 Mr. Chair, I believe we're all set and ready to go. All right. Okay. All right, good morning. Welcome to the April 27th, 2021 meeting of the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors. It's nine o'clock in the morning. Would the clerk please call the roll? Mr. Joining, sorry, before I call the roll, I'd like to welcome everyone to the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors 427-21 meeting pursuant to the provisions of the governor executive order N-29-20. This meeting is being held virtually. The county welcomes the public to participate in today's meeting using the Zoom link provided on our website at www.SantaCruiseCountyCA.iqm2.com. Click on today's date and then the agenda and you will find the Zoom link at the top or you may enter it in as you see it on your screen. If you wish to participate by phone, you may do so by dialing 1-669-900-6833. The meeting ID is 840-7832-7816. If you need further assistance logging into today's meeting, please call the clerk of the board's office at 831-454-2323. As always, you may watch the livestream broadcast of today's meeting at SantaCruiseCountyCA.iqm2.com, the county Facebook page, or on community TV's website. And now for the roll. Supervisor. Well, just one moment. You said the phone number for the clerk of the board was 2323, it's listed at 2333. You said 2323? I'm sorry, that is correct, 2323. Thank you, I don't have that corrected. And then for the roll, Supervisor Koenig. Here. Friend. Here. Coonerty. Here. Caput. Here. McPherson. Here. Thank you, Chair, you have a quorum. Thank you. We will now take a moment of silence or have the Pledge of Allegiance. Is there anyone that wants to make any comment before a moment of silence? Seeing none, just have a moment of silence, then we'll have the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. We will go to item number three, consideration of late additions to the agenda, additions and deletions to the consent agenda and regular agenda. Mr. Palacios, do we have any corrections or additions? Yes, thank you, Chair McPherson. We do have a number of corrections. On the regular agenda, item number 10, there's additional materials, revised attachment A, which replaces packet pages 52 and 53. On regular agenda, item number 23, there's additional materials, there's a revised memo, packet page 118. There's also an addenda to the regular agenda, item 6.1, presentation recognizing members of the community who have participated in the volunteer initiative program and the Sheriff's Volunteer Program was outlined in the memorandum of Chair McPherson. There's a board memo printout. On the consent agenda, item 51, there's additional materials, revised attachment A, which replaces packet page 1068. And then item 52, there's additional materials, revised attachment C, which replaces packet pages 1084 and 1094. There's also an addenda to the consent agenda. Item 60.1, this is to direct the Chair to revise a previous request to the California Board of Forestry and Fire Protection to enter into emergency rulemaking to provide temporary relief from special county rules regarding weekend timber operations and hauling of forest products within the CZU Lightning Complex fire area. There's a board memo printout. That concludes the corrections. I'm number four, an announcement by board members of items removed from the consent or to the regular agenda. Anybody want to move an item from consent to the regular agenda? Okay, saying none, we will go to item number five. This is a time any person may address the board what's during the public comment, not exceeding two minutes. Comments must be directed to items that only today's consent or closed session agendas yet to be heard items on the regular agenda or on a topic on not on today's agenda, but within the jurisdiction of the board. We'll take public comments now for 30 minutes. If necessary, additional time for public comment will be allowed after the last item on today's regular agenda. I did want to say that we are trying to contact Graham Knouse, the director of the California State Association of counties. He's with us and he has a previous appointment that he needs to get to. So I wanted to allow him to have a public comment before our Senate Chris County Board of Supervisors. Welcome, Mr. Knouse. Good morning, good morning to you all. Thank you for the opportunity and the flexibility of the board. Really appreciate that. That's the chair indicated on Graham Knouse I'm the executive director of CSAC, the California State Association of counties and we serve as the voice of all of California's 58 counties in Sacramento and also in DC. There's certainly been no more grueling year for all of us than what we have all just gone through and we're almost through it, but not quite there. But I also think there's no greater example of county government of public service really as a calling requiring a timeless commitment to one's community. And so a big thank you to this board for your leadership and perseverance and standing up for your community throughout this past year. Same for your CAO and a particular shout out to Mimi Hall, your director of health services and Dr. Gail Newell, your health officer who have been in the trenches every single day often with us, but certainly with you and your community throughout this pandemic. And so they're heroes throughout this endeavor and certainly appreciate their efforts on behalf of your community. Beyond advocacy, CSAC focuses on education, leadership and policy development through our foundation and through two arms. One, evidence-based criminal justice where Santa Cruz actually was one of our first counties where we're partnering to improve criminal justice in communities. And then our CSAC Bill Shiet Institute for Excellence in County Government, which is really what brings me in front of you today. It's the national model for leadership and policy development. And throughout the past year as transition from an in-person, a very heavy in-person networking model to one with online, that is all online. And it's done that through dexterity and through the vision and grit of Chastity Benson who serves as the director of operations and education programs for the foundation. Really am thankful and appreciative of the incredible dedication of a number of Santa Cruz County employees as leaders who are graduating through our Institute and your leadership program. And so I wanna thank them for their commitment above and beyond in a remarkably challenging year with plates brimming over full and in the face of that investing in themselves and in their community to improve their skills, their leadership, their ability to help navigate and deliver on behalf of your board. And so a huge congratulations to all of them on behalf of all of CSAC