provide a report on these items, the item codes 4.02.080 and 4.04015 so that we can evaluate what the impact is for those. In particular, they sound like they're of concern to other council members and they are of concern to me as well. So maybe just asking for a report back rather than scheduling it into a whole study session at the moment and then also directing and then also getting information about any efforts to find out more about how the courts, the process, the extent to which it's actually programmatic that the courts will forgive fines. So I'm wondering if we might agenda as just an agenda item so we can get more information and have some discussion but rather than suggesting a whole study session today. If I could just speak to that, that was part of my desire for separating the motion because I would prefer to go along that line than doing a whole separate study session. I think we can get a lot of information on the flexibility of the courts for reducing the fines or setting alternatives which are significant already and which can be further developed. So I think there's a lot of interest in doing that and probably a focused report on that will get us there faster. That's my guess. So that was my hope was to separate the motion, add back in these two items and then also look fairly in a focused way on the alternative for reducing fines in specific cases. Okay. Mr. Gundadi, I have a quick question for you. In terms of the proposed items to be removed, what do you feel or what are your concerns about not moving forward with those at this time? Well, again, it simply gives rise to the situation where we may have people cited for violations and the court simply doesn't have a mechanism within which to process their citations. So it renders our job, you know, it makes it impossible for the court to implement the ordinances that the City Council has adopted. If we don't have anything. With regard to those specific violations. Okay. Council Member Glover and then Council Member Mathews. Thank you. I will refer us all back to the motion that was adopted by the Public Safety Committee, which was to specifically explore an additional study session that would take a broader look at the impact and the enforcement of fees and fines on homeless and low-income individuals. So I'm a little concerned that we're shifting away from a study session and we're moving into just a report, which is not a study session and which was not the recommendation of the Public Safety Committee with regards to these fines. Also, I would advise us not to move forward with the proposed amendment with the re-edition of the two lines because it would ideally behoove us to move more quickly on the process of figuring out the situations and having that study session. Because in the interim, I'm going to say it again, people will be subject to these fines and however long it takes us to address them. And I don't want to give people that are low-income or currently sleeping outside or seeking survival shelter in an abandoned building a $1,000 fine because we haven't talked about or we haven't looked at the impact on low-income people. Why not? Move the bail schedule so everything else except for those two codes are put into motion and then we can intentionally move forward in doing this. And we talk about workload. What's our job here? Yes, to keep the city going but also to protect our citizens which include the low-income and the homeless individuals that we're trying to serve. And if time is the argument which has been used in so many circumstances when we're dealing with issues of homelessness, we don't have time to deal with it. We don't have enough time in the meetings. I don't like that we're using time as an excuse to allow the possibility of the oppression of low-income people. It just doesn't make sense. Okay. We'll go ahead and hear from Vice Mayor Cummings and then we'll go ahead and start taking the votes on the motion. One of the expectations that I thought was supposed to come out of this because this came to us back in what May it was. And so my understanding was that this was going to go to the Public Safety Committee for review and it's now November. And so there's been almost six months to where people could have looked over these and gotten more information and we don't have any information today. And I'm just curious. I mean, that's disappointing because with all the talk around how we need to be addressing these, there's been six months for people to actually have looked into these and addressed these. And so it's sad to me that there hasn't been anything done to address the concerns around these different fines because there's been six months to do so. So I think that we need to continue having these studies. We need to have a study session on this or I'm sorry, not a study session, but I think we need to get more information back from the city attorney's office, the Public Safety Committee. But I think that, you know, we've had, I would have expected having information come back on these individual topics by this date because it's been six months since we agreed to send it to the Public Safety Committee in the first place. So given how I think, you know, as imperfect as it is in all the constraints that we have, I appreciate the input of the city attorney bringing forward the concerns around the specifics around not having anything in place for some of these items. I'd like to go ahead and just take the vote. We have a motion to amend and then we'll go ahead and hear from you. We have a motion to amend the regular emotion by having the additional, the full package of the bail schedule to move forward by Council Member Matthews, seconded by Council Member Myers. Given the input by Mr. Kandadi, I understand the need to do that and we'll go ahead and vote on that first. I'll just point out there was also a comment about dividing the question. And I'll divide the question after that. The chair has the prerogative to divide the question. I'll divide the question after that for the remainder of the main motion. So a motion to amend the motion to incorporate that. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? No. Okay, that passes with Council Member Matthews, Vice Mayor Cummings, myself, and Myers voting support, Council Member Crone, Glover voting against, Council Member Glover, and we'll go back to your original motion. Hopefully get action on that. Yeah, just to respond to Vice Mayor Cummings' statements. So, yes, it was referred to the Public Safety Committee in May. It wasn't agendized on the Public Safety Committee until October, which should be an issue with regards to the direction coming in from the City Council, the process of it going through staff, and then that making it agend as a recommendation from staff for it to be agendized. So if you're talking about timeline, then it has to do with City Manager's Office. And then secondly, with regards to the study session, we asked for additional information as soon as it came to the Public Safety Committee for us to discuss it. So I'm a little dismayed that you're using the fact that it hasn't come without even asking why it hasn't been addressed or the process or timeline associated. And I can tell right now, when in reality all the Public Safety Committee meetings have been filled with time-sensitive issues like fire safety and the like, and the fact that it hasn't been put on any kind of a time-sensitive agenda by the staff that's operating to help coordinate the Public Safety Committee, it seems rather strange. And now, because of that and your votes, we're going to potentially have tremendous financial burdens put on low and indicative of a pattern that we see with this body, but it's really disappointing. Okay. We'll go ahead and take the vote on the main motion. Do you need clarifying information before you vote on that motion? No. Well, the reason that we wanted a study session is because so many of these fines, it would take a while, like, you know, we could revamp the whole thing like use of steel-jawed leg-hold traps. I mean, when was the, or putting these things here, but also just generally, you know, we know that we're not enforcing the camping ordinance right now, but there's a lot of other things that are being enforced that we hear about. I'd like to know, as to address your point, you know, get some statistics on how many fines are being, you know, which fines are being leveled against folks, you know, is there smoking fines being leveled? You know, the little fines that are in here, some of them, you know, with the study session. All we were saying, you know, just not to not be obstructive at all is there was two that we said we would go for with, you know, everything else we could pass except those two. So it doesn't make any sense to me exactly why we wouldn't err on the side of caution in this case. It's only two and they're really, you know, entering a public condemned building and failure to post bail. It doesn't make any sense to me whether I include those or want to include those, like take them out right now and talk about them later. Okay. Well, for the interest of time, we, I'd like to see if we can go ahead and vote on the remaining aspects of the motion on the floor. If the motion to amend changed the original motion, then we would primarily be voting only at this time on whether or not to pursue a study session. Is that correct? The motion to amend was adopted and you need to vote on the motion. Okay, so we'll go ahead and split the motion then at this time and we'll vote to adopt the amended motion which incorporates the full inclusion of the bail schedule first and then the remainder of the conversation around potentially scheduling a study session for the second portion of the motion. So we'll go ahead and take them vote on the first part of the motion to adopt the amended motion which incorporates the full bail seconding. Your second has no impact into the motion that has now been amended because the seconding of that motion was adopted, was seconded by council member Myers. That was an amendment to the main motion, I thought, and we would vote on that, wouldn't we? Mr. Kandadi. If the council votes to accept the motion, the council should then vote on the amended motion or substitute motion. As amended. Is that impacted by council member Crohn's interest in the draw of the second? I don't believe so. When do you vote on an amendment to the main motion or not? How did we accept the amendment? It was a motion to amend by council member Matthews seconded by council member Myers. The motion that you voted against. The council voted to amend the motion. That was a motion to amend by council member Crohn. For the record, council member Crohn withdraws his second for the now amended motion, but we'll go ahead and take the vote on the motion. We need a new seconder. Is that correct, Mr. Kandadi? Let's just put the motion. Council member Myers will second the amended motion to adopt the full bail schedule. Any opposed? That passes with council member Brown, Matthews, vice mayor Cummings, myself, and council member Myers voting in support. Now the second split portion of the motion, which was council member Glover's motion, is still I'm assuming seconded by council member Crohn. Is that correct or did you withdraw your second to that as well? What are we voting on then? It's the second portion of the motion. All those in favor please say aye. Opposed? No. That passes with council member Brown, vice mayor Cummings, Crohn, Glover voting in support of a study session, council member Matthews, Myers, and myself voting against at this time. I have a question or maybe a comment about that. It seems to me that given that the initial direction was from the public safety committee and I believe council member Glover stated that another public safety committee meeting is coming up on the 2nd of December. I think it would be my recommendation to bring this issue back to the public safety committee on the 2nd so that the committee can give some direction as to the scope of the information being sought for the study session because we were asked to attend and present the bail schedule at the October meeting. We did that in a study session was scheduled but I think in order to provide useful information to the council as part of that study session the public safety committee may want to give some direction as to what information it would like to have at the study session. Is there any objection? Is there any objection to the recommendation? Question. So the intent is that the study session would be for the entire council and not just for the committee. Is that correct? That's right. I don't know how to write that report. I agree and I think there's probably a good deal of information that will be a helpful lead up to a lot of things like smoking and alcohol and stuff like that. I know just from direction given by council and experience a lot of that there's a warning before there's any citation. So I think it would be helpful just to get the big picture of how those are administered enforced, et cetera. I think that if there's consensus from the council that if that is further clarified by the committee and then brought forward at a future time that seems appropriate to me unless there's any objection. I don't see any objection. The only additional comments I would add is that we have a lot of big issues to address and one of the issues was recommended to have a study session on housing and the housing blueprint subcommittee come forward with some of the recommendations that were brought forward for that group. So I think it would be helpful to have a study session on housing and some of the other aspects of all of the different items that we could have a study session on at large. So with that we'll go ahead and conclude that portion of our meeting and move on to the remainder of our general business items. So next up is the consent public hearing. These are items 18 through 20 on item 20. Okay. All right. Is there any council members who want to just only make a comment on items 18 and 19 on our consent public hearing agenda? I'm seeing none. Is there any member of the community who would like to address the council on item 18 or 19 in our consent public hearing? Okay. Seeing none we'll go back into the council. I'll go ahead and see if I can have a motion on the floor. Council . I'll move item 18 and 19 on the consent public hearings. Seconded by council member Mathews. All those in favor please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay. That passes unanimously. Okay. Item number 20 on council member Cronen. Yeah. I had some questions just about in terms of the low, very low and extremely low and where do we err on when that's on page 20.1 and then on page 20.4 we talk about making it available for low income households. So I'm wondering when the very low and extremely low kick in and how is that part of our ordinance and what we're requiring of the developer? So we have our team here coming forward to answer your question. Good afternoon. Good afternoon, mayor, members of the council. Bonnie Lipscomb, economic development director. It depends. Our standard inclusionary is at low income, which is 80% of area median income. When it kicks in lower it depends on the project. So on a case-by-case basis sometimes we'll actually negotiate with a developer. Sometimes they'll put forward certain concessions or public benefits or something like that and then we'll negotiate with them to provide some lower affordability. So that's something that on a case-by-case basis sometimes we will actually try to achieve some lower affordability for some of our projects. But the standard requirement on the inclusionary is based on low income, which is 80% of area median income. Another situation that could be in a density bonus situation when they are looking to do a project with density bonus and that kicks in some very low requirements. Just a follow-up. And then director Butler pointed out that the SROs are also very low requirement. Right. So is that 80% is that like HUD guideline, is that written into our ordinance, is that come out when we pass the inclusionary ordinance I guess in 1979? Yeah. So that's something we can bring forward to you. It is a little confusing because we have HUD guidelines and then we actually have ours which are slightly lower than some of their guidelines based on median income. So those are they come out each year and we recalibrate each year based on what those guidelines are. Sometimes they don't change and sometimes they do. And when we say slightly lower, how do we do that? I'm not sure if I understand the lower. I have to bring it back to show it to you but when we actually calculate it, you know, we have in addition to the set percentages which we have, you know, the 30% no more than 30% of income or if it's low income we do 35% of income. The HUD for median for our area is actually is a little bit higher and they actually recently just raised that that was one of our concerns looking at that and bringing that forward to you. Thank you. One more question but go ahead leave you up to something. Thank you. Lee Butler, the planning director and I would just add one thing in relation to you asked if it stemmed from the 1979 measure that measure as we mentioned before actually sites that 15% of the units produced are affordable to people of average income and averages substantially higher than median and we are at 80% of the median and so our inclusionary ordinance is a substantially lower it's much it makes units available to a lower income group of individuals versus what's called for by measure O and so I want to make sure that that distinction is clear for the council. My other question was 20.4 letter C fractional affordable housing requirement for rental residential developments with more than 10 dwelling units if the number of dwelling units required results in a fractional requirement of 0.7 or less then there will be no inclusionary requirement for the fractional unit and this is my colleagues I thought I've heard some of you say that you would prefer a 0.5 like anything because that would be right in the middle so we get another unit of housing under we wouldn't and anything over 0.5 we would are you you're asking it was a question because this slipped by me and I didn't bring it up last meeting when we passed this okay does any council member want to respond to this question council member Graham well I'm not sure that it entirely addresses your question but the proposals that we voted to send that came from the settlement negotiations but we're not part of the settlement agreement speak to that and those are going to the planning commission and coming back to us so I think that will be an opportunity to have that conversation okay so we will bring this back then hopefully this will come back to 0.5 versus 0.7 well it could be potentially it's possible essentially if I could because I follow your logic that what we passed at the last meeting was part of the settlement agreement agreement the additional recommendations for exploration was going to our planning commission that's going to come back to us and that's when that potential modification could be addressed is that accurate yes that there are several sections in the red line version from the plaintiffs that involve that and so that's going to the planning commission on the 21st and then coming back to the council on December 10th I will just add that the fractional the rationale for the 0.7 also relates to the smaller unit projects for rental this is rental only not ownership and that's specifically because of the 15% inclusionary if you have that requirement rounding at 0.5 that means that someone who is doing a 10-unit project would actually be paying and providing 20% inclusionary and it's really hard to finance that for the smaller projects so you'd be disadvantaging them over larger projects that can more easily be financed so the 0.7 gets at right at that percent so that it's a little more rational so someone that's doing it for example a 12-unit project would round up to two units and it ends up being like 16.6% so it's still a little bit more than 15 but it's more reasonable than requiring 20 of a 10-unit project I get that but I think we just this past council we passed the 20% already so we're right in there then on that one 20% inclusionary we didn't do that at the last that's going to the planning commission that this body did pass it as far as I know it recommended to the planning commission okay is there any member of the community who would like to address us on this item this is item number 20 on our consent public hearing he's seen none we'll go ahead and return back for council action motion councillor Mathews motion by councillor Mathews seconded by vice mayor Cummings all those in favor please say aye opposed okay that passes unanimously alright next on our agenda is item number 21 and I'll go ahead and hand it over to our city manager Martin Bernal to introduce the item as well as the interim assistant city manager Laura Schmidt and Ron so I'll do a brief introduction and then turn it over to Laura and Ron earlier this afternoon you heard from our climate action coordinator Tiffany and I wanted to reflect on that because you know I think you saw the great work that she does when you have an individual who has the expertise the background and the time to dedicate to a particular function a lot of great work can be done and so that really is largely what we're bringing forward to you today our ability to make progress and to do what we really need to do with respect to responding to homelessness and addressing homelessness as well as our ability to engage with our community to be responsive and to be proactive to the way we communicate and interact with our community it really is lacking and so before you there's really two attempts to try to really become more proactive and responsive to this really huge needs that we have in our community and it's an issue that is just impacting us on a daily basis in the community within city operations locally and regionally we have to interact with multiple agencies deal with issues on a daily basis and so having a dedicated individual who has the background expertise would be tremendously helpful to be able to make progress and be more proactive with respect to those issues similarly with respect to our communications function and our ability to again be proactive about communicating with what's going on in the community on a multitude of issues to coordinate issues and to be able to better plan for and address engagement activities events that sort of thing is really needed in the city. Right now we're trying to do with some of our existing staff which also hampers our ability to be responsive to all the other work that we have to do for the council. It limits our ability so this has the other benefit of allowing our analysts for example who's now trying to do two jobs our assistant to the city manager also is trying to do two jobs who can then really focus on the council priorities, the council goals the council work plan because right now we're very very limited particularly on those issues that involve our department coordination and facilitating teamwork and moving things forward. So that really is kind of the overall goals but I'll turn it over to Ron and Laura now to kind of give you specifics about the positions and how they'll be funded. So regarding the homelessness response manager and the communications manager so the first position of the homelessness response manager is a new position so the agenda report asks you to establish the position and then fund it. The communications manager that one was an existing position that was titled the community relations manager and we have retitled it as a communications manager and added scope of services and scope of the job description to be a little bit more strategic and encompassing of all the different functions in a public information office and then we're also asking you to fund that. I will hand it over to Ron and he'll give you an overview of the work that he's done on the homelessness response manager job description. Thank you Laura. Mayor and members of the council Ron Prince, special projects advisor for the city manager's office. So today we're pleased with presenting this recommendation for the creation of the homelessness response manager for the city. The recommendation has been several months in the making and it's actually reflected in your six month work plan specifically to quote one of the goals was the development of a sustainable and focused effort on coordination of city and county homelessness initiatives. So in response to that goal this new position is intended to fill a much needed void that the city's overall we're currently experiencing with response to homelessness issues and over the past several years the city has studied the issue and developed comprehensive lists of recommendations and strategies to help prevent and mitigate human suffering experienced by the unsheltered population and while staff from virtually every city department has been working on different aspects of this issue it's and obviously it's not just a Santa Cruz issue the entire west coast is experiencing a continued growth in this area and becoming increasingly complex. So after working for several months trying to gain more traction on the recommendations that the city's already adopted and trying to develop it became clear to me and others that the much higher level of coordination with the county and our local non-profit service providers is just absolutely critical Additionally one of the key recommendations from the county's focus strategies effort is to increase staff capacity focused on intergovernmental and interagency coordination and with the hope to have a much more effective use of available resources now with more funding coming from the state focused on homelessness issues the county and the city have a glimmer of hope that we can actually make a bigger difference in getting shelter for our homeless population and getting critical health services to these folks If approved today this recommendation will essentially eliminate the need for most of my services for the city but I'm certainly excited to see this effort move forward after several months of working on it and I'll be happy to answer questions later on but at this point I know Laura has a description of the second part of this recommendation in the report so the communications manager we worked with a company called SAE Communications and they did a bunch of industry research for us and the recommendation for them was as Martina alluded to for both of these positions they have the same thing in common as far as us needing to have industry expertise and advisement so somebody whose subject matter expertise is homelessness and somebody whose subject matter expertise is communications these people that would hopefully we would recruit and find amazing employees for them would give us a view into the strategic planning of homelessness and communications rather than the ad hoc just reactive nature of the current work that we do they would be stewards of the relationships with the other agencies in our community and as Martin talked about these positions are critical in their management across the different departments these functions are not siloed within a department there are very much functions that we need to be doing with a city wide perspective and a city wide hat for employees and for our community and for our community partners the communications position itself would encompass a broad spectrum of communications knowledge and that includes media relations what we traditionally view as the communications manager function as well as the modern aspects of website and social media strategy and planning community relations and community engagement processes so workshops using different mechanisms to be able to have community feedback and a feedback loop in place and being able to do outreach and then get that information back into our programs and projects we also need somebody for the emergency communications and crisis communications think PG&E, PSPS very real and probably not going away unfortunately anytime soon and then also overall graphic design and print media expertise all of which we're kind of doing piecemeal and sometimes not at all as either I are the assistant to the city manager or our principal management analyst as we try to scramble and fulfill these functions which are not our core competency obviously so the cost model to support all this what we ended up looking at is there are also community relations specialists that do the more day to day work of the community world communications world so we integrated the communications functions those community relations specialists and then we also applied a shared funding model for the homelessness response manager and the communications manager net net what we came up with was cost savings and because of that we're able to fund both positions with net savings to the general fund while increasing the cost to the enterprise