 Yeah, and the wine is served at this server. Good afternoon, welcome to the 12.30 PM public portion of the closed litigation session of the October 23rd 2018 meeting of the City Council. In 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. Before we open public comment, I'd like to ask the clerk to please call the roll. Thank you, Mayor. Council Member it's Crone. Here. Mathias. Here. Chase. Here. Brown is absent. Norion. Here. Vice Mayor Watkins. Here. And Mayor Trazos. Here. And Council Member Brown provided advance notice of that she'd be absent. I have a brief announcement. The City Attorney will provide a report on items listed on the closed session agenda at the beginning of the 1.30 PM session. Are there any members of the public who would like to speak to any items listed on our closed session agenda? Seeing none, I will adjourn this meeting to the courtyard conference room where the council will go into its closed session. Ready? Good afternoon. Welcome to our now 12.36 PM public portion of the, excuse me, 1.36. Public portion of the City Council, let me go to our open session, actually. Welcome to the 1.36 session of the October 23, 2018 meeting of the City Council. I'd now like to ask the clerk for role, please. Thank you, Mayor. Council Member it's Crone. Here. Mathias. Here. Chase. Here. Brown is absent. Norion. Here. Vice Mayor Watkins is currently absent. And Mayor Trazos. Here. And if the clerk would please lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance. Thank you. Now it's my pleasure to introduce Tony Elliott who has a new employee that's coming to the Parks and Recreation Department. All right. Good afternoon, Mayor and council members. It's my pleasure today to introduce Mr. Travis Beck to Santa Cruz. Travis is our new park superintendent. Travis and his family are from Delaware. Lived in Pennsylvania but worked in Delaware. Travis' wife's name is Sarah. Their daughter is Alexandra. Travis has a master's degree in horticulture from Ohio State University. He also authored this book here, Principles of Ecological Landscape Design. So in many ways Travis is a scientist which is a great addition to the Parks and Rec team. Travis will oversee parks maintenance, the wharf golf course, and open space park ranger program. So you can find him over the Parks and Rec office where his space will be. But he'll be out and about the town quite a bit as well. So yeah, please help me in welcoming Travis Beck. I think that's the first time we've had a published author as one of our new employees. So thank you. Yeah, very good. And if I may say it's rare for the Parks and Rec staff to be wearing jackets. I thought you were going to say ties. That too. All right. At this point we're going to have a presentation and this is a presentation that was encouraged by Vice Mayor Watkins. And so I'd like to turn it over to Vice Mayor Watkins for the introduction. Sure. I'm just so happy to introduce Mimi Hall who's going to introduce herself to the council. She is the interim public health director at our county. And she's going to share and go over a framework called health and all policies for us today. And this is a framework I've been very interested in for a number of years now. Have learned about from some various other folks that are working on health and all policies. And was so happy to meet Mimi and learn about her experience. And I'm very grateful for you to be here today. Thank you so much for coming. All right. Thank you. Thank you Mayor Tressas and Vice Mayor Watkins. I'm really pleased and honored to be here today. And I'm actually also pleased to announce that as of a week ago Friday I was appointed the director of the health services. Congratulations. So I'm really, really honored and humbled to be here serving the county and also serving our local jurisdictions including city of Santa Cruz. So thank you. So yeah, thank you very much Vice Mayor Watkins for inviting me to come and talk about health and all policies. Health and all policies is an approach that actually not just the US nation or California has embraced, but it's really something that is a worldwide approach in population health solutions to some of our society's biggest problems. So the World Health Organization, National Institutes of Health, CDC, they all embrace and support health and all policies initiatives. Today I just want to give you a little snapshot or an opening on how thinking about health and policies can help us do better and serve better as local governments who share certain jurisdictions. So I like Alice in Wonderland. And in Alice in Wonderland, Alice asks the cat, chess our push, push, would you please tell me which way I have to go from here? And the cat says, well, that depends. Where do you want to go? I said, I don't really care where I want to go. And then the cat answers, well, then it doesn't matter much which way you go. And then Alice answers, as long as I get somewhere, oh, you're sure to do that, said the cat. So the purpose of health and all policies or the idea of health and all policies is if we don't have a plan to go somewhere, if we don't have an understanding of what our biggest problems are and how we're going to work together to get there, we're really not sure where we will end up. And I hope that one of the things that we can think about as local jurisdictions working with large employers, working with school districts, working with nonprofits, working with neighborhoods, is that we all have a role in planning the future of our communities. So this is the official definition of health and all policies. It's an approach to public policies across sectors that systematically takes into account the health implications of decisions, seeks synergies and avoids harmful health impacts in order to improve population health and health equity. It's a mouthful, and I hope that I can explain what that mouthful is in the next few minutes. So some of the objectives in a health and all policies approach is that when we think about things like health and equity and well-being, we try to think about them in every aspect of the work that we do as local governments or institutions. Coordinating governmental decisions to achieve shared goals across many, many matters, including our most important and towering social problems, making sure that we use proven, effective, and research-based strategies so that with the limited dollars that we have in government, we make sure that we are spending them in the most impactful way possible for our community members. And then another objective of health and all policies is to promote the establishment of health-promoting conditions, meaning create the conditions that create optimal health and wellness rather than asking people to make an active choice. So the five key elements, it looks like something weird happened when this got converted into PowerPoint. Looks interesting. Yeah, so I think there was something that happened with the PDF to PowerPoint switch, but that's fine. There are five key elements of health and all policies, and it's about the first one is promoting health equity and sustainability. The next one is collaboration across all sectors, not just government. The third one is it's got to benefit multiple partners and engage internal stakeholders. But the one I'm here to talk to you about our possibilities today with you as city government is create structural or process change. So in order to change the environment that people live in, it's not just about individual decision making. So we really have to think as people who set decisions and policy. So if you're a school district board, you set policy about what children learn during the day, maybe how much time they have to access running around and having recess, maybe the content of their educational day, maybe what they eat during the day and how often they eat. Those are policies and programs, and the school board is the decision maker. Those decisions that they make affect a child's day where they spend more time at school than they do at home. So as you can see, we have to have a lens for what opportunities do we have and the decisions that we make to create the optimal environment for our constituents. I just pulled a few things from the Santa Cruz County Community Health Assessment. And so the other thing I should tell all of you is I'm brand new to Santa Cruz County. I come from Northern California. I've worked in rural areas, nearly all of my California career, and actually before I came to California and Hawaii. And I'm used to working with very little resources and trying to address diverse issues in a lot of different populations. But I pulled the top three concerns from our Community Health Assessment. One of the most striking pieces of information, and this is the 2016 health assessment. We're in the process of getting ready to do our next one, is that 40% of Santa Cruz County households don't have enough income to meet basic needs. And that is one of the contributing factors to poverty, housing, and homelessness issues. The other two things that really, really struck me were that for more than ten years running, suicide and drug induced fatality, which basically means overdose, are leading causes of death in Santa Cruz County. And again, for more than a decade, they have occurred at higher rates than the state of California or the nation as a whole. And so those are big social problems, right? And now I'm in charge of an organization that's meant to address those. But what I absolutely know is that we can't treat our way out of addiction, we can't treat our way out of suicide, and we can't do enough prevention work through healthy eating and active living to change that 40% of the households don't have enough income. Health Services Agency working alone. So the point of that is that there are things that determine our health that have nothing to do with the choices that we make or how excellent our medical care is. So this information is from the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare, 2016 National Expenditures Highlights. So in 2016, our nation spent $3.3 million on healthcare. 96% of it was for medical services, and 4% was prevention, and that was the Prevention and Public Health Fund. However, the factors that influence health and health outcomes are 70% your behaviors and your environment, and only 10% medical care. So what are we doing as local governments to invest in that 70%? I'm not going to talk a whole lot about social determinants of health. I think you all understand what they are, and you can read this slide. But what's really clear is that there are a lot of things, often beyond an individual's control, that we as policy makers set that determine how the trajectory of their lives. So because of that, it's really, really important that all of us who have the opportunity and the good fortune to be in a position of making decisions that rule people's lives day in and day out work in a systematic manner. Because what we do know is this, health is a lot more than healthcare or the absence of disease. The environment that we live in every single day, whether it's are we able to walk or bike safely to school or work, is the market that's in our neighborhood. In a position to provide me and my family with healthy, fresh produce that I can afford. So it's those kinds of things. And the idea that health outcomes or disease or injury, it's not inevitable. It's not inevitable that we all just can't afford housing in Santa Cruz County. It's not inevitable that we're all going to have diabetes or other chronic diseases. There are root causes of all of these problems that can be addressed. So I talked about some of the choices that we make. And I wanted to give just a few examples about how health inequalities are not all natural. There's actually science and GIS mapping that maps where fresh produce is available in communities. And is it on a bus line? Is it walking distance to where there's dense housing, locations of liquor stores and convenience stores, stores that sell tobacco? Where do we have public transportation? How much does it cost? Does it go to our remote areas? Are our parks and our outdoor areas clean? So all of these things are things that create an environment where people don't think about it. You don't think about when you go through your day if something is accessible to you or not. But if it's not there, you don't have the option. So health in all policies is really taking that health lens of all of these things in the different work that we do. This is just the nutshell slide. So how can our decisions impact health? I'm encouraging not only the County of Santa Cruz but all of our city jurisdictions as well as the departments, our school districts, large employers, all of these people who touch Santa Cruz County residents every single day to think about their policy and programmatic decisions that impact people's lives. So of course, what impacts a vibrant community? It's so many different things from planning to transportation to our schools to housing. And there are many things that aren't here. But try to think about your day from the time you wake up in the morning and you turn on the faucet to get clean water, to brush your teeth, to the food that you eat, to how you get to school or get your kids to work. And everything that you do throughout your day, all of those things are our environment. So in the interest of time, I might glaze over some of these. It's really clear that our objectives have to focus on the environment and those entities that have the ability to make decisions about the environment. It's also clear that to take a health and all policies approach, we have to be willing to acknowledge that it takes an entire spectrum of partners to come together towards some mutual goals. And that when we make decisions about procurement or about awarding RFPs for, I don't know, food services for schools or corrections, that we make it with this eye towards health as a lens to look through for all of our policies. Some of the things that are necessary to make this kind of effort successful is that there has to be an agreement across multiple sectors. Many local jurisdictions, they actually have charters or ordinances or MOUs that they develop together to say these are the things that we commit to working on. Because it also doesn't have to be broad, you can choose health and all policies for one issue. Maybe it's nutrition, maybe it's homelessness, maybe it's the opiate epidemic. So it can be as big or as small as a local jurisdiction chooses, considering health in the policy making process. And so that would be in any kinds of agreements that local folks would do. School districts can do this with the county health department. It can really be at any level that you want. The most important thing is that there are accountability structures so that the entities that say we're in this together to make change for our community know that the next time they have the opportunity to get, I don't know, tobacco prevention funding across all of our school districts that we're looking at this lens and that we're going to incorporate that in our decision making process. So I'm almost done with my 15 minutes and I wanted to provide just a few local examples and maybe I'll just highlight one or two of health and all policies in action. When I worked in Plumas County in Northern California, very small rural county, we had a really, really high rate of children who are eligible to be on Medi-Cal but were not enrolled in Medi-Cal. On the flip side, we also had a really high rate of kids who were using the free and reduced lunch federal nutrition program. And California a few years before I had become director there had passed a state law saying that local entities can share confidential information with each other as long as it's for eligibility purposes of public programs and it would require all these things including an MOU. So we had an idea that if we change the policy environment which means the school lunch application and we could work together at a local level towards increasing access to health care for children, could we use the school lunch application as a Medi-Cal application because of this new law. So we convened a task force, we got partners together from the different school districts, the school board, the nutrition folks, public health, the county, social services, which here we call human services and we took a health and all policies approach because it meant changing policies at eligibility at the county. Because now they're going to have this whole kind of chunk of people that were eligible for Medi-Cal through a different kind of process. It meant changing the school district because they had to go to California Department of Education to have their school nutrition form changed to also serve as a Medi-Cal application. And then it took the county agreeing to take several follow-up steps with those folks because what we didn't want was people to get enrolled and that's it. So that's one example of a health and all policies approach for one objective. Restorative justice. There are so many restorative justice best practices and examples across the nation right now. And what you will see as a common theme in all of them is the approach of looking at the whole person, looking at making sure that they complete their education, that they are employable. They have the supports that they need to be successful in many endeavors including in their own well-being. And also an eye towards those who have been the victims of some of these issues. And the restorative justice coalitions that I've seen have been so effective because they take the partnership of all of these folks from different entities and change the way probation works, change the way the courts work, change the policies and the procedures and the structures in these institutions. So just a couple of examples. So how can health and all policies help our community? These are all blank because it's up to us. I think we have an incredible responsibility but also a great opportunity as local leaders who can influence not only the protocols and the policies within our own organizations, but those I know that some of you sit on, you know, local nonprofit boards and have are active in school districts. And so I call upon you not just as city council members, mayor and vice mayor, but also as community members to think about your role in the community to further a health and all policies approach in Santa Cruz County. So again, this is just a first conversation to get us all thinking about ways that we can put some formal structure in place and make agreements with each other to move forward on some issues that we can't solve as one organization alone. I named a few of them. We don't have to address all of them, but just wanted to start the conversation and thank you very much vice mayor Watkins for inviting me here to talk about this. Thank you. Are there any questions? Welcome. I'm so glad you're here because a lot of what you mentioned, you know, the health of the community, obviously health universally means a lot. But, you know, specifically the county is responsible for health and human services, whereas the city doesn't really get resources for that. And so we really need your partnership in having a health and all sort of approach to doing these things. So just thank you very much for being here. It's really promising, you know, for me to see the new director of HSA in front of us presenting this information. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate it. And I wholeheartedly believe that we accomplished these things in partnership. Chris. Welcome. Yeah. So, you know, the health and all policy, how do you do you see that being extended to decisions we make about parks and recreation about building development? I mean, would this appear on an agenda that would have, you know, the health impact? Would that be the optimal way of doing this? I think the decision is up to the entities that decide to do it. There are some jurisdictions that have decided to make it infiltrate everything and they put a lot of money and resources into the planning portion. So I think there are a lot of conversations that have to be had. I know that we're committed and council member Narayan. Very good. And she hit the nail right on the head like the county health and human services has responsibility for the entire county. But that overlaps with your jurisdictions and there are many areas where we have to kind of work out some issues on policy matters. So I think that it'll be up to us and it depends on so for parks and rec. I think there are definitely ways that we can identify how we're going to put this in there, but it has to come through number one research. And there is something actually called a health impact assessment that can inform what we choose to pursue. Council member Narayan. And that's what I was going to ask. Where will we go to find real world examples of how this is being implemented in a practical way? So there are tons of examples. California actually has a whole initiative called the California Health and All Policies Initiative. The World Health Organization. This little link here. I don't know if you have the electronic version of this presentation. But it's, I didn't bring it because it's 169 pages. It's a guide for state and local governments to implement health and all policies. But there are many, many resources. And I believe one of your consent agenda items is to form an ad hoc committee around this issue. And I'm happy to provide more resources. So for instance, I think you might have mentioned it, but you know there's UN, the UN has indicators of health or how a country is doing overall. So you say there's something similar called a health index? So there are lots of, so the health impact assessment is actually something that we do actively here based on those kinds of indicators. But there are many, many pieces of information. Most of them are referred to in the county community health assessment. But it uses something called the county health rankings. So there's a nationwide county health rankings that Robert Wood Johnson Foundation does. There's also, I mean there's so many resources. And so I would say allow us since one of the things that has happened since I've come is we've developed an epidemiology team. So it's a team of people who are really smart that follow data and population trends and disease trends. And so we review and collect all of that information. And we have a lot of data about health indicators and outcomes from Santa Cruz County comparing us to other counties in California and the nation. Yeah, because I think for on a city level it comes down to for instance, how much park space do we have per capita? Is it in line with what, you know, are we better? Are we worse? Knowing those things I think are great tools when it comes to then looking at our public policy. Yeah, and we do have the capability to break down some data by zip code as well. Right, oh great. Okay, thank you. Council Member Mathews. And then Council Member Cron. Are you Director of Health Services Agency, Public Health Director, both? I am the Director of the Health Services Agency. Its structure was kind of fluid when I came here, so I'm not sure if I'm the Public Health Director. Okay, I think there should be two people here. Yeah, so we actually have a Public Health Manager over the Public Health Department. That person's title for some reason isn't Public Health Director. I've always served as the Public Health Director in the county that I am because that's my background. Just a question. Yeah, so Health Services Agency. Thank you. Okay, go ahead. We have you here. 40% of households don't have enough to meet basic needs. I'm assuming in this county it's probably because of housing. And then you mentioned mental health and substance abuse disorder. Are those the three things that come up for all coastal counties in California? Or is there something else that's particular about our county? Not necessarily. So what's typical for most California counties, and I have to admit I haven't looked just at coastal counties. But typically you see the cancers and the chronic diseases and all of those things rising to the top as the leading causes of death. We're actually doing better than the rest of California counties in those respects. So it means maybe that for the most part we eat well. For the most part we have the ability to exercise, you know, because we're not seeing those chronic diseases as leading causes of death here. I'll just say thank you Director Hall and thank you Vice Mayor Watkins for bringing this forward. One of the things I can say is anytime I've had a meeting with you up until this point you've been very responsive on issues that have come up. And I really think it gives the city a really kind of confidence in terms of working with the county on addressing some of these issues. The points that you made about where the county resides in terms of high levels of ice off fatalities for drug addiction. It'd be good to understand like rather than we oftentimes see a full gamut of issues that are going on and how we could be more focused on particular aspects where we can be partners to show measurable improvement. And I think one I'm particularly interested in is how we address kind of our mental health crisis and especially in our city and downtown. And so the more we can work with you as a county I feel really confident in terms of how you've been able to respond and you'll be a good partner in that effort. So thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you so much. So thank you. All right, thank you. And that concludes it. There's no other questions. We'll move on. Thank you for being here today. Thank you. Yeah, that's great. Okay, so the next item we have is a presentation from the Regional Transportation Commission. This is an update on the Unified Corridor Study and I have Ginger Dicar and Grace Blakesley. Good afternoon, Council Members. Ginger Dicar Transportation Planner at the Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission. And Program Manager for the Unified Corridor Investment Study. My co-worker Grace Blakesley and I will be presenting the draft results of the study. And there was a handout that was provided for this item. Does everybody have that? And as far as members of the public, the handout is over here on the windowsill. It's very helpful to have that as we go through our draft results. So thank you for providing me the opportunity, for providing us the opportunity to present the draft results of this study to your Council. The objective of the Unified Corridor Study is to identify multimodal transportation investments that provide the most effective use of Highway 1, Soco Avenue, Soquel Drive, and Freedom Boulevard and the Santa Cruz Branch Rail Line in order to serve the community's transportation needs. As we all know, we deal with congestion on Highway 1 and Soquel Freedom on a regular basis. And with the acquisition of the rail line in 2012, which has unused capacity, we're trying to answer the question of how best we can use the rail right of way in combination with transportation improvements on the parallel corridors Highway 1 and Soquel Freedom in order to address the transportation needs of the county. So here we have the Project Study Area identified on the map. Highway 1 from Davenport to Watsonville, Soquel Avenue and Drive, and Freedom Boulevard for the entire length and the entire length of the rail line from Davenport to Pajaro Station. The process we use to evaluate what transportation improvements are a priority for our community, our performance-based planning, and a scenario analysis approach. As I show here on the slide, we started with the goals and performance measures, identifying those. Each step along the way, we've had approval from our commission and outreach to our stakeholders, members of the public, RTC advisory committees, partner agencies. The second step was to identify what projects were we going to evaluate on each of the different transportation routes. Once we identified those projects, they were then grouped into various different scenarios in order to bring a scenario analysis together. The scenario is a set group of projects that are evaluated. For the step one part of the scenario analysis, we evaluated six different scenarios. We brought some information more qualitative about the feasibility of all of those scenarios. Step one, our staff recommendation was approved by our commission. We dialed down to four different scenarios which are being evaluated in the step two analysis on a more quantitative basis. So the intention of this study is to identify a preferred scenario in order to identify the projects that are a priority to implement. So you should all have the handout. This is another way to view it, but the handout will help you identify which projects are in each of the scenario. So if we go through the slide and the draft results, you'll have a sense for what projects are in each one, and I'll review that now. Scenario A has, the projects that were evaluated in that scenario is HOV lanes on the highway, which includes the auxiliary lanes and ramp metering on SoCal freedom as BRT light as well as some intersection improvements and the trail only on the rail right of way. For scenario B, the highway projects are more operational improvements with ramp metering. And let me just step back a minute and say that all of the scenarios were evaluated with the three sets of auxiliary lanes that are funded through Measure D. So that's in all of the scenarios as well as the no-build three sets of auxiliary lanes since there's funding already available for those projects. So again, scenario B is ramp metering and bus on shoulders on the highway. On SoCal, there's BRT light and buffered bicycle lanes and passenger rail service as well as trail on the rail right of way. Scenario C also has bus on shoulders on the highway with auxiliary lanes that go all the way to San Andreas. BRT light is considered on SoCal and freedom. And on the rail right of way is being evaluated as bus rapid transit as well as the trail. And then scenario E is kind of the scenario that has both HOV lanes on the highway and has buffered bike lanes on SoCal and freedom. And on the rail right of way is passenger rail service freight and also the bicycle and pedestrian trail. The goals for the study were five-fold. We were looking at safety, reliability and efficiency, environment and health, economic vitality and equitable access. So this is all through a triple bottom line analysis. For the safety goal, we looked at the number of collisions in our project study area. So here we show in the baseline number of collisions in the project study area is 1,110 in no build where we had for 2035 population increases, traffic volumes increases. Therefore collisions tend to increase. No build is on the order of over 1,200 collisions. And then we evaluated for the various different transportation improvements for each of the scenarios. How would that help reduce collisions? So these collisions data comes from the California Highway Patrol data set. The way to forecast reductions in collisions comes from a methodology provided by the Federal Highway Association. This does show that scenario B shows the most reduction in collisions and that's based on ramp metering as well as the bicycle and pedestrian trail on the rail right-of-way that separates active transportation from auto vehicles and also education and enforcement. Just want to mention there is a cost to collisions. That's another performance measure we're evaluating. But for more detail, go to the report for that as I'm trying to keep this to a 15 minute. The next measure I like to talk about is that the goal is reliability and efficiency. Our actual measure is looking at the auto speed. And this is a county-wide measure. So even though the numbers are subtle, if you look county-wide, when you look at scenario A and E with the HOV lanes, it does show an improvement for the auto speed. We've since added this information. There's a lot of good information in the Highway 1 draft environmental impact report that has been put out by Caltrans in cooperation with RTC. The sum of the data there is provided for HOV lanes and what the speeds would look like on the highway. The speed data that's represented here is between Branson-40 Overcrossing, which is real close to Highway 1 and 17 Interchange, all the way to San Andreas. This is peak hour speed data. As you can see, the scenario A and scenario E with the HOV lanes show the highest improvement in speeds on our highway. And I have a scenario B plus. This is kind of an in-between scenario B and scenario C because the Highway 1 EIR just looks at the HOV lanes and a transportation system management, which is shown here as a scenario B plus. So with operational improvements rather than capacity increasing, the speeds would be more in the order of 20 miles per hour relative for that stretch of the roadway. For another performance metric for reliability and efficiency is the transit travel time. So these are shown here on the various different routes. For scenario A, you can see on the State Route 1, it's 33.5 minutes to go from Santa Cruz to Watsonville during the peak travel time in the evening. If it's more like operational improvements shown in scenario B and C, that time would be longer. 