and our foundation for a job well done and really appreciate this board's leadership in bringing our Institute to your County. So thank you very much to your graduates and really appreciate the partnership with this board. Thank you very much, Mr. Kanaus and thank you for your leadership in CSAC. I am gonna give full 30 minutes for public comment but I did wanna have that report from CSAC which represents all 58 counties and I am this county's representative on CSAC and I want to let you know that in our three-day legislative conference last week many items were discussed at length but none more that were gained attention than was the expansion of broadband. I think there was at least 20% of our population does not have access to broadband and especially in these times of emergencies that natural disasters that we have is more important than ever. And especially to the rural counties too that they have access to that. That was a huge subject as well as fire or resiliency and with that I wanna say that the issue of the Department of Forestry's review of what needs to be done or what needs to be in place before people can rebuild in some of the rural areas such as ours up in the San Lorenzo Valley or in the Sumkel Mountains. I can tell you that our contingent of Pyle Levine and David Reed of our planning department and David Reed our recovery analyst made a huge impact on the Department of Forestry when they made their presentation a couple of weeks ago. The board of forestry was pretty much online ready to go with it's what it was the plan of attack and kind of a one size fits all but the topography and so forth of all of our counties whether they be rural or suburban urban but especially those rural and suburban ones is different. And what Pyle Levine and David Reed presented to the board of forestry really set them back said, hey, we've gotta go for the review and we are now in a 45 day review period for the board of forestry but I'm very proud of our presentation from Santa Cruz County and why to use that term again that one size doesn't fit all and we're in this recovery from these awful fires that we've experienced in particular in the state of California. I also want to let you know besides broadband fire resiliency and recovery that the issue of homelessness is throughout this state throughout this nation very much concerning of homeless and the whole subject of housing but I don't know, Graham, if you think of that pretty that was those were the highlights of the most seriously discussed items in that CSAC invention and I would like to say for the eighth year in a row CSAC did not increase our dues too. That was good. So, but thank you, Graham, for being here. I don't know if you wanted to have any closing comments before we go back into our public comment period here at Santa Cruz. Just to note that we're thankful for your leadership serving on our board previously on our executive committee and also that of supervisor friend who serves on the NACO board the National Association of Counties and has been very active there. That's been very helpful for elevating the voice of Santa Cruz County in your community. You hit the issues that are right at the top of our priority list and that board of forestry there's an item on I think on your agenda related to that this morning as well. There is now additional public comment opportunity that is critical to get in there to ensure that county voices are heard and we look forward to continuing to have the opportunity to connect with all of you to learn from and advocate on your behalf. And I'm really just thankful for the incredible dedication of the Santa Cruz County employees that have stepped up to pursue additional leadership and earned their Institute credential with us and through your leadership program. Thank you. And I know that your friend would say the same thing about NACO but the input that CSAC has in Sacramento and our state capital it can't be overstated. They are very highly respected and very determined to get their voices heard of all 58 counties in California. So thank you for the whole team at CSAC. I just wanted to take this public time. I thought it was necessary under the circumstances to do so. Thank you and thank everybody at CSAC for what they're doing for us here in Santa Cruz County and throughout the state of California. We'll do, thank you all very much. Thank you. Okay, now we will go to the, which shall we say a regular public comment period. I think you said, we have a two minute limit. We can go for 30 minutes. Do we have anybody that wants to address us under a public comment? Yes, Chair, we have several members of the public that would like to speak. Caller 3256, your microphone is unmuted. Caller 3256, you'll need to dial a star six to unmute your microphone. Hello? There you are. Yes. Hello, good morning. Good morning, I'm a black and I want to bring up the issue of the strange patterns in women's menstruation that's being seen and being reported over the last couple of weeks through major news outlets. It has evolved from the claims that there is no connection whatsoever to the COVID vaccine to now that it's being investigated by several doctors. And in light of this, I'm wondering whether our county here is going to take any sort of a stance on this, perhaps putting a hold on all vaccines until we see what's going on with this. There's also a incident reported on the CDC vaccine adverse event reaction site, reporting site, a story of a five month old baby, breastfeeding mother who had just received the COVID vaccine and the baby died from an unusual clotting disorder due to low platelets, which is also being looked at for some of the vaccines that are being offered now. And so in light that these vaccines are now being given to 16 to 18 year old, I believe that this county should put a hold on all vaccines given COVID until these things are actually figured out. And we should not be experimenting on our children. And in addition to that, I'd like to request that we go back to three minutes for public speakers because it is far too little time in two minutes for the public to be able to communicate with the board. Thank you very much. Caller 1999, your microphone is unmuted. Good morning. My name is James Ewing Whitman. First of all, I appreciate that the agenda items were available to the public last Thursday night. That was great. I'd also like to thank the law enforcement that was very helpful orchestrating events that I've been doing at Twin Lakes Beach every Saturday night for the last 16 weeks. I wanna thank them. I don't have time to read everything that I wrote. The title is, where is the moral compass pointing on this day 04 27 to 21? I find it fascinating that whoever spoke before that is representing leaders in 58 counties in