funds but these are city wide community wide positions so working with finance we felt that that was very supportable in an allocations model that this was shared across general and enterprise funds and with that I'll turn it over to the council and we'd welcome any questions well thank you for your presentation I know that you meet with the council members in advance to hopefully get some of the questions answered in advance do any council members have questions for our city manager's department council member Glover wonderful so thank you for that presentation both of you and for all your great work in coordinating the potential coordinators just curious with regards to the recruiting process how is that going is it existing staff that may be allocated into the position or are we going externally because I do know that there may be there's some existing emotions between some especially for the homelessness coordinator which I think may or may not want to revisit the name of that title but the potential issues that exist between existing staff currently doing that work and the unhoused population with regards to trust and the ability to engage with them so what's the recruiting strategy for that and then how will the final decision be made on that specifically the homelessness response right now we'll just talk about the homelessness my understanding councilman that the homelessness response manager will be open recruitment will not be internal will include internal interest in candidates but certainly will be a wide open recruitment and advertise throughout the nation and what is the determination process with that will it be the city manager that makes that decision finally without running by the council or will the council be able to review the applicants and then make a decision based off of because I'm just a little concerned if you know like I mentioned before there isn't allow for the council to be involved in the hiring of city employees so it's just not allowable under our current city charter so this position obviously will have an extensive recruiting process for it an extensive vetting process we don't want to make sure that typically we have a variety of panels that can be involved in providing input particularly involve community members we've done various components to be able to make sure that we have the departments and other stakeholders be involved in providing input and certainly into also assisting with making a decision but our goal is to get again someone who has really good experience really good background we don't have really anybody in the city that has that at this point that can really come in really like the Tiffany of homelessness is kind of what I envision and then I noticed in the job description there was a lot of information about providing analysis and evaluation identifying implementing strategic short and it was a litany of things here but I noticed that there wasn't much verbatim with regards to soliciting input and recommendations from the unhoused community to explore implementation of identified needs from that community so can we include that in the job description to engage intentionally engage with unhoused community members to survey and understand their needs so that we can work on implementing those kinds of solutions as well well council member the catch actually is fulfilling that role right now as far as getting that perspective that critical perspective I would think in part of the role that this person would have would be to work with the catch that would be in existence probably through April at least this hopefully person will be on board by February at the very latest so they'll have some exposure to that yeah I'm not sure if it would be if we start specifying that level of engagement you're right there is a lot here in the job description but anything's possible this actually this job spec was based on other communities all over the west coast that are doing very similar recruitment so that particular language this has been pretty widely and broadly utilized but I appreciate that the reason I ask and you have to excuse my concern is because traditionally especially in the implementation of certain solutions or tools there's been criticism from those that are unhoused that their perspective it's not even what they really need what they need is like socks and all other kind of stuff so okay so there's just shifting to the communication because you answered my next question which is what's their relationship with catch communications manager why is the homeless response coordinator staff position paid less than the communications manager so we did market research within the state of California SAE did that on the salaries for the communications manager and the market research that they provided and the salary ranges we're commensurate with how we set the communications manager one in order for us to be competitive and to be able to hire externally and recruit and attract somebody absolutely okay thank you I understand and I understand the importance of communications I'm a little concerned about the price tag associated with all of this now the communicate or the homelessness response manager totally understand I think that we need to be aggressively looking at how we can not only work in between agencies but also implement effective solutions but I am concerned that with the two groups combined it's $450,000 a year that we're allocating in total to these two new positions this is at the same time when we're you know we could be paying our existing employees higher rates but also we could be allocating more of that money towards emergency homeless services so with specifically with regards to the communications manager and shifting it from a full-time position into a half-time position and having them come in and respond to things so nothing against communications out there for anyone watching I appreciate communications and understand how important it is but when faced with a fiscal dilemma like we are right now anticipating going into a budgetary deficit in the coming year I would encourage us to be just you know a little critical when it comes to allocating these new positions and money and whether it's a new position or it was an existing position that was reallocated or redefined do we want to spend $234,261 a year on a communications manager and we'll have an opportunity to discuss that when we hear from the public and make a motion are there any other questions I have Council Member Myers and then Council Member Cron and then Council Member Brown I just have a quick question you know we have a somewhat complicated reporting structure in our homeless sort of coordination with the county as well as with public health and you know so I'm just curious how do you see the response manager sort of fitting into you know we've got the happen you know we've got all these different committees so I guess what I'm wondering about is really the level of decision making this person will have versus when they would need to bring a policy question or what have you to City Council so maybe just if you could speak a little bit to that. This is a management level position I think it's equivalent to the assistant to the City Manager level and so we expect this person to be really involved with the help and in the various you know high level decision making relative to that that's our expectation again that somebody has expertise but also has the ability to and also with it being in the City Manager's office to bring together the various departments and to work with the officials over at the county and other agencies forward and have some authority to do that. I'll have some comments later. Questions Council Member Kern? Yes thank you. It says that fiscal impact the general fund will not incur additional costs for either the homeless response manager or the communications manager but then in the chart that we're given it says 16.65% is coming out of a general fund. How are we making that up or what does that mean? So all of the figures in the chart are actually fully loaded costs so the salary is the salary assuming that the person is at top of the range as well as benefited so it's the salary plus benefits and then if you look across for the homeless response manager you see the 16.65 16.65% to the general fund and down below the communications manager is at 18% to the general fund so going further down the chart the cost to the general fund for the communications manager and the community relations specialist in the blended integrated model is 121,000 and then the old communications community relations specialist model cost distribution of separate non-integrated was 205,000 so that's the salary savings right there and so that netted out an $84,000 salary savings to the general fund and then the cost of the homelessness manager of that 16.65% is 35,346 and that nets out to an overall 49,000 benefit to the general fund and then if you go across to the general fund it increases to the respective enterprise funds accounting magic a question about why we're not looking for someone with a master's degree or higher city manager Bernal keeps talking about Tiffany and I agree Tiffany wise West has a PhD and she's in a position that I think well why are we just going for a BA in this case why not there's people out there with master's degrees that would also fit the bill and maybe be more experienced I'll just say council member this doesn't preclude somebody with a master's or PhD that's just the entry level that's the minimum to even apply so certainly someone came in with great experience and a much higher level education they're going to be very competitive but this is just the minimum entry qualification but you might also not attract people with a higher level education when they see that you want somebody with a BA I'm always a proponent of not creating artificial boundaries in the fire service for so long trying to make sure everybody has an opportunity to apply so I mean that's a good point but that would minimize somewhat our pool and I wouldn't recommend doing that at this point I mean the climate action coordinator position doesn't require a PhD either I think it's a similar requirement off the top of my head but I think it really is to make sure that obviously we want somebody that's qualified and the higher the qualified the higher the educational attainment the better but we just have it sort of as a minimum standard is what this is required and I'm going to give you an email from someone who said that I agree that these things are important but paying someone $13,152 a month really that's $80 per hour by my calculation is that correct we're going to pay this person $80 an hour that would be top step I believe so that's all the calculations based on top salary which typically employees don't start at the top salary they work their way through a five step end process my last question would be what if this homeless response manager was answerable as a city manager and the city attorney are to this body that we would allow them a lot more independence and be able to ask questions I've found anyway throughout this whole homeless discussion there's been avenues pursued and avenues blocked and I never could figure it out that's somewhere in the bureaucracy that we didn't pursue the sports authority building for example on Riverside North River excuse me when it was available and then I found out later there was other things going on I love to see a level of independence in this person that they could just go out there and pursue good ideas creative ones and come back to the council and share with us what they've been doing and get direction in that way and us to go through a sort of plan for them that was approved by this body and given to that person my understanding and I'm assuming the same as what Martin Bernal will say is that our city charter has us the manager and the attorney correct it doesn't provide for hire and other individuals it does for the city clerk as well I don't like us leaving that out all the time Council Member Brown any questions I guess a follow up because Council Member Meyers asked one of the questions that I had just to clarify so basically what we're looking at here with this position would be and I appreciate that the job description looks great kind of more expansive and proactive efforts on behalf of the city kind of through the same channel so the same kinds of questions that come to the council with the city manager's office the current work you all do would be coming to the council so no change in that but we would just have more kind of expansive proactive activities with this position in terms of the kind of chain of command and you know all of the questions that Council Member Crown was also speaking to right the position would be in position in the city manager's office the communications manager the recommendation from SAEs that report directly to the city manager because it just needs to have that interaction with city manager and with executives and be involved and knowledgeable and kind of up to date on all the issues that happen with respect to the homelessness response manager believer is that reporting to the assistant city manager yes it's reporting to the ACM assistant city manager and but would obviously be also involved they would have more time full time time to really focus on the issues think right now part of the challenge is that we've got people splitting up their time and trying to make time here and here just having a full-time person would make a tremendous difference having them have some background and experience of knowledge on you know effective homelessness strategies and also would make a tremendous difference as well so all those things I think would just really now with respect to their workload and what they work on and policy direction that will continue to come from the from the council and will be reflective of the council work plan and whatever strategies and direction they'll be there to implement and to follow that direction as well thanks so I guess what I was getting out there was just to clarify that it wouldn't necessarily have any impact on the work the decision making the council does with respect to the work and then another question that I had was related I guess a follow-up to council member Glover's question about the hiring process I was going to ask about the use of community panel or community panels for this process I know that that has been that has happened in the past and I've heard really good things about that as a process so that I just want to clarify that is something that you're looking at you're intending to do so that there's some yes talking to the HR department that's exactly what they recommended we have multiple panels great thank you are there any members of the community who would like to address this on this item please come forward okay if you can't please line to my left you'll have up to two minutes okay Garrett Phillip Santa Cruz I don't really necessarily have any opinion on whether you should or shouldn't have these two positions but it appears this new six-figure homeless resource manager position is paid for mostly out of water sewer refuse municipal income is that right sounds like executive action should be based on American principles your actions and as water sewer and refuse our government monopoly income from charges for these should be exclusively used for those city services not for profit and not abusively used in this manner whether they are have been in the past as I regard this position as having nothing whatsoever to do with those you may say that all departments interact with helms people but that's not really true I mean I encounter homeless people but so what you know water sewer and refuse charges are not a slush fund with blank check unlimited application I regard this position as an expense of a social program and somehow ideally it should be funded by the state or fed and the city share of property and sales taxes should only be used to fund core city services in principle this is because only the fed has constitutional authority for welfare and has the most fair progressive income tax base with proper scope to draw from also the city's tax base is regressive levied on a small group of people and apply it or proceeds for utility bills from an even smaller group of city residents whose unrelated water refuse and traps trash usages arbitrary to this position has won or any of a potentially unlimited array of social programs that ideal political ideology could dream up is in principle wrong considering the city's massive increases in income over the last 10 years with a still overall surprising deficit position with accompanying cuts to city services recent astronomical water treatment and water rate increases past and currently requested huge debt accumulation for water infrastructure one wonders where all the utility money has gone if it's not enough and what kind of reserve planning is in effect or if principal use of the people's trust of their money is justified thank you I don't know what you all be thinking or talking about check this out think about it like this you talk about giving all this money to somebody ain't in the field probably never been homeless they don't know what that is why not flip the script there's people out there already experts and know how to use funds put it over here for this reason because it's right 200 grand you paying them 200 grand for a salary Moses $80 an hour let's say we took somebody who's homeless and been dealing with this and paid them $50,000 and we pay another person in this section part of the city county $50,000 and there's another person over here you got four people with $200,000 you didn't save $200,000 I mean $34,000 $35,000 right there and you got people soldiers they boots are already on the ground they in this they know it because they feel it they wear it instead of let's experiment with this he's high he's intellectual that ain't feeding me that ain't helping me well it's gonna take a day or a month to do this well this person over here can do it in an hour they already in the mix flip the script we got this person a job that gets them out of the people who are homeless that you all say you're trying to help they know these people because they hands on I got respect for you I'm listening to you and the people are developing programs that actually work saving $40,000 $35,000 for Pennsylvania salary who has no clue what they're doing coming in and they having means with you well this is what we're gonna do time is up next speaker my name is Sandra Larson and I work with as a mental health advocate I'm curious I'm aware that you receive $10,000,000 to address our homeless fund last year and I'm curious if this money is coming from that or what is being done with that $10,000,000 in terms of addressing the homeless situation it is nationwide not just Santa Cruz and personally I had a really hard time sleeping at night when it was windy and raining and those are human beings there are most fragile section of our society and yes there's a divide here where people say oh they're addicts oh they want to be that way no one wants to be an addict trauma is the root of addiction and these people need services yeah $235,000 a year is I mean yeah PhD whatever but no one's an expert in this unless you're living it and what we need to do I mean the rains are common these are human beings who are again going to be out in the cold, wind and rain not by choice but by us not having mental health services addressing this or you know tiny homes or you know showers there's things that we can do and with $10,000,000 I was hoping to see something in place by the time the rains hit and I'd like to know what's happening with that $10,000,000 and what we can do right now to avoid what happened last winter because it's shameful really shameful thank you I'm Mike Rotkin a citizen of Santa Cruz four quick points number one if in response to one of the earlier speakers all the departments in the city have to deal with a homeless issue ask the people in the public works department to clean up after the mess that happens all the time ask the people in the water department that are dealing with the issues that are happening up in the watershed areas of the city I won't go through the whole list but it's a citywide problem and I appreciate your approach to this because it's a critical function homelessness is almost certainly the biggest issue the city is facing along with housing and trying to do something about it it's really critical and worth some money because it won't happen for free second point the city charter sets out that only right now that the city clerk and the city attorney and the city manager the three people the city council controls you can't change that without a vote of the people just to put that away as an issue and it's not a good idea to have somebody serve two masters as an employee actually work for somebody if you don't like their work you fire them or you fire the person that hired them but you don't have somebody to respond to two different people with very different ideas about what should be going on or two different groups third point you don't get these coordinators on the cheap you need someone to communicate with the people in the city about what's going on I follow the city really closely I don't have any council meetings I don't come down to the meeting anymore but I still follow what's going on and I don't know what's going on I have no idea what we're doing what we're not doing and having a coordinator that makes the services happen but someone that explains what the city is up to what's our strategy what are we going to do is worth paying decent money and finally I have a PhD a lot of people have skills you should be hiring for this job someone that's shown that they know how to respond to these homeless questions and not just because they have a degree next speaker is there anybody else who would like to address the council on this item you do? you'll be your last speaker hello my name is Emily Sinclair I've been studying this quite carefully and I don't know if I'm correct but my impression is that the county is pretty much responsible for what's going on the responsibility rests with them they receive about 1.3 million a year to run an office of homeless coordination that's one bureaucracy they also there's about 2.3 million a year that's allocated by a county that goes into the HAP homeless advisory program this is basically the money for homeless services 2.3 million a year that was extended by the 10 million emergency grant from the state federal sources which was distributed within about a week so basically you're looking at an allocation of 2.3 under the county 1.3 is already going into a bureaucracy to run this there's no money there's 800 people living on the street 1600 across county it's an emergency you've just modified the city charter the municipal code to allow for encampments in the Harvey West and on the Benchlands I don't think this is going to work something with the county a coordinated program the residents not going to tolerate this and there needs to be money and you can pay 400,000 it seems fairly cost effective this is a bureaucracy we need the money to build the emergency shelters and they have to go up by next year 2020 alright thank you next speaker are you interested in speaking on this item as well okay you'll be our last speaker good evening I'm Scott Graham I'd like to address the communications manager first the police department has a spokesperson and I don't know if that's a part-time job or what but it seems like that person could also do this job because the spokesperson for the police department is only on TV and in the newspaper when there's some big police action happens in town and I don't know what she does the rest of the time but she could be the spokesperson to the communications manager and do both of those jobs I would think and that would save the city a bunch of money if she was able to do both jobs and as far as the homeless response manager I would hope that this job would be very autonomous that it wouldn't be necessarily just a rubber stamp of what city staff and the city manager want but a person that would be out there coming up with you know searching out new ideas and things that haven't been tried yet in Santa Cruz and trying new things to alleviate the situations we have right now with the homeless and according to the thing in there about what their resume should be it said something about three years of having worked for the homeless so it seems like possibly some of the former directors at the homeless resource center would be the people that might be qualified for this job like Ken Cole or Karen Gillette so maybe you should reach out to them and see if they want the job alright thank you you're our last speaker City of Portland just recently hired homeless coordinator type something akin to this position the reason is one reason is because 52% of the arrests in Portland are homeless folks so their first contact so these folks have the police department have very solid experience with the homeless population there in Portland so I just suggest maybe looking at shifting this position perhaps to a beefed up community one of the community service officers that we have with the police and looking at it from you know in that department that's all thanks alright that concludes our public comment if you have any questions I'll just throw a motion out there I'm going to recommend the resolution amending the classification compensation plans for FYI 2020 budget personal and complement for the city manager's office by approving a new job classification with an associated new position of homeless response manager and not titling the existing community relations manager classification to communications manager and discussion of hiring a community relations manager until the mid a year budget review there's a motion on the floor by council member Cron is there a second I'll second seconded by vice mayor Cummings for the discussion council member Mathews and then councillor I'll oppose this I think there's been just a huge amount of thought going into the contemporary needs of both the city manager's department all the departments coordinated together and council having good access good flow of information back and forth and I think this this readjustment makes sense it's not etched in stone but I think for the needs that we have now I would prefer to support the entire recommendation council member Myers yeah I'll echo that sentiment I think first on the communications position I think just the last couple of months and watching other communities in our state deal with the threat of fires the electrical shutdowns we in my opinion I think one of the the weaknesses that I've seen in our organization is communications and we've assigned it to various people who either may not have the expertise or it's assigned as an additional duty I think that our ability to communicate with our community is very hampered right now and I think it's a really important position to be in place and I don't think we should wait six months we have a lot of important topics coming up that I'm sure our community will want to understand the ins and outs of and so I think that the position is really important and is critical to put into place immediately on the so I would support also both positions in the motion and so I won't be able to support the motion as proposed just briefly on the homeless response manager I was a little bit on the fence about this but I am supporting it and I think we really need a professional clinical mind around all of the needs that we need and I'm pleased to see that in the description that we have expertise sought with regards to mental and behavioral health and other qualifications so I think it's a good fit for us and I think we need both these positions very soon. I'll just say that as long as I think my entire time on the council communications has been a challenge for our city and I think that this is an opportunity for us to prioritize that not only communications internally but communications externally as well with our community members so I won't support not moving forward with that position that's a position that I think I've anxiously been wanting to see filled. I do support the homeless response manager position although I will not be in favor of not pursuing the communications manager as proposed by the motion on the floor unless there's any further debate for clarification council member Glover and then council member Croner I don't know if you have anything. Yeah I mean it just struck me it was a kind of suggestion by Mr. Willis with regards to splitting the $234,000 into multiple positions and then figuring out a way to give someone with lived experience a job and insight to be able to provide a paid position in acting as a liaison between the city and the population outside so I don't know if that's necessarily appropriate in this moment because of all the work that's already been done by the fantastic planning staff and