61 minutes for scenario B and 45 for scenario C. If you have transit on the rail right-of-way in scenario B and E, we're looking at a passenger rail service. It's about 41 minutes travel time from Santa Cruz to Watsonville. And on Soquel and Freedom, even with the BRT light, it still has enough stops and the time it takes to travel down Soquel and Freedom is significantly longer. Another reliability and efficiency performance measure is the mode share. All of our scenarios do increase transit, bicycling and pedestrian mode share and decrease drive-alone and carpool mode share. Scenario B with the passenger rail service as well as additional transit services, BRT light and bus on shoulders does show the greatest improvement in transit mode share. Scenario E comes in next. For the countywide vehicle miles traveled, this is under our environment goal. We show here that the scenario A and E with the HOV lane projects does increase vehicle miles traveled slightly above scenario B and C because of the increased capacity and increased speeds. This could be just due to redirected traffic that people decide to go on the highway. One example is if somebody's going from Capitola Wharf to Santa Cruz Wharf, with the highway improvements, they may decide to go a longer route but a shorter time instead of going the beach route, which might take a little bit longer. One reason why those increase in vehicle miles traveled are shown for the scenarios with highway projects. Closely related to the VMT is greenhouse gas emissions represented as a CO2 equivalent. We show here from the baseline to the no-build, there is a reduction in the future regardless of any transportation improvements due to fleet mix changes, vehicle technology changes that will improve the miles per gallon. And you do see similarly it kind of follows along scenario A and E have a slightly increased amount of greenhouse gas emissions than scenario B and C because of the close relationship with vehicle miles traveled. And household transportation costs. This is one of our performance measures to look at equity. We have a couple other performance measures in the report for the equity goal. But this one was provided some very interesting results and showing that even if you just by owning a vehicle it costs you on average about $15 a day. Typically in our community there's households own two vehicles so that's about $32 or $31 a day and then add fuel costs on top of that for a total of $44 a day. If there's ways to provide opportunities for people to travel in other ways besides owning a vehicle and they can reduce the number of vehicles they own this is how we see in this study that provides the greatest decrease in household transportation costs. With that I'd like to hand it over to Grace Blakesley. Good afternoon Mayor and Council Members. Grace Blakesley staff to the Regional Transportation Commission. One of the measures that we used under the goal of economic vitality is looking at the level of public investment both from a capital perspective as well as form and operations and maintenance perspective. And one thing that we did here was try to identify what new public investments would be needed above and beyond what is already estimated to be potentially available to Santa Cruz County through 2035. Here the results are shown on a scenario basis if you'd like to look at the cost per project that's also included in your report on table 38 and also is associated with the potential revenues by project. So the new additional revenues to fund these improvements would really need to come from future new state or federal grant programs or from locally generated funding sources such as a parcel tax or a sales tax. The cost estimates that we are used to gauge this against are all shown in 2018 dollars and were developed using several different estimating tools including the Caltrans cost estimates reflecting back on the cost estimating for the Santa Cruz Ranch Rail Transit Feasibility Study as well as information from local jurisdictions including City of Santa Cruz staff. In order to take a look at the funding potential so that's the dark part on the bottom, the funding estimate, we looked at the revenue projections in our 2040 regional transportation plan and I'm not sure how familiar you are with that process but we take a look at all of the different funding sources that come to our county not just to the Regional Transportation Commission and make estimates about how much we expect to receive over the life of the plan. For the Unified Corridor Study we're looking at revenue projections through 2035. We also made some updates to the funding projections to include revenues that could be available for rail or bus rapid transit on a fixed guideway so for the rail ride of way and that's why you'll see for scenarios B, C and E which do include transit projects on the Santa Cruz Ranch Rail Line that there's additional funding estimated to be available. Some of that funding is from SB 1 which of all of the funding estimate we assume could be reduced by up to 40% if Prop 6 passes. In some case if you do take a look at the Table 38 where it identifies the cost per projects and signs a particular funding revenue amount to that project, some of that funding could be moved around by projects within that scenario depending on the eligibility requirements for the same funding source, for that particular funding source. What we tried to do was align the available funding estimate with projects that would be most competitive for that source but even if you were to move that around the total funding estimate for each scenario would not change. We went through a similar exercise for the annual cost of operations and maintenance and we were demonstrating that here on an annual cost basis. This includes what's included here is all new transit service vehicle operations and vehicle cost. It also includes maintenance costs for trail projects and new bus rapid transit facilities on the Santa Cruz Ranch Rail Line as you would see in Scenario E. Also shown here in terms of the cost and funding potential is the annual cost of facility maintenance on state highways and local roads. We thought it was important to show here that there is a cost to maintain the roadways as well even though we do assume that that cost is funded by continues to be funded by Caltrans and local jurisdictions. What's not shown here is the cost that Ginger just mentioned related to the individual cost per household for owning the vehicle and using it. As part of the unified corridor study we also did an economic analysis and there were two pieces to that analysis. One was to look at visitor tax revenues and a change in that that might result from implementation of the UCS scenarios. Another was looking at overall economic benefits that could be provided through the unified corridor study. The areas that were looked at to do this evaluation were first the area impacted by the transportation improvement and who would be benefiting from that improvement. If the improvement creates a new transportation route so this would apply to projects on the Santa Cruz Ranch Rail Line as well as a creation of a new amenity. So are there projects that actually in themselves would attract visitors and we treat the excursion rail service as well as the trail as a new visitor amenity in this analysis. If you look at the visitor tax revenues here you can start with your baseline on the left and then move all the way to the right to look at the no builds. You can see that in the way that was analyzed is looking at past trends on an annual basis. So you can see that Santa Cruz County is existing transportation system as well as the current visitor amenities will continue to attract people as we project here under a no build scenario. What you do see in the differences is the impacts of highway improvements, passenger rail facilities and trail projects on the different scenarios as applicable. So any of these would have an impact if they change access to major destinations and lodging, shopping and recreational amenities and this looked at the evaluation looked at the individual projects but then brought them together by scenario. I'd failed to mention that the two measures here to calculate these totals were the hotel tax as well as the visitor related sales tax. The other piece of the relative economic benefits was looking at changes in locations of business location decisions shown here on the left, the list, changes in development potential and property values, changes in business performance, local tax revenue and user benefits. Again, the projects were evaluated and then the relative benefits by scenario were compared and that is what's being shown here on the slide. I'll give you just a few examples as I know I'm running to the end of our time on our presentation but for example for the change in business location decisions any improvements that would ease access for businesses would be expected to have an impact. This includes the most significant impact is thought to be changes where the new transportation route is created so again projects on the rail right of way that would create a new means of access or access to a particular area that was previously difficult to access because of congestion. Access to freight is also evaluated and it's expected to influence business locations that do rely on freight and then also trail projects are more evaluated because their business decisions may be affected in potential clustering of customer serving businesses. We've been doing a lot of outreach and we're very pleased to be here today to speak with you. We've been meeting with our stakeholders which includes staff from City of Santa Cruz. We've also met with the RTC advisory committees which includes the Bicycle Committee, the Elderly and Disabled Transportation Advisory Committee and also our Interagents and Technical Advisory Committee that has staff from City of Santa Cruz. We've had a set of three focus group meetings to speak with neighborhood groups, businesses and environmental groups that are working on improving the environment in Santa Cruz County. We also have an additional focus group meeting next week with a focus on Watsonville. Here we are now presenting to you. We have presented to the City of Scotts Valley. We will present to the City of Watsonville this evening as well as the City of Capitol in a few weeks. We expect to make a recommendation of the preferred scenario to our board at our November 15th meeting, which will be at 6 p.m. in Watsonville and ask our commission to take an action at the December 6th, 9 a.m. meeting. People have comments. We'd like to encourage them to submit them to our email or to write them and submit them via mail. If people still do that, sometimes they do and we still accept those. So all comments are welcome. If the comments that we do receive before November 2nd will be able to incorporate into the recommend staff recommendation. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. And before you leave, I just want to recognize Executive, RTC Executive Director George Dundara, who's also here today. And are there any Council member questions in regards to the presentation? None. I'll just say thank you for the update on what you're doing and on the outreach in the community. It's interesting when you look at the importance that transportation has to our community and thank you for all your work in providing these reporting and we'll hear updates in the future, I'm sure. Thank you very much. Thank you. I have a few announcements and then we'll move on to our regular agenda. Today's meeting is being broadcast live on Community Television, Channel 25 and streaming on the city's website at cityofsantacruz.com. Jennifer Cameron is our technician this afternoon and I'd like to thank her again for her ongoing work to record these meetings. All City Council members can be emailed at citycouncilatcityofsantacruz.com if you would like to communicate with us about an agenda item. We'd like to receive your email by Monday at 5 p.m. before our Council meeting whenever possible. This provides us with an opportunity to review your email and include it with the rest of our agenda packet. Please bear in mind that all items of correspondence with the City or the City Council constitute public records and are generally subject to disclosure upon request by any member of the public. Accordingly, if you have sensitive or private information that you do not wish to be made public, you should not include any information in your correspondence. Our rules of decorum are on the window ledge to my left and it's my job to keep the meeting running without disruption and we ask that you respect your fellow citizens whether you are inside or outside of the Council chambers. At this time, I'd like to ask if any Council members have any statements of disqualification today. Seeing none, I'll ask the clerk if there are any additions or deletions to the agenda. Yeah, agenda item 13, all working group update is going to be heard at a future meeting. Thank you. In regards to oral communications, oral communications is an opportunity for members of the community to speak to us on items that are not on the agenda. Oral communications will generally occur at the conclusion of afternoon business at or about 5.30 p.m. but may occur sometime before that or after. At this time, I'd like to call the City Attorney to see if there's any report out. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor Tarazas. Members of the City Council, the Council met in closed session this afternoon at 12.30 p.m. in the Courtyard Conference Room. On the closed session agenda were three items. Item A was a conference with legal counsel concerning liability claims. The claims of Pacific Bell Telephone, DBA AT&T California and Jill E. Winters. Also listed on your consent agenda this afternoon as Item 5. Also, there was a conference with legal counsel concerning existing litigation in the matter of ARLT versus the City of Santa Cruz pending in the U.S. District Court. Council received a report from Outside Special Counsel on that matter. There was no reportable action on that matter. Thirdly, a public employee performance evaluation involving the City Manager. There is a subsequent closed session this evening scheduled for 6 p.m. involving labor negotiations with the SCIU Local 521. Thank you, City Attorney. Now I'd like to call on the City Manager if he has a report today. Yes, I have a brief update on a couple of items for you this afternoon. First, I want to give you an update on the emergency shelter in the River Street Camp and then also on the Temporary Parks Closure. First, I'll start by just going over the big picture in terms of the overall goals that we have relative to sheltering services. As you all know, obviously providing shelter services is a major issue in our community, in our region and state of California. So our major focus has been to really maximize the amount of indoor shelter bed capacity through the winter months and we've had to do temporary tents but really it's mostly out of the fact that we weren't able to identify permanent facilities but that continues to be a goal, obviously. We want to conduct a robust community process to site an interim shelter facility. Again, that is because ultimately we need permanent long-term year-round facilities and we've clearly learned that doing siding facilities is a major challenge for the community and it's going to require quite a bit of outreach and then finally, that this is really a regional issue and so a regional approach needs to be taken relative to being able to provide the services that the community needs in order to address the impacts that we have every day in our community. And so these are really the things that we are working on long-term and because of a variety of changes that have happened and I'll get into that a little bit we are we're very I think in a good position that finally with respect to because this has been such a major issue in our community that finally we're getting really a regional focus and it's not just now Santa Cruz sort of led effort to address this issue and I'll talk about the state funding that's available in all that in a few minutes but because of that we really have focused on having the HAP which is the Homeless Action Partnership which is a entity comprised of all of the cities and the county working together to really address this issue so that's a really critical and important shift so through the HAP process we're now working on how do we address this issue moving forward it had historically only focused on the winter shelter but now again we're working on what is really the permanent solution here or ongoing changes so with respect to the HAP in our latest discussions it was determined that it made sense to close the River Street Camp effective November 30th this is again in the context of opening up a new winter shelter facility indoor facility at the veterans facility over in Live Oak and we want to obviously also continue to identify support and expand current and new shelter programs and there are current discussions to providing some additional shelter relative to veterans in addition we are talking about trying to provide additional shelter capacity and support for women that's one of the things that the River Street Camp was able to do I think pretty effectively and there is an ongoing concern that that need is there and we wanted to try to see if we can provide and expand that that type of support here as soon as possible as I mentioned earlier we are in a position where the state has allocated funds to our county to address this issue and it's recognized that providing emergency shelter is a critical piece of this and so we have approximately a $10 million that needs to be allocated and spent within the next two years in order to address that and you've heard presentations about this and in addition with the advent of a measure H that's on the ballot in November there's a possibility of an additional $20 million to provide for shelter facilities and a community from a regional perspective to really try to address this need for emergency shelter as well as providing for homeless housing programs and as I mentioned earlier we do need to be able to work with our nonprofit providers to provide these services as you know with the River Street Shelter the city took on that effort but it really isn't within our wheelhouse to operate a shelter and we really do need a robust partnership and the ability to work with and have nonprofits in our community that can provide these services and work with us to do that at a regional level the just to remind council with respect to the latest actions that you took on August 28th the council approved the recommendations before you with respect to moving forward with the HAP and the North Winter Shelter Plan to provide authorization to extend the River Street Camp again in order to transition the camp and the Winter Shelter Program into one program authorizing the staff to work with the CAP to explore a temporary shelter the idea then there was to be able to transition seamlessly from the River Street Camp to the Winter Shelter into an indoor facility and to expand the homeless that Paulie loft in terms of their capacity to provide shelter services there and to explore a proposed a safe parking program some things have changed since then the program for a safe parking has been taken off the table due to concerns relative to sighting again something that needs to be explored further unfortunately we continue to talk to the homeless services center about the expansion of services there and we'll continue to do that however the timing to do that in a seamless way is very difficult at this time however we have as part of this process allocated additional funding to at least maintain the existing Paulie loft program because that was set to close without additional funding so part of this new approach involves preserving those existing shelter beds at the Paulie loft as well as the addition of the winter shelter over in live oak and then of course we're working to see if we can provide additional services shelter services for veterans and women and children in particular so at the September 14 HAP Executive Committee that is where the decision was made to continue to explore the feasibility of the shelter options including the expansion of the Paulie loft as I've mentioned prioritized indoor shelter should opportunities arise again that continues to be a major issue which is again why it's very important that we really look at this regionally holistically and that we have a robust effort to involve the community and have engagement with the community so we can site these facilities and then like I mentioned earlier the safe parking was a table of deciding challenges the one thing I also want to just mention really quickly is that you know I'm really it's really a difficult challenge it's been a difficult challenge and it's a difficult thing to close a facility that has actually you know provided a good level of support to the community and I want to say I'm very proud of the work that the city's done and the city staff have done in particular and the employees at the river street camp who have really done a remarkable job of helping individuals if you look at actually the numbers of people that they've helped relative to the number of people that stay there it's actually quite effective and there's some things that we've learned from that and we hope we'll be able to move on to the next step including the fact that you can operate a shelter and coexist in a neighborhood in a way that actually works and two you can actually make a difference in people's lives in terms of getting people out of homelessness and about 30% of the people that actually stayed at the camp ended up moving on to housing, transitional housing or other avenues out of homelessness and that's pretty remarkable for something that was put together so quickly and it was really temporary in nature so that is the update on the shelter I'll move on, I can answer questions about this now if you like or I can move on to the next and answer questions. Maybe at the end. So just to update on the temporary parks closures as you know we have maintenance work that is scheduled pretty comprehensive maintenance work that's scheduled at two parks over the next several weeks at San Lorenzo Park and the Grand Street Park and the primary purpose is to implement a really thorough and focused maintenance work plan at these two heavily used facilities and we want to take the opportunity to really do some thorough work the scope of the work really involves doing some turf maintenance some irrigation inspections and replacements really the Russian facilities are used quite a bit and could use some work and some maintenance so we want to do that and open those up as soon as possible the play areas, I didn't stay in repairing some of the the equipment, cleaning some of the equipment to have quite a bit of landscaping it's just become tired and really needs attention so we hope to focus that the pathways, the number of areas need more granite they just need more upkeep and then the trash receptacles replacing those painting those and the thought is that by being able to close the facilities and then redirect our staff resources in a way that's comprehensive and focused they were able to sort of make this work quickly and thoroughly in each of the facilities because that is now it's very hard for the staff that's assigned to each of the parks to really do these preventive maintenance projects because they tend to only be able to stay up with the existing things services that are needed and so this is one way that we're trying to really get ahead of these issues and do preventive maintenance because again like the it's been mentioned in the case of other other areas and the broken, you've heard of the broken window theory that to the extent that you can maintain facilities you have good uses and people take pride of them and maintain them and so we want to be able to do that for these two facilities and then we'll see if this is an approach that we can take for other facilities moving forward as well so with that I'm happy to answer any questions also Tina I think and Susie are here and Tony if there are any particular questions we're allowed to the parks closures as well. Thank you for that comprehensive report are there any questions regarding either the emergency shelter update or the parks closures that council has at this time? Council Member Crone. It sounds like the HAP could be responsible for looks like could be $29 million in spending and I'm wondering the accountability and what that process is. What is the HAP? I don't think a lot of people know what that is. So it would be the $11 million because the $20 million that comes out of Measure H that really will be allocated that would be well actually that is to be determined it could go through the HAP as it relates to the homelessness funding portion of it there is a portion of Measure H that will be allocated to each jurisdictions but that's for the housing but the HAP is really a creature of the federal structure that's been put in place to allocate and spend federal funds for homelessness and housing services that's been in place for a long time and it's been structurally used regionally allocate funding particularly for homeless services the way the state decided to allocate the $11 million was to use this existing structure to do that and the way it's structured particularly in Santa Cruz there's a continuum of care committee that includes service providers and local agencies and then there's an executive committee which is comprised of city managers and the CAO so the thought was that it would be more efficient and effective to use this existing structure to be able to implement these programs now at the executive committee level we recognize that some of these decisions are very consequential in nature and we do want to and do need to require it is required or needed it's not necessarily required but we do acknowledge that we need to come back and talk to our respective legislative bodies and policy decision bodies to get your support and buy in on some of these major policy questions so I suggest that and do intend to as this moves forward to bring recommendations and updates to you on a regular basis again some of these issues are very consequential particularly when you start talking about siting and how that's put in place and so you will have that come before you but that is the structure that's been directed for us at this point Any questions? Okay I have a couple questions first of all thank you for the comprehensive report I guess when we had the August 28th we had a discussion from council in regards to maintaining the shelter space as well as kind of looking at how we can expand areas I mean generally signify the need to have the services to continue because I think there has been some improvements as you alluded to in regards to the emergency shelter that came forward and I'm wondering if there's something that you could bring back to the council to like you mentioned presentations that sometimes by having everybody those in need of housing services or support services grouped together it does create challenges in terms of staffing and that came up I think when they had the homeless subcommittee looking at kind of how different model programs are is there anything that the HAP executive committee can recommend in terms of things they might support to have maybe expanded services for new veterans as you mentioned in your presentation or for women or families we have our family shelter is a way to kind of maybe help to at least provide additional bed spaces in one of the existing service providers that maybe is not dependent on the homeless service center the answer is yes that when we have had conversations with respect to that and in particular you're right because the homeless population you know there is a diversity of needs there and to the extent that we can successfully implement some of those programs and if there are interested parties in particular who are willing and able to support in moving these things forward and organizing these things and partnering with them that is a good thing and so those are the two areas that specifically I've heard that there is an interest out there in trying to address veterans and there is some support and funding for that and women and children we do have some that have been at the river street camp and I think those are also easier to site and would have probably easier it would be easier to implement those in a more quicker fashion so we have talked about doing that and we will bring that back to you and I guess can you talk about if they are those that are able to be relocated to a place where there is a family shelter or a women's shelter that those could be at least reported that you know we are not reduction in bed space but we are able to kind of find new spaces for people to be assigned yes we can report on that and that is our goal to maximize I know there is a concern that we are reducing shelter capacity as a result of the closure but our goal obviously is not to do that and also just so you know with respect to the current residents of river street camp we are working very hard and we will do our best to transition those folks into shelter or different housing opportunities so that we don't have people back out in the streets but yes we can definitely focus on that Council Member Chase thank you for the report and thank you Mayor for your comments I just want to acknowledge that the focus on women and children incredibly important obviously we want to pay attention to anybody who is houseless in our community but in specific the homelessness coordinating committee was focused on unsheltered folks who are on the street as well as causing the community impacts and so there was a very strategic and specific focus on that in the 20 recommendations and it seems like we are veering off of the focus of that report which was what brought us to this point to begin with so I just want to keep that in everybody's in the forefront of everybody's mind about when we move forward and how we move forward it's very disappointing to see that we are having exciting issues continue I'm not entirely surprised but this has been going on for a long time and they folks have got to be somewhere so everybody is going to continue to say no at some point we're going to have to step up and say yes well I'll have to say also I mean I think that's a good point to say that Supervisor Leopold continue to to acknowledge the need and we having the winter shelter in Live Oak at that point I think it's something that you know one we should say thank you to continue that service that we had last year and they're going to do it again this year but I do think whether it's veering or whether it's not providing more specialized service having some way to address the need for shelter for women or shelter for families we do have a family shelter here in the city of Santa Cruz some of the issues that we're experiencing in the city go well beyond what we're capable of handling when you think about those with chronic drug addiction we just saw a presentation from the director of health and human services about drug addiction here in fatalities and having some way where perhaps those specialized services are concentrated to help create a more stable environment for others that don't have the same significant needs might be the best path for us to help those as a city and that we're maybe where we should be looking at concentrating our resources in my opinion Council Member Naroyan. I just want to add to you know that was shocking the statistic you know our addiction rates as well as people who are dying due to it I can't help but think that we need to be talking about prevention because we could take care of the folks or we could be offering services to the people who are currently in crisis but if we don't stem the tide on the other end it just will keep going and we won't really see a light at the end of the tunnel so I'm kind of upset at what I see as kind of a lack of focus on looking towards prevention a lot of the surveys that we've taken show that a lot of these folks are growing up in our community and I think we really need to do some deep soul searching on why we have so many people who look like they're growing up in our community ending up you know living some pretty harsh harsh lifestyles and we need to go there but I don't see a lot of people talking about that so I hope that's something that gets in our radar as well. Yeah I would say that certainly one of the things that I think the council has on their work plan that we need to focus on too is really that sort of statewide advocate because you're right I think to make some of these changes does require really larger policy structural changes to our systems because even the sheltering is a temporary it's temporary nature and so to really get at what you are wanting to address requires some systematic changes at the statewide level and support those programs that will help people with more permanency. But I do say though it looks like it's something that's really problematic for Santa Cruz more so than let's say you take the average rate of let's say addiction in the state or your typical county I think it's higher here and I think we have a bigger crisis around the amount of people who are coming up and growing up here and ending up with some really harmful addictions. Vice Mayor Watkins. I'll just briefly add that I really recognize all the different sort of aspects that go into this social challenge in terms of the preventative approaches to it the various subpopulations and the folks that are living on our streets. I'd be interested in learning how some of our insights from our council are related to the HAP and the HAP structure which are then tasked to identify strategies to impact them and so in terms of that structure and that process how is that related or how can we better understand that process so that we can have that countywide conversation essentially when we're thinking about funding and allocations. Well we certainly can you know talk about it and review it with you. We certainly provide an overview here at a council meeting or individually or in any sort of process that we wish to do and I think also that with respect to moving we are kind of at a pivotal point given that now we actually have dollars to be spent within a particular time frame and that is going to require a robust you know really community engagement and educational process that we have to embark on so I think that's the other opportunity here to really look at that there's also been something that has been worked on but not fully addressed so that has to continue as well in terms of whether the HAP is the best model probably not and some work has been done but it's not completed so much work has to be done really on coming up with a governance model that will work for our community as well. You know just another quick item as part of the August 28th council direction there was looking at authorizing staff with the HAP to explore related hygiene based service expansion is that something that's continuing or is any of the direction from the 28 continuing or is that something that based on funding from HAP we're not going to proceed with? Yes I think we're completely that is part of the work that we're doing with the homeless services center to try to expand some of that we've done some of that by extending some of the agreements with them to provide additional showers but yes we want to continue to talk to them about day use services which would include those things that you mentioned so that is continuing yes. And then when does the executive board of the HAP meet again to go over this to say hey we are going to be looking at how to provide some interim recommendation to council? November. November when? It's meeting on a pretty regular basis more than it ever has in the 20 years that has been in existence since I've been on it to be honest. There's a lot of money at stake. Yes, yes exactly. So will there be an opportunity to have another update or recommendation at the next meeting as far as where we are? Yes if there is something we'd be happy to include it on a regular basis. Thank you. Just on that and other opportunities to report in your weekly newsletter that comes to council and updates I mean however we get the updates just as incremental progress is made it's good to know rather than wait for a big report. Just because council member or vice mayor Watkins mentioned the HAP committee the HAP executive committee consists of all the city managers and county administrative officer correct? And so do they take recommendations from the HAP directly in terms of when they look at it or is that totally independent? No no there's the HAP executive committee and there's the HAP executive committee. Do you take recommendations from the HAP? Yes and there have been some and I can talk about this there have been some stakeholder meetings and some discussions that have been happening relative to this issue for example as it relates to the priorities and how to spend this 11 million dollars already taking place there were so a number of meetings that I think actually I think vice mayor Watkins attended one of those so the answer is yes and the recommendations come back from after the HAP executive group votes or reviews. Any other questions? No? Now we'll move on to the main agenda and we'll first up is our consent agenda these are items three through nine on our agenda all items will be acted upon in one motion unless an item is pulled by council member for further discussion council member Cron has already requested in advance the meetings items number seven and nine be pulled from the agenda are there any other items that wish to be pulled? I don't want to pull one but because I wasn't here for the last meeting I won't be voting on the minutes because I also haven't reviewed them. That's item number three I just have a quick you'll just abstain from item number three. I just have a quick comment on item number four. Do you want to wait until after item number four comment on four? Any other? Council members have comments on item number four are there any members of the public that wish to speak to any items on the agenda other than item seven and nine please line up go ahead that's pulled so you'll have a time later are there any other members of the public that wish to speak on items on the agenda other than items number seven and nine what item are we on right now? We're on the full consent agenda which is items three through nine you wanted to comment you know what if you want to speak to any item other than seven through nine you could step up on the consent agenda that you'll speak at oral communications this was just a presentation this one will be Nick this is the presentation from the city manager report okay that's something if you'd like to speak you could speak at oral communications at five thirty p.m. see no comments I'll bring it back to the council for action can you speak to the clerk see no public comment on items on the consent agenda I'm going to bring it back to the council I will move the consent agenda which is items three through nine with the exception no I guess it would be three through eight with the exception of number seven I'll second that just to be clear for the public item number seven which has to do with PG&E financing program for lighting and number nine which has to do with replacement of university tank number five those two are polled from consent everything else will be approved with this motion thank you for item number three councilmember Matthews made a minor change which I left on your seat so it would be just a correction one of the votes yeah I saw that so that includes that correction okay is there any further discussion did you have a comment I'll just briefly comment on item four at this time before we vote is that okay I just I won't go very very detailed to my comments because I've done a lot of research on the health and all policies framework I was very excited to have the presentation this afternoon by Mimi Hall and I'm hopeful that as we start to look into what the framework can offer our community we can understand and identify a way that's going to make it fit for Santa Cruz and I briefly just want to kind of share experience that I have when I was doing some research in the Bay Area about epidemiology data and life outcomes and there was some work done on a health impact assessment for folks in the Bay Area and they found that folks living within a certain region below are the 580 freeway there had a 20 year difference of a life expectancy that they were 20 years likely to die before there are other folks that are living on the other side of the freeway and what that looked like was lack of affordable housing access to healthy foods, safe communities and parks to plan looked like air quality in terms of access in areas in which the people were living in proximity to freeways so all the different aspects that we do and we influence in our role as government and public policy really truly do have a health impact and we play a role along with our supportive partners and doing something to influence that and we do that in so many ways I see it almost every single agenda that we have whether it be climate action or any of our parks and rec programming or active transportation and public works number of things that come before us really do use that lens I believe and I think this is an opportunity for us to really research how to systemize a structure evaluate and proceed in a cohesive way so I appreciate the presentation and the interest of working with Council Member Brown on this agenda item and hopeful that we can look at something moving forward. I was going to say that this needs to be tailored to Santa Cruz I was reading the document and it you know I think didn't have some of the issues that we have going on in Santa Cruz in regards to health and around addiction issues as much that I think seems to keep coming up but I think it's really important that we incorporate documents that we've already worked a lot of hours on like the housing blueprint the homeless coordinating committee the public safety citizens committee so you know not I just want to make sure that this I think we do a good job maybe compared to other areas thinking about health this will just bring it more into focus and to look at it holistically but I think it's just really important to not repeat work that's already been done and you know to try if we're going to have this lens how it's practically applied to that's where I was kind of trying to grasp like well how do you actually put this into action as we're at a city council meeting decide making these decisions so. I was also very interested in this and moving forward with this subcommittee one of the areas in which we have a leg up in Santa Cruz County and I'm talking county wide not just the city is an incredibly forward looking and collaborative health care community health and wellness community so I think there's a lot to start with here there's a lot already happening pulling it together is a great idea I'd be interested in serving on it. Okay thank you well then I'd like to express I'd also be interested in serving on this. Thank you for bringing this forward and on this and looking at the way health affects every aspect of what we do up here thank you. Okay thank you there's a motion by councilman Matthews which I seconded to approve the consent items with exception of items seven through nine all those in favor please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That motion passes unanimously with councilmember brown absent. It was seven and nine not seven and nine. Seven and nine I said I said seven and items three through eight right just for the record you said with the exception of seven through nine. Seven and nine. Seven and nine if I did I misspoke. Okay so we're on to item number seven. Item number seven is the utilization of the PG&E on-bill financing program to upgrade lighting infrastructure. What was your question councilmember brown? I was alerted to this by a couple members of the public who are wondering how closely our staff is working with the Dark Sky International Dark Sky Association and I think there's a couple people who came to speak today about this issue so I will if you don't mind let them go to the audience. First and then we'll come back and answer the question. Yeah I think it's probably better. So are there any members of the public that wish to speak to item number seven? Please step up. You have two minutes. Good afternoon councilmembers. I am assuming this has to do with street lighting largely and I wanted to say I'm really happy to start seeing more LEDs going up. They use about 15% of the energy and that's wonderful. They also produce more light which is wonderful and not wonderful depending on the direction of the light. So we're looking at lighting up the streets and below the streets but as you probably know from Mr. Chrome mentioning the Dark Skies business it can have a significantly negative impact on the environment particularly wildlife and we have an urban area we're trying to encourage as much wildlife as possible. I understand from a friend whose husband is an amateur astronomer that she complained about the light level she was able to come out and put a shade on that light which is terrific but I think that you would be wise to require that as a practice. It's for one thing cheaper than going out and retrofitting individual lights but in a general practice as far as the Dark Skies effort when you take care of these things with PG&E that should be one of your considerations that unnecessarily light pollution is not part of what's slipping by us so I just want to bring that matter to your attention. Thank you. Next speaker please. So good afternoon just for clarification we are members of the Santa Cruz chapter of the International Dark Sky Association or IDA. The IDA is the recognized authority on light pollution worldwide and has taken the lead in publicizing the negative aspects of artificial light at night on human health wildlife and climate change. Our local chapter passionately supports goal HZ5 in the city of Santa Cruz and the general plan which calls for quote minimal light pollution in our city. Specific language in the general plan calls for investigating the merits of a Dark Sky ordinance, appropriate lighting at city facilities and lighting guidelines that limit light from escaping onto adjoining properties or into the sky. So as part of our effort to support environmentally responsible outdoor lighting our chapter would like to commend the public works department for their plans for outdoor off fixtures and outdoor upgrades as part of the PG&E on bill financing program. If you have something to finish you can ask your colleague to finish it for you but your time is up. You want to finish? Full cut off fixtures are designed in such a way to reduce glare thereby improving safety and they align with the guidelines stated in the general plan. In addition to using full cut off fixtures we recommend that the fixtures chosen for the project have a warm color temperature specifically 3,000 Kelvin or lower as has been proven to be better for human environmental health. Unfortunately there are very many examples of outdoor lighting in our city that do not conform to sensible lighting standards. We look forward to working with the city on lighting issues with the goal of standards that are in tone with the general plan and provide health good health experiences for our citizens visitors and the environment while ensuring public safety and saving energy. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, is there any other member of the public that wishes to speak to item number 7? Seeing none I'll bring it back to the council and see if there's any sort of response from staff in regard to the question that Council Member Cron raised. Mayor Tarazzo's council member is my copper public works operations manager. There are no street lights on this list of projects. Those were taken care of earlier on bill financing package in 2008 and also as part of our California Energy Commission 1% loan. The other fixtures were chosen for the most part. There are many that are just interior fixtures. The largest project is the City Hall annex. It'll be replacing around 300 fluorescent fixtures with LEDs. But the outdoor fixtures have been chosen with the objectives of the dark sky folks in mind and often in consultation with them. Thank you, Mr. Hopper. When they say full cutoff fixtures is that what we're talking about? Full cutoff fixtures are not always practical. We try to use them when the light pattern is consistent with safety. And how often do you send folks out when neighbors have an issue with the light that's being emitted in their living room or whatever and they call you. How much do we deal with that? Yeah, in the two and a half years I've been here. We've gone out every time. Most if not all those cases we've been able to come up with a shield. It usually relates to a street light shining into someone's bedroom. That's understandably obnoxious. Thank you. Thank you. So we'll bring it back to the council. Is there any further discussion or action? No discussion. I'll move the recommendation and thank the staff for moving forward with this. Second. Okay, there's a motion by Council Member Matthew second by Council Member Narroyan. Is there any further discussion? No? Yeah, I'd like to echo the thanks and thanks for the responsiveness on the questions that came from Council. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Opposed, unanimous or excuse me passes with Council Member Brown-Abson now moving on to item number nine, the University Tank number five replacement project this is a bid protest and we'll I think set this up for presentation please. Yes, just to be clear this is on the consent calendar because a bid protest on the grounds of non responsiveness is not entitled to a formal public hearing. However, the person that submitted the protest may address the council as part of public comment. The sole issue raised by a bid protest is whether or not the bid submitted by the apparent low bidder, Paso Robles Tank, conforms to the requirements of the bid specifications. A determination was made by the staff that it did not, that the second lowest bidder did submit a bid that conformed to the bid specifications and therefore the recommendation was to reject the apparent low bidder and award the contract to the second low bidder, Crosno. I think I might have pronounced that right. Staff is here, if you have questions or might wanna provide some introductory remarks. And I believe that there is an indication that a member or representative of the company that submitted the protest may be here as well. Correct. Okay, did you, Council Member Crohn, did you have anything specific you wanted to raise or just did you wanna hear background? I just wanted to give Mr. Wombles an opportunity to speak at some point, but I think it's a good idea to give us some background and let us know what led to this. Thank you. Actually, we're gonna have staff give it just some brief introductory remarks and then we'll open it up for comment. Great, good afternoon, Mayor Torazza, City Councilor Heidi Lickenblock, Water Department. As Tony said, I just wanna give a few comments to give you some context and background for the project and why staff is making the recommendation that we are. So the University Five Tank is one of the highest tanks in our service area off of Empire Grade, this two million gallon drinking water tank was built in 1965. And as some of you may recall, we have a program maybe 10 years now where we're going through the system and replacing and are rehabbing all of our tanks. This is, I believe, the second to the last tank we have to go. The tank does provide service predominantly to the University, but it also has the capability to provide emergency and fire flow to the rest of the system. You can see there a picture of the tank. I'm gonna go to the next slide, which will show us a graphic from the bid documents. But the graphic shows is looking down on the top of the replacement to this tank. So again, this is a plan view looking down into the new tank. And this was part of the bid documents. The council approved letting the documents to bid in June and September when bidding closed, we received two bids, one from Paso Robles Tanks and the other from Crosno Construction. The bidding documents provided by the design engineer, Robert Miles, provided some flexibility in terms of what the bidder would propose on. What I'm showing here in red is called an intermediate girder. And I think you'll hear a little bit more about this later. So I'm just gonna give you a few details. This intermediate girder, according to the plans and specifications, could move either towards the center of the tank or out to the perimeter of the tank, but it could not be eliminated. So the flexibility was given to the proposal to do that, but it had to remain as part of the tank construction. Another item which is really difficult to see here are there are two angles that the designer provided that the construction had to conform to. And there's this angle right here, which says 12.9 degrees. And there's this one right here, which says 6.4 degrees. And both of those had to be part of the construction of the project. So this is another very similar graphic. I'm including it because to the extent that you've been reading the materials that you've been receiving, there's reference frequently to sheet R4. It's very similar to R3, which I spent more time on, but you might see this one a little bit later. It just shows the cross section of what we're talking about here, but this is the same plan view. This here is the submittal provided by Poser-Robles tank. And as you can see on this drawing, the intermediate girder isn't there and the two angles that were required for the construction of the tank are different. Instead of two different spans that would meet up at this girder, the proposal was to provide one long span going from the middle to the outside. This is Krasno's drawing that was submitted with their bid. And as you can see, it is consistent with the bid documents. Because of the variations that were provided by Poser-Robles tanks, the bids weren't comparable. They're really bidding on two different projects. And again, while there was flexibility provided in the bid documents to make modifications to the design, the one that was provided by Poser-Robles was kind of went above and beyond what the expectation and acceptable limits of those modifications were. That's the background I wanted to provide. Thank you. Okay, so now what I'd like to do is we'll open it up to public comment on this item and Sir, I'd like you to begin, if you'd like, you contact me in advance for some additional time to speak in regards to your protest. Yes, Sir. Well, first off, we, the letter, rejection letter was dated October 1st. We did not receive that till October 8th. There was no certified mail being sent to us. So the official date that we recognized receiving it via email was October 8th. And that gave us five business days, which we did in a timely manner within three business days, respond to that. It wasn't, we didn't get a letter that said, here respond to these allegations. We got a letter saying you're being rejected. Now in my 31 years of doing this business, I've always been afforded the opportunity by staff, recommending staff to answer these questions. And some of these accusations being made against Pastor Oble's tank or not accusations as comments, the proposed roof layout did not conform to section 13658. I contend it did. And my engineer contended it did. And my engineer is a sitting member of the AWWA National Committee. And speaking with the engineer, he agrees, there was some variables that were permitted on this project. And one of them read, the number of rafters may be varied except the number indicated are minimums. No, PRT increased the inter rafters from 28 to 56. There's more rafters than the 28 on the interior that I asked for. Number two, that was a permitted variable. The plan radii of the ring girders may be modified from those indicated. Well, modified, what does that mean exactly? I can reduce the number. So we went from seven columns to three columns and we went to one rolled girder on the interior. Now, this is nothing new. We built plenty of tanks well over 105, 108 foot diameter. Matter of fact, North Coast County Water District, your neighbor are just up the road. We built 108 foot diameter by 70 foot tall. Single bay structure, zero problems. Now, one of the original complaints by the staff was that our tank proposed, okay, the proposed roof design eliminated the intermediate columns in girders and proposed a single span roof which may be susceptible to detrimental welding distortions. We took this into account. We are stamping the drawings. Your engineer, your consulting engineer is not stamping the drawings. What do we do to prevent this tank from the tear warping? Well, we increased the minimum roof thickness from quarter inch to five sixteenths, one. We increased the web span which was specified at eight inches to 18 inches. And then lastly, we increased the web thick width from three inches to four inches. Why do we do this? Well, it's been our eight, nine year experience in building more press broke, more press broke roof tanks than my next three competitors combined that we have this experience in doing it. Matter of fact, we're the leading tank contractor nationally to get this roof to replace the standard AWWA standards. It's in progress right now with steel tank, steel plate fabricators association. And we hope in the next five to 10 years this is gonna be the standard roof design. Now, in the 31 years I've been doing this, I've never seen a water district that I want to spend over $600,000 for a tank, same thicknesses, same diameter, same height, same capacity, and the next bidder. This confounds me because I thought the idea was to be lowest, well, the lowest and most responsive bidder. The specifications which is our Bible to bid from clearly state that these changes are permissible. But now we're being told that they're not permissible based upon a consulting engineer's opinion. Now, and I'll do respect for Mr. Robert, I'm sorry. I'll just address us. Okay, I'm sorry. And I'll do respect to your consulting engineer. He's designed two welded steel tanks. I've been doing this for 31 years. I've successfully designed engineer fabricated and sold well over 5,000 projects in my history. Never once have I had it been rejected. And my bid's been rejected at $600,000 low and meeting the specification and based upon an opinion that the roof may distort. He doesn't know because it says it may. Well, your specifications are very clear, counsel. It says you cannot distort past this plane and it gives you a measurement. We agree to that. Now, the last item that they're rejecting our proposal is saying that we didn't include a weld symbol. If I can bring up the city's drawings, you guys don't include any weld symbols in the top of your roof plate. Can you pause for a second? Do you have that slide? Do you want R4? Yes, ma'am. Sorry, I don't know how to use this. Well, if you look at the detail, how do you make this go up here? I don't know if you guys can see it or not. Oh, okay. If you look at section A, sure, there is a seal welding detail. There's no top detail. I'm sorry. Okay, there's no top. So if you look at detail, what is that? Two, there's no top weld symbol there. It says a seal weld it. If you look at my competitors drawing, right here, there's no weld details at all. Now, by my CAD operator, who missed a simple detail, does that mean that I'm not gonna seal weld the bottom of the roof that's clearly specified? Absolutely not. Now, again, we are talking $600,000 and I can go to a lot of other things. I guess my time's up, but I would like to another two minutes if possible. Actually, we're gonna do this. We're gonna take any other public comment and if council members have questions, you might have an opportunity to address that there. Thank you, Mayor. We're on item number nine. Are there any members of the public that wish to speak to this item? Seeing none, I'm gonna bring it back to the council for further deliberation and action. Council Member Cron. I was wondering what Ms. Lukenbach would, how would you respond to his comments? Sure, I mean, if you know, I guess first of all, I would say that we're not doubting the credibility of the design at all. What we're looking at is the fact that the consultant that we hired and the design they provided was not what was bid on and so it was kind of an apples to oranges comparison which would make it fair to the proposer who bid on the bid documents. I think we still don't agree that there was flexibility in the design and what was to be built on, but what elements there was flexibility with and what there wasn't. I think we aren't agreeing on at the moment. It sounds like we do have a process where if a proposer wants to recommend a different design, we can accommodate that. We actually just went through this process with a different project where a potential bidder contacted the staff and asked in advance of submitting a bid if they could bid on an alternative and we said no, but we said we would consider it after the bids come in so that when the bids do come in, again, you're doing that apples to apples comparison, you're getting your low bid and then you can look to alternatives that may in fact save you money. So there's a process for doing that and as far as I know, Pastor Roblesenck did not reach out to us in advance to ask those questions. I'll just, you know, one of the points, City Attorney. I just would like to reiterate that the question is whether or not the bid that was submitted was responsive to the specifications and that really boils down to a simple analysis which is whether or not the bidder complied with the bidding instructions and if the city determines that the bid deviates from the bidding instructions, then there's a second analysis, whether or not the deviation is material or immaterial. In this case, the absence, as I've been told, the absence of the second ringer and that additional support was a significant cost item so the deviation in the bid amount was likely at least in part the result of the deviation from the bid specifications and you can't award the contract to a bidder that has made a material deviation from the bid specifications because that provides an unlevel playing field for bidders to try to cut costs and get their bids approved by not conforming to the specifications. So that's just my comment. I'm happy to answer any questions that Council has. Councilor McCrone. Is that Heidi, is that your understanding too? Just what the city attorney said, that's what happened when you said apples and oranges. He just said it better than I did. Could we just give the applicant just 30 more seconds and just I would say 30 seconds more just to say, could it be an apples and oranges situation that you really did a bang up job bidding on this on A, but we were asking for B? Council, my cost actually cost me more to build this tank than what was shown. I've said it in the letter that I have no problem going back to a two bay system, it will save me money. But I've been a pioneer in this industry for the last 15 years with this style roof trying to give the best product in the industry to beat my rivals in the concrete tank industry because that's where those are apples and oranges. This roof right here, keep in mind I have a much heavier roof. I'm going from quarter inch to three sixteenths. It's taken me three times more to press break this roof because of the special equipment. I don't any shop can go press break what they have shown it's a 25 foot press, it's easy. I need a 50 foot press to do this. Okay. Thank you, thank you sir. I'm sorry. Well, let me ask you a question more based on what you said. Why did you deviate from what the bid instructions were? Because you just, I just heard you say that you built a different roof based on your experience in building this type of roof that you recommend other water districts. Because based on my experience at the North Coast County Water District Pacific a very similar tank to this one with the exception of the height. It was a very successful job with us. We use a five sixteenths roof. It was 108 foot diameter. It was about 52 foot length press broke roof and the owner was extremely satisfied. It was our opinion and it still is this specification says there's variables. The variables are as listed. You can change the rafter number and you can change the number of girders. It says it in black and white and the specifications. What else anybody who had bid this would see the same thing. Okay, I guess can you speak to that and when it talks about variables how does that go to the issue that city attorney Kandadi mentioned about like material differences? Yeah, and I would actually like to introduce Robert Miles who did the design who could speak better to those points. Okay, Mr. Mayor and council and staff. When we constructed the bid documents for the project we wanted to give the contractor some latitude and exactly the dimensions and other items that they would need to construct the project. That's normal in the industry. However, well in the Crosno bid they did exercise in their sketch. They eliminated one of the columns for instance and that was permissible in the specification. They can adjust the number of columns. They can adjust some dimensions and so on. However, when I reviewed the sketch that was submitted with the bid for Pasa Robles tank they presented a project that was materially different than what we envisioned and what we had in the specification. Now, as Heidi explained, normally what you do is the contractor is obligated to bid to the drawings and specifications. And then if that contractor is the low bid and is fortunate enough to get awarded the contract then you start discussing potential changes or improvements. But by not doing this, what the Pasa Robles tank company has done is they're bypassing the bid procedures. And now in the last couple of weeks they submitted a second sketch. It is different than the one they submitted with the bids. A materially different. And so I think what, in their ideal situation they want to open this up to negotiation. But in the bidding, public bidding arena this isn't a negotiation. You have to submit your bid and it'd be the lowest responsive bid. In my opinion, they work. That's more current. Mr. Mayor, I'm satisfied. I was just wondering from the city attorney what would the recourse of Pasa Robles tank have? I mean, there's no appeal process. That's right, the courts have looked at this as essentially the public entities have the discretion when there is a deviation from bid specifications to reject and so there would not be a legal basis to challenge that in court if that's what your question is. Thank you. I mean, 600,000, it's a lot of money and that's why I'm just putting it out there, right? Right, I appreciate that. Vice Mayor Watkins. Mr. Mayor, can I have one more comment? Sure, please go right ahead. Now, the thing is, we have another bidder on this project who has complied with the bidding documents. Now, my opinion, my observation in the past, I'm not an attorney, my observation in the past has been if the city awards this to Pasa Robles tank or negotiates with Pasa Robles tank, the actual responsive bidder will then file a lawsuit. And then if it is determined that say you have to go out for bids or something like that, that will potentially scull the project because you have to go for another bid on the same project, you have to have a materially different project or else the low bidder or the responsive bidder, you know, someone can just bid 10 dollars less than they did because they know what the prices are. So this would be a difficult situation in my opinion for the city. City Attorney? I guess I would agree with that in part in that in my view, the options before you are to reject all bids or to adopt the staff's recommended action. Thanks, Mayor Watkins. I appreciate the perspectives offered here today and somebody who's written grants, I can only draw on that experience and that if there is, you know, not alignment with the application and the RFP process and specifically what they're looking for in your submitting an application that doesn't necessarily fit that standard, it is unfortunate in many ways. I think one of the things that I'd like to understand is if we do have a way to help our sort of learn from this experience I guess and have some sort of language around if there is innovation or if there is opportunity for negotiation in whatever form that might be part of it. Do you have something to add to it? I haven't reviewed the contract specifications for this project but that is a very typical provision in standard specs is to allow proposals that are innovative and we can certainly explore that. Okay. As part of our ongoing review of our contract templates. That'd be great just to hopefully avoid a situation like this in advance but knowing that I will be prepared to move the recommendation as presented by staff. Are you doing that? I am moving the recommendation as presented. Okay. Second. There's a motion by Vice Mayor Watkins and a second by Council Member Naroyan, Council Member Cron. And I just want to say to the applicant, thanks for coming, it just sounds like we missed and hopefully we'll get. I appreciate your time. You guys are paying 600,000 more for the same product. And I must have money to burn is all I can say in my life. Thank you. All those in favor of the motion on the floor by Vice Mayor Watkins and seconded by Council Member Naroyan. Please say aye. Aye. Those opposed? That passes with Council Member Brown absent. Next up is our consent public hearing item. This is item number 10, our agenda. Are there any other members of the public who wish, are there any council members who wish to comment on this item? If there are any members of the public that would like to request this item be pulled or speak on it, now is the time to do so. I'm now. I believe there's members here who do. I don't think they understand what you're saying. Okay. There are people who want to speak to this item in the audience. Is there any member of the public that wishes to speak to this item? This is item number 10, our agenda. It's a second reading and final adoption of the ordinance amending section 10.60.010 of the Santa Cruz Municipal Code. Excuse me. Yes. Good afternoon, Mayor and Council Member on Pomerance. And based on the information that in your packet, at your previous meeting, the rationale for increasing speed limits was to ensure radar enforcement on the listed streets, in order to ensure enforcement was legal and to make the streets safer. As now written in your packet, and I'll read it, it is hereby determined upon the basis of an engineering and traffic survey that the speed permitted by state law upon the following streets is less than is necessary for safe operation of vehicles. That's confusing to me. The ordinance says that the current speed is less than is necessary for safe operation of vehicles. How can increasing the speed limit make them safer for bikes and pedestrians while making them also safer for cars? It doesn't make sense, nor does it conform to the rationale staff put forth when you approved the first reading. Why is it necessary to increase the speed limit? Studies say increasing speed inherently creates less safe streets. As an example, I'm a bicyclist and I use Morrissey and I feel that your past action, the council's past action increasing the speed limit has made that street far less safe for me as cars go a whole lot faster than the posted speed limit without the commensurate follow-up of the police enforcement. When you increase the speed limit by five miles an hour, you're in effect increasing it by seven or eight miles an hour because cars generally go a few miles per hour faster than the posted speed limit. Increasing the speed limits on the additional 18 streets will reduce safety, especially when police radar enforcement appears virtually non-existent. Where's the data to support increasing speed limits by council action has made those streets safer? I encourage you to take this off and rethink it. Thank you for your time. Thank you, next speaker please. Hello, Fred Geiger again. Well, I have to admit I'm a little confused here because as the previous speaker said, he just read what I just sent around there. It says it's the following streets, the speed limit is less than necessary for safe operations of vehicles, but in the agenda it says you're reducing the speed limit on several streets. So I hope you know more about what's going on here than I do, maybe you can explain it to each other or something, but I can tell you this much. It's saying like that Swift Street you're gonna, at the end of Swift Street you're gonna change the speed limit to 30 miles an hour. The sign's been up there for like three or four years including the blocks, they'll go all the way to Woodrow. That block at Delaware Avenue is where the divided road ends, the lanes merge, the bicycle lanes disappear, and I have a list here of 14 accidents in the last 12 years including cars being totaled, completely blasted off the streets. So I don't know what's going on because if you're saying you're doing something that's already done, that doesn't make sense. If you have a 30 mile an hour speed limit on that Delaware between Woodrow and Swift Street that doesn't make any sense when you have like a 25 mile an hour speed limit elsewhere. Morrissey, the city was wise, they narrowed that road, they got rid of that freeway off, four lanes, people came blasting down a number of years ago, they narrowed that to two lanes and reduced the speed limit. That says here from what I can tell that Morrissey between Pacheco and Prospect Heights and Water and Fremont, the speed limit's gonna be raised. So if you are lowering speed limits, that's what one piece of paper says, I think that's a good thing except for in industrial areas like the end of Swift or High Street out past the university. If you're raising speed limits, like the previous speaker said, a five mile an hour impact on a human body or a bicyclist can mean the difference between life or death or paralysis or it's not a small matter when you get hit by something, so I would encourage you and the neighborhoods had no impact in this or no reports to the neighborhoods, no feedback. I think this would be very unpopular if people on residential streets knew that you were gonna raise the speed limits on their neighborhoods. So I hope you'll look into this and figure out what the heck's going on. Thank you. Thank you. Are there any other members of the public that wish to speak to this item? Seeing none, I'll bring it back to the council and just to clarify and just to have staff clarify there are no increases in speed limits being proposed by this action. It's my understanding that the only action that we're doing is maintaining the speed limits on the streets you surveyed and lowering the posted speed limits on sections of Delaware Avenue, Isbell Drive and Western Drive. That is correct. Just wanna make sure that's clear that the speed limits that are currently listed are the actual speed limits currently in place on those streets, correct? Okay. So maybe it's just the process, maybe it's very confusing for many people who've alerted me to this and they didn't understand what it was and it says lowering, but then there's all 30s here and we don't see any 25s because that's what I thought. We had three streets that were going down to 25 but it's not in this ordinance. So what's the process? So there are two instruments needed to adopt the speed survey. The first is a resolution which certifies the 2018 Engineering and Traffic Survey and this council approved that at your last meeting and that's where you can see the speed limit at 25 miles an hour on the three streets. Those streets in the past, after preceding today were actually also included in the ordinance. They are no longer in there because the speed is being reduced. So the ordinance is required by the vehicle code. 22358 I believe is the section and we need both instruments on the books to adopt the survey. Because the resolution only needed one reading, this one's coming back by itself. The ordinance, the title of the ordinance is a little confusing. I agree. Does that help? Yeah, yeah. Glad we agree. That's confusing. Is there any other council member Naroyan? In a previous life, I worked for the state legislature and we had these issues with in order to enforce speed limits, we had to increase the speed limits or else the only way it could be enforced is if a police officer was tracking the car and it was very hard for them to determine the speed that it was actually going. You couldn't use radar. And that's the whole issue in this is that if you have to take a speed survey of the street and then take the average speed of people going on the street, regardless of what is posted as a speed limit, and then you have to set the speed according to that average. And there's, can you round up or round down? I spent, unfortunately, seven hours of listening to how speed limits are actually set at a hearing in San Francisco and the state of California has a committee or commission, like a coastal commission, except it has to do with vehicle codes. And this is one of the things they grapple with all the time. And so cities sometimes have to round up to actually be able to do enforcement because you really do need to use radar to not have speeding tickets thrown out. It's really confusing. I just, thank you. I just have one quick comment. And that is, you know, some of these streets, we've seen schools kind of move around to different places. Like PCS is now on the West side and we've got Gateway, I believe, is gonna move in eventually and where the former site of PCS was located. They moved in. Gateway has not moved in. No, oh. But what is the process of like requesting like the school signage so that we can have enforceable school signage there? Does that require council action or is that something? No, they just need to reach out. They need to reach out and request that. Okay. Although if they're moving into natural bridges, it should all be signed, I can double check. I think that's already signed, but PCS. We required the builder, I think, to put in all the signs out there. Okay. When the project was approved. And so that, even though it's not part of this under the state law, where either they can get a lower speed limits with schools in six to 25 miles an hour when children are present. All right, thanks. All right, any other council member, Matthews? Well, I think the mechanism, the rationale for establishing the speed limits by prevailing speeds in order to be able to enforce with radar has been covered here. And this, just for the interest of the public, this was one of those happy occasions where the measurement and prevailing speed actually went down so we could lower the speed limit so it could be enforced by radar at a lower level. Correct me if I'm wrong on that. That's correct. So given all that, we don't get to do this very often. So given all that, I'm going to move the staff recommendation for second meeting. Second. Are all of these. Okay, we've got a motion and a second on the floor. Able to be controlled by radar. They're the ones that are in front of us here. Yes, by adopting the survey, you give us that ability. Okay, I have a question for the chief. I see him sitting out there about radar. I see him too. I hope I'm not putting him on the spot. But as far as our radar units, like for example, the neighbors at Morrissey want to know, well, are they actually checking the speeders because the people are speeding now that when the city raised the limit from 25 to 30, and how often do we have units out there anywhere else in the city? I mean, how often are we doing radar? Well, good afternoon, council and mayor. We regularly do radar enforcement when we have the units or officers available to do that all over the city. We primarily look at the collision locations or respond to complaints from community members where there's high levels of speeding present. And without this ordinance, we can't do an enforcement on those sections of roadway. So folks from Delaware or Morrissey called and said, hey, could you all check out the speed of these people? They're going really fast. You'd send somebody down there. Right, that's correct. Thanks a lot. Thank you, mayor. Thank you. Okay, so we have a motion on the floor by council member Matthew seconded by council member Naroyan. Is there any further discussion on this item? Seeing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That motion passes. With all council members present, council member Brown is absent. Okay, next item is item number 11, the Tree Permit Appeal for 1420 King Street. This was an item that came up at our August 28th meeting and there was a robust discussion, which I saw on video. And one of the things that we're going to be doing now is not having a presentation on the item really because that presentation did take place. We're going to be solely focused on the public comment of this item before council deliberation. I'd like to have the city attorney, Tony Condati, clarify any other further process. Yes, at the last hearing on this matter, it was continued under your rules of procedure due to a tie vote resulting from one council member's absence. So it's unfortunate that we haven't even a number of council members again to reconsider this item, but you're right. This is a continuation of the public hearing that started, I think at your early September meeting. And so it is not an opportunity for the appellant to represent the appeal or for the applicant to make their case again, although they may speak as members of the public. And so the recommendation is assuming that the mayor has rehabilitated himself by viewing the video of the last meeting and reading the agenda packet to continue the public hearing and afterwards for the council to deliberate and take any appropriate action. I have, and I voted on the approval of the minutes at a prior meeting and I stated as much. Okay, so at this point, after hearing the city attorney's comments, we will open it up to public comment. There were some members of the public that requested to speak on this item. Is there any people present that wish to speak on item number 11, the tree permit appeal for 1420 King Street? Please line up to my left and you'll be given an opportunity to speak to this item. Is there any other member of the public that wishes to speak on this item? Please line up to my left so we have a good accounting of who wants to speak and we'll take it from there. Sir, you can step up and begin. Afternoon again, I'm getting my dimes worth out of the city parking meter here. Hope you appreciate my economy. Fred, it's up to $1.50. Pause. I don't pay any. Pause, please go ahead. This is simple. You've got a couple of experts here, arborists who've told you what's going on. You're very clear you have a heritage tree ordinance. It's very clear this is a heritage tree. I don't know, what's the question? Do you hate trees or not hate trees? I mean, it's almost come down to that. It's a little more detailed and putting that bluntly is, the arborists have said if there's any issues which there really aren't, they can be resolved easily as far as any root intrusion without having to remove the tree or having to damage the tree. It's quite manageable. Why would you cut down a giant redwood tree when you have a heritage tree ordinance and it's not even causing anybody an immediate problem? And if it did, it can be remedied. Don't get it. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, please. I'm feeling about it. There's just too many of these heritage trees are being sacrificed. Matt, please pause for a second. If you'd speak into the mic so I can catch you for a second, that's the one. Okay. I'm concerned about the amount of heritage trees that are being taken down. My first visit here was with the pine trees over by the dentist's office. And that was a very distressing hearing for me to be here because so many of the people who voted to take those trees down were dentist patients. So I hope we have cleared the way where there's a little bit more openness about it. But that tree is magnificent. I went to see it myself. And you just took down a pine tree over on Galton, Darwin Street, just a few weeks ago, which was a heritage tree. So it's too much. It's too much. You've got to stop doing this and reevaluate and start taking care of our trees. And we're losing too many. So I hope you'll take a reconsideration on this. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, please. And good afternoon. I'm Satya Ryan. And I too went and visited the tree. And it is indeed a magnificent giant sequoia home to birds and squirrels. And I looked up giant sequoias and saw that they can live to be 3,000 years old. And so I'm thinking, I talked to the arborist and she said it was a very healthy tree, maybe 50 years old. And I also looked at the sidewalk. And I saw a small crack in the sidewalk, about seven feet from the tree. So I'm just wondering why the sidewalk can't be fixed if that's the issue. I'm not completely sure it is. But the tree must have been living there when the people bought the house. And it's just, if you've gone to see the tree, I mean, any excuse to cut an amazing, beautiful tree like that, I can't think of what it might be that anything could justify cutting that tree down. So many trees give us so much in so many ways. So I think that's all I have to say. And I hope you'll reconsider this and grant this tree another couple of 1,000 years of life in our city. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Hello, Nathan Kennedy here. And what I got to say is apparently this tree is causing enough problems that it's a good idea to take it down. And we've got trees 3,000 plus years old all over the world that are being cut down as we speak, just to provide paper and wood for all the ridiculous uses that the human race is using it for. And if we're cutting down trees like that, like there's no tomorrow, clear cutting them all over the world, but then here in Santa Cruz, oh, this one tree, it's a heritage tree. It's so important to us. Well, I think we need to take down the tree. We need to let a lumber yard use it, let it get turned into houses, whatever use that we need for four trees, and just make sure that when they take it down that the people that are responsible for removing the tree, they have to plant several like five plus, 10 plus trees elsewhere to help replace it. But the house that it's affecting, the sidewalk, from everything I've heard, it's a big enough deal that I do actually support this tree being taken down as long as we can take measures to make it fair. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Hi. Good afternoon, Council. Basically, Leslie Keady and another professional arborist stated that there was no staff findings to support the tree removal. The city arborist assessed it and recommended use of root pruning and root barriers to address any concerns. There is a heritage tree fund that would help supplement the cost of the root barriers. Leslie stated that installing the root barrier would give them 15 years before the issue would need to be addressed again. There is minimal impact to the sidewalk. The new owners have no arborist recommending that the tree be removed, but are only relying on fear of the future. I also would like to submit another 190 signatures that sign the petition coming to 490 neighbors and community members that wish to save this tree. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Good afternoon again, Mayor and Council. I'm Ron Pomerance. I strongly encourage you to vote to support the neighborhood and the staff's recommendation to save the healthy vigorous majestic neighborhood redwood tree. Although I don't live on King Street, I often pass by and marvel at its beauty in the neighborhood character-shaping quality of the tree. The current property owners located 1420 King Street knew full well what they were buying. Clearly, nothing was hidden from view, especially the tree. The staff's report is clear, quote, staff has determined that this application does not meet the criteria required for tree removal approval as specified by city council resolution. It's the arborist staff's opinion that the giant sequoia tree located on King Street can be pruned and retained. Staff's report is supported by a second opinion of James Allen a long time and well-respected board-certified master arborist. Mr. Allen says, quote, the residents and landscape elements could be protected from future damage with the design and installation of mechanical root control, diversion barriers, tree-friendly surface coverings, and reinforced foundation elements. The experts in the community are saying there's absolutely no compelling need to remove this beautiful heritage tree that gives beauty, fresh air, and unparalleled ambience to the neighbors and the passerbys. I thank you for your thoughtful consideration. Next speaker. Good afternoon, Richard Stover. This is the healthiest sequoia in the city. It can live for hundreds of years and do wonderful work for everybody sequestering carbon. Our response to global warming. But the word on the street is that today you're going to kill this tree. You're going to kill it because you don't care that much about the future. You care more about a raised sidewalk. In the hundreds of years, this tree can live dozens of generations of Santa Cruzans could benefit from this tree. But the word on the street is that today you're going to kill this tree because it inconveniences the owners and might cause them to spend a little bit of money and maybe because they're afraid of this healthy tree. We're out of time, folks. Global warming is building all the time. You cannot excuse anybody from making a positive personal response to doing something about global warming. The word on the street is that humans are simply incapable of fixing this problem. They can't save themselves from the climate chaos they've created. But you can do something. You can show that you will try to do something. You can save this tree for dozens of generations to come. The future children, dozens of generations of children need to know that that's our goal, not personal gain on a very short time scale. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Hi, my name is Dr. Silvana Falcone, and I'm presenting this statement on behalf of myself and my husband, Dr. Matthew Layman. We're longtime residents of the Santa Cruz West Side, and we felt it important to state for the record our support for the Toledo family's case to remove the giant sequoia, which sits on their property. We believe laws and ordinances provide structure and rules for a community, but they should not be so rigid or without eligibility for waivers in cases where a family could be financially harmed long term by recurring tree root home foundation damage, as is in this case. The Toledos have our proposed plan. They would like to replace the giant sequoia tree with appropriate trees for the neighborhood in which they have the city's approved tree list as a guide. We understand this tree is impressive, and we also understand that the home's previous owners did not fully appreciate the harm they would cause future homeowners to their foundation. They planted the tree decades ago and did not consult with specialists who could have explained the long term consequences of planting a giant sequoia tree so close to a home's foundation. For the city to ask this family to undergo financial hardship for a tree that is not natural to the residential location is unfair, and it sends a terrible message to working families that the city council does not care about extenuating financial burden for a heritage tree ordinance that should never have been planted in the first place. It should not be this family's responsibility to undertake the burdens of the heritage tree ordinance. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Hello, my name is Andrew Harris. I live across the street, 1504 King Street. My concern is the tree has a pronounced lean. I'm certainly not an arborist, but I've watched it for 25 years. It does have a pronounced lean. It leans towards the parses house. I've seen the damage to the wall of the Toledo's house, to their foundation, to the sidewalk, and now our newly paved King Street. I have had a tree fall on my house. It does happen. I'm concerned about the liability to the city. I'm concerned about the parses. If the tree falls over, it will be a big mess. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Debbie Bolter, I live one block from this tree. If you allow this tree to be cut down, no tree is safe in the city of Santa Cruz. You have on one side the written testimony of your own city arborist and a well-respected arborist, James Allen, who say the tree is healthy, that it is not a danger and that measures can be taken to prevent damage to the foundation. You have on the other side a well-meaning and fearful homeowner who is afraid, but has no substantive scientific information that says the tree is a danger. Additionally, cutting this tree does not meet the requirements of the city's own tree ordinance, and I urge you to follow your own tree ordinance and to respect the learned opinions of the arborists who have said that this tree is not a danger. If it becomes a danger in the future, the homeowner can reapply and ask that something be done. But at the present time, there is no danger that has been documented. Please, save this tree. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Good afternoon, Eduardo D'Aliu, the owner of the house in 1420. So as you know, the giant sequoia is only in its infancy stage and it will continue to grow by nature into our neighbor's property. And we all know that the tree will eventually has to be removed. So why continue to create a financial hardships for my family? The cost analysis in front of you is based on all the estimates that we received to remove the tree and the repairing the current damages today versus completing doing the repairs now, installing the recommended root barrier and that it's only gonna last 10 to 15 years, removing a much bigger tree later on because the tree continues to grow and completing the additional repairs that are gonna need at that point. So due to this tree, our family has already spent over $6,000 and now we're looking at additional $32,000 of expenses. We're in this up to about $37,000 plus. On the other hand, if we proceed with the recommendation of the root barrier, perform the new repairs today and having to remove the tree, the much bigger tree and 10 to 15 years from now, the estimate cost raised to about $75,000. So which is about $27,000 more of what is gonna cost us today and it's gonna double the cost and it's basically a temporary solution, right? In the city here, this tree grant program only covers 50% of the repair costs, up to $5,000, okay? So that's only 15% of the $32,000 we have to spend now. On August 30th, I spoke on the phone with the experienced bio barrier sales rep and explained our tree situation and location, inquiring more information about the product and he said, using the bio barrier for growing giant sequoia is a crap shot. Rolling the dice, your efforts are better to spend to save money now and have the tree removed. This barrier will not stop the tree from growing. In addition, the root barrier main ingredient is called trifluoroblin and it's known to have carcinogens and it's completely banning Europe. So thank you. But thank you. Next speaker, please. Good afternoon, Victoria Sanchez-Toledo. Our approved tree permit should be upheld under the criteria of the tree resolution, which is not meant to be absolutist and states the heritage tree has or is likely to have an adverse effect upon structural integrity of a building, utility, or public or private right of way. One, the tree has had an adverse effect on the house's foundation and our patio as invoices attest. Two, the tree is inappropriately placed on our small urban lot, close to homes and continues to likely have an adverse effect on our foundations and replacement patio. Three, the tree has had an adverse effect on our cracked and lifted sidewalk causing public hazard. Four, the tree continues to likely have an adverse effect on our sidewalk. Five, the tree continues to likely have an adverse effect on the main sewer system, a major point of city infrastructure that may have or will cost thousands of dollars of damage that the city is and will be responsible for. Without doubt, these reasons alone uphold the tree removal permit. Additionally, one, as our realtor confirmed to council member Cron, the extent of problems the tree caused and will continue to cause were not discoverable or disclosed by the seller at that time. This misplaced tree has been a burden for many owners. Why continue the burden for our family and our family's future generations? Two, the tree is impeding our rightful use and enjoyment of our front yard. Three, the tree is and will only worsen economic hardship for the owner and neighbor with postponing removal, increasing costs by 40K when kids are in college. Four, this tree is a community danger. Five, the giant sequoia is not on the city's approved list of trees for a reason. The park and rec commission voted six to one and stated anything less than granting a tree permit is simply kicking the can down the road. Respectfully, we implore city council not to kick the can down the road. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Hold on for a second. It just blinked out. Hi, I'm Chris Parse, the neighbor. I'd like to say I'm saddened by the polarization. I feel this has caused in our neighborhood. I lived in my home for 19 years. I've raised my family here because I love nature and this community. I have a huge oak tree in my backyard, which I love. However, I think perspective is important here. The houses were here first. Mine was built in 1917, but this improperly positioned in non-native tree is encroaching on and damaging my property. Current damage repairs are at about $20,000. The tree itself is inches from the property line and once it crosses, Leslie has said I will become part owner of the tree. I cannot take on the financial burden of that. My daughter just started college. Over the years, I've complained to Leslie repeatedly that the former neighbor was not taking care of the tree. She was hiring day laborers with power tools to secretly remove roots and discuss the tree's list towards my home. The proposal to cut even more of the roots around this gigantic tree, which is tilting towards my home, as you can see, really sounds unsafe to me. A decision to deny the permit is a decision to kick the can down the road. The tree is still growing and according to the arborist is still in its infancy. Future costs to my family, the Toledo family and the city of Santa Cruz will only increase. It is sad that the tree is in the wrong place. I hear that and I believe that. However, 50 years ago, someone chose to toss their old Christmas tree into the ground next to the corner, next to my house, next to the Toledo home without thinking about the future. And I'm asking you to save us from the recurring costs of maintaining an inappropriately placed tree. The safety and welfare of families must be maintained and considered. I can't imagine that this is in the spirit of the Heritage Tree Program. And again, in this case, the houses were here first. Please let's plant an appropriate tree that all the neighborhood can enjoy. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Good afternoon, Council Members. My name is Ed Porter. I've seen issues like this before. And I just want to say that our community, our city is proud of our community process, is proud of the way we assemble here to talk about these things, is proud of things happening like 700 and some people signing a petition to be submitted to the Council to consider this very carefully. So we're proud of our trees in the city too, or we wouldn't have a Heritage Tree Ordinance at all. And in my opinion, if ever there was a tree that should be considered to be a Heritage Tree in our city, it's this one. It's one of the most magnificent trees in the city of Sacros. So I just asked the Council to vote to keep this tree. And also an idea that's been floated around many times, but I haven't seen much implementation of it, is that the City of Santa Cruz has a fund in the park's budget to assist in things like root barriers and of management of Heritage Trees so that the city could financially share a little bit in the cost of maintaining Heritage Tree if the city believes that this is a Heritage Tree. So I urge you to vote to save this tree. Thank you. Are there any other members of the public that wish to speak to this item? This is item number 11. It's a Tree Permit Appeal for 1420 King Street. If you could close out the slides, I don't know if someone's got theirs there. Okay, is there any member of the public that wishes to speak to this item? Okay, seeing none, I'll bring it back to the Council for deliberation questions and answers. I know you guys spent time on it last time. I have a quick question that came to mind on this. Is there any required disclosure when someone is purchasing a home that they have a Heritage Tree on there or that they should be aware of the impacts? And I don't know if that's a park's question or if it's a city attorney question. Let's take a question. No, mom, it's in, yeah, right. Transfer disclosure statement is a required statement by the California Civil Code that specifies different types of disclosures that need to be made. For instance, if there's a code violation on the property or if there's any known hazardous materials on the property that could pose a health and safety threat, those sorts of things. To my knowledge, the fact that a tree is designated as a Heritage Tree on a city's Heritage Tree ordinance is not one of those disclosure categories. I haven't reviewed that issue carefully, but I'm not aware of that being a requirement. Okay, thank you. So is Council Member Crum? I have a couple of questions for Leslie. Something about the root barrier doesn't work is what one of the people at the podium said. Does root barrier work? In my experience, we have installed root barriers in different circumstances and also private property owners have installed root barrier panels and had success. And what about the tilt that's being referred to? I think I asked you this question last time, but have there been many giant sequoias that have toppled over recently in the county or even in the outside the county? In my opinion, there's no stability issue or likelihood of failure due to the list of the upper canopy. And how realistic is it for the city to share expenses with the applicant on preserving this tree? And what would those expenses be over the next five years, say? Well, it's difficult to project the expenses exactly on this depending on what the applicant and the neighbor opt to do, but the city did voluntarily approve a heritage tree grant program and pending this determination, I've set aside the maximum allowable amount of $5,000 to assist the property owner with any repairs that they'd like to come forward and work with me on. What does the root barrier generally cost? I think in this situation, it would depend on if the root barrier panel would extend onto the neighbor's property, but it would probably be a panel that might be $3,000 to $4,000 would be my guess. Thank you. I mean, I joined Mr. Porter, former council member Ed Porter in his remarks about this being a truly remarkable tree and it is one of the main heritage trees in our community right now. I mean, when I lived in San Diego, Santa Cruz was known for trees and people talked about the trees and I just think that we should take that in consideration that here is one of them and what Mr. Stover said about a carbon sink and trees being places where carbon is stored and everybody's worried about global warming. Here's a perfect chance for this council to like make a statement and do something about global warming as well and preserve this tree. Well, I know that I had the opportunity to watch the deliberations and you spent a lot of time talking about it. I actually had one impression at watching the video then going out to looking at the site. I had a different one in terms of the impacts in the surrounding areas. I totally understand the issue about the heritage tree and what we want to do to protect it, but in this case, I do feel that I and more after reviewing it and going on site feel that the Parks and Recreation Commission's review gave a little bit more perspective that I didn't have before in regards to the tree. I do want to ask the council how they feel about making sure there's clarity on when someone purchases a home that they have some sort of notice that they have a heritage tree on their property. So it's not just something that's left open. When you go to that site and you look at the root structure that's going under the foundation and the former site, I mean, that wasn't apparent, I imagine, unless you pulled out and dug in there and looked at it yourself. So I guess I'd like to just say that that's something I feel like I'm interested in having some sort of notice requirement whenever there's a transfer of real estate that if there's a heritage tree on it, it's gotta be clear that you know what you're buying and what the impacts are. That's just something that I came away from that. I will go ahead because unless others have questions or comments. As I mentioned last time, I agonized over this a great deal and I did go over the ordinance, all the documentation, all the letters and comments that were submitted and did visit the site as well. And given all that, I will maintain the position I took last time denying the appeal and upholding the Parks and Rec decision. I wanna make just a few comments for the record. It's true, the buyers knew that there was a big tree there. I think it's also true, they did not realize how much damage was being done to the foundation. They were unaware of the work that had been done on the roots and then covered up. So there was a great deal that was not disclosed. Much can be known or unknown about what might happen in the future here. But to my mind, the tilt and the kind of extensive root damage and at least some damage to the foundation itself are all legitimate concerns that are consistent with the ordinance. I will say parenthetically, in my mind, damage to a sidewalk can be readily remedied. That in and of itself is not the reason to take down a heritage tree. And similarly, damage to clay sewer lines, that's just gonna happen. If you have an old house, it's gonna happen. So I speak from experience. So fixing that will undoubtedly have to happen, regardless for both of the properties. In fact, we recently passed a sewer inspection and maintenance ordinance because that problem exists all over the city. So I wanted to kind of separate what seemed to me like legitimate concerns and issues and not. I also noticed that that property has a lot of trees on it already. I didn't inspect it, but there's, I think, three street trees, locust trees, there's a strawberry tree, I don't know, a loquat tree, some citrus, a couple of palms, a couple of birches, a Japanese maple, all in that parcel. So I mean, to the extent that the conditions are replacement of trees on that site, if that is the condition, I would say no, put the trees somewhere else and look to the owners, look carefully at the trees you've got and figure out the ones you wanna keep because relative to your point, there are heritage trees and there are heritage trees and some of them are great in an urban environment and some of them are murder. And so, not all heritage trees are created the same. It's a good point, but anyway, that's a very significant tree. It's on the scale of trees, kind of recent, apparently, and it's hard to make that decision, but I think in this case, it's the right one. And I just would say let's focus on making sure that the other trees on this property are maintained and healthy and maybe selected a bit so that they can thrive and that the replacement trees are chosen and placed in areas where they too can be a real addition. So I will go ahead and make that motion. That is to deny the appeal. Is there a second? Nope. Okay, seconded by Vice Mayor Watkins, motion by Council Member Matthews. Is there any further discussion? Council Member Cronin. Well, I'm disappointed the way the decision's going. I'm really disappointed in Council Member Matthews because I believe you're on the council and the trees in front of the dentists office, Bill Christie, the Monterey, excuse me, the Canary Island Pines. And you relied on our staff to do what they do and give us the best advice they gave us. They said at that time those trees should probably not be preserved. And you went along with that, you relied on staff, this time staff saying, no, this is a good, this is a healthy tree. This tree's gonna be around for a long time. And now you're throwing that into the wind and saying, no, let's cut this tree down. So I don't know, you want it both ways. It's very disturbing. I just think we're going the wrong way on this one. I think the tree is healthy and I think we should be preserving it. Okay, there's a motion on the floor. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Those opposed? Okay, that motion passes with Council Member Crohn opposed and Council Member Brown absent. Next slide, Maul and the agenda is the Cannabis Ordinance Amendments and Update. What I'd like to do is ask for just a five minute break before we get into that. So everybody wants to take a break and then we can go come back. $4,000 every time. I know. Well, and there was a fee. If it comes up about. That's 424 p.m. Next up on our item is item number 12, the Public Hearing for Cannabis Ordinance Amendments and Updates. Yes, we did write that letter. We have a presentation from staff in regards to this item and I'd like to turn it over to you. Good afternoon, Council Members. My name is Sarah Fleming and I'm Principal Planner with the Advanced Planning Division of the City's Planning Department and I'm here with Catherine Donovan, our Senior Planner and our Cannabis Project PM, our Project Guru. And we'll be presenting to you today some Cannabis Ordinance Amendments and other informational items. I'll turn it over to Catherine. Good afternoon. Happy to be here. Glad to see you. We're bringing, as you saw in the staff report, a number of different items. But the first are the Cannabis Ordinance Amendments that we are proposing. The first is for advertising and signage, then a proposed business tax rate revision. Then we'll cover the program status to date and then bring you our proposed legalization program. Topic one, advertising and signage. We're proposing, at our original adoption of the ordinance, the Council had asked us to work with community prevention partners on some of their proposals to prevent youth from starting to use cannabis. And we met with them several times and basically discovered that we really met their goals, except in one area and that is in our advertising. And so we have taken the language that they requested and put it into our ordinance and it would prohibit pricing, photos or graphics of the cannabis plant and any images of specific products from being used in advertising except on a dedicated website that has an age portal. And it would also be allowed with wholesale advertising because it's not intended to stop business to business advertising. The proposal for the signage, this was a request that came from the industry, our original signage restrictions came when the medical marijuana ordinance was first adopted and the city was very cautious at that time and we had significant restrictions on the size of signage for cannabis businesses. The industry has suggested that at this time those are somewhat outdated restrictions and has requested that they be given parity with other business types, given that there are no other business types in the city that have restrictions based on the business usage that seemed to be a reasonable request for us and so we are proposing that in our ordinance amendments. And the current sign ordinance under that restriction would allow two signs and there is a formula based on the frontage of the building that dictates the size that's allowed for those signs. The other ordinance we're proposing is related to our cannabis business tax rates. There are multiple different types of cannabis businesses, cultivation, manufacturing, testing, distribution and retail. At the time that the initiative that approved the taxes was approved, recreational marijuana was not legal and so we only had one type of business which was our medical dispensaries. The council at that time voted to set the tax rates at 7% and then an additional percent was added for the children's fund with the adoption of the recreational marijuana ordinance. So currently all of our businesses are taxed at an 8% rate but not all businesses have the same overhead, the same markup, the same impact on the product. And so at this time, we are recommending that testing labs which basically just perform a service for the industry that they provide the industry with the required, state-required testing certificates that the taxes for that service be lowered to 1% and that for distribution businesses which are basically wholesale businesses that provide a service to the industry by giving cultivators and manufacturers broader distribution and giving retailers a place where they can shop from many different products and they typically have a relatively low markup between 15 and 25% and so if you're taxing them 8% that's a very large percentage of their markup and so they either have to increase their markup or eat the tax cost which has a significant burden on the business. So we're recommending that that tax rate be lowered to 2% now given that we passed an additional 1% to be going to the Children's Fund. It makes sense to consider looking at how that additional funding for the Children's Fund is calculated. We did not make any changes in the ordinance at this time but we've been talking with the finance department and other interested people and the proposal that makes sense to us which we'd like you to just consider at this time because we're not proposing it is that rather than having that 1% set aside that it be a percentage of the total tax funding that comes in and to set it at an equivalent of the 1% of 8 which would be 1 eighth or 12.5%. So that's just one proposal but it seems like an equivalent proposal that would make sense. The other things to consider when we're looking at the cannabis business tax are taking the big picture and considering what we want with our cannabis industry overall. Right now with sort of a competitive market throughout the state we need to think about are we competing with other local jurisdictions? Are we competing statewide? Do we wanna encourage this? Do we wanna set the price that will encourage businesses to come here and then potentially raise it later which seems to be a trend. So there's a bigger picture that we would like to look at and when we had originally brought the ordinance to the council there were a lot of questions about what the rate should be, what other cities were doing and it appears to be quite a moving target. Many, many other jurisdictions have been lowering their tax rates and so we didn't, we considered taking this wholesale to you and bringing a complete revision of our tax rate but we also thought that it might make sense to hire a consultant who could give us a broader view of this and so at this time we haven't made the wholesale all sector recommendations and we're asking you whether you would like us to put out an RFP for a contract for a consultant to look into this specifically for Santa Cruz. When we brought the ordinance to you almost a year ago now there were a lot of questions and not a lot of answers. There are still a lot of questions but we have some answers now. As you may recall, our retailer license was a competitive process and for that process, we actually, this slide is incorrect, I counted wrong, it should be, we had 15 cannabis retailer licenses not including our two existing businesses of those applications, nine included women as owners or partners and three included minorities as owners and partners and some of those were both women and minorities so. And then three of those were chosen over a number of factors that included whether they were local, the types of benefits they were providing to their employees, the types of benefits they were offering to the community, there were about 15 different factors that we looked at. We now have one new retail business that is open. The two other new retail businesses are still working on either obtaining a site or completing the improvements needed for their site and you may have noticed that in the staff report, I listed one of them as having found a site and listed the address and you got a letter yesterday that had a different address. And it's been like that, it's been a moving target but I think that retail license holder has found just the right property and is moving forward. The other applications that we've gotten to the other types of businesses, we've had 10 in total, two for cultivation, one for distribution, three for manufacturing, three testing labs and four that are a combination either cultivation, distribution and manufacturing or distribution and manufacturing and there's two of each of those. And I'm not positive, I think nine of the 10 have been approved, it might be eight of the 10 and one or two are still pending. The topic four is our business legalization program and this program was started when someone approached the department and said, I have an existing business and I'm interested in getting it legalized and how would that work? And so our code enforcement department put together a program and it's kind of a carrot and a stick. We want existing businesses to be legalized and we wanna help them do that and if they choose not to, we don't want them competing with our legalized businesses and so we're looking at ways to prevent that. The first question that comes up is whether the business can be legalized and that has to do with the type of business and the location, whether