California. I found what was said was interesting. If anybody is familiar with the book, The 48 Rules of Power, I'm really gonna break number one, but I really try to live by most of them, particularly the last one, number 48. So I'm gonna start at the end. Further into the point, there is now vast information that the inoculations that have falsely been called vaccines only because the legal definition changed earlier this year in 2021 are indeed in creating spreading of the DNA from the JNJ and the mRNA from the Price, Pfizer and Moderna. Thousands of women throughout the world have that have not been inoculated are being affected by proximity to those jabbed. So that at what point do community members realize that this BOS and staff are only supporting agenda 21, 2030, the new world order and a Bolshevik style of support for their community members that amounts to genocide and change these paths of genocide. How about a pre 1871 constitutional sheriffs? All counties across the US and abroad elected and governed by all people of all ages, et cetera. So where are we as humanity? This nation and this country, where are this nation, this country heading one? Rothschild's owns PG&E and PG&E owns 90% of the open face street lights where... User one, your microphone is unmuted. This is Marilyn Garrett. I wanna thank the two previous speakers. Yes, we need three minutes back for speaking time. And I also agree we need to put a halt to all vaccines and especially these COVID shots. I wanna quote from an article in the publication wise traditions in food farming and the healing arts, a publication of the Westin A Price Foundation. You can get to it by westinaprice.org under publications. This is called The Contagion Fairy Tale by Thomas Callan M.D. and Sally Fallon Morel. Our book, The Contagion Myth is now available banned on Amazon but sold on other outlets. And it's already generated dozens of comments. Many of them challenging our contention that the coronavirus and quotes does not exist and that the illness attributed to this virus is not contagious. One comment even referred to our book as The Fairy Tale. Unlike most corona virus skeptics, we are not arguing that the illness is just a bad case of the flu with deaths due solely to pre-existing conditions or inappropriate hospital care. Rather, we postulate that the illness can be very serious and the likely cause is radiation poisoning, probably from the worldwide deployment of 5G, which is in our county as well. That's my comment, starting in Wuhan, China and followed by major cities. Carol, your microphone is unmuted. I wanna support and agree with the previous three callers and especially emphasize what Marilyn just said. You guys really need to take a moment to look at Dr. Thomas Callan and what he has to say about whether viruses actually cause disease because it's not been proven. Since June of 2020, there have been repeated requests by the people of this county for the board to remove the local health orders. And there's been ample information provided to the board which demonstrates not only the ineffectiveness of the local health orders, but also the harm that's been caused by the local health orders. And repeatedly, the answer from the board and the local health officer has been that they have to do this because of the governor's orders. Their hands are tied, there's no critical thinking, no one is acting on the behalf of the people of this county. So yesterday, the California Secretary of State verified enough signatures to trigger an election for the removal of Gavin Newsom as governor. Since you all have been relying on the governor's orders as a reason for upholding these local health orders, now's the time to remove the local health orders. That reason is being removed right from under your feet. Gavin Newsom will likely be recalled and replaced very shortly. I highly encourage you, either today or your next board meeting, put it on the agenda to remove the local health orders immediately. We need to reopen our schools, we need to reopen our businesses, we need to reopen our churches. We've been at this for one year and two months. There is no emergency, an emergency doesn't last one year and two months. An emergency is quick and it's over. The California Emergency Services Act requires that when the emergency is over, all orders are immediately over. There is no phased in approach to reopening anything. Caller 2915, your microphone is available. Good morning, this is Becky Steinbruner from Burrow Aptos. Consent agenda item 58, I wanna point out to your board that the fire department, fire marshal opposes the implementation of two new speed bumps on Clubhouse Drive. He opposes that the fire department position letter is not included in your packet. Consent agenda item 59 regarding the approval of the new Parade Street crossing with Swenson developer for the Aptos Village Project makes no mention at all in any of your documentation that it includes the tandem closure of the historic Bayview Hotel crossing. That crossing must be maintained open as per the language of the 1876 deed signed by hotel owner Jose Arano and states that if that crossing is closed or obstructed, the hotel owner has the right in perpetuity, in perpetuity to block the railroad crossing with a fence and she can do that. Ms. Locke, the hotel owner receive no notification of your action this morning, buried in the consent agenda nor did she receive any notification of the RTCs approval of it on April Fool's Day, some joke. I am concerned to see in the Parade Street agreement that section four, it says the county shall bear the entire cost and expense incurred in connection with the design, construction, maintenance, repair and renewal and any and all modification, revision, relocation, removal or reconstruction of the improvements. How can you state in your documents that the Swenson developer will be liable for all improvements when it states right here in the agreement that the county is? Vincent Vega, your microphone is unmuted. Hello and good morning, Board of Supervisors. My name is Vicente Vega, I'm an organizer with SEIU Local 2015. We represent long-term caregivers here in California. We have some providers on today's call and we are here asking you for your support as we negotiate for a new contract for home care workers. Throughout this pandemic, HSS providers have been caring for our most vulnerable populations here in Santa Cruz County, ensuring that people are able to stay safe and healthy in their own homes. HSS workers really have one of the most demanding jobs out there. I can't tell you how many times providers have told me they put in more hours and they are authorized or how many times workers have told me about having finished their day only to receive a call from their client at