putting it together. I do think it should go on the record of me feeling that that should that that's something that I think we should be exploring is funding going into the hands of people that have the lived experience that have the existing relationship out on the street and who can ideally adequately and intelligently get the information that we need to implement programs that are actually going to impact people's lives. I don't know if that's the latest 10 after so for we could have a break for dinner. So if that requires maybe just hearing from the public for the second item and then deferring action until later that that might have to be the case. So unless there's any additional comments for clarity to move the item, I'd like to go ahead and see if we can do that. I have Councillor Cronin and then I have City Manager Martin Bernal. Well. So I think that should be, can we call the homeless response and prevention manager. I would put that in the motion if it's okay with the second. We can reconsider the job title. It has gone back and forth quite extensively and we understand the concern raised as far as the proactiveness piece of it. So yeah, okay I understand that you're just gonna take that as a I would take it as a suggestion because ultimately the work of the person really matters if it's already gone back and forth personally. But you heard what maybe prevention to and think about it. Personal preference. Yeah, we were just simply trying to make a distinction and there's a lot of confusion in the community about the role of the city versus the county. And we're not in the direct services business. Although what we do is support rapid rehousing and a lot of preventative measures as much as a city can. One of their thoughts was to, and we did play with several different names, but was to make sure we made the distinction between county and city. I appreciate that. I'll call the question. Second. I just wanted to clarify that with respect to the costing here that the homeless response manager position adds to the general fund. The communications manager reduces the general fund. So the net, the reason for the net savings is because we're saving from the communications manager. Just to be clear about that. Okay, we have a motion to call the question. The question is. And the question is, would you like to repeat the motion on the floor? My understanding in the motion of the floor is to move forward with the hiring of the homeless response manager and to postpone the hiring of the communications manager position for another six months. Is that accurate? Postpone, but also the discussion and the hiring of that person, yes. I think it was mid-year. Tell me. Which happens in January. Okay, okay. Okay, all those in favor to call the question, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay, that passes unanimously. All those in favor of the motion on the floor, please say aye. Aye. All those opposed? No. That passes with council member Cron, Glover, Brown and Bismair Cummings voting in support. Matthews, Meyers and myself voting against. Okay, we'll go ahead and hear the next item before we take our dinner break. I realize the number of members of the community are here to address this on this item. I know that this item was brought forward by several council members. I'm hopeful that we can hear from the community and then reserve if necessary the conversation for debate until later, if need be. Okay, do you want to introduce the item briefly or? Sure, so I brought this item forward with council members Brown and Glover. Back in June, decriminalized Santa Cruz, a group of local community members who were concerned and wanted to see this item come forward. They contacted me and they emailed to my understanding a number of other council members. And I decided to start working with them on this. They presented a lot of research demonstrating how these types of plants and fungi have been used by indigenous groups throughout the world. And currently, it's been very much being explored for medical treatment. The use of these kinds of plants and fungi have shown to treat a range of mental illnesses, including PTSD, depression, anxiety, among many others. And by decriminalizing these plants and fungi, we're allowing people within our community to know that we respect their desire to explore alternative forms of spiritual, emotional, medical treatment, and recommend that this be done under the guidance and supervision of trained professionals. I just want to point out that yesterday, I went to the Veterans Day celebration. And I was actually approached by a number of vets who said that there are members of our community who have been participating in some of these clinical trials and have been very much getting a lot of benefit from being able to utilize these types of treatment. And so what this item is really intending to do is decriminalize the possession, cultivation, and use for adult medical reasons. And really allow people in our community to explore utilizing these for personal health. And so there's a number of members from decriminalized Santa Cruz here today who are going to provide a short presentation to the city council. Right. Okay, please come forward. He's going to sit up over here while I'm speaking. And my understanding is it's a brief presentation, is that accurate? No longer than ten minutes, is that correct? Okay, so between about four of us there's going to be a total of ten minutes. And then there are a few other folks who I think want to get onto the sign-up sheet. And who have a few other things to share if that's okay, but you said we'll keep it under half an hour if that's okay. So anyway, I'm Athonia Capelli, and I just real quick want to say thanks to Justin Cummings for kind of championing this and taking it the way you did. And of course to Sandy Brown and to Drew for helping bring it in today, I'm elated to be here and that this is happening, at least it's getting heard. So this talk has a little, there's a lot of areas that I'm unfamiliar with, I'm not a botanist and I don't work in the medical profession. So I do have to kind of refer to my notes here as much as I tried to memorize everything. So, and I also want to mention I do have Dr. Fadishia here, so she's going to go on. And I'm going to kind of watch my time, I want to make sure that I take less than three more minutes. Okay, so 548 kind of wink at me. So, I guess the first thing I want to say is that why decriminalize these so-called plant medicines at emphiogenic plants, emphiogenic if anyone's not familiar, just means that it's a plant that you may be able to engage with and encounter a spiritual experience. And I just learned that word last year, so this is, I wanted to throw it out there in case anyone didn't know about it. So why should we decriminalize these plants and fungi that are on the federal schedule one? So the first thought on that is, as Justin was pointing out, they're used to treat anxiety of all sorts and they're also used to treat addiction and they themselves are not addictive. So that's an interesting way of, I mean, they're very different from any kind of poppy-based plant in that respect. We also feel that for thousands of years, practices across the globe have highlighted emphiogens and their healing and spiritual potential, so thousands of years. This has only been criminal for like 30 to 40 years. So we also feel that we have inalienable rights to engage with these naturally occurring plants and fungi. And it seems like a shame that during the Nixon era, there was this criminalization of plants for no particular reason that anyone can figure out. And it seemed to be, and people have said that it was done as a way to suppress African-American, a little bit of an uprising that was happening at that time, in a way to suppress their activities. So I've got plenty of documentation that speaks to that, but clearly we won't be able to go into that here. All right, I'm going to go on for just like one more minute here if you don't mind. So I just want to talk real quick about decriminalized nature and what the group does. It's actually a nationwide group, and we've successfully decriminalized in Oakland. And we're not related to the Denver organization, but we are now national. And this is concurrently happening in Oregon. We have groups that are doing exactly what we're doing in groups in areas like in Chicago, we've had success in Port Townsend, Washington, I could go on and on. Just real quick, I wanted to speak to our philosophy. We believe in grassroots education and that community is the best approach to addressing the set and setting that is culturally relevant. So having a good mindset and having a good setting with which to use whatever these plant medicines are. We'd like to empower the people to engage with their elected officials at the local level to affirm their own sacred relationship to nature. I think most importantly, we want to decriminalize home grows and natural foraging which would exclude harvesting endangered plants. We believe in the model of grow, gather, and gift. We emphasize exchange over commerce. I'd like to emphasize our inalienable right to develop our own relationship to nature. We encourage equitable access to ensure disenfranchised communities are not left out. We understand statements like we don't have enough research or we need regulations. Ignore long traditions of ancestral relationships worldwide with plants and fungi. And we recognize entheogenic plants and fungi have a long history of use compared to psilocybin assisted therapy. I'm going to leave it at that because I've exceeded my three minutes. Let me invite Dr. Fiducija. Next, if you're ready. Oh, sorry. Hi, my name is Julianne Hodge. I'm one of the co-founders of Decriminalize. Hi, my name is Julianne Hodge and I'm one of the co-founders of Decriminalize Santa Cruz. And I'm also the president of Students for a Sensible Drug Policy at UC Santa Cruz. Hello, Santa Cruz City Council. My name is Sean Cutler. I'm also the co-founder of Decriminalize Santa Cruz. I'm an officer in UC Santa Cruz, Students for a Sensible Drug Policy. Thank you so much for hearing our testimony today and about why entheogenic plants and fungi decriminalization is so important for the community. Entheogenic use has already existed for thousands of years back before American and pre-realization when Europeans were fermenting fruit and barley and such to make alcohol and create their altered states. Indigenous Americans were using ayahuasca and peyote and mushrooms to achieve their altered states. There's also studies that show that these things, that entheogens can be used to treat people with opioid addiction. There are clinics in Mexico and New Zealand where Americans have to travel out of the country to receive this miracle treatment because it's legal for them to have it in their own homes. There's also research done by Johns Hopkins Medical School and the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies that the entheogenic plants and fungi like psilocybin mushrooms can be used to treat PTSD, anxiety, and depression that's uncurable. Also in 2001, Portugal decriminalized all drugs and there have been many benefits to that. Since 2001, as a result of Portugal's decriminalization, the number of people voluntarily entering treatment has increased significantly. Incarceration for drug related offenses has decreased and rates of problematic drug use have fallen. In a moment when the United States is facing an overdose crisis, learning from Portugal's accomplishments is especially timely and valuable. Additionally, the war on drugs is a war on us. Santa Cruz City Council should pass the resolution decriminalizing personal usage, possession, and cultivation of entheogenic plants and fungi because a drug war is immoral. The war on drugs was not created to preserve public safety or to preserve public health or to protect children. Rather, it was created intentionally to imprison minorities, imprison peace activists, and imprison those who oppose the United States military industrial complex. In the 1960s, as drugs became symbols of youthful, rebellion, social upheaval, and political dissent, the government halted scientific research into their medical safety and efficacy. In June 1971, President Nixon declared a war on drugs. He dramatically increased the size and presence of federal drug control agencies and pushed through measures such as mandatory sentencing and no knock warrants. A top Nixon aide, John Ehrlichman, later admitted the following. You wanna know what this is really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968 and the Nixon White House after that had two enemies, the anti-war left and black people. We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or to be black. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities, we could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did. End quote. My name is Daisy Orozco. I'm a US Air Force veteran and a current student at UCSC. I'm an officer for students for sensible drug policy. I've suffered from PTSD, severe anxiety, and depression for many years. But the reason I'm still here today is because I had got to try. So seven, two years ago, before that I abused all my medications. And I binge-drinked every other day. I lost all my relationships along the way. So I really want this measure to pass because it's really hard to try to heal when these substances are criminalized and stigmatized. Thank you. This is part of the presentation that was the organized presentation. And are you the last speaker of that presentation as part of the council member's presentation for the item? Because if not, we'll go ahead and have public comment open up at this point. Does that conclude your presentation on behalf of the council? Yeah, she's part of the presentation. You're part of the presentation? Okay, please come forward if you're part of the presentation. I just wasn't sure. Yeah, Jackie is the last member of the presentation. Okay, I'm going to open it up for public comment, yeah. Hi, my name is Jackie and I'm a student at UCSC and a member of students for sensible drug policy and decriminalized Santa Cruz. My first experience on entheogens was life changing and has been the one thing that directly changed my outlook on life forever. At the time, I was planning to end my life just a few months later, but this experience showed me how grateful I should be and how beautiful life truly is. Research as well as my personal experience shows that entheogens can play a significant role in treating depression and with decriminalization, we could help others who need it experience this treatment. Okay, so if that concludes the presentation, I'm going to go ahead and ask my colleagues to reserve questions until either later or after our evening item. We're going to go ahead and open up public comment on this item until about 10 after, so for about 15 minutes. If anybody wants to briefly address the council in one minute, I invite you to come up first. You'll have one minute. For those that want the full two minutes, you can take that time after, just being kind of mindful of the fact that we're going to close public comment at 10 after six. So you'll have one minute if you'd like to briefly address that. Sandra Larson, again, many of my clients are involved in this, and I just want to say that we don't need trained professionals. This is nature, and we're adults, and we should be able to choose responsibly. Some might not, and that's a part of life. It's already a part of life with pharmaceuticals. Also, I think that our law enforcement officers are overloaded and they don't need to be dealing with drugs. That's a mental health issue, and it shouldn't be criminal. So I'm all for people making their own sovereign choices. Whether they want to do plant medicine instead of pharmaceuticals. We have a huge opioid crisis, and we need hope. And we're seeing a lot of success with people coming back home to themselves and restoring their wholeness in their lives without pharmaceuticals. Thank you. Any other members of the comment for one minute? Are you interested in the one minute timeframe? I'm really interested in one minute briefly. Jessica, can the police pack come for me? Hi, thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure working with all of you and all of you on this issue. I grew up here, it's something that Santa Cruz has led historically in these type of issues. Everyone in the room is familiar now with the history of these type of issues, so we won't get into it. But I just want to say from the bottom of my heart, I would know a lot of people in the cannabis community that they tend to bed every night not knowing if their decision to try to save their grandmother was a stressful one. We've taken that off their people's minds for a bit. And so this is wonderful now that we've got folks that don't have to make that tough choice over mental health issues and things. So yeah, I'm on the WAM board. We're very excited about this. And I just couldn't be more positive about these steps to unravel the racist drug war. So yay. Would you like to speak for one minute briefly? Please come forward. Hi, good evening, City Council. Thank you very much for taking time to address this topic. I think it's an incredibly progressive Santa Cruz to take this consideration to decriminalize nature. I'm a veteran of the United States Navy. And I'm a local business owner with co-founders of SC Laboratories, a cannabis testing analytical lab here in town. And for the last eight years, I've also been on the board of directors of WAM. And I've personally been witness to profound miracles and being witness to healing through plants, through nature, not through pharmaceuticals. And to witness the devastation that pharmaceuticals are bringing into this community of benzodiazepines, toxicotin, the fentanyl, I mean, these should be criminalized production and distribution of them, should be criminalized. And they have plants, decriminalized nature. This is an amazing moment in time and I just really appreciate the consideration and the leadership Santa Cruz County is taking. Thank you. Thank you. And if you have a sign, please lower it just so you're not blocking or obscuring the vision from the person behind you. Okay, you'll have it. Good evening. In 2009, I was discharged from the United States Army after a parachuting accident left me with spinal injuries that were pretty severe. This occurred only a couple of months after returning home from a 15 month tour in Afghanistan. So I was pretty lost. I was broken, I was homeless, I had spinal injuries that I was trying to heal while being homeless. I didn't have the slightest idea of what I was going to do. After my experiences with entheogenic medicines, not only was I capable of dropping my dependencies to alcohol and nicotine, but I became free from the depression that unknowingly barred me from enjoying life. Since then, I have been able to improve myself with a new sense of direction, a direction backed with a purpose of love. With this new purpose, I have helped myself break away from stagnation. Really quickly, I've seen these things heal everything from people that wanted to commit suicide to people scared of dying from cancer. And thank you. Thank you. Hello, thank you for this opportunity. My name is Peter. I am here to support decriminalization of entheogens, otherwise known as plant medicines. I have personally witnessed how it has positively transformed the lives of many people. People from all walks of life. Personally, I have worked with ayahuasca in South America and it has transformed my life from one of depression and suicidal thoughts to one of thriving and mental and emotional clarity and personal success. Ayahuasca is non-addictive and the benefits it can offer, this community are absolutely immeasurable. Entheogens are natural healers, and at least in the states, their potential to bring healing to our communities remains untapped. Thank you very much. Are you all who are lined up here on the left, interested in speaking in the two minutes time frame? Okay, so you will be our last speaker, you're going to be our last speaker on, okay, so we'll have the remaining five there. Okay, please come forward. That was a clown show and I didn't see any one of any expertise speaking and anyway, I noticed some of the justification for the progressive leftists on the council for the item to decriminalize federal class 1 mine altering natural drugs was a mention of the UN cultures throughout the world. As a reminder, taking directives or justifying actions from entities outside the United States or even outside Santa Cruz simply because some entity or other outside authority does something does not respect your obligation represent the people of Santa Cruz. It is actually a leftist globalist philosophy somewhere, for instance, sanctuary city status, which disrespects federal law authority, the concept of nationalism and violates various made up principles the United States. The various mentions of the UN, the World Health Organization, etc., as justifications for many of the council's policies and actions suggest an anti-American leftist globalist ideological bent to the council, which I find disturbing since I grew up a patriotic nationalist. Equally disturbing is the focus of this decriminalization of natural mind altering drugs. While I tend to agree a supply side only war on drugs has not really worked, I see zero in the way of a demand side war in this ordinance, so it's a loser. Drug use in general is way out of hand leads to poverty. It's very costly to society. I seriously doubt anyone has read the voluminous citations included in this item. And as far as I can tell is a near verbatim copter of Rigel Robinson's, a 22-year-old youngest ever Berkeley City Council member of the UC Berkeley District 7, who seems to have copied it from Oakland. It seems like lazy legislation and since when does the City Council of Berkeley write our resolutions. Some other in this case, uncredited authority, does not represent the people of Santa Cruz. Unfortunately for us, leftist copycatting legislation seems the rage. From personal experience long ago with the very such substances you're discussing, they can indeed be transformative in much the same way placebos or tragic events are such as the death of a parent. Your next speaker. First, I'd like to go on the record saying that I'm actually in favor of decriminalizing all drugs, treating it as a health issue. However, there's meth and heroin, which are in a class of their own. They have their own self-destructive powers, if you will, on the person using them. Marijuana, mushrooms, these are fairly benign. They give you the giggles, they do whatever. But the problem is this will be fine except for the one fact that the majority of us drive these two ton hunks of metal called vehicles. And decriminalizing this, which I just spoke with Chief Mills and there's very, very few arrests for mushrooms that he can recall. But decriminalizing this kind of as a dog whistle to folks saying, hey, it's okay to use and by inference, possibly driving the influence. And unless there's some type of test for somebody under the influence of mushrooms, so whatever they are, the various names, it kind of troubles me. Especially, for instance, particularly when my four children, every time they got a driver's license, my concern wasn't with them getting into a wreck and killing somebody. My concern was with somebody under the influence killing them. So, thank you. Hi, good evening. I'm Dr. Ali Fedusia. I work as a senior clinical data scientist with the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. I'm also the co-founder and director of psychedelic.support. This is a website that has licensed professionals and also has educational material around harm reduction around psychedelics. There's also working as a director of a new foundation that's been started by a local philanthropist to use psychedelics to treat substance use disorders. So, all of this work is something I'm a part of, but I'm here to speak of my own opinion about this topic. And that is, you know, I've been doing this research for 15 years of a specialty in substance use disorders. Right now we have no good treatments. The ones we have fail many people. We have a lot of good research and evidence suggesting that these plants can be used to treat addiction as well as other mental health disorders. There's also some fascinating research coming out about how it can increase neuroplasticity and neurogenesis in the brain, which also reduces anti-inflammatory effects all over the body. So, there's really a lot of scientific basis now to support the healing that people speak about from taking psychedelic substances. You know, it's all about, I think, giving the right information to people in education, as well as the work we're doing with the clinical trials. It takes a long time. And once these trials are completed, if they're successful in bringing them forward, then we will also be then facing the cost of getting this out to the public. It's very inexpensive to grow mushrooms and plants. And so, this is a separate opportunity for people to have access that may otherwise not be able to receive it in clinical trials or even post-approval due to the costs associated. I think I'll end with that. Thank you. Hello. My name is Justice Earl. I've lived in Santa Cruz my whole life. I graduated from UCSC with a degree in biology and environmental studies in 2008. After that, I worked in high tech at Silicon Valley for seven years. And then I started my own company where I'm full-time employed here in Santa Cruz. However, previous to all this, I was on probation for seven years and I was in and out of jail during that time. Behaviors that I believe stem from trauma that I experienced as a child. While a delinquent teen, I would often take psychedelics as an escape as it was one of the few places I felt peace and safety in my chaotic life. Not one time did I do anything illegal or harmful while I'm psychedelics, nor were they addictive while the road with alcohol and other substances was fraught with abuse, harmful behaviors, and arrest. While I attribute my drastic conversion from a life of destruction to a fruitful life as a result of following a loving God, I attribute these psychedelic compounds which I believe to be made by God as helping to lead my way back to God. Due to my history and the stigma around drugs, I was 100% abstinent from anything considered an illegal drug for 15 years by the time I had started researching the science behind psychedelics. Since then, I've applied my rigor for my scientific background and I've been studying this movement very closely and passionately for over 18 months now. I currently hold a belief that through proper use of psychedelics, we're on the verge of a monumental breakthrough in treating some of the most severe conditions plaguing humanity that we currently do not have adequate solutions for. Conditions like PTSD, CPTSD, addiction, depression, anxiety, OCD, and more. I believe that Santa Cruz has the opportunity to be pioneers in going where the science and if I dare where the spirit lead rather than being stuck in outdated and ill-informed stigmas of our past. You'll be our last speaker. Good evening, Scott Graham. A number of anthropologists have put forth the theory that most major religions came out of psychedelic use. That's actually their origin, is the use of psychedelic plants. Timothy Larry thought that magic mushrooms actually came from outer space, that there was flying saucers that came down and dumped the spores for magic mushrooms on the planet, so that humans could evolve. It was a tool left behind by the space people to help people evolve and open their minds to alternative realities. Much of what's happened in Silicon Valley is a result of the use of psychedelics. I don't know if any of you ever saw the movie about Steve Jobs, but he was doing psychedelics and a lot of his ideas came out of his psychedelic use. There's a lot of information out there that points to the positive effects of mind-altering psychoactive drugs. I don't even want to use the word drugs, really, because that gives it a negative connotation. But these substances have done a lot to bring humanity and civilization to the point we're at now. Without them, we may still be dwelling in caves. Thank you. So we're going to go ahead and close public comment at this time. I want to thank those who have been here waiting to have this item come before us. I know we've been delayed with hearing the item. I just want to thank just having honored and having taken the moment yesterday to respect and honor our veterans, the veterans that are here in the room, and thank you for your service and your sacrifice, as well as those that may be watching at home. We have been going since 1 p.m. this afternoon. We also have an evening item, and we'll need to take a dinner break. I'm not sure how much debate the council wants to have on this item. I know the recommendation has it to be directed to the public safety commission for additional kind of discussion. If