the zoning in that location would be allowed. If it's a retail business, we already have our five retailers so it couldn't be approved. The next question is whether there are any life safety issues? If there are life safety issues, then the business needs to be closed immediately. If there are not and it can be approved, it has the potential to be approved then the program is that we would work with the owners of the businesses to help them obtain their permits and to walk them through the process of completing and meeting their conditions. One of those conditions, and I bring this up because it was something that was asked about by the council, is that they would have to pay back taxes or enter into an agreement to repay the city any cannabis taxes that were due. Our cannabis ordinance went into effect basically the beginning of 2015 so if they were operating at that time, anything that they owed from that time forward they would have to repay to the city. So I've known in the past when we have these complicated staff reports it helps you if we go through the recommendations. So we are introducing for publication an ordinance amending section 2412-1340 of part 14 of chapter 2412 of the Santa Cruz Municipal Code adding restrictions to advertising related to cannabis and removing restrictions to signage for cannabis businesses. We are also introducing for publication an ordinance amending chapter 5.07 cannabis business tax to reduce tax rates for distribution and testing laboratories and to exempt non-cannabis containing items from the cannabis business tax. And I beg your pardon, I did not bring this up in my presentation but in our existing cannabis tax retailers are taxed on their gross and so non-cannabis items such as t-shirts and mugs and whatever else they might be selling also are subject to the cannabis tax and what we are proposing is that those non-cannabis items be subject only to our sales tax and not to the cannabis business tax. So the third item in this staff report is for council to consider and provide direction on hiring a consultant to review the city's cannabis business tax rates for other sectors of the cannabis ordinance. And number four is to provide feedback regarding the proposed cannabis legalization program. Any questions? Great, thank you for that report. Now, I appreciate you bringing back that the item we gave direction on in regards to the repayment of taxes for those. I think the discussion also at the time was when there was applications. Was there any assessment of those people that applied whether or not there was any sort of back taxes that were owed? We don't actually have any applications yet. We have, I think there's been discussion with that one person who came forward, but they haven't actually submitted an application yet. No, but I mean for those that are applying for licenses. Right? When you initially make an application for a license to do an assessment, if there's any back taxes owed. Oh, I see. None, according to the finance department, when we got those applications in the original retail applications, we ran them by the finance department. According to them, they did not owe back taxes. So we're okay on that. One more item, the clerk handed out to you a revised ordinance. Council Member Matthews stopped by my office before the meeting and she brought up that the wording in this second sentence here was a little confusing because it said any form of advertising or signage would be prohibited, whereas later we say it does not apply to signage. And so we clarified that to say or related signage such as window signs and temporary signs. And at the time that we were correcting this, we also discovered a spelling error, which is why the word devices is highlighted. You could have just corrected that and no one would have known that you're- Sure. We try to keep it transparent. Yes, thank you. So I guess one of the things I'd like to see, first of all, if there's any questions before we open it up for public comment. Council Member Cronin. Yeah, you said you might have some numbers for us at the meeting about how much we've collected so far. Yes. In the cannabis tax and also how much Children's Fund has collected. I have both of those numbers. So, so far from the beginning of our collecting of the cannabis tax, we have $1,733,201.77. We need to be more exact. And the amount in the Children's Fund is $61,010. And that since 2014, December, was it? I think it actually went into effect January of 2015. Thank you. The Children's Fund since this year. Yeah, the Children's Fund is since it was put into place last year. So it basically was from January up forward. That's all. Okay, what I'd like to do is maybe open it up for public comment first. And I know I did receive one advanced request for a group presentation from the kind people's collective. That was the only one I received. You have four minutes and you can go ahead. Now is your time. Is there any other member of the public that wishes to speak to this item? If you would, please line up to my left and then you'll be going afterwards. Good afternoon. Feel like first just giving you guys so much gratitude and thanks for everything that you do. I've been here since two and this isn't my job and I can't imagine how much you guys have on your plate. So thank you. That's what kind people do. So I'm Khalil Mutawakil, Santa Cruz native father of two and CEO for kind peoples. Kind peoples provides roughly 100 living wage jobs and health benefits to each of our employees. We have consistently among other retailers as well done the following, provided safe access to cannabis to tens of thousands of community members. We have not had a single service call from PD since our inception. We've worked diligently with local leadership to develop sensible regulations. Consistently remitted hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in taxes. So my first concern is that retailers must have the ability to transfer their license. Currently the city ordinance prohibits us from taking on a partner for greater than 10% of our business and that's just not workable. I fear that day that I can no longer be the proprietor. I would be forced to fold my company and be liable for my lease and perhaps declare bankruptcy. License transfers are allowed by the Santa Cruz County ordinance where many successful transfers have already taken place without issue. We deserve the ability to create value like any other business. The county makes license transfers subject to an application process with background checks, et cetera. Moving on, my second item is taxation. Since the first of the year, there's a new 15% excise tax, approximately $150 per pound state cultivation tax, hundreds of thousands in state license fees and a barrage of new costly regulations that have significantly increased retail prices to the consumer. They are devastating small businesses. Greater than 90% of cannabis businesses across the state have already shut their doors. There is a growing opportunity for value conscious consumers to shy away from legal retailers and return or stay in the illicit market. The legalized states of Colorado, Washington and Oregon, each continue to have a thriving black market and have all taken measures to reduce their taxes. Colorado lowered their taxes after a state sponsored study substantiated claims that the state's 30% tax rate was permitting the continued existence of black market suppliers. We're actually much higher than this and locally we have the highest density per capita of retailers anywhere in the state of California. The market is spread thin with seven additional outlets coming online between Santa Cruz, Watsonville and Capitola. As we reach this critical point, let's not turn on our backs, let's not turn our backs on strong local businesses who have paid millions of dollars in taxes over the years and have the potential to contribute years of consistent tax revenue. Let's cast a large consumer net and encourage participation in a brand new marketplace. We want a well-regulated industry, but at a reasonable cost. The success of legalization is entirely contingent on the cost to the consumer relative to the illicit market. California has the most entrenched, robust and prolific illicit market in the world. Berkeley, Stockton and Oakland are at 5% for retail. Monterey County just reduced their rate to 4%, same as Sacramento. Santa Rosa at 3% and Sonoma at 2%. After alcohol prohibition, legal distilleries paid no taxes so they could produce alcohol cheaper than the bootleggers. Let's also put street dealers out of cannabis out of business to increase access to the youth, continue to encourage other business activities in the supply chain to also become legal, all while increasing the taxes going into the general fund. We don't need to waste tax dollars on a third-party consultant. To quote HDL company, the consultant likely to be awarded such a contract. Quote, evidence suggests the initial rates of 30% or more did not reduce the illicit market sufficiently and is advisable that if one intention of tax policy is to limit and eventually eliminate the illicit market and lower tax rates, particularly in the beginning of market legalization may be advisable. HDL also notes that while the tax revenue potential is attractive to local governments, imposing excessively high rates may reduce the number of businesses that step forward and decrease the likelihood that they will succeed in the regulated market. In conclusion, my recommendation is to tax retailers at 3%, cultivators and manufacturers at 2% and have no tax at all for distributors or testing laboratories. They are ancillary businesses that should not be taxed whatsoever. I appreciate your efforts. I want to thank this council and I appreciate the opportunity to speak today. Thank you. Next speaker please. Hello, my name's Nicole Lagner and I'm an attorney with a law firm called Clark Newbert and we counsel cannabis businesses across the state of California, as well as serve on several committees with state lawmakers and we've also been involved with some local lawmaking in Santa Barbara and the city of LA. I wanted to lend my support to the staff recommendation to lower the tax rate on distributors as well as testing labs. Distributors in particular, they serve a very specific service function to all other businesses. So they arrange for the state mandated testing. They're the only ones who can transport and they are also required to collect taxes both from suppliers and from retailers. Without a local distributor, you're going to disadvantage all of the local businesses here. Right now there are a couple of distributors in the city and the largest one is considering moving because the tax rate is just impossible. They're effectively taxed at 45%. Secondly, I also wanted to comment about the proprietary aspect that Cleal mentioned. So the threshold for ownership in the city of Santa Cruz is 10% in the state it's 20%. But this on the state and in every other jurisdiction does not mean that you cannot add an owner. It just means that you have to have a process to do that. So you all know who the owners are and like the county, you submit a form or you provide notice to the jurisdiction as well as to the state with your application that there is someone who qualifies as a new owner. This is someone with over that threshold percent equity ownership or has management direction and control over the entity. Without that, it's a draconian concept to say that you can't give your employees equity that you can't take on partners or any other business function. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Hello, my name is Dr. Christina Vorbey. I am an executive committee member on the coalition, the community prevention partners or CPP. I'm a community member here in Santa Cruz County. I'm also a national state and local champion for youth safety, youth mental health and youth substance use prevention. I want to extend a big thank you to you, the city council for directing the planning staff to work with CPP on advertising restriction language, opening up an ongoing dialogue about public health and youth cannabis prevention policies. Thank you for your leadership in this. We have learned that through the experiences with alcohol and tobacco industries that restricting advertising is an important prevention strategy and that's what I wanted to talk to you about today. Right now we have a unique opportunity to get in early on and apply lessons from the alcohol and tobacco industries to prevent youth cannabis use and its related harms through normalization, decreased perceptions of harm and earlier youth use of cannabis. So just real quick, I wanted to review the learnings from the research, years worth of tobacco and alcohol studies. So this is where I would cue the video montage but really I'm just gonna make two quick points about it. Tobacco research has identified that youth are three times more likely to be influenced by tobacco ads than adult counterparts. Advertising is more powerful than peer pressure or even family smoking rates in determining youth use of tobacco. The next industry research that I wanted to cite is alcohol research. There is consistent evidence across studies demonstrating the positive relationship between alcohol advertising exposure and underage drinking. So now on to our emerging research with regard to cannabis. Recent studies specific to cannabis have reported that the percentage of youth who saw cannabis advertising increased sharply from 25% to 70%. Thank you. Next speaker please. I am Nate Alex, dot kennedy at gmail.com 3469888. Now the big point I wanna make here is that what we really need to focus on is the use of the lifting of cannabis prohibition or marijuana prohibition to allowing for industrial cannabis hemp growth and use and it is a plant that has so many uses that it could be turned into quite literally millions of different things. We could build anything, paper and clothes are obvious but Henry Ford made a car out of hemp. We could make houses out of it. We could make skyscrapers out of it. We could make a lot of the parts that go into computers out of hemp. We could even make skyscrapers and spaceships from hemp. That is how diverse the use is. My suggestion is that we have the city of Santa Cruz start growing industrial hemp. We should have the city growing like at least a hundred thousand plants of industrial hemp not pot, not marijuana, industrial hemp. And thus bring back the industrial hemp industry and revolution that was going on up until near the beginning of the 20th century where suddenly with all this propaganda we suddenly get the human race to try and take this wonderful plant and drive it into extinction. We as a city need to do everything in our power to change that. As far as places that it could be grown you could grow it on rooftops. It doesn't necessarily even need to be a yard. We could allow it to be grown anywhere and everywhere. The only thing is permits and taxes and all that and even the taxes we should be taking part of the hemp as taxes. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker please. Hi, my name is Jacob Lagner. I'm the CEO for Oz Distribution. I'd like to start off by saying thank you to the city council for an amazing job implementing the cannabis regulations in the city. Just really briefly about us. We are a type 11 distributor of commercial cannabis. We received our permit to operate in the city in March in the six months since we've really began operating. We've grown to more than 40 employees. The majority of whom reside in Santa Cruz. As a distributor we have the unique ability to assist local cannabis cultivators and manufacturers to enter the commercial supply chain. We distributed in the entire state of California from Mount Shasta to San Diego. There are few large distributors currently operating in the state without local distributors such as us. The local businesses have a disadvantage in entering the commercial supply chain. So I'm here today to ask the city to eliminate the CBD tax on distributors. Similar to a testing lab, we are an ancillary business. We serve three primary functions which were intended by the state which is to collect taxes on both the cultivation side and the retail side. We function as compliance. So we are the gatekeepers for entering commercial product into the supply chain through various checkpoints and work closely with testing labs to fill that function. And we also function as the transport, the transportation and storage for cannabis. So I would, thank you. Thank you. That your time is up. Okay, thank you. Next speaker please. Good evening. My name is Jenna Shankman as I believe you know and I work at United Way of Santa Cruz County in the community organizing department and I'm a part of the coalition community prevention partners that was mentioned. So thanks to your direction we had the opportunity of collaborating with city staff about advertising restrictions as a form of prevention policy and it was exciting to have this opportunity and really continue to think about youth prevention and public health which is clearly on your minds as evidenced by the health and all policies. So we just wanted to reiterate that in addition to the advertising restrictions which we think will have a benefit by decreasing youth exposure to ads and the use that has been so to be associated with increased exposure to ads and to really receive the full benefit of these advertising restrictions that these advertising restriction criteria should also apply to the signs which are highly visible and shape the landscape in our neighborhoods. So we definitely agree that signs are important identifiers but can be leveraged as advertising depending on what the content of the sign is. So with a simple kind of modification of also considering the content of the signs and applying the same advertising restrictions that were deemed beneficial in other sorts of visual ways that could reach youth. We encourage these restrictions to be applied to signs so that youth who are prone to the influence of symbolism and brand recognition don't have that as much as part of the milieu. So we know that our local dispensaries work hard to be responsible business owners. We've had the privilege of meeting with a lot of them but it's important to have language in the ordinance to ensure that local advertising restrictions apply to signs long-term no matter who the dispensary owner is. These types of clear responsible advertising and sign regulations foster a healthy environment. Thank you so much. Thank you. Next speaker please. Good afternoon. My name is Jim Coffes and I'm here on behalf of Green Trade Santa Cruz. We're a coalition of businesses, local businesses who are attempting to operate in the regulated market. I want to first of all thank you all for your service. I think I'm always whenever I come to a city council or board of supervisors meeting I'm always struck by the dedication and the patience that it takes to do the job that you're doing and I just want you to know I appreciate it and thank you. I trust that you all received the communication that Green Trade sent and so I won't go through all of that again. If you have any questions I'd be happy to answer them but I do want to urge you to strongly consider taking action today on the issue of reducing the tax rates across the board in each of the pieces of the supply chain in order so that beginning January 1st we can begin with a new tax rate. That will give, that will afford you the opportunity to have real comparisons between what your current very high rate is now and what a lower rate would be and you could have three or six months worth of data and come back and look at it again and make any adjustments that you might need to make at that time but I think the idea of putting out an RFP trying to find a consultant, having the consultant do the work and then come back more than likely with the same or similar types of reports that they've given to the county of Santa Cruz or Monterey County or 35 or 40 other jurisdictions that have engaged consultants recently, you could save all that time and money. Thank you. Thank you, Jim. Next speaker please. Hi, Pat Malo, nice to see you guys. Lifetime residents and I'm also the executive director of Green Trade. Also, I have the pleasure of being on the WAM board. Today, as always up here, I speak as a community member. We're in a very positive experiment but an experiment nevertheless and that's from moving from our old medical regulations into a new regulated, heavily regulated and heavily taxed paradigm and the folks who have been lucky enough to move through this, which is maybe 10% of local businesses, 1% of local folks who are involved with this are very lucky to be moving forward. They're very lucky to be doing it in a place in Santa Cruz because 100% of existing businesses were eliminated in most other jurisdictions but we still have this experiment and for this experiment to do what it's supposed to do which is replace the unregulated market and all the associated problems with it which we don't need to make the list, it needs to be here in five years. It needs to stand up and be able to out-compete that unregulated market and so a lot of this system was cast down on us by the state. Santa Cruz City, I always says, has done a much better job than the county and much, much better job than 90% of jurisdictions if not every jurisdiction in the state but we still need to go the distance with this thing. I think that there's a real emergency in retaining local businesses and retaining every piece of that supply chain because we're attempting to replace a unregulated supply chain so we need every piece of it especially the pieces that have been mandated by the state like distribution and testing because without those we're gonna be disadvantaged so thank you. Thank you, next speaker please. My name is Valerie Corral, I'm the director of WAM, executive director of WAM and I'm here to speak against skyscrapers being built in Santa Cruz even if they're out of hemp. A little levity, so I just, I wanted to speak obviously to the taxes, they're exorbitant, we've had a really quite difficult time trying to convince the state that it's necessary to support the compassionate access as a matter of fact we were unable to do so. There are other avenues forward and we'll seek those avenues but the taxation is exorbitant, we have to look at how we not only maintain the service to our community and also rely on small business being able to thrive in this community with many different safeguards in place but January 1st did not, it legalized cannabis but it did nothing to help small business and it did less to help people who were sick and are facing illness and poverty and many of those people are on the streets and back into the black market. Has the black market been affected? Yes and no and what we can do to see how to prevent more people being turned away is what's really profoundly important and I think that we're considered, I mean I want to commend you, the $61,000 must feel good and I want to commend you and all of you, we've worked together for a long time, I'm a member of the community partnership program and it's an important thing that we're doing to see our whole community served, our whole community served. I want to also thank you because we've been sitting, I've been doing this with you all for 25 years and it's been a long haul and I'm grateful for your work. I want to also to remind you to keep your eyes on partnerships and big business coming into our community thwarting the efforts of small businesses to exist and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, sorry. Thanks, next speaker please. Okay, before you begin, are there any other members of the public that wish to speak to item number 12? This is the cannabis ordinance amendments and update. Okay, yeah, I know you do, you do also? Okay, please go ahead. Hi, I'm Grant Palmer, CEO of Canakruz. We are a cannabis dispensary in Santa Cruz and top 25 tax paying business in the city of Santa Cruz. We are always happy to pay our fair share, just like everybody else. However, in this critical time when we're being asked to make all these improvements to our business, really expensive ones, we need help if we want to stay in business and you want us to exist. The taxes are killing us. We're being killed on one end from taxes on the other end from the illicit market. There's all these delivery services, so do not pay taxes and maybe if there's some way the city could have them pay taxes, that would even out the playing field a little bit, that would be a big help to us. Otherwise, we need a break and I think 3% is a good number. You could hire a consultant and they'd take what's the equivalent of 4% or 5% of tax money for the year or you could just give us a lower tax rate and see how it works out. The consultants don't, they're just making their best guess just like anyone else and they don't really have any information we don't. You could always hire Jim as a consultant. He seems to know what's going on. Tap price, there you go. And then testing analytical labs. It seems interesting to have a syntax on an analytical lab. I'm not sure, that's very unique. I'm not sure I've heard of that anywhere else. We can find another example of that. But distribution and labs, I don't see why that needs to be taxed at all and as far as rest of us, at least give us some time. Give us a couple years so we can develop our businesses so they don't end up all being swallowed up by Canadian IPOs. And as far as advertising goes, we're not a tobacco company. Tobacco kills, we heal. It's a big difference and we don't really feel like we need to be compared to tobacco. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker please. Good afternoon. My name is Sam Laforte and I'm with West Coast Wellness. As a micro business with a retail license, we want to focus our business on selling and featuring local cannabis products. And moving forward, our goals of providing an outlet for local products face a significant hurdle and that hurdle being the compounding nature of local taxes. For instance, if we were to buy a product from a local grower who sold it to a local distributor and then we sell it at a retail, we just added 24% to the total for our retail clients. And that's on top of the 15% state excise tax and the $150 per pound cultivation tax. In total that compounding local tax affects our ability to fill our goals of supporting our local cannabis companies. And furthermore, as we move as cannabis retailers, we're competing against each other, but the proposed final state regulations, we will be competing against delivery services who will pay no city tax and are likely paying a lower local tax. To compete, we'll have to further diminish our margins with these non-local retailers. And I support the city's recommendations for taxes, but they don't go far enough as they do not affect cultivators and retailers. I think a 3% retail tax, 2% for manufacturers, cultivators and 0% on distribution and labs is appropriate. 0% for distribution was the original staff recommendation back in November of last year when the ordinance was originally adopted. And as we've heard staff say, distributors are wholesalers. Wholesalers aren't taxed on the federal or state level in any industry. They are key and they're paramount to the local industry because they provide access to a statewide network. So we definitely need to decrease the distributor tax as much as possible. And I'll leave it at that, just 10 seconds left. Hey, thank you. Are there any other members of the public that wish to speak to this item? This is item number 12, the Cannabis Ordinance Amendment and Updates. Hello, my name is Henry Lopez. Okay, two minutes, that's perfect time. So basically my only concern is the carcinogens. A lot of people don't understand that we should have more tests on carcinogenic effects of marijuana when one person comes up with a very good strain and is like, oh yeah, this is really good. And all the other providers from out of the towns are like, no, we got the good stuff. Yeah, maybe the THC is super high and the CBD is really high. But as soon as you take past a couple hits off of it, it turns into straight carcinogens and it is deteriorating people's brains. Thank you. Are there any other members of the public that wish to speak to this item? This is item number 12. Seeing none, I'll bring it back to the council for any further deliberation and action. Council Member Crone. Thinking about the way they just talked about the labs versus manufacturing versus retail. When you said 1.7 million, what were the breakdowns from those areas? I couldn't tell you exactly. The vast majority of that is from the retailers because we have only had three additional non-retail businesses that are opened. So it would have been in the last two quarters and it would have been a relatively minor amount. Thanks. What's the reasoning behind the 10% partnership that you can't take on that? That came directly from our tobacco retailer license. We used that chapter as a template for our cannabis retailer license and at the time we didn't see any need to change that particular provision. Since then, the state has come out with a definition that proprietorship is a 20% interest, which I think one of the speakers brought up. And if I might add to that, my understanding too, I was not here when the original cannabis ordinance was passed for recreational use, but my understanding is that there was an interest to make sure that we're preserving the local character of our businesses and making sure that we're giving a fair shake to our local businesses, our women-owned businesses, our minority-owned businesses. And so part of retaining that had to do with making sure we preserve that. And the other thing about license transfers, like if you go out of business or you just decide you want to get out, you can't sell your business or you can't sell your license? No, that was, it was part of the tobacco. It was also when we were first discussing, prior to the ordinance coming to the council when we were first discussing it, there was an expression from council to prevent license flipping. And so we came up with the process of having, and there was also the limited number. The council voted to limit the number to five. And so in order to have a process where we could limit the number to five and prevent flipping, we had a competitive process for the licensing, and then not allowing transferring just fell right in line with that. And there's no way to regulate, like if a local person wanted to buy it from a local person, is that impossible to regulate? I'd have to defer to Tony on this, but I would think it would be. The local person would have to apply for their own license, and then the business assets could be transferred if the city council approved a new license. Just to be clear on this, the code defines a proprietor as a person with an ownership or managerial interest in a business and an ownership interest is defined to exist when a person has a 10% or greater interest in the stock assets or income of the business. The provision regarding non-transferability says that a cannabis retailer license may not be transferred from one person to another or where there's a change in proprietor. So by definition, a transfer of more than 10% of the assets of a business constitutes a change in proprietorship. And then council member Matthew said a follow-up. I labored over this whole section here, and I still have questions. One of them was related to this, so I just want to continue off this one. So as I read some of the commentary and staff report, transfer of taking on equity partners was equated to transfer of license. But it's not really, it may be adding someone to the business, but not necessarily transferring the license. I stated that as a statement, it's a question. And I think it's related to what you were talking about. But it's, to me, they don't equate to the same thing. Having a license, maybe adding someone, you have a license as an individual, you bring in a partner, but that's not transferring the license. It's expanding the, anyway, that's my question. It's confusing, but apparently it's significant to local businesses. As I recall, that was something that the council thought was very important in the discussion when the ordinance was originally considered. I agree, however, that the intent might have not been to go that far. That's just how I read what you adopted. That's how I interpret it. But the council could clarify that and give direction to clarify or modify that requirement. Should you deem it appropriate to do so? A couple more questions. Yeah, I would just say, that we just related to your talk about them. I know that originally when it came up was about the idea that someone would use the recent changes in the state law to flip their license. And I think the discussion first started with the idea that we wouldn't, we wanted to prevent that. And then it became an outright prohibition on any transfers. So I think that's where it went in that direction, maybe a little too far. Yeah, the staff's not recommending any reduction in tax, I mean, they're recommending a general reduction possibly, but not to any particular level. You're allowing council to decide or did you put a number in here and I didn't see it? We put, for the tax, did you say? Yeah, for retail tax. We didn't address retail manufacturing or cultivation at this time. But you're recommending that it be reduced? In general, we've always taken the position that the evidence that we've seen seems to support that a lower tax is better in terms of competition with the illicit business. There's some evidence that it may also, in the long run, lead to more tax revenue for the city, but I think that's speculative at this point. And last question is, do you think that we're so different than other cities that there's been enough information accumulated that we don't really have to go out to a consultant and ask them what our tax rate should be? Do you think it's enough information that's already out there? Or would you recommend it to a consultant? If I might respond. So I think just to back up a little bit, so for the last time, and when you asked about the taxes, could you repeat your question? Because I did have a comment that I wanted to make to that and I don't wanna lose it. If the staff was asking us to read any particular number in mind that we should reduce retail tax. So as Catherine did say, we do have a couple of proposals here for the testing laboratories and the distribution, but we specifically did not come forward with a number for anything else because we wanted to have the conversation with you. We do have some good background and experience and knowledge about the industry, however, we are not experts. And so we are looking to counsel to give us the direction on, do you feel that there is a tax rate that's suitable based on information that you've heard and based on your knowledge, or does it make sense to have a study done? We obviously will take direction as it is given and be happy to move forward with that, but I just wanna be clear that we don't have a number in mind right now that we wanna propose for anything other than the items that are on the screen before you. Are markets so different that we have to go hire a consultant to tell us what the tax might be? I don't know that that's necessarily the case. I think that that was just the proposal at the time when we put this together, but if council is interested in having us approach it another way, obviously we'll be happy to do that. Any other council, or vice mayor? Okay, council member Roy. Okay, so just a procedural question. Let's say after our discussion here, the council is okay with lowering the sales tax without needing to hire a consultant. Is that something that we could propose here or would we, I imagine we would need you to come back to council with that proposal because it needs to be notified to the public? Is, would that be correct? Actually, the notice that we sent out was general and it simply said that we would be revising our tax rates. That said, I would defer to the city attorney on the actual legality of that. You do not have to adopt what's proposed here. The council could make changes this evening and bring it back for a second reading at a subsequent meeting. So you can make changes from what is proposed here. And it wouldn't require needing public, it wouldn't require public notice as a first reading because we're pretty open. We hear on what we're doing. I agree with the characterization of the notice. It was broadly worded enough to give the public notice of the fact that you're considering changes to the cannabis tax regulations. Vice Mayor Watkins. Thank you. And thank you, staff, for the presentation and the just very thorough and comprehensive report. I know that there's so much going on. And I recognize all the sort of considerations to take into mind here. You know, with the state at the 15%, I know there was recent policy to lower that to 11. And I think some of the work and some of the thoughts that you have here in terms of how we, as a local government, can advocate to our state representatives and possibly to the League of Cities that we do want to see some of these fixes at the state. I think a lot of them do actually lie there. And then I also recognize that it's really complicated to identify really what's right. And I also understand and honor the businesses that I have had honor to also work with in many ways in terms of their commitment for use in our community. And so I also recognize their perspective in terms of the business. So there's a lot of different sort of layers and lenses to look at when we're thinking about this. I appreciate your proposal here. I mean, for the purposes of discussion, I'm prepared to move a motion if I want at this point. Okay. So I mean, I'll move the recommendation as, but with a few additions. One is I support the Community Prevention Partnerships ask to, no, I can't find it in my paper, to, okay, I'll have to find that later. But I support the Community