the end of it, asking if they could go back to help them out. And so many providers do go back to help because a lot of times that provider is the only person that a client may have who they trust and who they know will be there for them. Mentally, physically and emotionally, workers are there for their clients. And so now is the time to take care of our workers. It's time to prioritize home care, time to prioritize HSS providers. And you can do that by supporting us in this contract fight. I want to let you all know that we do have a few Spanish speakers who are on another call with an interpreter. And our interpreter is actually on this Zoom. So you will be hearing, I'm sure she has her hand raised, her name is Mary Hernandez. So just so you know, when Mary Hernandez is speaking, there's actually a few providers who are there with her as well. So yeah, we're just here asking for your support during this contract fight. Thank you so much for your time. Kit, your microphone is unmuted. Hi, my name's Kit Sherman and I'm an IHS care provider. And I'm here to just ask for your support in the contract negotiations for us in the county that are care providers. And that's it really. I just, the Sente, the previous caller really did a good job of explaining our challenges as far as our jobs. We do have a lot of hours that we work that are unpaid and it's just challenging to keep housing in Santa Cruz. For instance, my household, we require four full-time jobs to keep the house, to keep the roof over our heads. So and a new contract would be great to get us closer to a living wage. Thank you. So I'm going to start with Ms. Sonia Jimenez. Good morning, my name is Sonia Jimenez and I work in IHSS program. And we are asking for your support during these bargainings for our contract negotiations. So I'm going to start with Ms. Sonia Jimenez. Ms. Sonia Jimenez, I work in IHSS program and we are asking for your support during these bargainings for our contract negotiations. Because I believe that as essential workers, we deserve a good salary, especially because we contribute to our home. And aside from that, I do apologize. Someone did hang up the phone line. I have been disconnected on my behalf on my call line. I apologize from the union. Okay, would you like to go to the next caller or the next speaker, Ms. Hernandez? I do apologize, Ms. Secretary and Chair. The whole call was, it hung up, I apologize for that. I will attempt to raise my hand once again once I get connected, if that's okay with the board. So I'll go to Abigail Nieves. Hi, my name is Abigail Nieves. I'm actually here more to translate for our representatives for COPA on the housing issue. If they could call on other people, I'll just be translating. Great, thank you. Nancy Smith, your microphone is unmuted. Hi, my name is Nancy Smith and I have been an in-home support services caregiver for the past six years. And since I began, there has never been enough providers to help my client. Throughout COVID, my coworkers and I work even having symptoms because we know that no one else is gonna be able to ensure her safety. This job makes me wonder how much is worth sacrificing. This year, a state auditor named Elaine Howell reported that 63% of California is experiencing an IHSS caregiver shortage. And these workers are paid an unlivable wage, which makes recruitment very difficult. IHSS is an important program because in fact, every year, it will save MediCal from spending $22 to $153,000 for each disabled client who would have otherwise been forced into convalescent homes. I urge you to make a new contract with the SCI Union and increase wages for IHSS caregivers. It is not only financially responsible to spend the state's budget this way, but it will also ensure that the disabled community can live in their comfort of their homes and our essential workers are compensated fairly. Thank you. Isabel Velasco, she dropped off. Elizabeth Munoz, your microphone is unmuted. Yes, good morning. My name is Isabel Velasco, I'm a member of Holy Cross and leader of COPA. And here with the group from COPA, our coordinator is Barbara Meister. She was supposed to go with for me. There's a group of about five of us. Should I just continue my, I'm the last person to speak as far as my presentation. I'd like to stop now with the permission of the council and maybe you can call on Barbara Meister, please. Thank you. Barbara Meister, your microphone is unmuted. Thank you, good morning. I'm Barbara Meister, a volunteer leader with COPA and Holy Cross, I live in Santa Cruz. I'm taking time away from my job at the aquarium to share a deep concern. We're on the verge of another wave of homelessness unless we take action to fix the problems of SB 91, the rental assistance program. COPA leaders are here to share some of the struggles and barriers. And as you know, we met with you last summer to advocate for the $1.1 million in CARES Act funds for rental assistance. We did hundreds of workshops, helping people to apply, learn their rights. And we hit all kinds of barriers, lack of digital skills, language barriers, ineligibility for those who lack formal leases, landlords unwilling to cooperate with applications. In January, when we received news of the $16 million coming down from the federal government to the county, we met with county staff, shared our concerns about barriers, gave recommendations on how to do this differently. But the staff determined they didn't have the capacity to administer the funds locally. So we're reliant on the state. We agreed kind of reluctantly, but now we're experiencing all our worst fears of digital barriers again. And the worst part is we were promised to receive, we locally funds for staff assistance to go to a local partner network. Only $106,000 was granted to them. That's barely to staff people. And we know somewhere between six and 12,000 households are behind in their rent and utilities and the state programs full of errors and barriers and it's a digital application. We need staff assistance to be paid to help people with the applications. We have yet to see any checks written on this program. The moratorium on evictions lifts at the end of June. So as Isabelle said, she's got some specific proposals we'd like to present to you. And we most importantly would like time to sit down with each of you over the next week or two to figure this out together. We've got families who sheltered in place. They stayed home to teach their kids. And Elizabeth Munoz, your microphone is unmuted. And Buenos Dias, Abby Nieves va a traducir para mí. Okay, Abby Nieves, your microphone is available. All right, thank you so much. Adelante, Elizabeth. Okay, in 2019, experimenté homelessness por nueve meses. El sistema en Santa Cruz no le da prioridad a las familias con niños. Entonces