that's the direction that the council is feeling comfortable with, perhaps we can take action on the item at this time. If there is more interest in a more extensive debate, then I would ask that we reserve this item for after our evening item. And I think that's okay to postpone it, if that's correct. Okay, Council Member Matthews, Vice Mayor Cummings and Council Member Crombs. I have just a basic question, and that is, is the recommendation to refer the resolution to the Public Safety Committee? Do I understand? Initially, we weren't sure how much what the response would be when we were putting this forward. So the recommendation was to send this to the Public Safety Committee. Over the past few days, and given since we've been having TV interviews and since this has been proposed to the public, we've had very little, if not only maybe two or three, letters of opposition to this. And we have a lot of people in the community who are in support of this. So if I would actually be more inclined to move the recommendation tonight, just given that we haven't had as much opposition and need for more public engagement. So, but I'd like to let that, you know, I don't know if we want to discuss that or if it should come back later then. I think given that, I think we should have that come back later. So we'll go ahead and pick up this item at the end of our evening session. I would just bear with me one second. I'm just a little concerned that the description in the agenda packet is to direct, to refer it to the Public Safety Commission to take up the item for additional discussion and consideration. Given that description, I'm a little concerned about the council taking action on it this evening. But perhaps one alternative would be to refer it to the Public Safety Committee with direction to bring it back to the council for action at the December 10th meeting. I think I appreciate the interpretation. I don't believe there's any burning urgency on this item, and I think there's been a good public input. And it could come back even on the consent calendar if that's the recommendation of the Public Safety Committee. Okay, so given that information is, as I said, the will of the council to move this item as directed at this time. Sure. Okay, do you want to go ahead and- May, could I just ask? Because my understanding of it was the language has received a recommendation to consider a resolution. And then there's a lot of language and take up the item for additional discussion and consideration. The item, I assume, to be the resolution. So we can have the clarification in a minute. It's the resolution. Direct Public Safety Commission to take up the item. The item is the resolution. Yes. Not the broad. No. Okay. So the resolution. Yeah, thanks for the clarity. That's how I interpret it. Okay. Given that information. I'm good. It's going to the Public Safety Committee. That's correct. I'll hold my questions until then. Okay. So we'll go ahead and entertain a motion. Okay, I'll go ahead and second the motion. And then we'll move on to the discussion. Councilor? I'll just say, you know, I have a degree of ambivalence on this. I'll be perfectly honest. And I think the resolution as presented is very enthusiastic. And personally, I'll look it over and I think it could probably be tightened up a bit. That would be my suggestion. And I was really surprised to see this whole long bibliography attached to it. I understand that those are all references, but I've never seen those in resolutions before. So I don't think they're necessary. That's just a comment. And those could be included as an appendix to an agenda report, but I don't think they're appropriate in the resolution. Those are just my comments on what we've got right here. So, Tony, if a council member has, Tony, if a council member wants to weigh in on some of their concerns, should they email you their concerns to inform the conversation around the Public Safety Committee as a Brown Act? Yes, because a council member could attend the Public Safety Committee, but could not participate at all. And so if there are concerns, you can go through you. Right. I can distribute that. Okay. Any further discussion? If the audience know what we're doing exactly, I don't know if it's clear. Yeah, I will clarify. Thank you for that. So thank you for pausing for the interpretation. The item was agendized as essentially having this concept and resolution go back to our Public Safety Committee, which is comprised of the three council members to my right. They will be taking up the item to, one, incorporate any concerns or ideas that was brought to our city attorney from council members on the item to hear from the public as well as other interested community members or staff folks that want to weigh in. And fine-tune and then return to the council for final adoption. We are advised by our city attorney that it's not wise to take action on final adoption of the resolution at this time, given the fact that we agendize it as an item that would go to our Public Safety Committee. Okay. Thank you for that. City Clerk, the motion was made by Vice Mayor Cummings, seconded by myself. I'm back on December 10th. Ideally after it goes through the Public Safety Committee. December 3rd. Second. Do we have time for staff report on that? So if it doesn't work before December 10th, if there's not enough time for the staff report, given the time constraint, then it would come back at the earliest. January. January first. January first. At the earliest convening time for the Public Safety Recommendation. Okay. Okay. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay. That passes unanimously. We're going to go ahead and adjourn our meeting until 7 p.m. We'll go ahead and adjourn the meeting if you want clarification. Thank you. Let's go ahead and get started here. I'm going to ask that you stop your conversations. We're going to go ahead and get started here. So good evening, everybody. Welcome to our 7 p.m. session of the November 12, 2019 meeting of the Santa Cruz City Council. We have oral communications first. And then we have an item that is going to be a joint item with our water commission after that. So I'd like to ask our clerks to please call the roll. Okay. The first two items are not the joint water. But I'll take one. I see what you're saying. Okay. Council member it's Crone. Here. Whoever. Here. Meyers. Here. Brown. Here. So to clarify, we're going to have two items that are going to be council items. And then we're going to open it up to a joint water commission item. So right now is oral communications. Oral communication is an opportunity for members of the community to speak to us on items that are not listed on today's agenda. I'm assuming those that have lined up to my left are here to speak to us on oral communications. Oral communications is generally about a half hour. We're getting started about five minutes after, so we'll try to go to about 7.35. I hope to hear from everybody. I want to remind all those that are inside the council chambers of our rules of decorum. It's my responsibility to ensure that no matter who wants to come to speak to the council can do so without threat or intimidation. It was also my understanding that before we began tonight's proceedings that there was an instance that occurred to between community members. I want to remind you all, we want to hear from you, even though we may not agree with each other. We need to respect each other and their ability to address the council at this time. And if I see you disrupting the council proceedings, intimidating or disrupting our ability to do our business, then I'm going to go ahead and give you a warning. If I see you repeat that behavior, then I'm going to go ahead and ask that you leave. I hope that does not happen tonight. We want to have an opportunity to hear from each of you, and we ask that you are able to do so in a respectful manner. So with that, I'll go ahead and start the oral communications and you're welcome to come forward. You'll have up to two minutes. Okay, thank you for this opportunity. We would like to request the Santa Cruz City Council perform due diligence regarding the proposed demolition of the Circle Church. By adding an item to your next agenda to discuss requesting the Historic Preservation Commission as an unpaid, neutral party review the 111th Eric Circle Historic Report. The HPC has requested to review this report and make recommendations to City Council, but staff will not allow that process. There is no language in the HPC bylaws nor the zoning ordinance that prohibits the HPC from doing this. The Historic Preservation Commissioners were appointed by the City Council to advise you because of their expertise in local history, and their intentions are very different from those who prepare the DPR-523, which is the Historic Report. They are hired by the developers, and their future work depends on garnering a reputation for favoring developers' outcomes. We want something more neutral. We believe it is imperative that city actions are congruent with the city's 2030 general plan, which actually coins the phrase demolition neglect as a problem for the city due to lack of sufficient historical evaluation. And what we've provided you tonight is binders with objective justification to support you in making this request. Thank you very much. Next speaker please. You'll have two minutes. Are you in line to speak? Yeah, you're welcome to come forward. You'll have up to two minutes. Hi, my name's Jennifer Smith. I'm also here on the topic of the 111 Errat Circle demolition. And I'm here a little different appeal, really for the same purpose, which is to preserve it. And that's our intention as a group, is to do so and to attempt to purchase it back from the folks who have bought it, and to do so at a reasonable cost so that there isn't a loss to that group. We see it as a potential cultural and art center that could benefit the entire West Side community, as well as all of Santa Cruz, as well as all of the Central Coast, with the facilities could host speakers and music events and classes and STEM and art and culture and radiate out from the center of the West Side, the very cultured tradition and spiritual heart of Santa Cruz, that which holds many of us here. We'd like to combine that kind of effort with the brain trust of the university and bring that power down into the community to benefit all people in the community, rich, poor, and everyone in between. And we feel that by you reviewing this, it allows you to ask the HBC to review this. It allows you the opportunity to make an objective decision on it, and potentially, in our opinion, come out on the right side of history. We can't go back once it's gone and we want to preserve it. I'd just like to say that we are here at somewhat of a cost because we've been threatened with a lawsuit by friends of the owners. And so at our own peril and our own concern, we're here today for the community and to speak out, to attempt to come out on the right side of history and think of the many instead of the few and to community rather than community for a closed housing. Thank you. Mayor and council members, my name is Sue Powell. I have talked a lot about the Circle Church in the last few months. Just want to give you a little bit of background about myself. I settled in Santa Cruz 40 years ago, and I also spent the first 17 summers of my life here. I have deep roots in California with Latino heritage going back to the 1850s in the Central Coast area and indigenous ancestors as well. I am very interested in local historic preservation. In my 30 years of community activism here, I have worked to support public process, participatory democracy, and environmental and social justice. I am currently very concerned that city planning staff is blocking public process on the Eritre Circle Development Proposal. From my observations, it looks like staff is advocating for the developers without adequate concern for community input or community history. The planner for the Eritre Circle Development Project is also staffed to the Historic Preservation Commission. He has repeatedly refused to allow the HPC to add an item to their agenda to review the project historic report submitted by the developers. As you're very aware, the role of the HPC is to advocate for the cultural and historic heritage of our city to listen to community concerns and to advise the city council about sites that merit preservation. The HPC wants to review the Eritre Circle Historic Report and they want to hear from the community so that they can assess the historic significance and cultural importance of the circle church. I am voicing a request from nearly 1,000 petition signers, neighbors, and friends of the city council allow the HPC to review the Eritre Circle Project Historic Report as an agenda item at a public meeting. We're asking the city council to add an item to your next agenda to discuss this request. Thank you. Hello. My name is Freya Sands. I want to thank you for your service to the city. I would deeply appreciate the council ask the historical preservation committee to look at the history and future benefits of the entire property at 111 Eritre Circle. My understanding of the city of Santa Cruz 2030 plan after reading it carefully is that vibrant neighborhoods should be supported and enhanced and that city government wants to take, wishes to take into account the desires and perceived needs of the neighborhoods. Our neighborhood will continue to be strong and become more vibrant with a continuing treasure at 111 Eritre Circle. Thank you. Mayor and city council, I did not come here to talk about the circle church but I'm a neighbor. I have to put my two cents on that one and say it's been a great resource. My grandchildren have been to many events there. That's not my topic for today. So now, dear city council, in view of the escalating climate crisis, the city must accelerate our efforts to address the emergency. We are aware of the Santa Cruz city climate action plan, the climate emergency resolution and the Green New Deal support resolution. We acknowledge the continuing hard work of city sustainability manager Dr. Tiffany Wise West. However, due to the urgency of the climate crisis, we must continue to act decisively. In recent September, global climate strike actions and demonstrations were well supported by much of the community, including over a thousand young people. They are very aware that their future is at stake and we cannot lie to them on this. Meanwhile, a number of cities are stepping up with their own Green New Deal plans to address both the climate crisis and many social justice issues. Santa Cruz needs to continue its leadership by taking further steps. The Santa Cruz Climate Action Network, which at this point is about 1,500 strong, has been looking at the resolutions of other cities such as Portland, Chico, Los Angeles, New York, San Luis Obispo and others. We have emailed this request to you today. You probably have not had a chance to look at it yet. But we emailed it with links to all these cities at the bottom so that you can find out more about those. And now I will hand over to my friend who will continue. Thank you, Pauline. Good evening, Mayor and City Council and assembled people. Everybody on the TV feed too. My name is Carol Long. I'm a resident. We of the Santa Cruz Climate Action Network request that the following be placed on the agenda for the year November 26 meeting for inclusion on the ballot for March 2020. We want a ballot initiative, in other words. And I know that the City Council can place this on the ballot by themselves. We don't need a petition if you do that. So what we want you to put on the ballot is this. We hereby establish a Climate Action Commission to oversee the design of a Santa Cruz Green New Deal. And lay the groundwork for tackling the climate crisis. This group of leaders will support the development of a climate action plan that exceeds current state greenhouse gas emissions targets. The engagement and education of the public on the local issues related to the climate emergency. The collaboration with other city departments, business leaders, and community organizations toward a greener future and economy. The inclusion of a broad spectrum of the community and at least one youth representative. The convening of public assemblies to involve the entire community in this green new deal effort. Thank you very much. In the interest of trying to get to everybody, I'm going to go ahead and reduce the time to 90 seconds and we'll go ahead and have you come speak. Well, I'll have to talk really quickly. I just saw an altercation that was really disturbing and Alicia Kool was basically, somebody went after her verbally. What I witnessed was it took the police in the room a long time to respond. We all watched it and hopefully it's on your cameras. So what I did was speak to the officer about the fact that this is a double standard. If I had done anything like what was waged on Alicia Kool, the woman was with an inch of her nose. I would have summarily been escorted from the room. And I think this double standard is really rampant in Santa Cruz and it really needs to be addressed. I'm here to talk about 190 West Cliff Drive. The plan is a social and environmental disaster. Apparently our city council does not seem to be grasping the meaning of climate change and the consequences that we're all facing. That plan is absolutely egregious in terms of climate change. It shows absolutely practically zero comprehension in terms of the design toward climate change. After church this past Sunday, gentlemen, I'm going to get totally cut off. So I don't appreciate that, Ms. Watkins. You're cutting into my free speech. And I consider that an affront and an assault on my constitutional rights. You've done it ever since you got into office. And I have to say it's abysmal. And I would just like to say that what I've witnessed in this room tonight with that violent assault on Alicia Kool. And then as if I was the problem, the way he acted and the way you cut my time is just typical of you, isn't it? Next speaker please. Hello, City Council. I'm here, Bruce, from Dufort Neighbors where we've had ongoing problems for a year. I passed out the memo that went out a year ago. And our issues haven't been addressed, but I'm coming here tonight on behalf of the new projects that are in the pipeline. And the Garfield Church, I really want the City Council to encourage community input. I think it's so valuable to get something that's long lasting and will really enrich this community. And not have the same kind of problems we're having on Dufort Street. And I do want to point out, there's a real paradox here. The former Comerica Bank building to which two restaurants were put in is deemed a historical structure. And for that reason, the city has been unwilling to put an obvious loading zone behind the building, because it would require removing a little bit of a roof line. Whereas the Garfield Church is not considered historic. It seems like the city is making decisions that are convenient to their purposes instead of listening to community input. So please listen to community input. Thank you. My name is Stephen Stewart. I'm a resident of Woodrow Avenue. And yesterday was Veterans Day. And I'm literally wearing my veteran status on my sleeve to raise an issue that came up in September when I went to get a new license that was compliant with the new real ID requirements. I decided to get the veteran status put on my driver's license, which is an option you're having in California. I needed to produce this item, which is a DD 214 department of defense form, which is the most important form that any veteran has. I had to take this over to the Veterans Hall on Front Street. And I was repelled by the pungent odor of urine far before I ever got to the door. And it just made me think back to the day where when I served, you didn't get thanked for your service. You got spat upon or called a baby killer. And so that actually had a very dramatic effect on me because the last time I had been at a VA facility had been 43 years ago, and I was so disgusted by that experience, I vowed to never go again. So this is on you because I talk to the staff and they deal with it every day. And they've pleaded with the city to clean up that area. And I'm asking, do you have no shame that you would treat your veterans that way? I exchanged six years for 90 seconds worth of free speech. Your time is up, sir. Thank you for your service, and I'm sorry to interrupt. Please go right ahead. Yeah, bathrooms would be nice, wouldn't they? Instead of sending them to the catch committee, how about opening them up? 431-7766 is the phone number, the support number to call. Tonight, next to Highway 1 behind Ross, a vital community self-help project is taking place. Homeless people themselves have created and staffed the Desiree Quintero Survival Camp. 431-7766, act where city council and the supervisors have not. This is addressed to you, the community, and to you out there in the audience, since the council is hopeless on this issue, thanks to the defection of soon to be mayor Justin Cummings. Lots of money, but no winter shelter. The Quintero Camp costs the city nothing. It uses vacant, fenced off space. It created a protected survival place for disabled seniors, threatened women, it does so tonight. Those who had no place to go but sleep in storefronts, bushes, sidewalks, see for yourself. Support this restored, re-imagined camp. But again, it's the community that has to do this. This council is not going to. What do they need? They need tents. They need survival camping supplies. They need tarps. They need regular dumpster service. They've already gotten porta-potties today, which Food Not Bombs placed there. Democratic socialists brought food. The health department, the police and the fire department have all checked the campground and found it not illegal. Okay. Thank you. I'm here again to ask you to make the pedestrian bridge truly for pedestrians. First, I request that you start with a lettering on the Water Dragon Gate. Please direct the artist to make it say Chinatown Foot Bridge. It was said at the October 8th meeting that changes can be made and are expected to be made. Second, I request it be mandated that riders get off their bicycles and skateboards and walk across the bridge. The small signs do not work. They are not seen and or they are ignored. Please attach enforcement and consequences as you as you did successfully with smoking in the park. Third, I request that you paint walk your bike in large black letters ladder style at both ends of this footbridge. If any of you is willing to talk with me about this and the increasing problems with pedestrian safety and stress free enjoyment of this lovely short span over the river, please tell me. All pedestrians of all abilities and ages should be able to walk across the bridge peacefully and comfortably through the park over the bridge in a leisurely meandering fashion if they so desire. Stopping to linger for the pleasure and renewal offered by nature. The wildlife, the waters, the trees, the views of town, hills, mountains, sky. Thank you for your attention and consideration. Next speaker. A lot to think about here tonight. Susan worth so kill. Well, I don't know when the decision is going to be made on the library facilities across the street. But that beautiful plan by Jason Architects was to me great. And I hope we get to keep the library where it is and keep our farmers market where it is and put that parking lot in a trust. But I was still wondering. I don't think any. Well, one quick question. What happened to all the water lilies that was in San Lorenzo's beautiful little duck pond and the water lotuses? They're all gone. I was I'm missing them. I just walked through there today and there's not a flower left. Anyway, what about that? Beautiful toys are us, which we could change the T to a J and put joys are us. Couldn't we move folks into toys or us? Hardly any neighbors to give us the NIMBY response. It's a beautiful big building, nice parking lot for all the folks that are living in their cars. Couldn't we do something with that? Toys are us is not coming back. And I'd love to see joys are us. Thank you. Next speaker. Hi, my name is Alicia Kool, President of the Santa Cruz Chapter of the California Homeless Union. As you know, a survival encampment has popped up again behind Ross. I am asking you to support this camp and not bite against it. Do everything that you can to offer supportive services. We are currently using the dignity village rule model. So we have five basic rules. We are having people sign in and out. It's really an attempt to take all of the concerns that happened last time and have them addressed so that they are not repeated. We're reaching out to the people that are living at the tannery in order to bridge that gap so that we're all on the same page and they're working with us as well. And so we're really here to ask for your support and maybe you can deliver some garbage cans. Today we got our porta-potties delivered. Food not bombs and the California Homeless Union is providing the funds for that. And so we're not asking for very much. We're doing a lot with no budget. And so we're just asking for minimal support from you. Thank you. And I'm going to close oral communications after Pat in the back there. Go ahead. Hello. I'm Crystal Olson. And I'm here for support for the, we're going to change the name, the old Ross camp. We no longer, it's no longer a Ross camp. What, how should I say this? I'm not really sure how to say this, but we want to show the city that we're not little kids. We don't need a ride in and out of camp. We're not in jail. We just want to live and survive in a safe place. And we are trying to change everything. We're asking for support from the community. And I'm going to work at the homeless garden and I'm willing to take people to work with me that want to work. I'm willing, I go to school at Cabrillo, I'm a full-time student. I'm willing to take people to school that want to learn. There are success stories that people just need to get a chance. We're not allowing the same stuff to go on. This is not going to be okay. This is not a chop shop. This is not a drug place. This is a place to stay safe. And we are not okay. Like she said, we have rules and we're going to try something different. And if we just get a chance and maybe some support from the community, that would be great. Okay. Well, since the time was reduced, I won't get to read everything I wanted to read. But so instead I would just say that you can't possibly trust the homeless to do anything different than last time. Can you really? I mean, and you want to wait till there's 200 tents there to find out that, oh, guess not. So that's a big bet. And the idea that they do know, they cost nothing and there's no harm in having a camp there. I don't believe it. It didn't work out so well for the Ross merchants. It doesn't work good for our city's image and in Tice's homeless to come here. It's a bad deal. Some other place, I don't know. You did it at the beach. You could do it there. I don't know where to start. The 240-year-old American experiment in a free people was injured October 29th with rent control adoption in Santa Cruz. I hope to never again hear the leftist victim oppressor garbage justification of tenant protection spoken. One half of the problem here is mass poverty. In 2018, Santa Cruz County was ranked the third highest in its supplemental poverty rate of over 21% in a state ranked first in the nation with a national SPR poverty rate of over 18%. That is awful. Poverty occurs for several reasons, not really related to normal investor retailer landlords, and here are two. I'm out of time. That's enough. And maybe start uploading oral communication speeches that are actually read instead of thrown away. Next speaker. Good evening. My name is Candice Brown from East Morrissey. I came here today to speak about the commission for the prevention of violence against women. On September 25th, and then again on October 9th, the commission, I believe, did violate the Brown Act. Within 24 hours, they were asking commissioners to ask for, to validate the censorship of two city council members. They were asked to vote on this to go back to the city council. After thinking about it and actually watching the video, they realized that they were sort of being had, so to speak, and wanted to resend their votes on October 9th. And they asked for that to be considered, and they were not allowed to do so. There were agenda items that were presentations, and yet they were making motions, which is again against the Brown Act. There were 20 of us women that had listened to the videotape and were horrified about what happened on September 25th. So we went to the October 9th meeting. It's all on audio. I really recommend that people listen to that video and that people from the city manager or the city council's office investigate this. Because basically this was a kangaroo court where they actually required that the commissioners