Prevention Partnership one that was very specific to the signage. I also want to say that I appreciate the recommendation and consideration about changing the policy for the Children's Fund. I would like to support that as the direction for staff to reflect that as commensurate to the existing 1%. So the tax changes to, and- If the tax changes that that's what the policy will reflect, but to move with that as- It would still be 1% of the total tax. That's right. Not of each individual. That's right, that's right. I think that, you know, if the will of the council is with me on this, I'd like to see if we can write a letter, have the mayor write a letter to our state representatives or the League of Cities to express our hopes for them to do some shifts there at their state level. I support also the fact that we're changing the things that we can do, like exempting non-cannabis goods. And then also, I mean, I'm open to a conversation around the consultant. I personally, as somebody who likes more information would be happy to do that. I think if not, we're sort of arbitrarily choosing numbers. And I didn't necessarily see the evidence, although I understand the different kind of ways, I don't know how you could find it, right? There's so many different things to take into consideration, but they didn't necessarily say this would be that. And that, you know, with the city of Santa Cruz being different than some of the other jurisdictions, such as the county, I think having a consultant look at the numbers would be helpful for me particularly, but I'd be open to that conversation. And then I really want to just also thank you for sharing the information about the minority and women-owned businesses. I feel that we have a responsibility to repair some of the harms of the war on drugs, and that I'd like to see how we can continue to find ways to bring equity into the industry and have opportunity and access of empowerment for minority people who have been disproportionately criminalized for that. And so that would be my general recommendation, and I don't know if I didn't cover anything. So your motion, as I understand it, is to move forward with the ordinance as presented. You want to incorporate the recommendations by the CPP in terms of signage. Do you want to read that? Yeah. So Vice Mayor Watkins, I found the letter from Community Prevention Partners, but I'm not sure which part you want, is it? Maybe I'll just, so you're moving the recommendations with the only changes that you'd want the advertising, that the cannabis advertising restriction language be applied to sign content to continue, and so that you would not make the changes that were recommended by staff, but just keep a consistent signage. I believe that there was a number of different changes that were also in alignment with the Planning Council, but there was one area in regards to the signage. Is that correct? Right, I believe what CPP had objected to was that the restrictions on the graphics and images on the signage. You know, if it's okay with, go ahead, Belen. This is not it, so. Let's, we're going to work through this. Go, please go ahead, Mr. Butler. Good afternoon, Mayor and Council Members. If I recall correctly, there were two comments that CPP had that were different from the staff recommendation. One was the square footage, so right now, the square footage of signage for cannabis businesses is limited to 20 square feet, and the second is the images, the image restrictions, and so they were recommending image restrictions and the 20 square foot limitation. If I recall correctly, I'm looking to the team. That's right, there's two pieces that's helpful. And then the staff recommendation that was proceeding, which I believe also was the Planning Commission recommendation, was to allow the same square footage as other businesses and not have the image restrictions as it comes to signage. So the council could mix and match those or propose just CPP recommendations. Okay, so I'm opting to advocate for the CPP recommendation, the CPP. I would go with the CPP recommendation, sorry. I am, I think, prepared to second the motion. Okay, let's go. I understand, I agree with the staff's recommendation that the size restriction be the same as for all other signage in the city for all businesses. That was one issue. The other is the restriction on images, and I'm fine to go with the image restriction. That's fine, restriction. Okay, so partly accepting staff recommendation on size, but following the CPC recommendations on, Sure. Limitation on images. Okay, I accept that. So, just again. I think that changed, yeah. To review, accepting the staff recommendation on effective immediately lowering the tax rate on two of the categories. Include communicating with our state representatives regarding re-examination and lowering of state license and fee amounts. I personally would like to see the engagement of a consultant. To my mind, it's a short-term, very discreet study. And I'll just say, we clearly see an industry in rapid change, and this is not going to be the last pass at this. I am very interested in lowering the tax rates on the other categories. I want to come out of the chute with that. Things are changing at the city, at the county rather, capital is coming online. I did read the whole report on Monterey. That was done in March, and that's still changing, and things are just changing at the state. So, I think this can come back to us pretty quickly, I believe, at, I think, a reasonable cost that is relevant to the city of Santa Cruz and our county. And that would serve us well as we make additional decisions. But I would like to see local information before we delve into this any further. So I would like to include in the motion that we engage a consultant to prepare a report on what we know of the costs to at the state level and at the local level and the regional trends. So I'd like to include that in the motion. So, Council Member Narion. Oh, I don't think we need to spend the time and money on a consultant. So many other cities have already done that. And cities that are close to where we are located, and when you look at after they've seen the study and hired a consultant, many of these municipalities have dropped their tax down to three or 4%. So I don't think we necessarily need to go out and spend the money and the time to get this analysis. I would like to just propose that we lower the sales tax to 3% and as things change in the industry, we are welcome to go ahead and increase that. I'm also interested in looking at being able to allow licenses to transfer, as long as they have the same background checks that's required of people applying for new licenses. So let me just say before we continue discussion, there's a motion on the floor by Vice Mayor Watkins and a second by Council Member Matthews. And so you're advocating that those changes be made as part of their motion. I will say, and it's your motion. I agree with reexamining this whole addition of equity partnership and to what extent that involves is or is not a transfer of license and so forth. So that's different than a tax rate. So I would give direction that staff come back to us with more information and options on that particular issue. I think that's another one that needs to be resolved. That's fine. Okay, that's great. But it sounds like he's still gonna agree with me on the three, four, six, five. I'm not gonna pick a number. Council Member Cron. When you said 3%, where was the children's tax on that? I would still say to maintain the 1% for the children. I would not advocate for getting rid of that. I think the council is pretty strong wanting to support that. I completely agree with you about the consultants. We don't need any more consultants. I think that there's enough information out there on this. I also would like to say 4%, but I could live with 3% because I think that we're hearing from the experts who are here today who've been in the trenches for years and years and years and they're telling us this is not working. And I really think that I don't think what is in the main motion is dramatic enough. I don't understand why we wouldn't go toward lowering the tax. I'm fine with lowering it to 4% or to, you know, going from three to four with my original proposal, but I don't think the maker of the motion or the person who seconded the motion agrees with that at this point. Taking that step at this point. I'd like to ask staff, how long do you think it would take to get a turnaround on a report, consultant report along the lines I described? Is that a Lee question? We'd have to go out with an RFP. So I think probably minimum four to six weeks and that would be a miracle. And that would be just for putting out the RFP, getting the analysis and the study done would be additional. That would just be the study. It wouldn't be us coming back to you with the study. Like March. I think that's probably fair. February or March to be realistic with the holidays and. Maybe with that pause, just I'd like to. And if I could, just continue this question. I did read the Monterey report thoroughly. And so there's a lot of information there. What's the staff capacity to do something along that line internally? Yet another work. We don't have the data they have. They have access. This is a company that has access to all the sales tax data. We just don't have that data. We can look at what other cities are doing and bring that back. But that's not exactly the same. If I may. I think there's so much variation if you do research what cities are doing from 20% to 2% and over the hill there's a couple that are at 10% and a couple at 8%. And we have a university and a tourism. I mean, there's so many different unique considerations. I think just, I don't feel like I have enough information just to arbitrarily sort of choose a percentage. But at this time, if anything, I would look at what I think I do know, which is sort of a little bit about what we have in our county, which is around the five to incrementally go to seven, which would mean for me, if anything makes sense, it could be to kind of follow something like that. At this time, if the interest is not to have the actual report. Well, rather than going to, first of all, before we go into the specific text, I'd like you to first restate the motion so we can make sure that everyone's speaking from the same page and then we can go. So, I move that we accept the recommendation to reduce the tax for businesses that are conducting testing laboratories and distribution as staff recommended. I move that we direct staff to return with a change in the children's fund council policy that encompasses a percentage that's commensurate to the 1% currently adopted by council. I move that we adopt the sign, that we adopt the staff recommendation for the sign size and I move that we adopt the sign content recommendation from the community prevention partners. I further ask or further sort of identified interests for looking more into having staff research the transfer component of it to also continue to look at local and minority women as a priority population that we want to engage in the industry. That does not encompass anything regarding what I previously had in the motion around the consultant to get the tax rate. So, if we want to vote on that and then have the discussion. I remember, Matthews, is that, do you second that? So far, yes. Okay, there's a second on those items. What about the business raising the partner thing to 20% where they said the state was at? That was for said she's given direction to look at that. Okay. Yeah. So, It also, I think it was implied in what you said exempting non-cannabis retail products. I mean, that's part of the staff recommendation. Is there any further discussion on that? I have a question. Yeah, Council Member Naroyan. You took out the provision that we do a study. I thought we were going to vote on that and then have that discussion. Is that right after? All right. Yeah, I appreciate that because I do, I may do that as the rest of all the other provisions you put forward. And when is it going to come back to us as far as the retail tax? Come back. After we vote on this issue, I was planning on putting forth another motion. Okay. I'll second that. I heard this discussion. Yeah. Okay. I'm going to say all those in favor of the motion on the floor. May I clarify something really quick. In your previous motion, you had said something about directing the mayor to send a letter. That's right. I'd like to also incorporate that. Yes, my motion. Okay. All those in favor of the motion on the floor by Vice Mayor Watkins, seconded by Council Member Mathews, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That passes with Council Member Brown absent. Now, Council Member Naroyan. I'd like to make a motion that we lower the sales tax rate to 3% and to not commission a study or report. I'll second that. And you are silent. And I'm seconding it because, you know, this issue has been put off for so long right now, weeks and weeks and weeks. And we've just heard incredibly expert testimony from our community. And so that's why I'm just like, you know, we can do this now and we can revisit it and raise it accordingly. And if people want to put a date on it, we can bring that date back. I would say this, if you, you know, this is the maker of the motions willing is to direct staff to analyze what the impacts would be if you were to do the tax and come back to show what the amount of loss of revenue is and then come back to Council to say, hey, this is what it means. It's easy to say the tax, but I mean, I appreciate you putting that on the floor for discussion, but at least some of these things can be done in-house and don't necessarily require an outside consultant. And I think that very issue you brought up is one that can be done. The only problem that I have for this is that we've been saying we were gonna come back and revisit this for a long time. And that, I mean, here we are, I believe we were gonna revisit this at the beginning of the year. And here we are in the month of October. So that's my hesitance in supporting what you just stated because I think that's something. That could have come forward sooner. City manager? So I was just checking with staff to see if there were anything we could do to fast track the analysis process and then talking very briefly to Marcus, he thought that we could do that, do some fast tracking. So maybe Marcus can come out on that. Yeah, I just confirmed that. There's some things we can look at to expedite the selection of vendors. And certainly on the fiscal analysis, if you have an idea of rates, we can run up some costs in areas of what the fiscal impact would be. Keep in mind, this is a general fund revenue base, I'm not advocating for or against anything, but there is a fiscal impact to the general fund from changes. But this is one of those cases though, where less might mean more because we know that there's a certain point of taxation where people will not go to the legal market, but will go to the black market to continue buying their cannabis products. So if there's a price point and it's been shown to be at around 4%, three or 4% where people won't buy it in what we call the legal market now. And so I think it'd be really hard to analyze that because from expert testimony, from other folks and part of the industries are showing that sales actually go up and revenue goes up when the taxes aren't as onerous. Vice Mayor Watkins. I definitely hear you in terms of wanting to understand where that threshold happens, in terms of the illicit market. But I think there's also the other considerations for the zoning and that's why I didn't feel like I adequately had enough information to make that call at this time. I think that if you're hoping to have action, one thing that I'd be willing to support while we internally maybe look at what's possible for our city is adopting something that's more aligned with what's happening in our region like the county's sort of framework essentially. I mean, that would lower the taxes for cultivation and manufacturing to five and then put it on a timeline for the 7%. That to me seems something that we have a little bit of information that is relative to our county that makes sense to me. The 3%, the 4%, the 5%, I just don't have enough information today to make that decision. If it does come back that that's the right threshold, then I'd be happy to consider it then. I feel like I do have enough information based on what's going on in other counties. I have a question. Yeah, Council member Matthews. Your suggestion was just to lower the tax on the retail only. That's correct. And so leave it at 8% for cultivation and manufacturing. No, because we- Well, that's what you said. No, I didn't, because we just recently, we just passed in our previous vote to lower it for manufacturing, right? For- For distribution and testing. Right, I'm not talking about the other taxes. I'm specifically only talking about the retail tax. Okay, so we understood what you said. Not supporting lowering the other ones. I tend to support Vice Mayor Watkins' perspective in terms of looking at like that. If we're gonna make any changes right now without the consultant, then I would go along with what she's recommended. I'm not prepared to support the motion on the floor. Well, I guess I'll vote for it and we'll lose and then you guys get your post. So we have a motion by Council Member Naroyan. A second by Council Member Crone. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Okay, those opposed? No. Okay, that fails with Council Member Crone. Council Member Naroyan voting in favor. Council Member Matthews. Council Member Chase. Vice Mayor Watkins and myself opposed. And Council Member Brown absent. Do you want to make a motion? Well, I mean, I mean, there's, do you have a date? Well, I would just say I would have been willing to go forward with the 5% on that. And I'm also not super excited about getting a consultant. I would like to see if we could get some more information about this internally, if we can and avoid going to a consultant. So, I mean, that's where I would stand right now is can we get a little bit more information than we have? So we're not picking an arbitrary number, but we're not going to get a full study, but we have a little bit more local data to help us make this decision as quickly as we possibly can. Council Member Matthews. I'll just suggest that we ask the staff to come back at the earliest possible time with additional information on reducing the tax rates for the remaining categories, which as I read it, is retail, manufacturing and cultivation, bearing in mind both the impact on revenue to the city and the longer term desire of supporting the industry and reducing the impact of the illicit market. So I'll ask the city attorney, is that something that you could prepare? Like, do you need motion in formal direction? Is that something like that staff can kind of bring forward? I think it's that the consensus of the council. I think that seems perfectly reasonable at this point. Okay, you guys, as early as possible time. Yeah. Okay, great. Thank you. And I just want to state that my number was an arbitrary. It was based on seeing what other communities are lowering their taxes to. I didn't just pull the number out of a hat. So I just wanted to make that really clear. And mine was based on our community experience. Thank you. That concludes all the item on number 12. We're going to be going to, right now, oral communications, we did, we voted on that. So we're going now to oral communications. And I'd like to, pardon? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you. I wanted to invite up, first of all, for oral communications. I know there was a time scheduling, so Gail Jean and Senator Monning is visiting with us. And Gail Jean, if you'd begin, this is, you had four minutes, she asked. I don't think we voted on that. We did. I, we sure did. We voted on that. On the LAMI amendment? Yeah. So that was no other motion put forward. No, there was not. To come back in the early stage. The direction of staff. Got it. No motion. Okay, so we're clear on that. Yeah, thanks. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Gail. Thank you. Yes. Can you hear me? Yes, sir, I can. All right. Thank you, City Council, for the opportunity to speak. My name is Gail Jean McGuire-Sias. A few weeks after my Daniel's fatal tragedy, I woke in the middle of the night raising my voice out loud, screaming, there should be a law. Not realizing how difficult and challenging it would become. The next morning I contacted an acquaintance, Paula Mahoney. She became the backbone and the communicator, the encouragement who has now become my true friend. Together we reached out to friends and family and recruited Lynn Robinson. By appointment, we all approached our Senator Bill Monning, who truly believed we could make a law. With that encouragement, we all went to work. This, we came in front of this council, where Cynthia Matthews wrote and endorsed us. Thank you, Cynthia. Then to Capitola, Watsonville, Scotts Valley Councils, Sheriff and Fire Departments, Paula with Help created a webpage called Daniel's Law. We made shirts, we went door to door, set up tables in front of stores and businesses for signatures and endorsements. That was not difficult. With this momentum, a tribe of us went to Sacramento and spoke individually to the transportation committee with our Senator leading the way. Then over the next four years and each stall, with more visits to Sacramento, I recognized time moved away from the momentum. The lawsuit settled, Doug lost his daemon, his brother, that our faithful attorneys lost both of their moms, Jessica had baby Taj, my daughter Reggie was pregnant with my grandson, and my encourager Paula had taken on another project and her family needed her. Our last visit this late June, there were three of us and Senator Monning, his staff Trevor and Rachel and a committee who had heard and our request many times. I knew this project was divine and felt both Andrew and Daniel's presence. With that being said, dear Senator Monning, our entire family along with a circle of friends who've supported us over the past four years want you to know how grateful and relieved we are that SB1236 has finally passed into law. It was a very long road and with Governor Brown's signature, I am so proud this legislation will protect the entire state of California for years to come. There are many times along this road when our grief well felt too heavy and passing the law felt too far out of reach. It was because of your support and the outpouring of love from Santa Cruz community. That we are inspired and we persevered. We would sincerely like to thank you and your entire staff for your determination and the long hours of hard work that it took to see the process through. It meant so much to us that you were truly moved by our family's loss and always willing to deeply listen. Each time we met your warm heart and personal interest and making our roads safer is part of what kept us feeling hopeful and able to find the courage to raise our voices in Sacramento. You said from the very beginning that not every tragedy could be prevented by changing a law but the events that led to Daniel's passing pointed out a gaping hole in California law. The lack of behind the wheel training for newly licensed commercial drivers. We will never be able to measure the lives that will be saved by SB1236. But we do know that the life of Daniel McGuire has now served a higher purpose. Thank you, Senator Monning. Four years is a really long time for all of us. So many things happen in our lives but for the friends and family of people who have lost their lives, it is an unbearable amount of time. The trips to Sacramento were arduous and the testimony sent all of the family and friends back into the tragedy many, many times. Trying to think of the things that aren't going to be said. So grateful in this era of kind of a lack of civility and public discourse that all of you who were on the council at the time that we came to not only listened but were willing to take action. And that is so true of Senator Monning. The graciousness and generosity that he showed and not only his ability to listen but to also figure out exactly what the hole in the law was that could be somehow mitigated through a change in California law that it took hours and hours and in fact, four years of negotiations to make it come true. When I tried to get through what I was going to say this afternoon, I thought I had it all together but I lost it completely because the sorrow never goes away and I think in the room tonight there are probably 20 or 25 people who are just some of those who came to Sacramento with us. It's always hard to speak truth to power but when you're a grieving family, it's just really, really tough. And I have so much respect for all of the people who have been involved. It really has restored my faith in government. Thank you so much. Thank you. Senator Monning. Mr. Mayor, council members, staff, community, thank you so much for this opportunity to close at least the legislative chapter of the tragedy and the loss of Daniel McGuire from the start, from the outset of this being brought to my attention. It was Daniel's parents, Gail Jean and Doug who's with us this evening, Daniel's sister Regina and Paula Mahoney who you just heard from who really did provide a support system for the family that helped to channel not only the grief but to activate a community response. I acknowledge the city council for its support, former mayor Lynn Robinson for her leadership in helping connect the family, both with the city council and with the county board of supervisors. As Gail Jean mentioned, not every tragedy should or can result in a legislative path or a legislative remedy. As we looked into this one, however, we learned that that tragedy on Route 17 could have been prevented, should have been prevented and that the tragic loss of Daniel McGuire was unfortunately the loss it took to wake up the state of California. But then our legislative journey began three separate efforts to move this through the California state legislature. Both times we made it through the Senate without any problem and we hit snags in the assembly. We hit snags with special interest groups. We hit snags with agriculture. Gail Jean acknowledged our staff person, Trevor Taylor, who I'm sorry can't join us this evening but we will share with him the proclamation or the framed news coverage and letter. Trevor never gave up, we never gave up but we were emboldened by the engagement of Daniel's family and friends. Every time we had a hearing in front of the transportation committee in the assembly, they were there. To me, part of the tragedy was having to relive it and retell the story time and time again. We were able to thread the needle and find a path that worked and got it through this year and secured the governor's signature just a few weeks ago. And so now moving forward, anyone who applies in the state of California for a class A driver's license, that's a big rig, double rig that drive our roads every day will have to have behind the wheel training because what we learned was the driver in that tragedy had no behind the wheel training. In fact, he was directed to use Route 17 by his boss to avoid the scales on Highway 101. So they were breaking the law just to be on Route 17 but it was the family's perseverance and persistence. Nothing will bring back the life of Daniel McGuire but this law will be a living testament to his legacy. It will be known as Daniel's law and every truck driver who is licensed on our roads will have to have behind the wheel training. And as Gail Jean said, it will save lives and it will be impossible to quantify how many other McGuire families will be spared the tragedy, the suffering and the grief that this family has endured. So we thank the McGuire family, we thank all of you, we thank the community and friends and we also welcome with us this evening, Regina Scarpello, Daniel's sister with their new two month old baby son, Sage. So Sage will help carry that spirit of Daniel McGuire. Thank you all. Viva Daniel McGuire. Thank you Gail Jean. Thank you Gail Jean and thank you Senator Monning for all your work to pass this law. I'd like to just on this topic if any council members would like to say anything. At this point. I think it's been said there's a lot of heart here. And I just thank you for all the family that are here present as well in support. This is, I don't want to thank you for being here. Thank you. Okay. We're going to continue. Thank you. We're going to continue with our oral communications for items not on the agenda. Is there any members of the public? You should be lined up to my left. You can begin. Mr. Norse, did you want to, Mr. Norse, would you like to begin? And he asked for, he asked for four minutes. Yes, yeah. Okay, members of the community, those who are remaining and members of the council, the river street campground, city manager, Bernal tells us, is slated for dispersal at the end of November, breaking the promises by his underlings, Susie O'Hara and Tina Scholl, that it would last through the winter until April. Instead, the population will be shoehorned into a small nighttime only shelter leaving little or no room for other winter shelter refugees. This winter shelter hoax had its rough draft in August when these two bureaucrats announced without saying so, that there would be no winter shelter. The so-called expansion of the Pauley Loft and the river street campground promised referred to programs which had long waiting lists, no walk up and no first come, first serve options. The vehicular park, which was promised 50 spaces has apparently been abandoned because of bigot pressure from Nimbis. We shouldn't be surprised. All prior so-called winter shelter programs were PR fig leaves that offered shelter for less than five to 10% of those outside. But this time, the community has some choices it didn't have before. Federal court has ruled in the Boise case that unless a city has enough shelter for its homeless population, its laws against survival camping are unlawful. This you would think would prompt Chief Mills and new PNR boss, Tony Elliott, to pause in their generous use of trespass and no resting in the park at night citations, which however have massively increased in the last year. Camping tickets are still being unconstitutionally given, but less so. Police now have probably the support of city attorney Tony Condati begun using other anti-homeless laws to attempt to ticket away those outside. Last year, the appearance of so many visible homeless people in public areas at night as well as a HEPA outbreak in Southern California may have prompted the tolerated San Lorenzo campground in the bench lands and the facilities open there. And this year, we see hardened cruelty of an anti-homeless agenda and operation. Fences all around San Lorenzo Park, the closing of the bathrooms there again, as the ones outside these chambers are closed and locked day and night when this council is not here. New fences are being raised around the post office, perhaps to discourage Food Not Bombs workers from supporting those who choose to sleep together at night outside the main post office. There is no legal place for folks to sleep, so they must sleep where they must. Instead of spending resources to open up spaces, even like the limited San Lorenzo campground last year, city tight wads are putting up fences, funding whack-a-mole type operations and endorsing the downtown association's private downtown snitch program, which it pompously calls ambassadors. These visible attacks on poor people outside are risky. What do we need to do? Support real homeless people, not the pathway to poverty programs. When will the homeless lack of services center restore meals it traditionally provided? Remove its gates, ID checks, guards on low impact zone. When will groups like Smart Solutions take real action to demand those outside not be treated like pariahs fleeing police, facing locked facilities and braving nighttime vigilante surveillance and harassment. Agencies receiving the big bucks and city recognition are not providing the vital services that need to be seen and they need to be seen for what they are. Those who care can then support homeless people directly or through agencies that actually provide more than closed waiting lists, phone numbers that don't answer. There's plenty of campground space in Santa Cruz if the bleeding of bigots is ignored. Conscience in action and huff meat tomorrow at the Sub Rosa Cafe at 11. Come to a Food Not Bombs meal Saturday or Sunday at 4 p.m. outside the post office. If there's any sidewalk space left not fenced off, support the day and night shelter program of Brand Adams. Keep your ears open for the call to support next steps for a meaningful emergency shelter alternative. This may mean a coalition of renters, students, the disabled, the elderly and other marginalized groups. One thing is sure, it's not coming from this council. Thank you, Mr. Norris. Next speaker please. My name's Kate Oates. I live on Market Street. My son, he goes to De La Viega Elementary School and he also takes the bus at Grant Street Park. I was made aware of the closure of the park the day before. I believe that we met up at the park. We did have a city official that met with us. They were talking about the beautification that was going to happen and the fixing of the bathrooms. There was nothing mentioned of the temporary homeless shelter that was also closed. So I feel as a parent a little duped that we were told what was happening in our park and it is our neighborhood park. And now currently we have like 30 children and parents who are standing huddled against a fence that is not open to us in the morning when the bus comes. It is an unsafe situation at the moment. And we are also not given a time for when it was going to reopen. So there's that part of it. I am part of the community who is trying to support the homeless community in town. We may not be as loud as those who are against it. Who want the temporary homeless shelters closed. We are actually meeting this weekend, a group of us from our neighborhood, from the Grand Street Park neighborhood to discuss ways that we can move forward and help what is going on in town. But the fact that it's being closed before the rainy season is very disheartening to us. We are concerned about their safety as members of the community. And just frustrated with the amount of communication that we're hearing also. Thank you. Ms. Oaks, if you could leave your email address, there's an update that's been posted on our city website. And so we have information that way. And then also there was a slide presentation that was given earlier today that we can send out. So your neighbors will have that as part of your presentation. So if you leave your email address, we'll make sure that that goes out. Sure. Okay. Does that also include the bus stop issue? Bus stop, I've already emailed the city PD and city manager about. Thanks. Yeah, next week. Can we get a report back possibly? Sure, I'll follow up. Next speaker, please. Hello, council. My name is Dora Berlanga and I am a community member for over 40 years. I've lived in this community. I've worked, I volunteered. I've done quite a bit here. I volunteer for the downtown streets team, a blessing and a disguise that you guys are allowing them to come here. I also work for the river camp shelter. I was also here when you guys had your meeting when you guys extended the date. It was the proudest day, one of the proudest days of my life when you guys extended that to April. I go home to work and I kind of find out you guys are closing us in the mid November. You guys lied. I don't understand how you guys could all sleep at night with this being known. A winter shelter, a joke. Okay, it's really a joke. People only lay their heads there. River camp provided these people a home, a safe place where they can lay their head, leave their personal belongings. Go look for work. And if you guys would just come and visit the camp, you'd see that the self esteem of these people have gone up. Mine has, I'm homeless as well. And now you're taking my job away. You're putting me back out on the street with the rest of these people. How can you guys do this? You guys downright lied when you said that you had enough funding till April of next year and now all of a sudden, boom, no money. Where'd it go? Where did it go? Fences. Seriously, are you spending it on the fences, putting it around the parks? Now you're not only closing me out of the parks, you're closing up people that do actually have homes. Again, I've been in this community and I have faith in this community. I've gone to school here. I've done my part. And now you're kicking me out on the street again. Why? Come visit the camp. Half the people that live there have gotten jobs. They are, they look forward to life. They're not dealing with the criminal elements that's out there. Just because we're homeless doesn't mean that we're criminals. I'm educated. I'm a retired firefighter. I've done quite a bit. Don't, you know, anyways, I'm just gonna leave it at that, but you guys lied to us. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Hi, my name's Cherie Peterson and I started talking to you four years ago about my hundreds of dollars worth of tickets for having the audacity to fall asleep in my car. And then I, and lately, in the last four years and one month, I've been living in the street period in the flat out dirt in front of dentist's office, doctor's office, behind coffee shops everywhere where other homeless people are this far away or whatever. I've had seven sleeping bags robbed. So many things robbed. It would take years to tell you, but I just wanna say that, you know, you keep promising you're gonna build a shelter for us when San Francisco's built 10-story apartment, San Jose's built eight-story apartment. What is Santa Cruz doing? They're going, oh, we'll think about it next year. We'll think about it next Tuesday. How about, like, never, it's never, you've never broken ground on nothing. There's a 32-bed shelter over there. I've had my name in for four years. I was in the hospital for five days recently. I have a lot of health problems. I'm legally blind. I'm handicapped, but I'm out there on the street. Luckily, I have my walker to carry all my junk around. I go to Cabrillo, you know? I don't let homelessness stop me. I just carry on because I wanna have a house. I wanna bake muffins in the morning and be a real person like you and everyone else, you know, and I just can't understand why you homeless people are all the same. A lot of us don't drink, we don't do any drugs, and we wanna home. And what's your solution? What's your solution for the winter? I told my daughter who's a millionaire, oh, I think I'm gonna kill myself this winter, because last winter, I almost froze to death. Three fingers froze. I froze my face. I froze my arms trying to find my son, you know? And I just can't see going through another winter having nowhere to be. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Next speaker. Are you up? Go ahead. Next speaker. I'm not really too sure about what to say about the homelessness. I am personally homeless myself, and I'm contracting and doing studies in the National Forest. All I gotta say is that the homeless crowd is always out on the streets, and you know, they're usually having a good time. There's not really too many people that are out there causing that much trouble. You know, I occasionally hear the cops running this way, running that way, but honestly, I think the homeless crowd here is one of the best homeless crowds that I've actually had time to participate with. Like, I have really good friends here. Like, the pirate and his girlfriend, they're awesome. And like, everyone else that I've, you know, hung out with in this town, like, they're here. And I just wish that a city would get together at least like a test or like, some sort of like chunk of property or something to start for like, you know, people that actually have the ambition to become successful through, you know, self-sustaining themselves. And exactly like, you know, the women that have been up here have talked about, had brought that forth, so I just want to touch bases with that. And yeah, what I'm finding out in the forest and with the evolution and, you know, cross-contamination through all the past year's poisons and stuff is kind of scary because, you know, I'm a man of God and if we don't correct certain things then this world could become toxic and revelations might come sooner than we expect. Thank you, next speaker please. Next speaker please. Hello, my name is Fran Swass. I have been here about three and a half months and I'm here to show support for the people that don't have a place to call home. I'm here to support the people that are trying to sleep. Animals need to sleep, bees need to sleep, birds need to sleep. The monarch butterflies, the sea lions, they all need to sleep. Without sleep, you can get sick. And so I say when you have people that are going around waking people up who have no place to rust their head but on the ground, on the earth, you're giving them a death sentence. I want to tell you what happened to me about a month ago. I rented a room from a woman who was very kind and she charged me $400 to stay in one room. So I would have a place to stay while I looked for a permanent place to live. I moved here to be near my grandchildren. I was walking down the street, front street, I had bought some groceries and I had bought too many groceries and I tripped on the sidewalk and all my groceries fell on the ground and I fell on my knees. Eight people walked by, they were clean, well-dressed. One looked like he was a businessman. They didn't say anything. They didn't say, do you need some help? Are you hurt? What I felt when they walked by. First was shock. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker please. I don't like public speaking, so I'll be quick. My name's Maya and I'm an early childhood educator and a grad student here in Santa Cruz. I'm coming to the city council to ask for more compassionate and dignified way of treating those in our community that are experiencing homelessness. Things really shifted for me recently. My mom's from the UK and my cousin came to visit and she was just horrified by what was going on in Santa Cruz. She kept asking, how does your city, how does your country allow this to happen? She'd never seen homelessness like we have here. She just couldn't understand and she didn't wanna come downtown at all. And then it made me realize how horrible our conditions are here. I really want the city to stop criminalizing people who sleep outside and to save money by providing real and dignified solutions, not just fencing off the post office and fencing off parks and not just private security and police giving citations for trespassing. I wanna see more access to bathrooms for people who sleep outside and access to services despite backgrounds and IDs and all of that. So thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Hi, my name's Sean. I do water filtration in Harvey West and bike along the levee quite often. And I just wanna say that the fencing I've seen go up and the winter shelter close, just really depressing and kind of embarrassing for this city. And I know that there's better solutions out there. I volunteer with Food Not Bombs and the winter shelter and their great programs that provide for desperate needs for holes in the services provided by the city. Literally the warming shelter. We're trying to have a place for people to just be able to store their things, which is kind of mind-boggling that people aren't able to do that safely. And it's just really depressing time to be young in this country and just watching the homeless situation get worse over the decades while the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. And literally Santa Cruz has some of the most expensive housing in the world. So I don't know how there's not money for it. I live by the outlook apartments that was just sold for $50 million to apparently I heard Goldman Sachs and I'm just here to demand more progressive solutions to a population that's really suffering. I went to college and work full-time. I have a hard enough time paying for rent and the low income in the city are just really suffering. And I demand more support. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Pat Kittle of Santa Cruz. I have a sign here, which I've been holding up. No more wars for Israel. Israel did 9-11. That's a lot of evidence for that and an investigative reporter right here at UCSC by the name of Christopher Bolin. Bolin.com will provide you with an overwhelming amount of scientific and forensic evidence that, yes, Israel did 9-11. The council members are all looking away because this is a fact they don't want to confront. That's to be expected, totally to be expected. But we give Israel welfare that 7,000 times. No. Unhold it. Put on pause, please. Oh, no, don't block people. Yeah. But thanks. The foreign aid we give Israel, get this, this is a fact you can verify it easily. It's 7,000 times more per capita than the foreign aid that we give the world at large. And Israel brags about its booming economy and its brilliant scientists and blah, blah, blah and how well they're doing and yet they're taking this kind of welfare from us and you just heard everybody express the idea that we're not particularly wealthy ourselves. Israel keeps doing this and that's this pocket change compared to the wars that Israel has sucked us into. That's coming to trillions, trillions of dollars. And that's not even counting the suffering both here and abroad. So I ask people to look this up. Bolinbyon.com. Don't take my word for it, look it up. Thank you. Next speaker, gentlemen in the blue will be our last speaker for all communications. Please go ahead. I emailed you before, can I have four? Yeah, go ahead. I'm representing Stepping Up Santa Cruz and we did a new resource, homeless resource directory. You can find it on the website or on the Facebook page, you might want it and we're gonna, it'll probably, oh, sorry. There's a new homeless resource directory on the Stepping Up Santa Cruz, sorry. Website and I'll update it to see any corrections. Please let me know. I have some information, some questions and then some proposals and I'll talk fast because I don't know what four minutes is, sorry. During the city manager presentation on page five, it said that when you guys voted, you voted for the River Street Camp Extending in absence of another half winter shelter option. I don't think that's what you voted for. I think you just voted to extend it. So maybe I miss that, like I think you, yeah, I think you're changing the vote now if you're voting to close it. So I would ask what specifically that vote was. Okay. The, in response to your question, when you asked, did the HAP General Board get to give feedback to the executive committee? City Manager said that the HAP General Board was at a meeting about priorities. We were, that was different and Council Member Nourian was there too. And, but we were never in any sort of meeting to give any feedback about winter shelter options. We were told afterwards, just to clarify that one. When in the newspaper it said the HAP Executive Committee decided to give money to the homeless services center, and that's actually city money as part of that. Don't you guys have to vote on that? Does the city manager, can they allocate money? Because it totals like $67,000, $68,000. So that's a question too. In the presentation with the closing the parks, the same as the first person who spoke, it seems like there's some connection between the closing the parks and the fence being put up around San Lorenzo Park. At the same time that the River Street Camp is closing, I would ask if that was part of the discussion because in the presentation, there was no connection to it. Okay, because, yeah. A few things about the HAP Executive Committee. There have been no RFPs put out for winter shelter programs. There's only been conversations with particular groups and that's one of the reasons why there's really few options because it's a very closed conversation. I would say if you want more people at the table, you should invite more people to the table. The HAP Executive Committee does not do any oversight of any programs at town. All the nonprofits and their outcomes, they don't have to answer to the HAP Executive Committee. It's just sort of assumed that they're gonna follow HUD guidelines, but no one's actually checking. So as you're deciding about where to put your money, you should be allowed to see what the outcomes are of these programs. The HAP Executive Committee, I wouldn't know whether how many city managers and the housing coordinating like Rainie Maher and Elisa. I don't know how many have to be in the room, whether they have to be unanimous, whether they have a quorum, whether they have a majority. None of that's open, but they're deciding to close the River Street Camp even though you voted to keep it open. So I propose keeping the River Street Camp open having the city manager go back to the HAP Executive Committee to try to figure out how you can do the funding because you're really only talking about December. In January, we're getting like 10, 11 million dollars. So putting it out to the nonprofits of, hey, who wants to apply for some funding to keep it to use money and then a nonprofit could do the River Street Camp. Another thing that I propose is having more of a discussion with Salvation Army. They're open to using their Laurel Street site too. There was issues with the neighbors and they're willing to do buses the same as they're willing to do buses to VFW. Thank you. Thank you. All right, next speaker please. Keith McHenry, like the library. On Sunday, which was really the third weekend of the month, we had over 209 people come to eat. Many were new faces who are people who are recently displaced. Sadly, many are reporting that landlords are raising their rents dramatically in violation of the rent freeze, but since there's no rent board to stop it, they go willy-nilly forcing people to the streets, including families with children. So next week should be way over 200 on both days if there's any, if history is any indication. At the same time, shutting down the River Street campground and fencing off Lorenzo Park and chasing homeless people out of San Lorenzo Park and telling them they're not allowed to be around there and telling them they have to go across the river and then putting a new fence around the post office and shutting down Grant Street Park. It has the impression to most of the people living on the streets that there's a war by this organization, by the city, by the city manager's office, by city council, by parks and rec against people that are poor. So as a result of the policies here, we know more people will die this year on the streets as a direct result of the actions of the city of Santa Cruz. So I'd like to have a couple of minutes of silence here for those who are likely to perish as a result of these policies. And people are certainly invited to come to the memorial services that will be held on Tuesdays out in front. Thank you very much. Next speaker, please. Good evening, city council. As time goes on and I see my tax dollars in action, I cannot seem to shake off that small yet growing feeling of buyer's remorse. We live in a town where rents are similar to that of New York City. I suppose you could say our traffic could be at the same level, but how about on the public transportation service level forefront? With most metro bus routes departing as often as once per hour, we are on the exact same level as Apple Valley, California, a desert rural town of Southern California. Why is our cost of living so high and our transportation so poor? Mission Street is dangerous for pedestrians and bikers, yet we only see Route 3 servicing that corridor once every two hours. Metro CEO, Mr. Clifford was already given a raise after services were cut by 19%. That's just wrong. I challenge everyone to do 19% less work at their job and have the audacity to ask their boss for a raise. I imagine pink slips in their future, but not, of course, for a manuensipality worker. On top of this, I feel baited by the library measured going toward a parking garage. All of this goes to show my tax dollars are being put to poor use. I will keep this all of this in my next time you beg for more money at the ballot. Now all I see these fences going up left and right while the city just got $3.3 million in grants to tackle the issue of homelessness. Thanks for blocking the garbage bins behind the fences and enabling litter bugs at San Lorenzo Park, by the way. If you can't manage your own parks and transportation with what you have already, this is how you can lose support for these items because somehow you were able to do it before and now you can't. What's with it? And I've said it before and I said it again, quit with the moseying. I understand that we've got a sitting duck here and there but enough is enough with deferring the issues that matter to our community. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker please. Phil Posner, I'm here speaking on behalf of myself and also my son Micah who wanted to be here. Martin Bernal a second ago, Serge was up here at this microphone and he made some good suggestions. You look like you weren't listening. Now maybe you were and I'm wrong. But I want to talk to the city council about your feelings. You think it's easy for a 79 year old man to sleep in a sleeping bag in front of city hall? We did it because we think there's a lot of people out there and you've been hearing them like that lady who was ignored by seven people who are being ignored. You have power. I assume that you sleep well at night. You know, I think what hurts me the most is I wrote a letter to every one of you and only Chris answered me. I spent 39 days on a penitentiary in Mississippi and you know what? They listened to us and they talked to us. We didn't always like what they said but at least they communicated with us. We've asked you to have some feelings about the suffering of homeless people. No bathrooms open at night, insufficient bathrooms, now a campground closed. Are you listening? Do you care? Do you sleep at night? Will you please at least communicate with us and tell us what you feel about this issue? Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker please. Gerard, last speaker on the side, oral communications. Hi, I was downtown the morning when Manuel Reyes vandalized a fountain, a drinking fountain in front of Starbucks. And I think, you know, I was thinking about saying like it'd be nice if you, you know, I could urge you guys to rebuild the fountain but you know, in some ways I think it's kind of an example of where we've got homeless people who feel very disenfranchised and he's a long term homeless guy downtown. He's, you know, on one hand, personable and on the other hand just kind of like emotionally unstable and weird and you know, a lot of that goes on in the homeless community. You've got all kinds of problems that are comorbid with homelessness, drug abuse. I wanna say that, I mean, you guys are worried about the wholesale tax on cannabis but I'm more worried about the people who are on the streets who are using drugs and you know, don't have a place to go. What I'd like to see with homelessness in this community is kind of what surge is on the tail of which is just finding solid solutions for people because there are a lot of people out there who have very limited options as time wears on. It seems like every year, I mean, they just raise the rent on me and as time, I mean, measure M, whether it passes or not. I mean, these issues of people being on the streets and being marginalized are gonna be with us for, you know, who knows how long. The economy's been pretty good, unemployment's very low but the stock market's doing something strange but you know, in the long run, we look at our community values and we look at, you know, what, you know, what do we feel, you know, is morally right to do about these issues and the bathroom thing, coming back to the bathroom thing, I mean, I hope you guys can see fit to have the, sorry, Loudon Nelson, sorry, I'm out of time. Loudon Nelson. Thank you. Thank you. Right, that concludes oral communications. No, you've already spoken. The next item on the agenda is item number 14, the accessory dwelling unit, limited deferral of owner occupancy requirements and affordability provisions. So that's number 14 and we have Jessica Mallore and Carol Burk speaking. Thank you. I can make it a quick report. Yeah, yeah, I've already told, yeah. This is a brief report as we discussed. Good afternoon or good evening, mayor and council members, Carol Burk and Jessica Mallore for economic development and you have actually the next two items are related in that they're both dealing with limited deferrals of owner occupancy requirements for single family homeowners that have an ADU on their property and Jessica's done all the work and she's gonna do the presentation, so Jessica. All right, thank you for having me this evening. As Carol mentioned, the first item number 14 is about ADU limited deferral of owner occupancy and adding a affordability provision. So there's two ways to allow for non-owner occupancy and the first way would be temporary and this has been included in the ADU ordinance since 2014. It's both limited deferral program which we're gonna talk about tonight. There's also an ADU legalization program that does have a temporary component for non-owner occupancy and then there's the permanent way to allow for non-owner occupancy and that's currently being researched by the planning department and it's based on housing blueprint subcommittee and council direction to research that non-owner occupancy in exchange for affordability. So just to be very clear, tonight we were talking about a temporary aspect for non-owner occupancy and this is related to council action you took in August requesting this affordability. So the history of the proposed resolution November, 2014 was when the first resolution establishing the limited deferral of owner occupancy program was passed by the council and then again on August 28th, the city council made the motion to direct staff to ask to provide affordability requirements. So our new resolution while mostly unchanged, there is a new aspect of affordability and that is just for the term of the limited deferral period. So it's two years as approved by council with an optional one-year extension by the planning and community development director. So the proposed affordability requirements in the resolution are for 60% of area median income or for section eight voucher holder and this is different from the inclusionary ordinance which was originally referenced in the motion which would be at 80% of area median income and so the reason staff is proposing 60% is that it's consistent with the AD legalization program and so it would be consistent at a level of affordability and then we wanted to highlight that while we're not adding the professional management company requirement, it is still being maintained in the new resolution. So any property owner who has a limited deferral must retain a management company to manage both the main house and the ADU during that period and then brand new is the income and rent calculator and exhibit B of the resolution and that is just explaining how we calculate the 60% AMI for both income and rents and then finally, this is the staff recommendation of action to be taken for this item. So any questions? Are there any, I'm going to go to the public first to see if there's any members of the public that would like to speak to this item. Please step on up. Is there any other member of the public that would like to speak to this item? Okay, go right ahead, sir. Yes, hello, I'm Patrick Thomas. I'm actually the owner of a ADU parcel. I was just, so this will be actually directly affecting me. I'm the follow-up. Okay, so you're speaking to this item. This is a different item. Exactly. Okay. So speaking from this sort of situation, I could definitely agree with the affordability requirement if it's a permanent change, but as a temporary change, it essentially nullifies the owner occupancy deferral originally written and added to the ordinance in 2014 because essentially the idea is that if somebody had to maybe move out of town for work or some other sort of obligation that they would leave and they would have two years with possible one-time extension and then they could return. So if it becomes an affordability requirement, you would therefore be asking somebody, the owner to basically be offering subsidized housing for someone for a short-term time. So if they were to return, you would know exactly which tenant would get a notice. So it's essentially a short-term solution, affordable housing solution, and it would make it so that somebody if they had to leave would seriously consider either selling the house or trying to do something maybe without going through the city essentially under the table sort of situation because the majority of people are gonna be living in the original house and the ADU would be most likely the rental tenant unit and so then they would be leaving the original house which would have to be, in my case, it's a two-bedroom one-bath. I think I've seen the numbers would be renting for about $1,000 a month and the application is $3,000. I don't see anyone that would write a check for $3,000 for permission to rent their house for $1,000 a month. Thank you. Is there any other member of the public that wishes to speak to this item? Seeing none, I'm gonna bring it back to the council for discussion and this item came forward on the August 28th, 2018 meeting and I watched the video, the discussion and I just wanna state before we have this discussion I really strongly believe in the owner occupancy requirement for these and when we first made the direction on the council back in November, 2014 it was really under emergency circumstances like to have these so when someone has a death in the family or there's someone that's forced to relocate or there's some other impact based on their ability to reside in the house it provided some flexibility so that one they could keep their house until there was a decision made and I feel that this is kind of a slippery slope in terms of like how we're starting to maybe take this ordinance and reapply it in different ways. I mean, one thing that I would say is if someone after three years is unable to figure out what their position is in the home they might, we might have a requirement that states that they have to sell it or there's gotta be something maybe it's sold to someone who lives locally or give first right refusal to someone who's currently residing in the property because I think we have an obligation to look at all types of housing options and one of the things I don't wanna see is is turn over our residential housing stock to create everything into a rental unit and so for me, I wasn't there for the discussion on the 28th, I think council member Cron voted against it at that time but I think it's something where I feel like I don't like this is being looking at bootstrapping another one for longer term housing and looking at grafting it onto this more temporary measure. So I just wanna say that on the outset. So is there any further discussion on this particular? Can I just clarify? This is not extending the period that the unit would be vacated. I mean that the owner would have the temporary period they would have two years with chance of a one year extension and the timeline is no different than what's on the books now. This is only dealing with whether one of the units would be rented at an affordable rent. I understand. Council member Cron. What's the criteria for the circumstances that somebody would qualify to do this to get the two years and then the one year option? We have the same thing with our inclusionary ordinance that if somebody needs to move away for a period of time they're either going for a job or take care of somebody or a school or there's a period and they know they're gonna be likely to come back so they don't wanna sell their house and every one of these comes to the city council to actually make the final decision. It's not decided by staff. It's decided by the city council. There's no criteria really, there's no set. It's supposed to be a unique kind of emergency situation like needing to move for, you have an opportunity to move for a period of two or three years to take advantage of an opportunity and you wanna come back or maybe you have a tragedy in your family and you need to take it. But it's an unusual circumstance. It's not just, oh I wanna leave to try out another town to live in. There's gotta be a reason for moving and a reason to believe that you intend to come back. How do you prove it? You can't, you know, we can't prove anything. We have to accept what's told to us and make our best judgment and that's one of the reasons why it comes to the city council as well. So all you are also making your best judgment. And is the thousand dollars that he's referring to that's approximation of what the 60% AMI would be for that unit? I included a sample of a rent and income chart with the resolution and for a two bedroom unit, it would be $1,175 per month. And just so you know that they can rent either the main house or the ADU as a low income unit. And that if they have a tenant already that is over income, for example, in the ADU and that's the unit they want to be their low income unit, they don't have to kick the tenant out. They can continue to rent to the tenant and then they would give the affordable housing trust fund the difference between the low income rent and the rent that they're charging. So, and they also have, of course, the option to put a section eight tenant in the unit which is close to market rents. Council Member Chase. Yeah, well, I'm looking at the owner occupant requirements which is B2A where it asks for documents that show basically where you're living or not living. And that's more than I was required to do when I had to measure O unit. All I had to do was sign a letter that said I still lived there. So, I'm not sure that, I mean, this is already more than we're asking for most of our inclusionary requirements. Actually not, when you purchase your unit, you're required, you're required. I had a bunch of stuff to do then when I purchased it. Yeah. Annually I had one form that I signed. And that's the inclusionary program. Right. You can buy your inclusionary unit and the next day win the lottery. Right. And so it doesn't matter what your income is, the only thing is you have to sign a letter as part of the monitoring under penalty of perjury that you live in that unit. And we do the best, Jessica does the best of ability of monitoring. If we send you a letter and it comes back or something like that. That is exactly my point. So that this is more than what we're doing there. I get it. And the point is we are doing our best here to get people to prove it. And we're trying to increase the accessibility of lower income units for people to live here. And we have so little that we can do to create more opportunities for people to have places that are below market. I feel like every opportunity that we can take to do that, we need to do that. This is not gonna create a huge number. In fact, what only three people did this since 2014, which is disappointing. But it's three more units than were available, I guess before. I'd love for those units to be open to people with section eight and open to folks with lower income. I think it's an opportunity we have and we have so few of them. Can I, I just wanna clarify. We do with Measure O, we do also require a proof of homeowner's exemption right now as another layer of proof. But that same list that's in the owner occupancy for ADU is also in all the Measure O agreement. So we could ask for any number of those items. My point was not to criticize the Measure O program. My point was this is like most of the things that we do. We do our best to prove things and you never really can tell, right? Just to move the item along, I am also in favor of the owner occupancy requirement for ADUs, but this to me seems like a very limited exemption for a limited period of time for limited circumstances. And under those, we give a benefit of an exemption from the owner occupancy. What we get in return is affordability and that seems to me like a fair deal. So given that I'm prepared to support this recommendation. I'll second. Okay, so you have a motion and a second on the floor. How do you feel after the third year, if let's say someone gets in. It's two years. Well, you can get up to three years. You can ask for a third year and under the rules that we currently have in place, does that change at all? Yeah. No, it doesn't change at all. So you can ask for a third year exemption. So after the third year, then what? You're facing a choice. So how do we enforce that choice? At the end of the third year, we notify the owners that their time is coming up and they need to take a number of actions either to return to the property, to fulfill the owner occupancy requirement, to remove part of the accessory structure to accessory dwelling unit, to make it an accessory structure and then remove that requirement of owner occupancy or sell the house with the ADU to someone who will fulfill the owner occupancy requirement. So that's what I understood. It's nothing that, how do you feel about having some sort of, if there's a lien, is there a lien on the house in any way in terms of? Yes. This is recorded against the property and so if they are not in compliance, they will be against the lien on the property and also it can become a code enforcement action because they're supposed to be living in the unit. So let's say after the third year, if the lien also included some direction that they'd have to offer the home for sale to one of the tenants, they have right of first refusal. Would that be something that would be acceptable to the maker of the motion? That's going further than I'm prepared to go. This seems very straightforward. So I'd like to just stick with this. I guess I think of it as a slippery slope in regards to, we have this discussion coming up in regards to the idea of loosening the rules for ADUs in general in a future meeting. And one, if we start allowing people that leave and the terms on when someone might leave for an extended period of time for whatever reason vary, but then you start to have a situation where homes become more, they're all rental properties and there's no incentive maybe to maintain our residential housing stock. And so I think that to me is an important interest. I definitely, and I supported this back in 2014, I definitely want to have an opportunity when someone's life circumstances change, that there's some flexibility in our rules, but I also feel like there needs to be some sort of backstop on this so that it doesn't become a situation that melds into some of our other policies for more permanent rental housing. So I do feel it's important that we retain this concept that was at the outset of the accessory dwelling unit program and that was owner occupancy requirements. And I don't support the motion as written because I feel it does kind of stray from that. I think it's consistent. I should have been at the police department that they were talking about this and that was not just slippery, it was very greasy. Yeah. So I mean, if folks here are in agreement with it, I don't understand why it's another issue, but why staff would be bringing us this owner occupancy thing, if we don't want it, I guess we'll find out in the meetings that we're having soon. That's right. Any further discussion? Here we have a motion on the floor by Council Member Matthews and that was seconded by Vice, or seconded by Council Member Chase. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Those opposed? No. That motion passes with Council Member Cron and myself voting against Council Member Matthews, Council Member Chase and Vice Mayor Watkins and Council Member Naroyen voting in favor with Council Member Brown absent. Okay. Thank you. We'll move on to the next item, which is the approval of a request for an accessory dwelling unit. And that is, we heard from one of the speakers, now we have a policy that's layered on to that application. So I'd like to turn it over to staff again for the presentation. Yeah, thank you Mayor City Council. Here is the request for owner occupancy limited deferral for 426 and 428 San Juan Avenue. So brief recap of the history that I just recapped earlier. November 2014, the resolution establishing the limited deferral for owner occupancy was passed. The property owner submitted his request for a limited deferral on August 27th of this year. And then Council took direction on August 28th to ask staff to prepare the resolution with the affordability requirements. And staff did consult with city attorney Kandadi to determine if the affordability requirements requested by the council could be applied to this request and we received confirmation that it could. So that leads me to the staff recommendation, which is to approve the property owner's request and ask for affordability restrictions to be placed on that approval. There's also two alternate options that the city council could move forward with and that's to approve the limited deferral request without affordability restrictions and also the second alternate to deny the request. That's it, two slides. We'll turn it over again to members of the public or any members of the public that would like to speak to this item. Yes, thank you. I would like to request that the council essentially honor the agreements that were in place when I lodged the application for the deferral for my unit. So I had purchased my house with the ADU in 2013. I was at the time working over the hill. I've since received a immigration visa to Australia. I'm looking at going to Australia. And so I actually quit my job. And before I did that, I had had a meeting with Alex to discuss the deferral and the ordinance in depth and was essentially assured that there was not gonna be an affordability restriction requirement on either of the units. And so I had been making my decisions and my financial decisions with that in mind. And so now I paid the $2,800 plus application fee and that was on the 27th. I hadn't heard anything for three weeks and I contacted Alex and he told me that Rachel was working on it. And so then I sort of was trying to figure out what was happening because it was the overall process. I was told this to take four to six weeks. And that's when I heard about this affordability requirement that had been brought up at the previous council meeting. So essentially in this case, I'm just requesting that it should not apply and that should apply in the future when people know when they make the request that it will be a requirement as opposed to making it a requirement after the request has been placed. Thank you. Are there any other members of the public that wish to speak to this item? Seeing none, I'll bring it back to the council, council member Cron. How much was the application fee again? 2,800 is what I heard. 