tuvimos que dormir por nueve meses en nuestro carro con nuestras niñas y yo embarazada. Con esto, cuando llegó la pandemia y nosotros pudimos agarrar una casa para vivir, nuestro miedo volvió a creasentarse de quedarnos sin casa, sin hogar. Y el estrés de haber gastado todos nuestros ahorros para poder estar en una casa, para poder pagar el depósito y todo eso. Cuando estuvimos pasando mucha necesidad para pagar la renta, conocimos de Community Action Board que fue dirigido por, o referido para nosotros por Copa. Y entonces ahorita con SB91, es muy difícil poder accesar lugares como Community Action Board para que nos ayuden a aplicar nuevamente para la asistencia con la renta y no experimentar vivir en la calle nuevamente. Es nuestro mayor miedo, eso nos causó ansiedad y depresión. Okay, if it's okay with everyone, I could translate the story now. Yes, please. I might say that we value the presentations in Spanish because we do have some Spanish speaking members of our society that have this, but I think that if that subject that has just been addressed has been before, if it's being addressed in Spanish, we will just have the person who presented that in Spanish make that presentation. I'm not repeated again in English because we have a time factor here, as we've stated. So I'll let you repeat what she said, but if somebody presents something in Spanish, we will let that happen and then go on unless it's an entirely different subject. Well, we have, I think five or four more other presenters and most of them will be presenting in Spanish. Okay, well, as I said, we've got 30 minutes and 30 minutes for public comment. It's just about up and you'd have to wait till after the end of the meeting or at the end of the meeting. So I can do with the wish. We just, it's repetitive and we appreciate that, but we need to do the business of the day too as scheduled. So you can go ahead and repeat what she wants or if you'd rather have somebody else speak Spanish to let their feelings be known on the same subject, we will let one or two speakers go ahead and then we'll move on to item number six, the consent agenda. I think it's more important for our stories to be heard. So I could let our next presenter, if you want, it could be Ricardo. Thank you. We'll have two more speakers then, that's good, thank you. Before we get into going on to item number six on the consent agenda. Thank you, that will leave Sarah Spaulding, your microphone is unmuted for my comments. My name is Sarah Spaulding and I am an IHS care provider in Santa Cruz County. And as you know, we are in negotiations of our contract and we, several of us have had the opportunity to talk to you all this year. And we hope that you will give your support for our contract. And I know the last time we talked to the Board of Supervisors, there was the question of the federal COVID aid that we had hoped was coming. And as we know, Santa Cruz County received the 53 million in federal funds. And I want to thank Zac Friend for putting that information in the octopus times this past month. And I know that he had written in what was being considered to use as the fund. And we know that Santa Cruz County isn't in a deficit still, even with the funds, but caregiving is very important to this County. And it helps so many people all live in their homes and protected and loved. So please consider our needs for our contract. Thank you so much. Margaret, your microphone is unmuted. Okay, unfortunately Margaret is using an older version of Zoom and we're unable to unmute her. I'll need to promote you to panelists. If you can please hold on, Margaret. You should have access to your microphone, Margaret. It looks like the version of Zoom they are using does not have a microphone feature. So the next caller will be interpreter Mary Hernandez. And as a reminder for callers, speakers are allowed to speak once during the consent item. This covers items on the consent calendar. I apologize during public comment and other items on the agenda. Thank you for allowing me once again. I have three speakers on the line and we will start with Ms. Norma. Good morning, my name is Norma Valencia. I'm a provider. I take care of my mother and my son. The work that I do is with IHSS and it's a very hard work and not well paid. We are having to expose ourselves to illnesses and verbal mistreatment and we would want for you to please support us with our wage and this work, there's better paid work than what we do. It's a very heavy job and we need your support so that you can increase our salaries. Please, Senora Palmiere. Good morning, my name is Valpere Salazar. I am a provider for IHSS for this program and I work with my son. In various occasions, I've tried to look for a different job aside from me taking care of my son and I've been rejected because they need a person that has full-time availability to do work for others and I have been rejected many times for work because I let them know that I have a special needs child and I have different appointments various times a week and they say, no, no, you can't work because we need someone of full-time so that they can do the work that you are doing. And so I feel very sad. I feel bad because I've been rejected to work and I have four children and well, my four children are teenagers and I have to help them study and I don't know how I'm gonna do it. Who do I support from all my children? I love all my four children and so I would love for you to support this program and to give us the opportunity to have a new contract and then you help us and just touch your hearts a bit where parents, where doctors, where nurses, where everything and we sacrifice daily for our children. Thank you. Senora Sonia. Yes, good morning. My name is Sonia Jimenez and I work with the program IHSS and we ask for your support in these bargaining of our contract as an essential worker. I believe that we deserve a good wage. And thankfully to our dedication and I support each one of our families and for our consumers, they can go out to work without having to worry about their family member or their son or their mother or daughter. And we would just ask for a justified wage and to keep going forward because aside from all of this, we're human beings and we have other needs and well, I as an essential worker, I'm proud of the work that I do. I like to help people and well, we would like to be recognized so that we can get better pay and I'd like to thank you for this meeting and for the time and may you have a wonderful rest of your day. Okay, Siguiente Orador. Thank you, board. I believe that is it. Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak. Okay, we will now, we're going to move to, if there was anybody that wants to speak after we complete our agenda, the remainder of our agenda, you're certainly allowed to do so later. We will now move to item number six, action on the consent items 16 through 60. Any comments, Mr. Coney, to the vice-president Coney. Thank you, chair. I'd like to start by commenting on item 23 and thank the cannabis licensing office for this great report. It's nice to see that the pre-app work is working so efficiently and that 15 of the licenses have issued and five pending are their direct results of code modifications. So I want to thank, again, thank my colleagues for that good work. Of course, the work on cannabis related policy is not done, but I think we've made some great strides forward. On item 25, the request to advertise for bids for a new pool boiler at Simkin Swim Center. Glad to see this moving forward that the Simkin Swim Center is really a gem of our parks department and at the heart of the Live Oak community. So I look forward to improving the facilities there. On item 26, the community television appropriation of $600,000. I think community television has done a really fantastic job broadcasting this meeting that we're currently at, as well as many other meetings like the Regional Transportation Commission and the Metro Board. And actually, if anything, I'd really love to see their services expand into some of the other County commissions. Right now, I know a lot of people have had trouble, for example, signing on and commenting on the Planning Commission, for example, this has led to a lot of confusion for the called the weirdest Zoom experience that anyone has had yet. And so it would be great to continue to standardize the way that our County public meetings for all commissions are presented. And I really think the community television is the best operator for that going forward. So I hope they'll continue to expand their services. Thank you. For item 43 on the Chanticleer Park and going out for an additional $3 million grant to help buy additional parcel and expand that park. I don't think, well, I think that we would all agree that that park is a fantastic asset for the community. It's great that we've completed phase one or going to phase two. I will be supporting this, but I do have some concerns. This is the second park expansion proposal I've seen in my short time on the board. Meanwhile, having walked some of the parks with concerned neighbors, there's a long list of deferred maintenance. And so I think we need to be careful about going out for free money that then will expand our operating budget beyond our real capacity. So I really like to see a focus on maintaining the assets we have rather than expansion beyond what we can support going forward. On item 44, the request for qualifications for pre-approved ADU plans. I want to thank the planning department for their great work on this. I'm really excited to see it moving forward. And I think that the language that's been added to create a process to pre-approve prefabricated units and create a process for the makers of those units to be able to apply to the planning department for pre-approval is really a great extension of the direction that the board gave the planning department. So thank you. Thank you. One more comment on item 52, moving forward with the Soquel Drive project. You know, I can't overstate how exciting it is to see this, the buffered and protected bike lane project on Soquel Drive moving forward and all the projects there to improve traffic flow. Those bike lanes on Soquel Drive were often noted as the second most desired bike project in the county, second only to the rail trail. And so it's really excited to see, it's really exciting to see that moving forward. And it's going to dramatically improve our community. That's all, thank you. Thank you. Second District Supervisors Act Friend. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'll begin briefly with just a recusal before speaking on the other items. On item 59, I need to recuse. It is a rail related item. My home is within 500 feet of the rail corridor. So I have a personal financial interest potential conflict there. So I'll be recusing from voting on item 59. On some of the other items, as my colleague had mentioned on item 23, I appreciate Mr. Laforte's report. We're about one year in or so on the cannabis cultivation ordinance. And I do believe that we've, now that we've had about a year to look at it, we have seen some impacts that I think need to be addressed in an update of the ordinance on noticing and review on some of the densities on impacts on some of the neighboring ag parcels on some other issues that we've definitely seen, especially in the correlated area. I think it's worthy of this board now that we've had a year's worth of opportunity to see how the cultivation ordinance is doing to actually now take a look at at some modifications to it. On item 32, which is the new Poprow Flood Authority, I'd like to thank Mr. Strudley in Public Works for his leadership on this, looking forward to joining with Supervisor Caput on this authority. And I appreciate Supervisor Coonerty being willing to serve as an alternate on this. This is a very exciting time as we move forward toward the construction phase. It's really a generational shift that'll occur down there once we can get this bill. On item 52 and item 60, which are both improvements on the greater SoCal corridor. I appreciate the work that we did with the California Transportation Commission for the largest infusion of funds that this County seen for transportation on the congested corridor grant. And item 60, Supervisor Coonerty and I worked with the Air Board to ensure that there would be this funding for, while it's not in our district, it's in Supervisor Koenig's district. This signal adaptation project is absolutely essential for traffic flow between either North and South or East and West, depending on how you look at it within our County. It's a very exciting project and these things don't always get noticed, but it takes a lot of work behind the scenes to secure this funding, especially from regional state agencies. And we're looking forward to seeing that done. On item 58, on the clubhouse speed tables, the neighborhood had come together and met all the requirements for this. The local school district supports it. We also have some other school safety improvements in that area. There are no sidewalks, for example, and we're doing some significant improvements thanks to the leadership of Steve Wiesner and Public Works to improve safety in that entire area for students going to Realtomar Elementary. So I appreciate the work of both the neighborhood and Public Works. And that is it, Mr. Chair. Thank you for the opportunity to comment. Thank you. Third District Supervisor, Ryan Coonerty. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Just a couple items to talk about today and maybe add additional direction. The first item is item number 23. As it was mentioned, I'd like to thank the work of the Cannabis Licensing Office for increasing the permitting. And now we're seeing some of those benefits accrue to our County. Item number 44, which is the pre-approval of ADU designs. I want to add additional direction that we also include factory-built ADUs, that those were not, that we work to get those also pre-approved so that people who are exploring that option can work hopefully quickly through our system to get their ADU put on their property. And item number 59, which is the Aptos Village Crossing, I'm supporting the item and I don't want to pull it. I just want to, I do want to confirm with our Public Works Director, Matt Machado, that there is funding and mitigations in there for the potential impacts that are going to be created in Davenport through this agreement. Very good. Fourth District Supervisor, Rick Caput. You're on mute, Greg. All right. You're on mute. Okay, thanks Bruce. Yeah, I'll just make a quick comment on item number 30. I'm very pleased to see Congressman Panetta putting forth a asking for money to protect the monarch butterflies on their thousands of miles of journey that starts somewhere up in Canada and the northern states of the United States. And one of the stopping areas on their thousands of miles of travel is the Central Coast. And I believe there's a section, I'm not sure who's Supervisorial area it's in, but you can see them every winter. Is that in Supervisor Coonerty's area? Yes, sir. Yeah, and I have seen in person the ending of one of the ending sites in Mexico which is Ciudad de Hidalgo. And 50 years ago, they were telling me that they would shoot pesticides and different things down there because they thought that the butterflies, the way that they were hanging thousands of them on the trees, they thought they were like a pest. And then they realized that a lot of people had an interest in seeing them and that they actually are protected down there now. And it's actually a tourist site for the last 50 years. And it's a beautiful site to see. Literally thousands are more down there when they are finishing their flight. Anyway, I'm glad to see that. Hopefully we can help out Congressman Panetta on his project here. And then item 52, I wanna thank Matt Pashado for his help on this. And we're looking forward to easing some of the traffic on Highway 1 from Watsonville to Santa Cruz. Thank you. Okay, I have a couple of comments. On item number 24, regarding the tourism marketing district, I wanna thank the Visit Santa Cruz County for its leadership in this past year. This pandemic has created a monster for all of us, but the challenges for the lodging and hospitality industry has been as significant as anywhere else. A lot to manage in terms of both changing the state health guidance about traveling and reopening, as well as the COVID protocols. We have a wonderful, very successful tourism industry under the leadership of CEO Maggie Ivy in our county. And they play a huge part in generating sales and lodging taxes to funds of critical county services. So I wanna thank them for their efforts this last year. It's been trying for all of us, but especially the tourism and marketing and restaurant industries. On 44, which has been mentioned about the ADUs, the pre-check plans, I believe are going to help a fire victims recover quickly and encourage residents to build more affordable by design housing that we critically need. And I accept the additional direction by Supervisor Coonerty. On item number 45, which has been mentioned, the resurfacing project, storms of the past, both dating back five years. We have a huge amount of work to do. We all hear a lot of complaints, but I wanna again thank the Public Works Department doing so much with what they have. This year meant that many roads in my area felt in particular were resurfaced. I know that that would happen throughout the county. And I wanted, it's another reminder of the importance of the Voters Passing Measure D in 2016, I wanna thank them again because we're able to do a lot more work. There's a lot more work to do, but without that passage of that measure in 2016, we wouldn't be able to be half the distance where we are today. Item 47 is the Public Works Department again, should be thanked for initiating these repairs on hazardous tree removal so quickly, due to the fire threat of damage and dead trees falling on the roadway in particular. I understand that we're going to be seeking some FEMA reimbursement for a good portion of these costs, but I just want the public to be aware there'll be a local match that is not gonna be reimbursable and it's gonna be amount to at least probably two or three million dollars. So it's important to note that in addition to the staff time involved in responding there are other hard costs being borne by the county alone to make these repairs and clean up after the fire. But thank you for your dedicated efforts in that regard. Public Works Director Matt Machado and all your full department and team. And items 52 and six, there has been some mention of that. Both of these are transportation projects that's gonna be more feasible that will provide more feasible opportunities for people to ride the bus and walk and bike that hopefully will relieve some of the congestion on Highway 1. Those are very important aspects and they were included in Measure D, which I mentioned earlier, all modes of transportation and improving our transit district service is the best way we can help working people in particular and get to their destination in a reasonable amount of time. I believe the proposed bus on shoulder project along Highway 1 is especially important for commuters traveling from south to north and north to south. Which depends on which part of the day. So with that, I just wanted to mention those items and I will accept a motion to approve the consent agenda with the addendum that Mr. Supervisor Pernoudi made. Mr. Chair, thank you. I just wanted to, I was gonna have Director Machado just confirm my question before I make a motion here. Okay, fine. Mr. Machado. I'm promoting him to panelists now. I should be rejoining shortly. Thank you, good morning. Yes, Supervisor Coonerty, let me answer your question. So it is correct that Davenport mitigation and improvements will occur before the Parade Street crossing is open. So yes, you are correct and I'll just confirm that. Yes. Thank you and the developer is gonna be paying for those mitigations. That is correct. Yes, sir. Okay. Thank you. Thank you for confirming that. I'd like to move the recommended actions with the additional direction. Second. Second, Supervisor Koenig, please call the roll. Okay, thank you, Chair. And