vote for start by believing. And if they didn't, then they were asked to resign, which is against the charter of the ordinance of this commission, which was voted by the people in 1981. And that is also not on the website. Please investigate this. Thank you. Hi. My name is Hilary Martisius, and I live at 1139 Walk Circle. And I've been there since 1994. And I have enjoyed the circle for what it is. And I'm very simple. I've had four years of art history at Cal Berkeley. And what I have to say to you is that the center of the circle is like a cake. And nobody puts anything but the chair in the middle. So you don't just dump anything. You put the right thing and let it be something that reflects our wonderful neighborhood and its history, has a beautiful history. Okay, that's that. Okay. I came here originally to talk to you guys about reopening a ROS. But I had, who's got kids here? Who's got nieces, nephews? Things like that. We'll go ahead and pass it on. We don't respond to you. This is an opportunity for us just to- Okay. It was a rhetorical question. So I have this lady that's the director of the homeless, you know, the director of Out of the Thing, whatever, Alicia Kuhl, posting pictures of my kids online with derogatory statements. And she's done it to a bunch of other people. So the people that were causing a hassle earlier were me and my wife. And I'm done playing with everybody here. I'm done screwing around. You guys open that camp again. It took me a year to correct my sales. It took six months for us to get rid of those rats. We haven't had to call a cop in five months. Open that camp again. Fine. But you got to think about everything else that happened last time. It cost you $300,000 to maintain that thing. And a person that's running it now is posting pictures of my kids and other kids online and making derogatory statements. I mean, what's up with this? I mean, this is just bizarre. And for her to think that we're not coming after her civilly, I mean, this is just a joke. I mean, my landlord, you know, this is just stupid. My business will close in April. My lease is up. I will walk away from my business. I will no longer support Beckman's, Pete's Pacific Cookie Company, all those. I go down the list. Carries cookies, kind grind. I buy products from all local companies. I've had people working for me for 28 years. I put thousands of kids through school and have somebody tell me that I don't pay my staff fairly. This is just fucking bizarre. Excuse me. Mayor and City Council, I understand that one of the items was postponed, having to do with the purchase of a backhoe and a dump truck for the water department. And I am the president of the Electric Auto Association, Central Coast Chapter, Beverly Day Show is my name. And I invited you in the past to consult with me about any new vehicle purchases that were not planned to be electric, because I said there were electric vehicles to serve all purposes. However, I was mistaken, the backhoe and the dump truck are not available in electric yet. However, something that would be an improvement on running those vehicles... One step back. I want to encourage you to hang on to those diesel trucks and make a modification, because they will be coming soon. We already have the semi trucks by Tesla and another company, and Ford has gone ahead and is making the F-150, which is a complete game changer for electric vehicles. So I don't know how long you plan to keep those vehicles, but certainly I'm sure there are long times. So I would encourage you to keep it and use biodiesel. The biodiesel station has closed down, but one of the former owners of it is still selling it, and I can give you that information. Thank you. Next speaker. You. I've been coming to these meetings a long time, and I've never seen so many people jumping up, clapping and hooping and hollering and supporting the stuff that you say. They come up to me telling me, Drew's doing a great job. Well, I like Drew. He's doing a good work, brother thing. When a person is voting on housing issues, they should not have a conflict of interest like this human over here does. She always waters down, takes out the teeth of any measure pertaining to housing, which helps her bottom line, her dollar amount. People, life and death situations, but she put her dollar amount ahead of these issues that are real. People are hurting and dying. I've been coming, like I said, a long time from the meetings, and I remember coming to meetings, and one day this was this mayor, the next day it's a different mayor. So I don't know how this mayor is still in office all this time. I'm wondering is there like some kind of thing she's done where she don't have to change to give somebody else the power of the seat of the mayor. So I think something should be looked into legally, somebody from the state city office look into how long has this person been in office and why she's still there? Should she have left? And if she had not, let some legal consequences come and happen to that. When it comes to... Time is up. All right, next speaker please. Tonight I went to Ross Camp and I brought a couple people from our local chapter of the ACLU. Actually, sorry, one person, the president of the ACLU local chapter and we walked around the camp. And I suggest every single one of you walk around that camp. It is so well organized. It's not like last time. They have a front office, a tent. They have everything more organized than any of the other city run camps. So I beg you, every single one of you, I know some of you will go, but I appreciate every single one of you will go. I think you might be impressed with how it is run with the people who are staying there with the rules they have in place. So that's all I'm asking. Please sanction, please go there and see for yourself how it's run. That's all I ask. Thank you. Pat Kittle, Santa Cruz. Not here to talk about the homeless situation, but I'd like to quickly say, and I've run this by Robert Norse. He and I get along quite well by the way, but I've continuously, over the years, told him, you know, there's nothing you could do that would generate more goodwill for the homeless than if the homeless would simply not trash wherever it is they happen to be, whether it's a sidewalk or the Pogan app where they shouldn't be in the first place or wherever. Just don't trash your place. If you see somebody else that's trashed it, pick it up. I've done that for years when I'm doing forest work and, frankly, kind of gnaws at my patients. Having said that, the reason I originally came here is to discuss something that I often discuss, and that is the undue power of the Israel lobby in both international, national, regional, and state and local affairs. The Israel lobby has far more power than what it legitimately deserves. We are at war since 2001, and frankly long before 2001, for the reason that supposedly Arab hijackers destroyed the World Trade Center. It wasn't Muslims that were primarily responsible for that, folks. Your time is up. One minute tonight? You have 90 seconds in the interest of trying to get to everybody. That concludes oral communications. Thank you, and we're going to go ahead and move on to our evening agenda. I'll just go ahead and close oral communications, allow a moment to transition, and we'll have some folks from our water department come up. Those who are not interested in staying, this would be a good opportunity for you to leave the council chambers as we move forward to the regular scheduled evening agenda. So very gen, very genical. There's a little transition time. Name of it is, because I did see a bunch of presentations, but it didn't look like it. Well, it should be in the M drive when the council presentations under the short-term stuff, right? Right here. Yeah, so it should be, right, should be, yeah. Should be, that's probably it. Okay. Okay. So we'll go ahead and move on to our general business portion of tonight's evening item. And for the community and for the council, we'll do a just quick reminder of how this will go. The presentation from the staff will first occur. Then we'll have an opportunity for council members to ask questions of the staff. We'll go ahead and open it up to public comment and members of the community who would like to address us on this item, and then we'll return back for council action and deliberation. We actually have two general business items that it's just going to be with the council weighing in on. We're going to go ahead and take a short break after we hear those two items, and we'll allow for an opportunity to have our water commission come up and join us for the remainder of our evening. So with that, I'll go ahead and turn it over to our water director, Rosemary Bernard. Thank you very much. Good evening, Mayor and Council. So we're here tonight to do a couple of items before we have the joint meeting with the water commission that are related to a bond issue that we would like to put onto the market here, just fairly shortly, a water revenue bond that would have us be basically finding a way to get money from investors to invest in our water system and help us to finance the improvements we're making in the capital improvement program. So before we get into the revenue bond portion, though, we want to talk a little bit about using green bonds to finance this particular piece. And also before we get too much into the presentation, in addition to the staff here tonight, myself and our finance manager, Jeremy Becker and Heidi Lukambach and Chris Coburn, our deputy directors for engineering and operations respectively. We have with us tonight our city's financial advisor and the Water Department's financial advisor, a gentleman named Bob Gamble from PFM, which is a national firm that does this kind of stuff specifically for public agencies and also our bond counsel from Jones Hall, Chick Adams, who has advised us both on the green bonds and also on the water revenue portion of this. So we will probably be calling them up if there are questions that you would like to hear from them on as they have been a part of our really important, critical part of our team as we've done this work. So first we want to ask the council to take an action to establish guidelines for the issuance of green bonds. And green bonds are a form of municipal bonds that are marketed to investors who are interested in sort of putting their financial resources to support environmental sustainability, climate mitigation or climate adaptation activities. And the programs for green bonds started in about 2007. Typically issuers of green bonds will set a set of guidelines for the kinds of projects that could be used to use green bonds to finance and then they would also commit to annual reporting. So what we want you to do tonight is to basically adopt the guidelines. We've given you a set of guidelines and also the reporting that we would propose to do on this would be concurrent with the work that you hear from Tiffany Wise West on the city's climate action plan and the climate adaptation plan as our work is really very connected to that work. So I'm going to go ahead and show you a graph here that is a little bit about the growth and issuance of green bonds. I believe the number from 2018 is something like 150 billion and you can see that the kind of brownish purpley color as opposed to blue, which is what it should have been. But the water piece is about 13% of that. And others in the state that have used green bonds in the water agency as San Francisco PUC, Public Utilities Commission San Francisco, their water waste water entity and also East Bay Municipal Utility District. And a number of other agencies similar to us have used this as a way to get investors who are aligned with the kinds of work that we're doing to improve water supply, reliability and infrastructure resiliency as part of our climate adaptation strategy. The kinds of guidance that generally go ahead and have Jeremy to the next slide. These are the kinds of things that you'll see in the kinds of projects that are eligible for green bond. Financing in the guidance we're suggesting and it's pretty much the kinds of things that you would expect to see that are environmental sustainability, things like reducing pollution, implementing reuse, reduce recycle kinds of strategies, reduce the consumption of fossil fuels, et cetera. So these are the basic principles that are being used and then we have some guidance specifically about the kinds of projects in the city that would be qualified. Go ahead to the next page. We wrote these kind of broadly because we want them to be applicable to any part of the city. Obviously the water items would fit in here very nicely and I included in the staff report some pull out from the climate adaptation plan that included the kinds of things that were included for the water department in that plan and they're very aligned with these kinds of activities. I think with that I'm going to stop on this and if you have questions I'd be happy to try to answer your questions. Thank you very much and thank you always for reaching out in advance to help us understand the topics. Are there any questions from the council at this time? I had asked you an earlier question and you're going to look into it. How much at the end of the term how much will we have paid for the bonds? Right, so I'm going to let Jeremy Becker our finance manager answer that question. He's going to tell you how much that we're going to make in the bond sale and then what the amount we estimate we would pay over the life of the bonds in total. Yeah, the issuance we put in the resolution for $30 million, but we're actually only going to ask for $21 million. We just wanted to make sure that we were kind of covered and then what we're expecting from what Bob Gamble has told us and our financial advisors, they expect us to get more money than $21 million, basically $26 million, so that would reduce the interest cost that we're going to have on the bonds and at the end of the day, basically all the debt service costs at the end of 30 years will be close to $42 million. So you're talking true interest of about $15 million. So one of the things I mentioned when we were talking in advance with a number of people is that some of these projects are very expensive. They have very long lives and it makes a lot of sense even though it does cost more to finance these through debt issuances, it makes a lot of sense to spread those costs out over a longer period of time because there are beneficiaries in the future who will have the value of these projects for many years to come and debt financing them does help to sort of spread those costs over the whole multiple generations of beneficiaries. I think I had Council Member Myers then Council Member Matthews. Just have a little bit of just out of curiosity what kind of investors are sort of investing in these green bonds? So I'm going to ask Bob Gamble if you come up to the microphone here please Bob. That is a good question. If I could add another question because I think it'll be the same answerer. My understanding from talking to you is the interest rates aren't different between these and conventional municipal bonds. That's correct. Good evening. It's good to be here. So to the first question, investors in green bonds are still institutional investors by and large. So large bond funds are creating funds that are intended to attract investors who are interested in environmentally sound investments basically. And it's a growing area. It's fair to say three or four years ago it was fairly embryonic. It has grown very substantially as the slide showed. And currently there essentially is no what we call spread between the cost of a regular municipal bond, tax-exempt bond, and a green bond. They're essentially priced the same way. There's some expectation going forward that there could be at some point if the investment base grows in green bonds that they could actually become cheaper than regular bonds. Thank you for the clarification. I assume that was Councillor Rosha. Okay. Any other questions from the council at this time? Okay. Thank you for your presentation. Thank you for the clarifying responses. Any other questions? No. We'll go ahead and open it up to public comment to see if there's any members of the community who want to address this on this item. You'll have up to two minutes. Please come forward. Okay, Garrett Phillip. Once again I see in the justifications of this item references to globalist authorities and their guidance as justification for action on your part. You cite again globalist entities such as the World Bank or the United Nations Secretary General Antonio Gutierrez or green bond principles that were developed by the International Capital Market Association as justifications for your actions. Taking directives from globalist authorities does not do the job of representing the American people or Santa Cruz in particular. You apparently take your directives from outside the city and country. By your own admission, a bond is a bond, but not really. To be a green bond, you march to a foreign authorities template such as the International Capital Market Association's definition of a green bond. What foreign directive strings or project templates are required or attached to be a green bond? We don't know exactly, but they're not products of American authority. You don't need, and the people, if they aren't rabbit globalists, don't want foreign input into environmental projects or foreign strings attached to financing. I see in the next agenda item a Japanese bank is now writing or modifying our city ordinances to obtain financing. Is our credit really that bad? That is an example of what I'm talking about. We don't have to bend to the left of socialist globalist ideologies and shouldn't sense our own people's wisdom. America made of principles that beliefs are more than enough for any task. Well, actually better since the USA is up till now, and I'm worried about it staying that way, the most powerful, prosperous, longest lasting Democratic Republic and the history of man. Thanks. Next speaker, please. Good evening. My name's Becky Steinbruner. I'm a resident of the Aptos Hills. And I always worry about taking on huge amounts of debt without really knowing what projects are going to benefit by it. So I'm sorry I didn't have a chance to thoroughly look at that, but I would like to support your council and very astute water manager here to do all you can to support alternative recharge. Working with Dr. Andy Fisher at UCSC and the recharge initiative, do some groundwater, stormwater capture and let that infiltrate into good areas that could naturally recharge the aquifer. I also support in terms of green buildings that I saw, I have heard Miss Menard say that UCSC has in their new buildings the ability to have sort of internal, it captures the water that you let run to get the water heating up and it recirculates it and use it, it's a separate system. And I want to encourage your council to work closely with the city's building codes and upgrade that so that it is actually a requirement in all new building. I also want to take an objection to the water department using a quarter of a million dollars to do phase two study of recycled water here. I think there is and we will talk about this later. I think it is unnecessary other than to use for irrigation and I urge you to look at that expanded into the golf course area. And above all replace your infrastructure. I saw that and correct me if I'm wrong losing 0.2 billion gallons a year with leaks and that's that really needs to be changed. Thank you very much. Thank you. Are there any other members of the community wanting to address us on this item? Seeing none you'll be our last speaker. Beverly Day show again. I'm curious about a couple of things. I don't really know how the water department works. Does the water department include wastewater treatment as well? No. Okay. Could you tell me what percentage these bonds would be and what the cost of the actual loan or bonds would be? I'm going to go ahead and pause your time. This is a chance for us to hear from you. We'll try to take note of your questions but we're not going to get into a dialogue. I understand. Yeah, I'm just looking at people. And I'm also curious if there's a transportation involved in what's being asked because something I didn't say was that 82% of our emissions are coming from vehicles according to the Monterey Bay Community Power's recent inventory. Thank you. All right. That concludes public comment. Council Member Matthews. Yeah. I want to thank you. Oh, did you have a comment? Did you? Okay. All right. You'll be our last speaker. First of all, whatever projects you end up eventually deciding on and you'll have control over that, we have a huge backlog of needs in the water department in terms of our basic infrastructure at the water treatment plant and all these 150-year-old pipes that need to be replaced. I appreciate your spreading the cost of this over future generations who will benefit from it. And I see no reason you shouldn't take green bonds. It's a wonderful idea and the idea that somehow you're going to be under the control of international forces seems a bit far-fetched to me. Thank you. Thank you, Mike. Okay, we'll go ahead and bring it back then. Council Member Matthews. Well, thank you. I wanted to just clarify for one thing. This agenda item is simply enabling setting up a framework for when we do decide issue bonds for major capital projects that we will look for opportunities to use green bonds for financing. It defines no specific project, no specific amount, no specific interest rate, et cetera. But I want to thank our staff for bringing this to us. We have said so many times no one can count them. We want to look for every way we possibly can implement environmentally-friendly policies throughout the city's operations. And this is one more. And it's very explicit in the guidelines that it can be used only for those types of projects that do have a green or environmentally beneficial purpose to them. To Miss Disho's question, it could be environmentally sound, beneficial transportation policies if I understand that correctly and in many other departments as well. But this is just one more wonderful option that we now have available to us. So I'm going to go ahead and move the recommendation before us. I'll second that. Okay. Two to motion by Council Member Matthews. Seconded by myself. I know Council Member Brown wanted to speak. But before we do, did you have any response to any of the questions that were raised during the public comment if you remember them? If not, maybe offline. They can get back to you. Okay, go ahead. Please. Yeah, I think it would probably would be for our investment advisor if there is an answer to that question at this time. But I imagine the price of bonds would depend on, yeah, would depend on what the, you know, when it's issued, what the offer is it? So I just wanted to make a quick comment saying I absolutely support this. I really appreciate the work that the Water Department has done to kind of move us in this direction for the city as a whole to be taking that leadership, you know, I think it's going to be, you know, definitely worthwhile for the city. And so I really appreciate it. My lack of questions does not refer to my lack of interest in this issue. But I, and I, so I also want to say I really appreciate you taking the time to answer a lot of questions and walk Council Members through this in advance. So we could understand to the extent we are able to answer a very complicated set of questions and issues. Here. Okay. Seeing no other interest in commenting at this time, we'll go ahead and take the vote. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay. That passes unanimously. Thank you very much. Okay. Thank you. Okay. So we want to move on now to the water revenue bond sale. And this is a, this particular item asks you to do two things. One is it asks you to authorize a resolution that would allow us to do the sale. And as it's noted here, the resolution is for up to 30 million, but the actual number is going to be smaller in the neighborhood of around 21 and a half million. It would be a competitive sale. So in other words, it's kind of a little bit like an auction, if I understand correctly how it runs. And there are a list of projects here that are listed including the water treatment plant replacement of university tank, number five improvements in the no creek pipeline and other capital projects. Some of you will remember a couple of years ago, we brought you a short term line of credit that was bridge funding. And so that would, this loan will also take the money that we've expended out of that short term line of credit and we'll reimburse that and basically, you know, long-term finance the resources that we've spent that money on, which is all capital related. So that's the first item. And if you have questions about the terms or conditions of the resolution, Chick Adams are bond counsel can answer those questions for you. And the second one is a council policy, it's a change to the council policy that would explicitly add an additional purpose to the use of the water reserve, the rate stabilization fund that we already have on the books and would add the green language that you see there and specifically allocate, allow for the allocation of those funds without following the council approval process that's in section three of that council policy. This is in lieu of providing the trustee for the bonds with a million dollars in sinking funds so that we would give them that and then they would hold on to that million dollars for a really long time. Instead, we maintain the sort of guarantee, if you will, in our resources and are able to provide the same purpose that the sinking fund would from the trustee using this mechanism. So those are the two things we're asking you to do in this process. I'm happy to answer any questions you have. Thank you very much. Any questions from the council? Council Member Mayos? Real quick. I took an all-day tour with your staff about six weeks ago and actually Vice Mayor Cummings and I were both on that trip and looking at the list of projects, I'm seeing most of the locations and the projects that we visited that day as being part of this list that would be funded through these. Right. And I think when we spoke, we've also, I think the council has taken action this year, this calendar year in particular, on a number of actions relative to loans from the State Revolving Loan Fund, various kinds of revenue, you know, dedications, those kinds of things that would allow us to borrow money from some of the bigger projects, the concrete tanks project that's planned for the Graham Hill Water Treatment Plant STEM Inlet Outlet Project through the State Revolving Loan Fund, which currently has an interest rate at about 1.8%. So substantially lower than market rate and would, as we anticipate, those projects have a price tag of around $130 million, I think, that the lifetime benefit of financing those through the State Revolving Loan Fund versus market rate is about $45 million. And I just, just for clarification, you used the term sinking fund and I'm just wondering if you could maybe just explain that. How about one of my esteemed colleagues out here can answer that question better than I can? Good evening, Madam Mayor, council members. My name is Chick Adams. I'm with Fermi Jones Hall in San Francisco where you're bond council. The sinking fund actually refers, it's an older term, the newer term is rate stabilization fund and that's the one that Rosemary was referring to. It's a mechanism whereby if you get to any year where in order to make your debt service payments, you need to raise rates precipitously, you can cushion that by using prior years funds. That's what a rate stabilization fund boils down to and that's all it is. And by modifying your policy, you're enabling yourself to do that. About it? Thank you. Any other questions? Okay, thanks for the clarification. Any member of the community wanting to address this on this item? Please come forward. You'll have up to two minutes. Is there any other members of the community wanting to address this on this item? Okay. Okay. I see you're going to use MUFT Union Bank as trustee, a wholly owned foreign Japanese banking corporation with interest in wholly owned subsidiaries in the United States. Would it be too much to ask what is the justification for this instead of using a more American-owned bank and keeping the considerable estimate of $15 million or so of interest of Santa Cruz ratepayers' money in this country? Is there any chance locals can buy some of these water bonds as a hedge against the astronomical water rate increases that will probably follow? I see you're going to modify by resolution city policy giving up your authority as a city council to suit this foreign-owned bank's demands as an excellent example of your following globalist directives of a foreign authority instead of the people of Santa Cruz. I see you're going to use a bank that has paid huge sums of money as