2,800 to $53. What do you get for that? It's that's a question for Alex Corey, I think. It's the same application as fee as a variance. It's a variance from our code and you get the right to come to the city council and request the referral. Oh, but it's not based on like the amount of time it takes staff to go through paperwork and... Well, it is, it's the same application as a variance. So yes, it's the same fee that we put in the time writing the staff report, researching what is being proposed and making a recommendation, yes. Thank you. Last question. If he went the section eight route, what would he expect to get? The current fair market rents were updated by HUD for 2019 and I believe it's in the neighborhood of 2,400 a month for a two bedroom unit, fair market rent. I have a question because it just came to my mind after we covered 14, but under the policy for these limited deferrals, do we make a distinction if let's say a family member were to be residing in that that's not necessarily owner but related? It just will be treating that as someone, just any member of the public. I don't think we make a distinction if the renter is to be a family member, if the property owner wishes to put a family member on their deed as an equal or majority share owner then they could fulfill the owner or occupancy requirements. So you just have to change the deed to come on. So we heard from one member of the public who has this application in, it was submitted prior to any of these changes and what I understood is he was given instructions before he made any decisions that the current ordinance was in effect and he wasn't gonna change. That's how it was characterized. The property owner has been talking to me for quite a few months about this and so when he did submit the application I was unaware that the council had even directed staff to provide these affordability restrictions until Jessica mentioned it to me while we were getting ready to prepare for the staff report and then we notified the property owner immediately. So, but when he applied, yes, there were no affordability requirements and staff was unaware that we were even thinking of those requirements. Go ahead, councilmember. I'll split the baby here. Yeah. I support the action we just took but I know in the past we've also said that we allow applications to proceed under the regulations that were in effect at the time they were submitted and I think what's clear here is right left hand didn't even know what was going on here and so just in the interest of fairness I'd be prepared to move alternate one. I'll second that but before we kind of vote on it I'd like to ask you as the applicant to come back up again and see while you're walking up what do you do after the three or two years or up? What are your plans? Because if you are working and you don't come back what are you gonna address this issue but that we do have an owner occupancy requirement for ADUs? Well, the owner occupancy requirement is not new to me. The affordability requirement was but in this intervening time between lodging my application I've been running through a whole bunch of different scenarios of what I would do and one of the things would be possibly if I were you know if the case I come back it just solves the problem there's no problem I come back I move into one of the two so it would only be an issue if I were to not come back and so I had looked actually talking with my sister to get to your family question. She lives in Southern California as a teacher and she was thinking about possibly moving back up this area and so that would be a case where I would put another person on the deed or the title as a 50-50 owner or something along those lines. Then I also know that there's a requirement if you are essentially have power of attorney over someone and it's sort of like a caretaker situation then that would possibly be a situation too that I could use it if maybe one of my parents wanted to move into it or something along those lines. But I am totally also on board with the sort of neighborhood cohesion and not wanting to just turn these things into sort of turnover rental sort of situations which is actually when I read the ordinance and I actually had sent Alex a letter is that I really agreed with it because you don't want just sort of tenant turnover in these neighborhoods and but in the situation with mine I've actually put a lot of work that's what's in that one binders. It's like I have like $70,000 in receipts of stuff that I put into the house as I was working and so it's actually, I've gotten a bunch of nice comments about it from the neighbors. All right, thank you for answering the question. I appreciate you thinking ahead about that. And if you don't bring in a family member hopefully you've sold to someone locally. Yeah, that would be the idea. That's the one thing with the 80s is awesome. Well, you can't, yeah, just think of that. Okay, so we have a motion on the floor by Council Member Matthews which I supported any further discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. That passes with- Didn't ask for no's. Any no's. I heard I didn't see any so I didn't. Council Member Brown absent, passes unanimously with Council Member Brown absent. Okay, we are on to item number 16 which is the 1930 Ocean Street extension item and I'll turn it over to Lee Butler, I believe. Good afternoon, Mayor and Council Members or good evening now. This is something, a project that was thoroughly debated a couple of meetings ago and this is just a formality with the paperwork to provide you with the first reading for the map change that the Council authorized us to move forward with and we're available for any questions you may have. I have no question. Is there any member of the public that wishes to speak to item number 16? Item number 16. Seeing none, I'll bring it back to the Council for discussions and action. I'm prepared to move the recommendation. Okay. Is there a second? Second. Okay, Council Member Chase with motion, Council Member Naroyan in the second. All those in favor? I just want to make a comment before you, you know. You know, there's a lot of neighbors that came before us. They didn't want 32 units. They didn't want 40 units. So I'm just going to stick with my no on this because I think it's a bad development and a bad precedent for Santa Cruz. Okay, thank you. So all those in favor with the motion on the floor, please say aye. Aye. Those opposed? No. Okay, that motion passes with Council Member Crone voting against and Council Member Matthews, Council Member Chase, Council Member Naroyan, Vice Mayor Watkins and myself in favor, Council Member Brown is absent. Okay, now we're up to the long-awaited downtown maintenance overview item. This is item number 17. Thank you for your patience. Good afternoon, Mayor and members of the City Council. The purpose of today's downtown maintenance overview, and I should say this is Bonnie Lipscomb, Director of Economic Development. The purpose of today's downtown maintenance overview is to provide you with an update and a snapshot of the current downtown maintenance practices, conditions and needs, including some of the major stakeholders involved, both for providing service, both public and private. It's also an identification of data gaps that we have around maintenance downtown, and then some takeaways today from the data that we've collected so far. And we've actually been able to move forward on two things that were identified from the data gaps, which is pretty exciting. Why we're doing this. Downtown is a heart of our community and also our primary concentrated commercial retail and central business district, home to our diverse and eclectic mix of businesses, retail, restaurants, professional offices, services and restaurants. It's a special and unique environment that also provides cultural, civic and social pursuits and is a major destination for residents within the region and visitors from around the world. For the long-term success of downtown, it's critical to provide a clean, safe and welcoming environment. As we are planning for a substantial amount of housing development and up to an additional 1,000 or more people living in our downtown, it's very timely to look at our practices and our needs for long-term downtown maintenance and cleanliness and develop a plan for future success. Next steps include today is just a snapshot of where we are in this moment of time and sort of the assessment of downtown maintenance. And next steps include development of future coordinated maintenance plan as well as an analysis of funding mechanisms and recommendations. And with that, I'll turn it over to a staff presentation of Amanda and Rebecca. All right, good afternoon. Amanda Rotello, Principal Management Analyst for Economic Development. I'm Rebecca Unit, Business Liaison for the Economic Development Department. And this has been a real multi-departmental community-engaged process. So with us, we have a representation from Parks and Rec and Public Works as well as the DTA, which will be presenting along with us. So this is today's presentation. These are the topics that we'll be covering and we're aspiring to move quickly so that we can get to your discussion. And Mayor, if it's all right with you, we can do questions at the end just so we can get through it. Okay, great. So what are we talking about when we're talking about maintenance in the downtown? We're looking at this image and all of the elements that make up a streetscape, banners and lighting and public art and graffiti and benches and infrastructure of various kinds and signage, all of this makes up our downtown and it all needs to be maintained and cleaned and cared for. And it all contributes to the overall feeling of the downtown. Yeah. And looking at our downtown, one of the things that we feel is really important, to say is that it is an urban environment. And so while we, as you'll see with our presentation, there's a lot of maintenance happening in the downtown, there's also just a high level of usage. We can scrub the sidewalks one morning and there's coffee spilled on at the afternoon. So just recognizing that is one of the challenges that we have. And so as Bonnie said, the first step is really just to get a grasp on what's happening now and then making that second step of looking at how we can improve the system or create new systems to better provide a higher level of service. As I mentioned in the staff report, we're looking at kind of, I like to distinguish between these three areas. The first is ongoing maintenance. So that's scheduled maintenance happening in the downtown. There's a schedule that happens certain days of week and this is being provided by city departments as well as outside entities that we contract with like Uncle Poop's pet waste removal or our graffiti contractor, the Hope Services team that's out there. So this is ongoing maintenance that's happening and this is a lot of what we have budgeted for. We're setting up funds specifically for this ongoing maintenance. And then the second category is calls for service. So this is calls for issues that are coming up kind of outside of the ongoing scheduled maintenance. And the highest ones would be pet and human waste removal in the downtown, spills on sidewalks and then offensive graffiti tags would be things that we would call in someone go out and tend to immediately. And really we're pulling both funds and staff capacity sort of out of our ongoing maintenance pools to really do these calls for service. And then the final category here is repairs, replacements and beautification. So looking at those street elements, the infrastructure in the downtown, this bench I like to call the Christmas bench because as you can see it's red and green. And so this would be a potential candidate for either replacement or painting. And so that kind of falls into that category there. So the first thing we did with ongoing maintenance is look at what is our current schedule of maintenance in the downtown. So this is the first place we started talking to staff, who is downtown doing what at what time. And what we learned from this, as you can see is there's a lot of maintenance happening in the morning. And this in large part is due to the fact that we want maintenance to kind of be done and out of the way before businesses start opening and we're seeing the higher level of visitors in our downtown. But you can see, for example, litter pickup, which is being done by Parks and Rec, Hope Services and downtown streets team. It's all happening in the morning. And so by the afternoon, if issues have come up, there's no scheduled maintenance that happens later in the day. The other thing that we learned is weekends there's just not a lot of scheduled maintenance happening there. And that's part of our highest traffic time in the downtown. My favorite slide. The next thing we looked at is where's the funds coming from? And as you can see, it's really a web of different sources. And the one thing we learned from this sort of research is there's no one department or entity responsible for maintenance in the downtown. There are multiple departments and groups that hold pieces of it and are responsible for certain parts of maintenance. And really this has been informed by changes of funding or funding going away. And so the city being strategic and scrappy and looking to where we can find funding and staff. I mean, all of these arrows represent both funding and also people going out and performing that work. And the one other thing I'll say about this particular slide is I think this also just really demonstrates how much resources we are putting in the downtown. In the research we've been doing and talking with city staff who are involved with that, there's a lot of hands involved and a lot of people who really care about making our downtown beautiful. So yeah, and with that I'll hand it over to Rebecca to talk a little bit about some of the data we pulled together. Yeah, so just in terms of looking at the data that we do have, we run a graffiti abatement program and that produces a lot of data. So looking specifically at Pacific Avenue in the downtown, we see that we take care of a lot of tags. And I think that this is a really exciting statistic because this program is so effective and we're able to keep the street looking good and abating those tags. Something that we also have data for is our pet and human waste removal in the downtown. So this is a contract with Uncle Poops from the Downtown Management Corporation. And so he goes out and does a daily route throughout the CRM district, which is Pacific Avenue on the side streets. And something that we can clearly tell from the data is that there's potentially residents who are taking their pets into the downtown and leaving their waste behind. So that's something that we've learned from this is that we need to do some follow-up with those housing developments, residential developments, specifically around Cathcart and Pacific. There's clearly some groupings there. So we can look at that and see about addressing some of those challenges. And then from the human waste, just looking at how we can better do some resources. So the pet versus human waste, the pet is significantly larger in terms of pickup numbers and the, but the human waste is the highest impact to our downtown businesses and visitors. And that's the thing that we hear the most from businesses. So looking at how we can better address those and maybe identifying some resources. Something that we also learned was our downtown sidewalk scrubber, we have a schedule and previously it was a little bit hard for the public to find. It was on several different pages. So we looked at creating one page that shows you everything so you know when your sidewalk is gonna be cleaned. And then in looking at that, we also noticed that there was a gap in coverage on Walnut and Lincoln, those streets weren't getting cleaned. So we were able to quickly just make that change and add that into the scrubbing schedule. But it's also important to note something that we've also learned is that some of these areas are only getting cleaned once a month. And so, and that's because of staffing or time capacity. And so looking at how we can further bolster that program and be able to provide that cleaning. And if I could just make a point with this one. One of the things that we did learn is that the Public Works parking division is taking on a huge line share of the sort of maintenance in the downtown. And this was one of the things, ways that they adapted just with already with things that we're learning. And you know, there's just a great team over there and they already moved to say, okay, let's add it onto the schedule. So I just wanted to make note that that staff is really working hard and as we're seeing results already. So something else that we've frequently talked about with our partners with the DTA and the DMC and our various departments is just the responsibilities and roles in the downtown and who's responsible for the various aspects. So thinking about private property and businesses are required to take care of their alcoves and cafe extensions. Sidewalks are technically responsibility of property owners, but the city has largely taken that on in the downtown and we've sort of gone above and beyond on managing those. And then there's challenges for the businesses in terms of regulations, stormwater requirements for how they can clean the sidewalks in terms of catching the water that runs off. So the city as a public entity, we typically have more of those resources. We have the sidewalk scrubbers. We have an understanding of those regulations and so that's where we step in and we're able to take on those tasks. So as part of this approach and in understanding the downtown maintenance program, Amanda and I and our intern at the time went out and spent a few hours just cataloging the downtown, taking a point in time look at what's the current state of things? What are we seeing are the constant issues and sort of logging that and putting some criteria in place around priorities and who the departments are that are responsible. And so we've been working with public works and parks department to look at these items that we've collected and that's gonna be for their discussion. And so then we created this huge source of data that we could pull some trends from. And so some of the things that we learned from that, those areas that we were assigning high priority to that the two pieces that really just kind of roads to the top was sidewalk cleanliness and scratched infrastructure, just infrastructure that was looking worn down. And one of the things that we learned with like the sidewalks below benches, the sidewalks, rubbers can access those. And we currently only have funding for them to be pressure washed three to four times a year. So you can see that those would end up being sort of a tired place if we just can't get to them on a regular basis. And regarding infrastructure, again, that challenge of you straighten the ballard and then a car hits it and it's lopsided. And because those are on a more annual, we're addressing those on a more annual basis, there can be points in time where things are feeling a little worn down. And again, that's a real reflection on just staff capacity and funding again. The other thing we started looking at are these sort of elements, these one-off elements in our downtown, things like the irrigation box on the left-hand side, which is part of that three to four times a year pressure washing. And pay phones that still exist in the downtown that tends to be big targets of vandalism and people are messing with them and they tend to be quite dirty. And I think we'd like to see those removed as they are kind of part of some visual clutter and aren't really being captured in some of the, being taken care of and maintained in a way that is positive reflection on our downtown. And then the newspaper racks, which are owned, the owners of the newspaper racks are responsible and we do reach out periodically to say, hey, these are broken, the windows are smashed in but there has been some just low responsiveness. And again, this is just in our downtown that just doesn't have a great feel to it. And so now I'd like to hand it over to the Downtown Association who performed some research for us about what's happening in other downtowns. Good evening, Council Chip, the Executive Director of the Downtown Association. And I want to thank you for taking a look at this issue. It's wonderful to see your eyes on the downtown. And I want to thank staff for including us in the presentation. We're a big fan of not reinventing the wheel. So we spent some time looking at other downtowns and comfortable with downtowns. And we worked with Sage. I'm sorry, I'm just facing Sage's last name. So I'll let her introduce herself. And Sage worked as our research associate and did some great research around the state. So I'm going to hand it over to her and she'll tell you briefly her findings. Council, okay, how's that? All right, so we just begun a study to look at how other cities are addressing these challenges that come with downtown maintenance. So our method for this study was to conduct interviews with other business districts, which we identified as sharing similar commercial rent values as our downtown business district, as well as reviewing their budgets and operations reports. And what we found is that downtown maintenance is a challenge for every city, but there's no single way to go about addressing it. However, business districts often play an important role in augmenting base-level services provided by public works. So I had an opportunity to speak with downtown Berkeley and Telegraph Avenue business districts, as well as Long Beach, San Luis Obispo, Fresno, and Santa Barbara. And they also reported success augmenting these base-level services. So who actually ends up doing this work are downtown cleaning ambassadors who are able to provide a range of services from sidewalk cleaning to beautification measures, landscaping, cleaning of street furniture, human animal waste removal, litter abatement, just depending on the needs of that particular district. What I also found is that funding for supplemental services often come from a variety of sources. It can often be city revenue from general or enterprise funds, commonly parking revenue, sometimes a partial transit or occupancy taxes, and private grants. But most commonly, this revenue comes from business and property assessments to provide supplemental downtown maintenance services. So the cost of these cleaning services can vary depending on the size of the business district, as well as the individual needs. So in each instance, you can see that downtown maintenance costs are often the largest ticket item on each of these business district's budgets per year. However, in each district, these stakeholders often reported satisfaction with the results of the augmented downtown cleaning services funded by a self-assessment to compensate for deficiencies in the baseline services provided by Public Works. Wonderful. Thank you. And so kind of the last piece of the puzzle is coordination. How are we coordinating maintenance? On a regular scheduled maintenance, that's just on a schedule, and so it moves along, but the calls for service. In the past, it's been city staff walking downtown, seeing things that need to be addressed, texts from CHIP and DTA staff sort of alerting us to issues that are happening in the downtown. But within the last couple of weeks, we've launched both the city app, CRISP, and in coordination with the downtown ambassador program, the C-Click Fix app. And really, this is providing just a whole new level of ways to call in issues that we're seeing. I mean, already it's been amazing, just the amount of calls that we've seen and the information from the eyes on the streets, ambassadors that are able to provide to staff, which has been quite amazing. And really, this is also gonna provide a huge source of data, so we can really target where the issues are, how often they're happening. So I think we have really high hopes for how the coordination can be better, can be more effective via these apps. And as I mentioned before, the flip side, the challenge for us is staff capacity and funding to be able to be responsive to all of these issues that are being reported to us. So what's next? I have a couple of things that we'd like to just put out there for your discussion. The first is what can we learn from the data? As Rebecca mentioned, we're seeing that pet waste is concentrated in front of some of the housing developments downtown. So how can we perform outreach and education to kind of help with some of that abatement? Is there a way to expand our street scrubber routes so that they're happening more often to address street cleaning and of course identify the funding to make that happen. And then better scheduling of coordination of the litter abatement, as I saw in one of my first slides was, it's all happening in the morning. Can we stagger it to have just a little more impact from our scheduled maintenance and then fill in the data gaps, which we're hoping to do with C-Click Fixed and CRISP. We'd also like to complete the funding analysis. So you saw that web of arrows, we'd like to attach numbers to those arrows so that we can really see how much we are spending in our downtown. And that can help us to inform that conversation around creating a dedicated maintenance funding. And then also informing the staff capacity considerations, especially when it comes to calls for service. And finally, as Rebecca also brought up, better address the human waste removals in the downtown that it kind of requires special tools and expertise around safe removal and in different parts of our downtown, how can we better address that and provide staff with resources to be most effective at that. And then the possibility of creating some sort of contract for sidewalk pressure washing to really be respectful and in compliance with the stormwater best practice management. And then finally, we just wanted to make note that the DTA is exploring a potential beautification program. So there's possibility of partnering for that as well. And with that, we'll turn it over to you for questions. Thanks. Is there any member of the public that has any questions on these items? Okay, I'd like to first bring it back to Councilman for a discussion and any action. I just have a quick question. You're good. Have you, in terms of the slide that had the bench and the photo booth, have you thought about or have you considered, yeah, partnering with the Arts Council potentially to look at some art and ways that we could beautify in that way? Yes, we've talked about with the arts partner Beth Tobi about a couple of ways to kind of engage the Arts Council. One of them, we're looking at trash cans. Is there a way to have a new trash can that would maybe have some art on it? Her feeling is that the Arts Commission is really looking at how to reduce visual clutter and so wanting to really simplify some of the downtown street furniture and that having just a lot of art in places that would be kind of adding to that clutter as opposed to kind of simplifying the look of the downtown. But certainly that's something we could look at. Council Member Matthews. And honestly trash cans tend to get gunk dripping down on them, you don't want that, but good idea. But I think we got a comment month ago or so about the state of the sidewalks on Metro, which were beyond gunky. And they're obviously not ours, but is there a way of engaging them constructively on getting their sidewalks cleaned? Sidewalks. Oh, all along from Pacific over to front, just where people wait and then all the benches just take a look sometime, really bad. So I just bring that up. That's part of the, it's not our responsibility, but it's adjacent. I mean, I think to your point, I think a lot of this is education and outreach with some of our partners about who's responsible for what and really kind of bringing people along with us and recognizing that we're all responsible. And I think I mentioned to some people many, many years ago, Larry Pearson came up with the business owners' rights and responsibilities or something. I bet he's got it in his computer. But anyway, if we can find that, and it was exactly that, we'll do this and we expect you to do that. And that's, I think that's the ethic maybe you're shooting for again. Yes, no? Do you have those in your file? It's the code of conduct, yes, it's on our website. It's on your website. Cool, excellent. Our pay phones, I mean, is there a place in the world for those still? I saw someone using that one in front of Peach today. I think that we, Rebecca and I, during our assessment, I think there's maybe five or six in the downtown. I do see more. More of a drag than anything. Yes, I mean, we would love council support to remove those. So, and then I will just raise the sandwich board issue too. Firstly, that was a topic of discussion. We said we'll do the blade signs, you know, that's our part of the deal. And the placement of those, not a whole lot of businesses do it, but they know they're not supposed to. I think to me that's part of the visual clutter thing. The real estate people are not supposed to do it too. They just do it on weekends, because nobody's enforcing it. Downtown? No, the real estate people all over the town, there's the side, all over town, all over town. That might be it. Well, anyway, I just raised the issue. Okay, do you have any? No, those are my comments. Okay, do you have any, Martine? I was just thinking if we are increasing, density downtown and there's gonna be more residents and they do have pets, we'd be helpful to probably plan for what that could look like in terms of a pet ride or I don't know, some sort of process. Put it in their rental agreements. No, seriously, it's not an infinite number of housing developments downtown in your rental. If you have a pet, responsible, pick up. If there's a possibility for them providing, bag doggie bags at the door, that's not right. Yeah, but it's definitely something to consider as we have more residents coming on. Chris? Yeah, I love the, I think we should preserve at least two of those phone booths because they're already relics. I mean, so why not, you know, I mean, there's kids that haven't seen those before. Seriously. Sorry to point you look. Historical. A few things that I really love, I love the piece of art in front of O'Neill's. My kids have always played on it, people play the drums there, stuff like that, that doesn't, you know, it doesn't show that it's, you know, old or bad or whatever. And it still gets played on by many kids, use it as like a small kids, use it as a slide. The Glow Festival the other night, they left a nice wide opening for people who were just passing by and didn't know what's happening to see it. I really appreciated that. The Green Bike Lane, I really appreciate all the musicians I personally love, even though I don't love them all, the music they play, but the fact that they're there. The stuff that I would look into is the garbage bin behind Surf Rider. Oh my God, it's always up and open. And like, what's going on here? It's grease. Dripping gunk. How do they get, this is years in the making and they never take care of it. And I've never understood it. The old Tampico's sewer, yeah, the catalyst also, the sewer frequently smells at that little place there. And I don't know if they've ever never tried to fix it or I know they've tried to fix it, but it still smells along Pacific Avenue and the alley on the side of the old Tampico's. I always thought it was a tragedy that they made David a chocolate take down all of his beautiful greenery. That was a huge mistake. And also not requiring the metro to have vegetation that lot of theirs is just the eyesore. And maybe something's gonna go on there, maybe not, maybe in a year, maybe in 10 years, but something should be, they should be required to have some green space there. The jump bike rack in front of poor is never used and it's a real, people trip on it all the time and they run into it. It's very poorly placed and there's no bikes there ever. That's really, and bathrooms. I just think we could use some more bathrooms along Pacific with people of access to them. Thank you. I just have one, I'm sorry, I have one additional, because I heard it from somebody that the stairwells, sometimes are there cleaning that happen in some of the stairwells? There is cleaning that happens on a routine basis, but there has been some staffing challenges there. So, yeah, that's something that we've logged as well. I just wanna say that I appreciate you bringing forward this report because it gives a kind of an indication of where we are and where we maybe need to go by working with the downtown associates and all the local businesses. I think one of the things I'd like to see is with those lines of funding sources, how do you have a more coordinated approach so you have a single point? I don't know if it's economic development, but when we think about the parks department, they have different regions and superintendents that's responsible for kind of an overview of that particular area. And it might be a good idea to think about our downtown as really kind of a district within our city that needs some more specialized oversight because with that many different sets of groups that are looking at it, I mean, each one might have their own priority, but when they're missing the bigger picture by seeing how it all fits together, someone forwarded me an article from about 10 years ago that Wallace Bain wrote, and I guess it was 50 years ago in the fall that the Pacific Garden Mall was first proposed. This is like an anniversary and the council made direction about how we landscape and how we do it in a comprehensive way and how we do it. And I think sometimes by knowing what we're doing helps us to kind of have a bigger vision for what we want to see in terms of the street infrastructure, the types of facilities that are there because as we start to add more people down there and more housing, I mean, we want to maintain the best of what we have but also move forward and make the types of improvements that are still going to make it a really desirable destination for people. So I hope we keep this up like we have some regular reportings, not just on the maintenance, but also kind of how we want to see our downtown as it progresses in the future. One thing that came up that I felt is something that we do need to look at is as these assessment districts that Chip mentioned, sometimes when we think about adding new housings, how do we add on like these types of, whether it be not just direction to the leases about how they manage their conduct in the downtown, but maybe how as a new facility, they help fund infrastructure that goes on downtown. We saw down at the end of Pacific Avenue with the Swanson project that we put requirements that they have trash receptacles that went out there, that there would be kind of more street infrastructure that also happened, I think, in the project that's going on up at Upper Pacific and making sure that we're kind of not losing sight of that when there's a development project that maybe is reviewed by economic development to kind of look at that in conjunction maybe with a downtown to see what kind of needs there are so they can be folded into any sort of improvements that we're contemplating in the downtown. But I really appreciate this and hopefully you come back with not just the gaps, but where if we need to fund more, I think this is a priority for us as a city and I think we should be looking at this is a true investment in our downtown and all the businesses down there and not just something that's secondary. It shouldn't be something that's like a, an informational report, it's really something that's a core city service and it's a primary destination for residents and it's also something we want to look at and making sure that we continue to nurture and not neglect. If I could just add, and that's part of what we would like to come back with is part of the identification of the gaps is recommendations for addressing some of those gaps going forward and hopefully streamlining some of the funding sources that we have now that are going towards the overall beautification. Just a couple of quick comments. Thank you. This was a great start. We're all looking now. Thank you for the data. The data too. And just picking up on Chris's comment about the roll-up door. There are a couple others downtown that I did. I mean, you walk by and they just, you know, they're highly functional but those could be steam cleaned every now and then to something like that. What I'd say is we took a tour of all the, what are they called? The trash enclosures. Trash enclosures, yeah, with our sanitation and refuse team. So we're talking about ways that we can sort of enforce the expectations of businesses that use them to maintain them. So we agree and that's something that we're looking at. And then I guess if any of us have bright ideas, we just get in touch with you guys. Please do. Yeah, we would welcome, finally. When is downtown cleanup day? Oh yeah. Well, thank you for asking. We're actually rebranded it. It's downtown beautification day. And it's November 13th in the morning and we'll be doing, Amanda mentioned in the presentation, we're working on a beautification program where we're working to really encourage businesses and business owners to do planters and planter boxes in front of this store and we're recruiting volunteers through our website downtownsandercruise.com to help beautify downtown, clean it up, get it ready for a fun, festive holiday season. So I'm sure I'll see you all there. I look forward to it. Thank you so much again for the opportunity. Thank you. And thank you for the presentation. Thank you. Thank you. I have a couple more items actually, believe it or not. So the item 18, I think we're going to review the meeting calendar. I don't see any changes other than what's listed there. Okay. Any comments on the meeting calendar? And then 19, I think we'll defer to the next meeting. That's like a report out on activities since the last meeting. And if you don't mind, okay. And then at this point, the council will be adjourning to the closed session in the courtyard conference room. And before we do so, are there any other members of the public who would like to speak to the item listed on the closed session agenda? Seeing none, I will adjourn this meeting to the courtyard conference room where the council will go into its closed session regarding a SEIU local 521 negotiations. It's an hour beyond. Yeah, we do have to talk. Hour and a half, David. Well, no.