settlements for wrongdoing and violation of U.S. sanction law. While I would tend to agree, it would be hard-pressed to find an American mega bank also not guilty of essentially a ton of criminal activity. Hey, give it a try, you never know, you might find one. Surely some must exist. It would have been nice to know the simplified cost-benefit analysis of these water projects in our detail to see what ratepayers are actually buying with an estimated $41 million. The maturity of the bonds, the lifetime of the improvements, and the estimated pipeline of future debt demands. You know, hard questions. Like the ones that weren't asked at the May meeting where water treatment increases were rubber-stamped after a chamber clearing, radical grievance, longer hissy fit, and some progressive city council members abandoned their duties. I'm still wondering why the rate increases put in place for that didn't include rolling them back after the improvements were over in five years. I'm wondering about that same issue again here when the inevitable rate increases come a call. Thanks. Next speaker. Hi, forgive me. I don't understand how the whole water thing works. I'm trying to figure it out as you're speaking. So I did hear some mention of wastewater. I'm sorry, I keep looking at her because I know she has the answer. Wastewater. Anyway, I'm curious if, because I see from the meeting earlier about the cogeneration engine. I just want to make sure that the cogeneration engine is cogenerating on reusable or renewable energy. And that's all. Great. Seeing that no other members of the community wanting to address this on this item, we'll go ahead and return back to the council for action and deliberation. I'll go ahead and see if there's an emotion on the floor. I'll move the staff recommendation. We have a motion by Councillor Brown, seconded by Councillor Myers. Any further comment? Seeing none. All those in favour, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay, that passes unanimously. Council member Brown. I do have a question. These are such big projects. What's your timeline? Or I guess we get to that on the next item. Well, yes. But I will tell you that for the projects that are we're looking at the financing from the State Revolving Loan Fund, we're going to be bringing the authorization for the council to approve the plans and specs and authorize us to go to bid on the Nill Creek Dam Inlet Outlet Project to the council on the 28th of January. So that one is coming, and we expect that one to be in construction next summer. At your next meeting, you will be getting one of the projects, the approval for one of the projects that would be paid for out of these funds, which is the replacement of the pipeline between the Coast Pump Station. It's under the River Pipeline. This is the project that we've been talking about related to the site that the River Street Camp is on that requires us to access that site for the micro-tunneling process that's going to be done to replace that pipeline. It's a critical piece of infrastructure that if it fails, we cannot get water really from any of our river sources, our flowing sources to the Graham Hill Water Treatment Plan, and things can go bad pretty darn fast if that happens. So it's a critical piece of infrastructure we know is in bad shape, and that project is going to come for approval of the plans and specs at your next meeting. And all these bond proceeds are expected to be spent in three years, and that's basically the maximum length of time we're allowed by federal regulations, and it also helps to just make sure you meet that period of spending because it costs money to issue bond proceeds. So the longer time that you can spend those or make sure that you're covered, the better off you're going to be in terms of interest. Council Member Myers had one last. So it sounds like we have a bit of a Green New Deal kind of coming on here. Definitely do. And again, a lot of our issues are very... This is all about water supply, reliability, and infrastructure resiliency, both of which are necessary for us to adapt to climate change that we already are experiencing, and we're going to be talking more about that in the next part of this meeting. Great. Thank you very much. So with that, we'll go ahead and take a brief recess while the council chambers are prepared for our joint meeting with the water community. All right. Well, we'll go ahead and get started again. So good evening again to those who are now tuning in to our November 12, 2019 joint city council water commission meeting. So I'd like to ask our clerk to please call the roll and welcome up our commissioners. Thank you. Council Member Cron. Here. Clever. Here. Brown. Here. Mathias. Here. Vice Mayor Cummings. Here. Mayor Watkins. Here. Commissioner Baskin. Present. Neckis. Here. Ryan. Here. Schwarm. Here. Little shoes. Here. Do that every time. Vice Chair Wadlow. Here. And Chair Angford. Here. Before we begin, I have just a few comments and then we'll go ahead and get started. I'm going to discuss the proposed revisions to the city's work plan to achieve water security. I'd like to begin tonight's meeting with a recap, a quick one of how we got here. As many in the audience and those who may be watching from their homes tonight may remember in 2014, the city council appointed 14 members of the community to a committee to develop solutions to the city's ongoing water shortage problems. The Water Supply Advisory Committee, or WASAC, as it's known, met for 18 months and took a deep technical dive into the city's complex water system. Supported by a technical advisory committee made up of consultants and staff, WASAC members were able to come to agreement on five recommendations to achieve water supply security. Those recommendations included increased water conservation, water transfers, aquifer storage and recovery, recycled water, and desalination. The WASAC set an ambitious course recommending that the water department evaluate all recommendations concurrently with final decisions to be made on which course to take by 2020. Work began in earnest in 2016 and the water department has made tremendous progress on evaluating alternatives. Through their analysis and pilot testing, they've developed a revised work plan. Tonight we'll hear about their recommendations for integrating new information, taking advantage of near-term opportunities for supply augmentation, and adjusting the timeline for decision making. But before we start tonight's meeting, I'd like to ask if there are any WASAC members in the audience and if so, please stand to be recognized. Do you understand those who are involved here? Please. Those that are here with us tonight, as well as others, put hundreds of hours into this very complicated and very productive process. I'd like to thank you on behalf of our entire city council for all your service to our community. So thank you so much. So with that, we'll go ahead and move forward with our presentation this evening or any additional remarks that may once be said by the chair. And we'll follow a similar structure as we did earlier. Okay. Please. Thank you, Mayor Watkins. And I would like to take just a couple of minutes before Rosemary gets started. And first off, on behalf of the commission, express our gratitude to the council for the opportunity to work with you all on water policy and for inviting us here this evening to join you at this meeting. This meeting's a little different than past joint meetings we've done recently. The most recent water supply augmentation strategy meetings have been mostly informational in nature. And this one we're asking you to make a big decision. We're at a crossroads in implementing the strategy. And specifically we're proposing a major change in the roadmap with the water supply advisory committee called an adaptation rather than just an adjustment, specifically as regards the timeline over which we're going to be implementing the roadmap. By way of background, Rosemary and her team over the last, well, several years, but particularly this year in an iterative process have been diligent, thoughtful, and creative in taking a comprehensive look at our existing system as well as our need for supply augmentation and mindful of some of the points that Rosemary made earlier about delayed system rehab that we need to undertake some supply benefits that are going to accrue as a result of that work. Positive piloting results we've been getting on aquifer storage and recovery in the belt's well field. Demand actuals that have fallen short of our original projections, meaning we have a little bit less demand we have to try to meet. The establishment, both imminent and recent of groundwater sustainability plans in our basins and our still evolving understanding of the impact of climate change on our largely surface-based water supplies, we're bringing forth a proposal, staff is bringing forth a proposal that the commission supports that'll make moderate but impactful increases in our available supply by leveraging existing infrastructure, taking advantage of the investments we're going to be making in our existing system and some modest additional no-regrets investments that'll get us some additional supply and buy us some time during which we can get smarter about the things we need to get smarter about so we can make the right decision to spend the right money at the right time to fully solve our water supply needs in the future. So with that, I'll turn it over to Rosemary and her team. Thank you so much, and I appreciate the hard work of everyone who's been involved in this, really from the Water Supply Advisor Committee. When they were finished, the Water Commission kind of seamlessly took up their role as the overseers and partners with us in the work that we've been doing. Really, I think Doug's comments are a lot of... covered the details, and I was recently at a presentation where someone said, in case you nod off, here's the takeaways. That was the first slide. So I didn't want to put, in case you nod off, here. But I did want to put the sort of key takeaways up front. So we're going to find our key conclusions. I think Doug just said them for you. In between is a summary of the work we've done that resulted in our arriving at those conclusions, and I'm really providing you that as much to give you a range, a feel for the sophistication and the level of detail of the work. And then we're going to ask you to take a motion to do the adaptation. So with that, I will get going. But before I do, these are the... what we've learned in the last four years and what we think we need to do to make some significant progress in improving supply reliability. If we focus near-term efforts on using existing infrastructure in the belt system to create a ASR program, we work with the Santa Margarita Groundwater Agency on its Groundwater Sustainability Plan, explore opportunities for additional groundwater storage in that basin, leverage the system reliability benefits of upcoming water treatment plan improvements that we need to do anyway, and then continue working, and really this is maybe the first and the last and the over and over again, continue working to understand the potential impacts of climate change on our region's ability to use surface water and groundwater resources to meet our needs on the run. This is a really, really important question with many big consequences, and understanding it better is in our interest and is something that we feel confident that we can do. So I've kind of divided the presentation into two parts. The first part is a summary of where we've been, and it's a little bit of the longer parts, but again, I want to... I'll try to move through it relatively quickly and when I show you a slide with lots of numbers and things that I'll highlight, why I'm telling you that and so you won't have to be trying to figure out everything about it. But so with that, I'm going to get going. So update on the status of the work. First, I'm going to talk a little bit about... a little bit more background about the WASAC and its recommendations, including the work plan that we've been implementing, and then talking about some updates that we have on their assumptions about supply, demand, and climate change, and then talk about surface water augmentation strategies and analyses we've done looking at this sort of available supply, kind of typically wintertime supply that is more water than we have and we certainly don't have any place to store it. So how could we possibly leverage that and then give you a quick update on the work we've done on recycled water and desalination strategies. These are the key dates for the Water Supply Advisory Committee. Council decided to do it in October 2013. November, they created the Council took action to adopt a drought solution Citizen Advisory Committee. February 2014, that group became the Water Supply Advisory Committee. It included 14 members chosen by a subcommittee of the Council. We met for 18 months starting in April of 2014. And then in November of 2015, there was a joint Water Commission City Council study session on the 10th of November, so four years ago now, and then the Council accepted the WASAC agreement and recommendations and directed us to integrate it into the upcoming urban water management plan. So we have done that. The group included a whole diverse representation chamber, the folks who were against desal, the folks who were for desal, some number of environmental groups. Water commissioners were represented, members at large from the community, great payers, what have you. These are they. We were a professionally facilitated group, and it was a group that probably, they did a lot of exploration and they came to consensus on their recommendations. This is their problem statement that our problem, our key problem is that we have limited storage for a system or size. Really our water supply reliability problem is not about growth. It's about meeting supply reliability for the people who live here now. We have fish flow requirements and potential climate change impacts, which could further exacerbate the supply situation. We have a fairly good size gap off of, at that time, an estimated 3.2 billion gallons per year total demand for water. We had a potential peak season, worst case hydrology, 1.2 billion gallon gap, which is a big hill to climb if you find yourself in that situation. And that while we have then committed community to water conservation for decades, and we've done a tremendous job on that, the group concluded that water conservation alone could not solve this problem. Their recommendations as you were sort of summarized, heard earlier, additional water conservation efforts in lieu of water transfers and exchanges with SoCal Creek, with Scotts Valley or San Lorenzo Valley, potential future partners in using our water in the wintertime and resting their wells to create a bank of water for us to use when we were in a drought situation. And then aquifer storage and recovery, those were the winter water harvest strategies. And then the alternate water supply strategies of recycled water, some kind of advanced treated, either non-potable reuse for irrigation or potable reuse strategies for groundwater replenishment or surface water augmentation. Those strategies are on the books as well as desalination. These are really, what you see on this list is pretty much the list of the resources we have available to us in Santa Cruz County. We're not connected to any of the other state water infrastructure. When it rains here, we, that's the water we have and when it doesn't rain here, that's the water we don't have and that's a problem. The one thing I want, this is their work plan and I know you can't read this and this is actually a poor kind of a cut and paste slide, but I will tell you, it was lined up so that in 2020, the information on all of the key alternatives was available simultaneously to allow for a kind of an apples to apples comparison of all the options. And that was a really, really important piece of this analysis that we've been working very diligently to create information that would inform this kind of analysis. And it's one of the main things that we're proposing to change. We're proposing to keep the Apple, the commitment to the apples and apples comparison of all the options, but we're proposing to move that back a couple of years and for reasons that we'll talk about. So I'm going to talk a little bit about what we've learned in the years, particularly as it relates to the key Wasek assumptions. This is our demand forecast for the 20 years following in the window that we were talking about 2015 to 2035. This part right here is blank, because we're just coming out of the second year of a drought here. Typically what would happen is there would be some kind of a rebound. It would take some time to do that. But the long-term demand forecast was basically flat, slightly declining. And this was flat and slightly declining, including additional 20,000 people coming into the area to be our customers over the 20-year period, as well as there's water in here that would have accommodated. UCSC growth has been kind of talked about over this kind of a timeframe. The basic situation, the reason it's flat is basically three things. One is existing building and plumbing codes that result in more efficient use. The second one was price elasticity of demand. Water has been getting more expensive, and our customers have been responding to it, particularly as it relates to discretionary use, like irrigation or longer showers. And then the third thing was additional programmatic conservation, mainly focused on things like rebates for turf removal or washing machine rebates or dishwasher rebates. In our case, most, not perhaps all, but most of the high-flow toilets, high-flow shower heads, those things are long gone out of our system over the last sort of 20-plus years. This chart is really hard to look at, but I think if I wanted to sort of focus on the color palettes, anything that's kind of the blue, gray, black, those are annual daily, the squiggle line is daily over that year from 2013 and before. So that was our pattern, and that's roughly about 3.2 billion gallons. The kind of average demand of that set of curves is about 3.2 billion gallons of total usage. The red, brown, kind of darkish, brown, purple color, I guess at the bottom, that's our demand pattern since 2014. And 2014 and 2015 were years we had water restrictions in place, but fundamentally, even after we took those restrictions up in 2016, we have not rebounded to the same level of demands that we've had historically. The good news about this is this makes the size of the gap smaller in the near term. It doesn't make it go away, but it makes it smaller. The bad news is we've rung a lot of the discretionary water use out of the system. So if we found ourselves in a situation where we had another 2014, getting a 25 or 30% cut to respond to that would be a more challenging situation. I'm not saying you can't get there. I'm just saying it would be more challenging. One of the things we're doing right now, and that's kind of on another parallel path, is we're working on an update to the 2009 water shortage contingency plan that the council adopted and was developed and sort of based on data and customer use patterns in 2005, six, seven council adopted it in 2009. That plan lays out a five stage plan for cuts up to about 50%. We're in the process as part of the planned urban water management plan update we have to complete in the middle of 2021 of updating that plan because we're required to have a six stage plan that goes up to 60% reductions, but also because we know that our customer use patterns have changed a lot, and so we need to adapt the kind of cut strategies or restriction strategies we would build into that plan in order to get sort of demand reductions if we need them and understanding customer use patterns is a big part of what's necessary to do that. So that work is kind of getting underway now and probably we'll be bringing something forward on this in the spring. But again, this pattern kind of the signal here, one of the signals is supply reliability is even more important than it has been historically because we have such a conserving community and those patterns of behavior seem to have really cemented themselves in many ways in our community. So this is a major issue in the sense of thinking about particularly near term strategies and what we can do to improve supply reliability going forward and you'll see some more of that as we get further on in the presentation. The other thing I wanted to talk a little bit about is climate change. We've developed a number of new scenarios. This one that's called GFDL 2.1A2. I love this terminology, right? This one is developed and used in the water supply advisory committee planning process, but subsequently we've developed this one that's called four ensemble model. You can see this little orange dots in here are from that one. And then this one called the historical catalog. This was not so much a downscaled global climate model as a picking out of the historical record, the warmer and drier years and then dispersing with a handful of the wetter years and then randomizing that and creating a new record. So this is kind of taking, using the historical information as a basis for what we would do. You can see that the one, the blueish one that we used in the in the water supply advisory committee process is kind of the warmest and the driest in general. But this historical catalog one is also fairly warmer and drier. These are things we've been using a lot of analyses looking at all of these options as well as historical data and you'll see some examples of that in a little bit. So the key changes, the modeling assumptions here we've done is we've recognized that we've got some near term demands that are lower and we're looking at those and building those in including the fact that the annual peaking profile is flatter than the 3.2. We're maintaining the 3.2 billion gallon demand forecast. That was actually a forecast that's created and we'll be updating that forecast also as part of the development of the updated urban water management plan next year. So until we've got a new forecast we're going to maintain using that number. Again, you'll see a lot of analyses later on in this presentation that will show you what the problem looks like at 3.2 billion gallon demand or 2.6 and under these various climate change scenarios. So it makes it for a chart with lots of numbers in it. I'm sorry to interrupt you. I know that you have time for the questions at the end but I saw a council member get my attention. It looks like there was a brief question here. Could you kind of briefly and simply explain that? Yes. Or not. Or should I? I can. Maybe Heidi, you can be prepared. Should we just keep going? That's fine. So the basic thing, there's two dimensions here. One of them is departures from average precipitation. So dryer, wetter. That's on this axis here, median precipitation. And you can see the ones are here. And then this is temperature. So increase in temperature, median temperature. And this is where this one is. So you can see that most of these climate change models are giving us information that says it's basically in this warmer and drier quadrant of this. There's a little bit from this four model ensemble that's in the more moderate kind of down here, closer to the averages here. But typically they're on the drier side. There's one or two little spots over here that are in the wetter side. Does that answer your question? Yeah. Thank you. So it's trying to kind of see, you know, by developing additional models, you're helping to understand whether or not the blue one that we had is close. It's not close. It's, you know, the other ones are similar. And that is one of the questions that we're going to be doing some more work on as we go forward. Well, these were three different models using this. Yes. Created in sort of, oops. Okay. So this is a summary of the changes to the key modeling assumptions. And that's, those are really important. I want to talk a little bit about surface water augmentation strategy. And there's two elements of this. One of them is the transfers and exchanges. And the second one is the, is the upper storage and recovery. So roughly a year ago, we celebrated the valve turning of the opening of the intertide that we have with Soquel Creek Water District at their O'Neill Ranch Well. And we started the first ever sort of water transfer project. It ran until April 30th. That was kind of the window November 1st, April 30th. This is the window we have in our CEQA document for this particular pilot project. And a number of the WASAC members, including there's Mike and there's David and there's Doug right there. And this is Rick Lajinadi and Greg Pepping. These folks are all here celebrating. There's Erica in the audience. And then this is some details. The direction we got was explore these transfers. The actions to date include developed an agreement with them in 2016. In 2017 and 2018 with the backdrop of the Flint kinds of, and the Fresno colored water issues, there was quite a bit of study going on looking at the compatibility of surface water and groundwater exchanging and not wanting to create a situation where we sent water to them and then they had red water problems or other kinds of corrosion problems because surface water is typically much more corrosive than groundwater systems are. So we did a study that came out with successful results that said we could, you know, do this exchange, send water to them without there being any negative consequences on a water quality perspective. In winter of 2018-19, we did it. We had good success. And we're planning a second round this coming winter. We haven't started yet because the flows in the North Coast streams aren't really up yet. We haven't had rain yet, but as soon as we have some rain, we'll get going on that again. This was the area for the first transfer that we sent and the planned area for this time is quite a bit bigger. So it's larger. This was kind of in this little hourglass kind of shape down here. It's going to be this whole service area one, this go around. So this has a more demand on it than the last time did and we're hoping to, you know, basically be able to move water further into their system. The other strategy we're looking at is aquifer storage and recovery. It's where you push water through with pressure, eyes, injection pressures to push it into the aquifer. It creates a little sort of space where your natural, your water that you inject is there. It doesn't mix with the native groundwater. And then later on you recover that, you take it back out and pretty much you can tell by the water quality changes between the surface water and the groundwater when you've moved beyond the collection of the water you put in and now you're talking about water from the native groundwater. So we have successfully done a lot of paperwork looking at the feasibility analysis of this strategy. We got good results and last winter we pilot tested in the Belts 12 well, our Belts 12 well successfully completed a pilot test of this technology and we're planning a second test and this year in a second one of the Belts wells. So this is a real, and you'll hear more about this a little bit later on as we talk about something we could do with an existing infrastructure that would improve our supply reliability. This is a section where I want to talk a little bit about some of the analytical work we've done to look at these things. So now you're going to see a lot of charts and graphs and numbers and things but I'll try to make it easy for you to understand. So we do a lot of modeling. We use a number of different kinds of models but we do a lot of modeling to help us understand the probability and scale of droughts, the water availability to do things like meet the demands of other communities for transfers to be able to put water in the ground, how much do we have? Infrastructure sizing, how big does the pipes have to be to take water to a place to get the maximum amount in the ground? How many wells do we need? Those kinds of things. Operational approaches in terms of things like, well, shall we operate the Reservoir differently, the Lachlan Reservoir differently than the groundwater? Shall we operate them the same? Those are kinds of questions we have to understand and then how to collaborate with other entities and how that could work. So those are the kinds of things we do for modeling. We use a major sort of system planning and simulation model called Confluence. We've been using it for decades. It's a model that uses a daily time step. So when we run a Confluence run, it runs every day of the historic record that's probably, you know, 70 years. And every single day it puts hydrology into the system based on actual record data. It puts water demand into the system based on the projected demand scenarios we're looking at. It simulates how the system will function and then it will feed that information into things like the ground motor models that we've been using in the Mid County Basin and also we'll be using up in the Santa Margarita Basin and then also to the Fisheries Effects Analysis models that we use. So this is our major model and a lot of the results you're going to see come out of Confluence. And again, they're really important in helping us understand are we on the right track or are we not on the right track. To just give you a little bit of background about how it works, there's a dispatch order that is this one that you see here. First start with the north coast. It said to go down the list. And every day so it says, okay, today we have a 7MGD of demand and so how much can we get from the north coast? We take that, then we take the next thing, take how much water is available from the Tate Street diversion and then the Tate Street groundwater and if it's summer time, we'll take the belt swells. And if we still need water, we'll go to Lachlomand now. We don't have the groundwater storage yet. And then finally, if we can't still meet demand, it will identify the shortage. And so at the end of the year, when you see some of these numbers that are accumulating, one put two billion gallons, that means that there were many days during that year when we couldn't meet demand with the available supplies that we had. And so as a result, they accumulate over that whole water year to produce that number. We live in the real world. So our daily dispatch is constrained by fish flow requirements, by infrastructure capacities. You can't put more water through a pipe than a pipe will take. You can't treat more water through the water treatment plant than the water treatment plant has the capacity for. Available flows from the various sources, water rights, flow rates, volumes, and places of use, and then water quality, turbidity, and first flush flow requirements. We have a lot of things that are taken into account in the way we model the system's performance, and these are the key ones of those. Okay, so here's a really good example of one of these charts. There's lots of numbers on it. Just to point out, so these are the four basic sort of climate scenarios, the historical one and the three other climate scenarios we talked about. This line here is the 3.2 billion gallons of demand, the 2016-2018, that's 2.6. And then the question that was asked in this model run is, what are the worst case droughts in each scenario? And typically it's a two-year back-to-back strategy, or in the case of the CMAP-5. They weren't as big of a one, but there were three together that were back-to-back. So that's why this one has three. And so you can see that this is a total for the historical item with the 3.2 billion gallons demand. This is a 1.8 billion gallon over two years. With the lower demand, it's a 781 million gallons, which is not inconsequential, but it's certainly not as big as 1.8. And you can see that the others have, again, this is 1.8, this is two, this is 2.4, this is 2.3. So the good news about these numbers is really probably they're all about the same number. And the second thing is there's not a 3 billion or a half a billion one on this list, which means that even though none of these are right, we're probably in the right ballpark. Let's put it that way. So this is an example of the kind of results that tells us how big the droughts would be and what their characteristics would be under different demand and climate scenarios. I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the Mid County groundwater basin and the modeling of the city aqua storage and in lieu projects in particular because it leads to some other analysis about what it is that we told Soquel about our availability to provide them with surface water to meet their needs. So our primary purpose was to validate the assumptions we had regarding the feasibility of groundwater storage. We had some parameters about storage losses. We had an operational scenario that said inject the water over a three-year period followed by a two-year drought withdrawal at a level necessary to meet the drought shortages. So put a bunch of water in the ground, accumulate, and then use it over a period of two years while you're having a drought. That's what the scenario looked at. This is a very geeky piece of drawing, but for those of us who love this groundwater thing, this is what the Mid County groundwater basin looks like. The reason I'm showing you this is because one of the references shows to the TU formation. That's this really deep one. You can see this well right here is actually screened in that formation. The city's wells are all screened in the A, the AA, or the TU formation. So Cal has wells screened in those same wells in those soil formations that we do, as well as these formations over here, which we are not, that don't underlie our part of the service area. This is an interesting issue for some other reason, but basically I want you to see that we're going to look at what happens to groundwater levels in this strata and in this strata in the next two slides. We did an example of an injection and a withdrawal looking at in lieu only, ASR only, and then some combination, and then a baseline. So that's what you're going to see in the next slide. So these are three monitoring wells on the coast. The strategy here is to try to maintain the level of the groundwater in these monitoring wells to keep seawater intrusion at bay. And you can see the baseline is these yellow lines. And these are then the little dotted green line is just in lieu only. The blue line is ASR only, and then the pink line is, oh, I'm sorry, this is ASR only, and then the other one is the combined one. One of the things I'm showing this to you for is you can see that this is the, this is the measurable objective from the groundwater sustainability plan. This thing right here is the level we're trying to achieve. And you can see that when we fill up the aquifer for three years and then we draw it down in a period of two years, we actually make the situation in the groundwater elevations in that basin, this particular monitoring well, which is this one right here, we make it worse than the baseline. That's a takeaway message from this. And this is the deepest layer, which is the one that is most subject to seawater intrusion because the seawater is heavier and so can come right in in the lower area. So this is a, operating like this is not a workable solution in this basin with this strategy. This is another one looking at these monitoring wells over here in the Soquel area, but it shows the basic same pattern. This one's in the A unit. And you can see again, this is the minimum threshold, this bottom line on this one is the minimum threshold, means we told DWR Department of Water Resources, we're not going to go below that. And yet we're seeing when the fill for three years and the withdrawal down for two years, that that's going to be a problem. In this scenario, which is this one here, this one here, I think, and in this scenario, these are all show that that's a challenging situation for us to be in. So when we started to talk about how much water we could provide to Soquel, we made a decision about making sure that since we have to solve our drought problem before we can solve a neighbor's problem that this would be the dispatch order. We'd meet the fish flows first, Santa Cruz's daily demand, put water in storage to meet our needs, and then if we have leftover after that, we provide water to the neighboring agency. That produced this result. And the really important takeaway here is looking at meeting that what Soquel has to fight as their 1500 acre feet of water a year is what they need to keep seawater intrusion at bay in their part of the basin. This is a probability. What it says, even with the lowest demand and the best case situation of these various climate scenarios, we can only achieve that 45% of the time. Now, in a good year, a year like we had this year or even last year, we could probably have done it, although we weren't putting water in storage for ourselves, but we probably could have done it. But when you take a long-term view of what you're trying to accomplish and the answer is only 45% of the time could you count on that, that doesn't seem like a very good way to go. Smaller volumes and provided off-peak winter only are pretty reliable. You can see these numbers. And then we have a strategy for improving the robustness of the water treatment plant process that will result in some reliability benefits, the water supply reliability benefits that will allow us to use more water, particularly in the wet situations and in the dry situations. And that improves the condition, you know, to 55%. But still is not really workable. Yeah, this particular climate catalog strategy had all the water, the precip condensed, somewhat serendipitously, condensed into like a single month period. And so when you're trying to do a water, sort of a transfer project or something where you're taking water out of the river every single day to put it in storage, and all the precip is in one month, it doesn't support that. That's why this says not applicable. And you can see at the lower demand, it works to some degree, but in this situation, the precip pattern is too condensed to even work for an awkward storage and recovery or, you know, using that supply for our own purposes, right? This was an interesting result. You know, again, none of these are right in terms of what the climate change scenarios are, but to get a result like that is kind of a little eye-opening and something we should pay attention to. Okay. So this is a very quick summary. Pilot testing of INLEO and ASR in the mid-county groundwater basin appear feasible. Those results, they say these things are feasible. We have a... We need to design any ASR project. We would work to meet both the protective groundwater elevations to protect the basin from seawater and to provide drought storage. So that's one of the things on our plate. And there continue to be a lot of opportunities for collaboration in both of the groundwater basins to work with other partners on various kinds of groundwater sustainability strategies as well as possible supply augmentation strategies using surface water and other activities. And we're definitely involved in those things. Okay. Moving on. Anybody have questions on that before I go? Any questions? Okay. Keep remembering that first slide about if you'd nod off. I know there's a lot of stuff here. Thanks, Ruth. Quick update on the work we've done on recycled water and desal. We did a recycled water project with public joint project with Public Works, other stakeholders who are involved. We finalized the study about a year and a half ago shortly. Basically, we looked at a lot of different options. This is the Santa Margarita groundwater basin, by the way. This purple one. And this is the mid-county basin, this green one over here. We looked at a lot of different kinds of options. And one of the things we looked at was the market for non-potable reuse for irrigation purposes. And if you have a question about this, you can see Heidi can answer this more, but large landscapes that are these dark ones, so Delabiega Park, et cetera, and then some of them have water budgets and some of them have water audits on them. But they accumulated, they identified every one of these sites and what the use pattern was and accumulated that to determine how or whether the degree to which some kind of non-potable purple pipe system might help solve our problem and it didn't really pencil out in most cases. Let's put it that way. So the project did recommend a couple of things. One was right next to the treatment plan, there's La Veronca Park, that would be a project there potentially. And then this project called Bay Cycle, which would have taken recycled water, tertiary treated recycled water up the hill to the UCSC campus for them to use both in irrigation. And I think earlier there was a commenter who mentioned that some of the buildings on the campus had been built to have use alternative sources of water for toilet flushing. So they have dual plumbing in those cases and so this would be a usable for those kinds of projects as well. And then a number of indirect potable reuse projects which are listed here and really would be things that we would move forward with in the future to dive more deeply into these particular projects. We were asked particularly after the work on D-cell that preceded the Water Supply Advisory Committee to give an update about what would be involved in this project. And one of the key things was to assess the possible change conditions since 2013. And so we hired a local consulting firm, Dudak, to update that information. That work was completed in August of 2018. Not surprisingly, since the ocean is quite large, a project could produce, could be developed to meet our need. Costs were refined based on change conditions. A major issue that has emerged in the time between the work that was done earlier and where we are now is that the Ocean Plan Amendment now requires all D-cell plants to have subsurface intakes, which means buried as opposed to a big open pipe that's sucking seawater in. I guess I would sort of cringe at my saying that because they're a little more subtle than that probably. But anyway, that's the view. But you have to be able to prove that it's not feasible, but they don't tell you what feasible means. So it's really like, well, I don't like that rock, bring me another rock, right? So it's a whole strategy that says this. And that led to this conclusion that not only would it be more expensive, but timeliness to actually get a project like that probably would not make it a feasible project to do in the timeframe we were talking about. A year ago, the council took action to basically de-prioritize desalination as the alternate water supply and prioritize further work on recycling as the alternate. So that took place. It didn't have anything to do with the Pure Water Soquel project. It had to do with how recycled water might possibly meet our needs. Okay. That's the main part. But I want to, I've got just a couple more slides to talk about what else we've learned in the meantime that I think we'll then we'll take a little break with her time for questions and answers. So this is the, this is the kind of the repeat of the slide early on, which said, you know, we think given the lower near-term demand, there's an opportunity to make significant progress if we focus on ASR in the belt system using existing infrastructure and available supplies, work with our partners in the Santa Margarita to explore options there, leverage the benefits of system reliability benefits, actually don't leverage them, design them in, and then leverage them to the upcoming water treatment plan improvements and then to work on further understanding the climate change impacts, particularly as it relates to how vulnerable is surface water as a source of supply for us to some of the kinds of impacts of climate change that could do the thing like we saw in that climate catalog, one where the rain pattern or the precip pattern changes so dramatically that it can no longer support the kind of winter harvest strategy where you have to have a long period of time to take water every single day or alternatively you have to have really big pipes and treatment plant capacity and, you know, transmission and a whole bunch of number of wells so that you can put the same amount of water in the ground in a much shorter period of time. So that's kind of the trade-off between those two. One thing I wanted to show you just in terms of the possible system reliability benefits of the aqua storage and recovery in the belt system. So this is the... You'll remember from the chart we saw earlier the size of the... with 2.6 billion gallons a year of demand and the historical flows. This is an example. I have the ones for all the ones, but I don't want to make your eyes glaze over. So 780 million gallons was the shortage worst year shortage under the historical flows. With existing wells you can make that shortage go to 105 million gallons a year instead of 700 and then you don't really need to add any additional wells or required capacity. Actually you can make it go to zero if you do add more wells in the area. Here's the warmest, driest flows and you can see the number here is bigger. It's 989. With existing wells you can make it go to 320 and then by again adding one well for putting in you can basically get that to go to zero. This is a really solid benefit to gain in a relatively short period of time for a relatively low price tag that is kind of a low regrets, no regrets strategy that is when we started looking at this it was like we need to change this plan so we can get on with this because this makes a ton of sense. That's the part about what we've done and kind of what we've learned. Well thank you for the presentation. Other than needing my magnifying glass for some of the slides. I learned something, no. It's fantastic. The work is just really extraordinary. So thank you for all your time and efforts in bringing us up to speed. We'll go ahead and pause right now and see if there's any questions from the colleagues here. Council Member Myers? I just have a couple of questions. I attended the climate change session you did in August. It was great to see all that work. I'm just curious how do you keep that prediction up to date? So I mean what does that look like? So the two models that were created from the global climate downscaling were used. The first one was from what was called CMAP 3 which is a whole suite of things that were developed kind of in the early part of this decade. And the second one came from CMAP 5. You go into the CalAdapt website and you can find all this stuff yourself. I mean it's totally available. But these are global climate models that are created in kind of segments. Like here's this one we did and this is work and then we're going to publish that and then a few years later you're going to do an update. So they came mainly from that and that work is ongoing, right? So that's one thing. The second way that we're looking at going forward and we're going to talk a little bit more about that when we get to the next steps is that's all top down. That's sort of, you know, take a bunch of stuff there and one of the things Bruce Daniels, if any of you know him, he'll say, well that takes a tenth out. The square size of that model is 10,000 square miles and then you're trying to downscale it to 50 square miles or whatever and there's a potential lot of error in there. So the other thing that we're doing or we're proposing to do is to do what's called stress testing the system and looking bottom up. So create a whole bunch of scenarios and they don't have to be refined. There just have to be whole range of scenarios across a whole wide spectrum of more wet, more dry, those kinds of things and then look at those in terms of how does the system perform in those circumstances and which parts of the system are struggling. If we ended up in, for example, in a pattern where we had the same amount of rainfall but it came in the 2017 winter kind of a strategy where you're just getting pounded by it, that is really hard on water quality aspects. So that's a treatment process needs to be really set up so that it can work better in those conditions. We have a lot of our pipelines in places where landslide risks or land movement, mudslides, those kind of things are a big problem. So those kinds of things stress different parts of the system then, for example, a really warm dry scenario would stress a different part of the system. So the idea is to really try to understand where climate scenarios of different characteristics would stress the system and be in a situation where you're starting to create some signposts out there as we go actually into the future looking at, oh, we're starting to see that kind of thing. Then we know if it goes in that direction we could have these kinds of risks. And so, again, designing in as we do some of the rehabilitation replacement work we're doing, ways to move things out of that right-of-way because that's really a bad right-of-way for that kind of landslide problem and some other right-of-way might be better. Those are the kinds of things we can do and might be informed by the bottom-up strategy. So like the Tate Wells first sea level rise, you would be looking at that from that infrastructure question rather than the climate per se. Yeah. Got it. Great. Thank you. And one of the things I was just going to, I was said to several of you when we talked was that these climate scenarios to do the stress test, I mean, we're obviously focusing on our system, but they're created and we could potentially consider how we stress test other parts of the city's facilities, the flood channel, for example. Smart. Okay. Vice-American. Well, first off, it's a great presentation. I had a question around, I know earlier you'd mentioned when you're pumping surface water into some of these groundwater wells, there's an ability to be able to determine the difference between the sources of water. I'm just curious, is that, are you all using stable isotopes or how does the water department, they're able to kind of determine what source of water they're actually pulling out and how, whether it's mixing or not? Native groundwater has quite different chemistry from surface water, especially when you're putting in a treated drinking water, right? So the mineral content of our surface water is typically way lower in minerals and you wouldn't necessarily look at the dissolved oxygen so much because that's probably gone by then. But native groundwater will have a lot more natural minerals in them, so just that's one thing. We don't need to use anything, but the real different characteristics of the existing water. That's how we do it. Any questions? What do you proceed to? Other commentary by any commissioners? You've been offered one. These folks have been, I think I mentioned to a number of you that these folks have been hearing about this on a quarterly basis in some detail for more up to three and a half years now. So most of them are really up on this. They probably could give this presentation as well as I could. Before you get started, Council Member Carter. I was just wondering about the golf course and we get a drill a well there and can water be stored from the winter for the summer to water the golf course then? I think the main strategy there would be to operate a well there to basically pump water into the pond up there which is the source of where all the irrigation water comes from and it would operate during the irrigation season and wouldn't operate the rest of the time. We hadn't really thought about the awkward storage and recovery there because sometimes when you, the thing about the Belts 12 system and the Belts treatment plan, I don't remember the numbers, eight, nine and 10. There's three wells there. I have a treatment plan on site that if we need to, well obviously chlorine would have to be added to bring the water back into the system but if we need to deal with iron and manganese for example, those treatment plans are already set up to do that and we would be able to do that. So we don't have that kind of facility at the golf course. With respect to UCSC, I know they delayed their, sending their LRDP long range of element plan for a year to the regions. Does that affect our planning at all? Are we waiting for them to finish LRDP and how much they're going to grow? No. The demand forecast we did in 2010 probably included, well after the last LRDP, let's put it that way, included a 349 million gallon per year allocation of water. That was supposed to be used by them by 2020. So they did that 2015 or 2005, and then they were supposed to be at 349 million gallons a year of use by 2020. They're at about half that and they've doubled the student population so their situation looks a lot like ours which is their per capita demand is way lower. So what we did with that 349 million that was already in our demand forecast is we stretched it out. That same number is in our demand forecast now, but it stretched out I think the 2050. So the point I guess I'm making with all of that is there's water built into our flat demand forecast for them to grow, not supporting it or anything, but for them to grow in some fashion and there would be water there in the forecast to meet their needs. That's my problem. So just a quick question about the examples of system reliability benefits of ASR. When we were talking, and I think you've reiterated that the pilot tests for ASR aqua storage in the belt system are using existing infrastructure and so which is why it's a low risk, low-fi approach. And then here it says add, if we were to add wells then we could reduce. I guess just a little bit, it would be interesting or helpful to hear what that might look like. I know that we're talking about projecting out or moving the deadline or the timeline forward, but what is... I'm going to ask Heidi... How kind of infrastructure are we talking about? I'm going to ask Heidi to come up and answer that question because I know she's been looking at that and I think she answered that question last month for the water commission. Good evening. How are you looking about the water department? The phase two work which would install new infrastructure is currently looking at just two additional wells. So like Rosemary said, we're looking at belts 8, 9, 10 and 12 for the low-hanging fruit if you will and then two additional wells over in the Capitola Mall area. We did look at most of the geology between the river and 41st Avenue which is in our service area. We did look going north to see if there was anything up actually in the De La Viega area and the geology there is conducive to the ASR. So we still need to do some groundwater modeling to understand if those six wells will... how much of our gap those six wells would fill so that work is still ongoing. Yeah, and that would be part of this... the plan so you can... when we get to this colored chart you can see that there's some work that would feed into a decision-making so that second part wouldn't really happen until we made this sort of bigger decision in 2022 but we would be developing that along with the Santa Margarita groundwater and recycling options simultaneously to bring all that forward together. I have a quick question and maybe this sort of a broader question but it seems... I'm just curious how common is it for water department, water planning to be incorporating the level of consideration of climate changes as our water department, as you all are... it seems quite cutting edge. In the last half a decade, decade maybe there's a group that's created itself called the Water Utility Climate Alliance. You can find them on the website and really all of the... certainly all the big western water utilities are members of it and they're basically a cooperative where they're working together to learn and understand what's going on with climate in their own situations as well as about other people's situations. They're very sophisticated and I think if you're a groundwater agency you need to understand this but if you're a surface water agency you really need to understand this particularly in a place where we can't depend on the state to do this work and then figure out how to manage all the state water project and the Central Valley project to cover our interest. There's nobody covering our interest but us. So we really do have to understand this and so I wouldn't say it's unique but I would say that perhaps a little bit unique. I think it's great. Do you want to continue? Yeah. Okay. So this part is shorter and I guess basically I want to talk a little bit about the assessment process and the proposed adaptation. I mentioned to... So this is the kind of overview of this part. The change management strategy and the overview of how we developed it and then what the recommended adaptation is. The Water Supply Advisory Committee were a bunch of wise old birds and they understood that we were doing a lot of study and theoretically if you do the study right information is actually produced that might influence what you do next and so they wanted to maintain the commitment of the people and the process that they were creating and the values if you will and so they created a two-part process to allow for changes to the plan that they created and we worked with them to do this because it made a lot of sense to us too. The first one was kind of an adjustment what was called... This is something that we were given authority to manage on our own in collaboration and communication with the Water Commission based on the fact that we needed to do something to keep the plan on track and if there was something that changed that made us want to change the plan that was a bigger deal and they wanted to have it to be a very public process so they laid out a process a three-part process that we would assess we would do an assessment, we would share that assessment with the Water Commission and us sort of collaboratively would come up with a recommendation to either change the plan or go back and keep doing this or bring it to the council and ask the council to adopt a change and update the plan. So that's laid out in this language and that's in your staff report over the last as I guess the big things that I think have really brought us to where we are in recommending this are the near-term demands, what is happening with near-term demands the positive results on the upper storage and recovery the recognition that we have more work to do particularly on the climate change question before we really want to ask the question of what next and the opportunity to leverage the existing infrastructure of the system to get more supply and reliability and so in the spring one of the things we did is we did a much more gruesome and in the weeds and long major sort of comprehensive update of all the work we've done with the with the Water Commission and the former members of the Water Supply Advisory Committee, we invited them all to a workshop and we went through it in very detail and the packet is the packet for that that included eight attachments that went through some of the major areas so in April we did that and then in June we brought the first draft of an assessment, the product that we have to produce if we want to make a change to the Water Commission and had some comments about that we brought the second version of that to the August 26th Water Commission and we had a major climate change workshop at that meeting also that I think really helped us to talk about what we knew and what we didn't know and some things we wanted to explore more and how that would change the dynamic of what we were doing and then finally in October 7th we put together the materials drafts of materials for this meeting and the Water Commission took action to agree to make a recommendation to you to change the plan any Water Commissioners want to comment on this just letting you have your stuff too you know okay so the plan which is still requires a magnifying glass but bigger is this is in front of you and if you look at the kind of the bottom four swim lanes it's the same stuff that is in the earlier plan I have more copies of this if anybody needs one it's the same stuff as in the earlier plan it's sort of modified in terms of the way that the timing of certain things obviously the vertical yellow bar and the red bar the decision process moved out a couple of years the diamonds on this chart are supply increments including a potential supply increment from the belts from ASR as soon as a couple of years out from now should be really a good thing a lot of the continuing work to input information into the decision process on Santa Margarita basin information on recycled water option the timing of this allows whatever we might do in Santa Margarita to emerge out of the groundwater planning work that's going on up there rather than the city packing its little bag and heading up into the valley and saying we're here to help you and we're going to do our project and wouldn't you like to let us and that kind of thing which is probably not that great of an idea it includes that very top line includes information about the related work that's going on particularly related to the two groundwater basins to the urban water management plan update which we talked a little bit about the work that's going on on the water treatment plan which is not the only project that's happening that could influence any of this but it's a big one the modeling and climate analyses far, it's the second one down from the top includes kind of ongoing modeling using both groundwater modeling and confluence modeling that we've talked about and kind of in an iterative process as things develop and then both the additional top down and bottom up climate analyses that would feed into decision-making process in 2022 and then following 2022 these three things that are happening in the bottom three swim lanes that look all the same it's either one of these or some combination of these but this would be the timeline for the implementation so this is the proposed revised water supply work plan that would represent the adaptation and the staff report I'm pretty sure I these are the implications the lay decision additional climate information would be valuable near term ASR treatment improvements being designed in and this is from your staff report which is the summary of the sort of changes including retain and continue etc that you've seen here this is the document that would be that we're asking you to take action on to accept along with that detail I think that's with that thank you so much I just have to say the policy kind of nerdy me the WASAC process model is just extraordinary I just want to say how much I appreciate the foresight that that committee was just taking into consideration as we move forward this is just really exceptional and to get at this place here using that model it's just it's wonderful so with that I'll see if there's any questions Council Member Myers I don't think I have any I think I'll wait come allow other folks to that's a question I will ready to make a motion and when we're ready okay are there any questions from from my colleagues up here question well I guess since we're all here and maybe if there are members of the public who want to speak do that before but if there are members of the water commission who want to say something about your you know the process then I it would you're here so it'd be great to hear from you so we could go here we can go ahead and take public comment and then come back and hear from our commissioners okay if there's members of the community who would like to address this on this item please come forward and you'll have up to two minutes we'll start with you Mike hi I'm Mike Rodkin I was a member of the WASAC committee if I understood what we're being shown here there's high confidence or at least a reasonable level of confidence that if you add additional wells in the belts area or perhaps to La Viega that we don't need anything else in fact that really now you still need back back up of possible recycled water because it might stop raining if that happened none of these things work at all but I'm trying to figure out the level of confidence you have in the in those injection wells in the in the belts area versus supers for example supersizing our treatment plants so we could deal with major storm in one month or something so how confident are we that there's water that it will store the water that can be recovered with these additional wells that's something it's a quantitative issue that I I understand the process we're in but I don't understand what the numbers look like and how confident you are that we because what comes down to is should we be speeding up the look at the recycled water thing because we're not confident that we're going to get off as you said to the future to decide that or these other options you know basically increasing the capacity of the pipes and the treatment plant that's my question Rosemary taking note we'll go ahead and see if you have any response after we hear the rest of the public comment please come forward thank you good evening my name is Becky Steinbruner I am the petitioner and pro per that has taken the legal action against the Soquel project in Soquel Creek Water District for many violations as I see them of the California Environmental Quality Act that that action is still in consideration by Judge Small and I want to point out to you that part of why WASAC in my opinion did what it did to really ensure that the public was involved is because where WASAC came from measure P and Rick Longinati and the DSAL alternatives people were screaming you're not listening to us as the two agencies forged ahead with a project a DSAL project that was very energy intensive and environmentally damaging and the people were saying no no no that's how you got WASAC and that's how you got that good process and that is the flaw with the pure water Soquel the customers, the people in the mid-county have said no no no and the district is forging ahead regardless without giving the people in live vocal voice I want to point out that Locke Lohman is 92% full and I would like to point out that wisely your agency is moving forward to amend the standards of use, water rights that will change very soon so you could give more water to the mid-county area using water from the San Lorenzo River that currently you are restricted to using only the pre 1914 water law north coast streams but you could be giving them water now the north coast streams and using yourself in more minute please actually I didn't receive additional time so we will go ahead and see if any other members of the community you are welcome to submit your comment so we can review them well I did send you two extensive written comments did you receive them thank you as a customer as a person I'm here to beg you to be leaders because Soquel creek water district does not have the will to do so thank you Good evening everyone I'm the Executive Director of the Coastal Watershed Council, and the Coastal Watershed Council is one of the organizations represented on the WASAC. Really short and sweet, I just wanted to come and say that as a WASAC member, it's that I support the recommendation to the staff recommendation and the adaptation as offered. WASAC knew a lot, and we knew we needed to learn a lot more. Still lots to learn. And the way I understand it, and since stepping off of WASAC, I don't have as much of command of the material as I used to when we were really digging into it. But what I have confidence in is that the work that the staff do and the work that the Water Commission is doing and I have confidence in that it's a fact-based recommendation. We knew we didn't know a lot. It's gratifying to see what has been learned. There's a lot of humility that there's still more research to do. I wish it was raining. We can't do anything about that, but we have what we have. With the work that we're doing as an organization, try to, you know, the habitat and water quality work and engaging youth and families and educating them about the river, none of that really is not worth doing if there's not water in the river. So WASAC value is really focused on sharing human, sharing water with a fish and that's consistent with what you have before you. The adaptation is still consistent with that. So that's very reassuring. So in short, just wanted to offer my support for the staff recommendation. Thank you. Good afternoon. Good evening. What are my, my name's Candace from East Morsy. So my understanding is that by making this decision today, delaying the decision, you're only delaying it two years from its ultimate implementation, which would be by 2027. I guess that's a question. The decision on this, the water advisory committee was like ended in 2015. So that like is 12 years. And I remember it being like six to eight years. So I'm just, just feels like it keeps getting pushed out. So I just wanted to point that out. For many of us, I'm one of the people that have just gone down to the bare minimum. I mean, if I were to ask to go down another 15%, I really don't know what I would do because I have reduced my water. I don't water any landscaping, any lawn. Some of my trees have died, a couple of my fruit trees I've lost. I haven't replaced them. Any kind of landscaping is to the minimum as far as any kind of watering. I just barely keep it alive during the summer. Some of my hedges almost died. Finally, we agreed with the neighbors, see they're a fence or heads. So we started watering a little bit, replaced all my appliances, toilets, washing, don't use my dishwasher, do Navy showers every other day. My partner goes to the pool, doesn't shower at the home. Yeah, I mean, what would I do to save water? Beyond what I do right now. And I think a lot of people are in that boat. So, you know, just keep that in mind when you talk about, you know, adding another 10,000 people or 20,000 people, a lot of people in this community are wondering, you know, how are we going to survive? Thank you. I believe you'll be our last speaker. If there's any other members. Okay. Good evening, Scott Graham. There's a lot of different things that could be done to supplement our water. The city owns a large track of land up Zioni Creek where they were going to build a reservoir at one time, put a dam up there, and they could be drilling artesian wells along the hillsides in that land and have a water supply from that. And then with the winter runoff, we could pump some of that water over to the sand pits in Scott's Valley and refill the aquifer that way. The other thing is if the city is digging up the street somewhere, putting in new water mains, they should throw an extra pipe in the ground so that in the future, when there is a reclaimed water system wide, they'll have pipes already existing for that system wide reclaimed water system, which could water landscapes, flush toilets and stuff like that. It isn't completely necessary to use fresh water to flush a toilet. I mean, nobody drinks out of a toilet except maybe dogs. So anyway, I would hope that you would look at some of these other ideas on how to get more water. And the other thing is that you should contact our state representatives and the governor and tell them to ban fracking in California because fracking destroys the water systems. And even though the Trump administration has opened up California to fracking, let's statewide ban it. Thank you. Seeing no other members of the community who want to address our joint commission and council meeting here today, we'll go ahead and return back. I know there were a couple of questions that were raised. I don't know if you want to speak to those Rosemary. I do want to just sort of really applaud and compliment you. I know you went over the slide, but the social norming shifts that you see here are pretty remarkable in terms of the education and outreach and it was brought up by one of the community members. So just sort of wanted to take note of that. I'll offer your response and then welcome any comments from our commissioners here. Just a couple of things. So with respect to the comment about adding one more ASR well in the Mid County Basin would potentially solve the whole problem. It's potentially solves the whole near term problem. If we end up in a situation where demand ultimately rebounds to some degree, people decide that actually the hedge is worth keeping for example, then we would need to do more. But I think that's the reason we're putting it on the table as something to do sooner is because with the near term demand being what it is, we could have a major impact in the event. We had a 2014 kind of an event again and that would be great to be in a position to say first increment of new supply, news based on storing of water that, of surface water that we have in 60 years, right? So that would be good. With respect to the comment about the opening up the water rights for Soquel, the analysis we did actually already assumed that that was happening, that we could move water from anywhere in the system to the Soquel. So it wasn't constrained by, that part was not constrained by the lack of the Soquel district being in our place of abuse for our San Lorenzo water rights. And then let's see, yes, that's it. That'll do. Okay, thank you very much. Well, I of course welcome any comments from our commissioners or our council at this time. I definitely just want to thank you for your, just your work and your commitment and service to our city and bringing us this far is really extraordinary. Councilor Madges. I just have one more question. I bet all the water commissioners know it already, but I'm looking at the blue to red chart here. And it's not all just social norms, it's a whole lot of equipment changes too that are built into that. Well, of course, some of the things that we've had in place for a long time, the retrofit on resale program has had a dramatic effect over a long period of time. I do think that irrigation practices probably have shifted somewhat dramatically. I remember in 2017, Mike Rodkin used to tell us that he liked to have a garden and grow corn and the good years and he was hoping it for more of those again. And I remember in 2017 when it had been raining, raining, raining, I sent him an email, I said, grow corn, Mike, it's the year. But I do think that a lot of the irrigation practices have really honed in. And one of the things we did in the last rate increase was we put the big irrigators all on water budgets. So they had, based on their actual size of their landscaped area and what have you, they had an amount that was 100%. You paid a certain amount, but if you exceeded that, then you paid a penalty rate and not penalty rate. So we've done a lot of things in the way that the rates have incentivized efficient use too. So. A lot of things. A lot of things. And so my question, I remember, oh, 10, 15 years ago, we were saying even then we have one of the lowest per capita daily uses in the state. I don't remember what it was then, but this is million gallons a day here. So, what's our residential? It's 48, including indoor and outdoor use. For the system-wide, I think it's about 70. So it's a, it's in number that, of course, we live in a, we live in a, you know, a Mediterranean climate, but generally we usually have kind of wet and dry, what have you. But it's probably one of the lowest, handful of lowest in the states. I think San Francisco might be lower, but then has way fewer patches of ground to irrigate, right? Chair, anything for you? Council Member Brown asked for additional comments and I thought, you know, rather than going through reviewing what Rosemary went through, there were a few other thoughts I had while I was listening to what you had to say. And we have the gift of time here, which is unusual in my experience. And I'm reminded of the old Latin proverb, festo nalante, he's an holy, we have an opportunity to get smarter in a lot of ways. And I'm glad we have the, that we're gonna take advantage of that. Couple little things, the wells, the ASR wells are supply agnostic, as Mike pointed out. Short term, we can take advantage of it with winter flows, longer term, but if those winter flows become attenuated, we can deliver other water there and prep. We'll be able to use them, which is usually beneficial. In the meantime, while we're taking some time here, technology's gonna get better. So if we do end up going with something like recycling, I'm confident that it'll be cheaper, more energy efficient. And more cost effective when and if we do have to do that. I'm also reminded that there are some generational equities in being able to take some time here, as Rosemary pointed out earlier, with respect to the bond issue. If we can delay these decisions or moderate the amount of additional investment we have to make in order to achieve our supply goals, then they're benefit. I've been finally gratified that we did follow the letter in spirit of the WASAC process throughout this plan support. Wonderful points. Any additional comments? Ms. Ryan. Hi. So I had a few points I wanted to bring out. I'm fairly new to the Water Commission. I started earlier this year, but Rosemary's been a very good teacher. We've had a lot on our plate this last year, a lot of opportunities to review this. So for those of you who are kind of new to this, as was I, but I have a few points that I wanted to make too. The first one is that while I do understand that there's a sense of urgency that we are facing that we've created, it's November, it's not raining. There's a real need, I think, that the community feels to see something happen. I think it's really wise to wait until we really have as much information as possible before spending tens to hundreds of millions of dollars from our ratepayers on a project. We want to be really sure that it's the right course of action and taking these short-term opportunities that have arisen. I think it's really wise. It's the right thing to do, both from a supply standpoint and from a ratepayer standpoint, so that we know that we're taking them into account. Another thing I want to say is that since the WASAC ended in 2015, you cannot go to a regional water-related meeting without seeing a city staff member. They've been fantastic collaborators. Really, at all of the groundwater planning meetings in both Mid County and Santa Margarita, they've been there, they've been active, they've been really collaborative partners, and it's reflected in this, and I think it's important to recognize that they're really talking the talk, walking the walk. They're doing it all, and they're trying to be here, making sure that they're looking at all options and talking to everybody at the same time. And then lastly, I just wanted to make sure that everybody is aware, and I'm sure you are, that the climate change, it's going to be ongoing forever. We're not gonna solve this problem. We're going to get us further down the road, and it might be that in the long run, we end up having to do a lot more projects than we're talking about here, but I think this will get us to that point where we can continue moving forward. Can you give me the slide before this one? We'll go ahead and hear from you, Commissioner Baskin, and then we'll have you go over. So, David first? Thank you. So, point C, looking at the impacts of climate change were the goal of providing the information necessarily necessary to compare the long-term viability of surface water development. That's been our defining thing for the last 10 years. When I got on the water commission, Donna Meyers was the chairperson of the water commission eight years ago, and through all of that, the defining question that has been at the root of our water process for all these years, is our surface water supply sufficient or do we need something else, whether we're storing it in the ground, however we're doing it? And so, to me, the adaptation we're doing now, it's getting down to the real nitty gritty. It's getting to the focus of what we really need to be focusing on. And we should not forget that when we did WASAC, we operated in a vacuum of no capital improvement program. We could just say, let's do this, let's do that. We didn't have to deal with an $85 million project on the Newell Creek Dam and replacement of our underground pipe system that is costing $1,000 a foot. I mean, there's some pretty heavy stuff going on there. And I also think about the fact that we should not lose sight of the impact of fish flows and the concessions we've had to make to the environment because if it wasn't for the fish flows, we probably wouldn't need a project at all. Our surface water really would be sufficient, but the reality is that it's in the drought years when the fish need the water that we need the water. And so that's when we need the project. We don't need it all the time. We need it in the drought years. And those appear to be getting more frequent and of greater duration. That's what climate change has been telling us so far and that's what we're gonna be studying as we go forward. The thing about the modeling which Bruce Jaffe always says and Rosemary always says too, is that the models are always wrong, but they're the best we've got to try and predict the behavior of our system as it meets the conditions. So I look at this adaptation and it's saying, okay, let's do what we know we can do that will work. Let's figure out what we need to do in a really very real and focused way and we'll get there. Which is what was always the WASAC process and has been the water department process and the water consideration process for the last 60 years whether it be the Zionty Reservoir or DSAL or whatever as we've gone through the different incarnations of trying to solve what we knew was the same problem. So I'm glad to see us getting down to it. Good evening. We're all touching on climate change. Climate change can sound sort of nebulous and squishy, especially when we look at multiple models that say something slightly different. In the August meeting, it was sort of brought home for me when one of our experts pointed to a report that says we should expect to be losing coastal redwoods within 20 years due to climate stress. They rely on the same groundwater and fog that we rely on for our water supply. So it's closer than you might think and fish flows. Well, a large portion of our North Coast water is dedicated to fish flows and Department of Fish and Game defines that for us. So in a sense, we are sole source with the Santa Lorenzo River watershed. It's a bit risky and the risks are described in some of our documents. We expand and provide additional storage with ASR that may or may not be enough as we move forward, but it's a good start and we need to get moving. That's pretty much it. Oh, one last item. I'd like to see us moving forward maybe more quickly on some redundancy. We don't really have that choice. We have deferred maintenance for decades on our current water system. And if we want reliability in what we have before we try and expand forward to what we need, we have to spend a lot of money just to upgrade what we have to meet current regulations and to make it solid. So challenges and opportunities. All right, I welcome any other comments, please. One of the things that I'm really grateful for in participating in the commission is the diversity of experience, different perspectives. And it's kind of fun for me working around infrastructure projects to see what a hugely complex project we've undertaken in a relatively small agency and how well we've distinguished ourselves in working throughout this. In your introductory remarks, the WASAC strategy was ambitious. It absolutely was. And it's ambitious because it preserves so many options and I think correctly that we have a lot of options on the table. There are a lot of variables at play and we're trying to keep track of them without just taking them out and freezing them. The DSEL proposal is a very simple proposal, very easy to execute. You do the one thing. You pay your money, you get your water. All kinds of side effects, but it's a very simple plan to execute and was maybe not a good plan. And I think we have a very complicated plan. I think everyone's being very patient as we work through some unavoidable aspects of a complicated plan. But I think Doug came up with a statement that's really stuck with me, this idea of the no regrets investment. Seems you find a no regret investment. Something that is obviously a good idea that you should do it no matter what. Like look at one or maybe two more wells in an area where you've already got rights and you can probably find a site. That's very low regret investment. And as soon as you do that, you take other options off the table, you freeze variables, you can simplify your problem. And then I think your momentum gains. And I think the one thing that we can look forward to as we sit here at the beginning, hoping for things to move more rapidly is that as we put pieces in their place, the other pieces are more obvious where they fit. It's like finishing the big jigsaw puzzle that all of a sudden things look like they make more sense after you've settled down the model. And I'm just, I'm really optimistic. I wanna make sure that people who are gonna new to this and don't touch it every month that I'm eating understand it is extremely complicated for a group of this size to be working through a plan like this. And it's going to get much easier over the next five years. Any other comments? Seeing none, my understanding is you're interested in having us make a motion to move the recommendation. I'll go ahead and see if I can entertain a motion. I'll make a move though. I know you said you were going too early, so. Is that okay? Of course, it's okay. Council Member Meyers. It sounds like we're tracking very well with all the recommendations due to all the amazing and good work and continuing commitment to keep discovering what we can do differently and those tweaks and no regrets. So I'll go ahead and make a motion to approve an adaptation to and also adopt a revised work plan for the November 24th, 2015, City Council approve agreements and recommendations of the Santa Cruz Water Supply Advisory Committee to integrate the new information identified tonight to take advantage of near term low regrets opportunities for supply augmentations specifically with the belts wells. I was outlined in our, in the new work plan to take advantage of near term. Oh, I'm sorry, I said that one already. And finally to change the timeline for decision making about additional source augmentation strategies from 2020 to 2022. Second that. Okay, we have a motion by Council Member Meyers, seconded by Vice Mayor Cummings. Any further discussion? Seeing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That passes unanimously and I appreciate leaving us on a positive note in a place of optimism. Thank you for your time this evening. Thank you for your dedication to our city for this critical resource. We really appreciate your work and good night.