if we could please call two separate votes so we can recuse Supervisor Friend from item 59. So we'll do a vote for items 16 through 60.1 with the exception of 59. Supervisor Koenig. Hi. Friend. Hi. Coonerty. Hi. Caput. Hi. McPherson. Hi. Thank you and now for item 59. And for the record, please note the Supervisor Friend has recused himself from the vote. Supervisor Koenig. Hi. Coonerty. Hi. Caput. Hi. McPherson. Hi. Thank you, motion passes. Thank you. We will now move to item, additional item 6.1, the Volunteer Recognitions Awards. Mr. Colascio, so I'd like to have you take some introductory remarks. Thank you, Chair McPherson and members of the Board. The Volunteer Initiative Program is a partnership between the Volunteer Center of Santa Cruz and Santa Cruz County, matching the interested community members with volunteer opportunities throughout county government. The county is extremely fortunate to have such a dedicated group of volunteers supporting our efforts. We are happy to welcome Volunteer Executive Director Karen Delaney and Sheriff Jim Hart, both of whom will be making brief remarks. Also with us today is Donna Patters, the VIP coordinator. I will now turn it over to Karen Delaney and Sheriff Jim Hart. Good morning. I am super excited to be with you to celebrate Global Volunteer Month and our wonderful partnership with the county. It has been a couple of years since we've been able to get together and we felt particularly driven, even though it's a much smaller celebration than normal to be here with you this morning, because the way, as our community faced these challenges, the way that volunteers showed up through the VIP program and showed up for the county through our disaster response was breathtaking, nothing short of breathtaking. You're gonna hear a little bit from Donna and our staff about some of the ways, but from the moment that the pandemic started, the partnership with your county, the CAO's office, the emergency services department, health services, human services. Since we last got together, not all through the VIP, but since we last got together two years ago, close to 15,000 local residents stepped up to help in one of our COVID fire or now mass vaccination activities, which is pretty astonishing. You're gonna get to hear some pretty amazing stories of VIP volunteers that I know will inspire you. Why I think it's really important that we take this time to celebrate not just these great volunteers who totally deserve it and inspire us, but since we got together last time too, there's been some pretty big changes and some soul searching around civic infrastructure and the way we come together in communities. And I think that this is a really great opportunity for us in honoring volunteers to remember that there's about a third of the volunteers, about a third of the people in Santa Cruz County volunteer regularly. Our engagement rate is higher than the California state average. And it's because together over the years, we've worked really hard to create a civic space that people love. These volunteers out there, they're the folks who quietly and skillfully not only work hard, but they repair the tears in our social fabric. They show up with positivity. They put their time into putting good into the world. They're not spending their time putting negative memes out and rants on our comment pages. They are out there every day telling a positive story, building this community in the spirit of true democracy that has built our nation. And so it's really important for us to take the time to thank them, to call them out. I would, before I turn it over to Sheriff Hart and then we hear from our staff and you tell us about these great volunteers, I would encourage all of you on the board and all of my fellow community leaders on your staff to join us at the Volunteer Center in being the change this year that we wanna see in restoring our civil space. And it's simple. Yes, we are thanking these volunteers, but every one of you that are on this panel, every one of your staff members all year long, you have a mic in front of you. You have infinite opportunities to just take 60 seconds everywhere you are and say, hey, who's a volunteer here? Raise your hand, let's all take a minute and thank them for every day making this community better. That the more that we find ways to thank volunteers to tell their story, to show the truth that there are infinite positive solutions for folks, that's how we restore civic infrastructure. That's how we restore civility by just recognizing and thanking those quiet people who have always been there doing that. So with that, I wanna thank you. I wanna thank the volunteers who know how to be the change every day. I want to thank you and your staff, your partnership. And I wanna also thank the Sheriff before he starts talking, the Sheriff's Volunteer Program, I think 20 years now has been just a really great example of how you can use the tools at your disposal to create a space where the community feels welcome and valued. So happy Global Volunteer Month everyone and we are delighted to be a service. Thank you, Sheriff Hart. Good morning, Chair. Good morning, Board of Supervisors. Thank you, Karen. Our volunteer program, as Karen says, we have about 120 people, community members that come in and they staff our substations, they work in our corners unit, our missing persons unit. One of the most important things that they do is they staff our search and rescue teams and our search and rescue team is our most used special team that we have. We staff it with some sworn staff but a majority of the people that are out doing the work are volunteers and they do some incredible things. They're available 24 hours a day. Usually this happens to be when it's the worst weather possible, the coldest night and they come out and they get the job done. And this has been a strange year. We've had to close a couple substations because of COVID and some of our volunteers are at a age where it's not safe for them to be in those facilities. And we're really looking forward to the time when we can welcome all of our volunteers back and get those substations open and get those folks back to working because they really do bring a lot to the Sheriff's Office. They bring a lot of experience, a lot of wisdom and they're just wonderful people to have around. So I've been with the office for 33 years. For over 20 years, we've had volunteers working here and they really add something special to the Sheriff's Office. So I want to thank Karen, I want to thank our volunteer program coordinator, Claudia Yamas-Padilla for the work that she does. And I want to thank all the volunteers in our community who really bring something special to our County. But thank you very much and have a great day. Thank you. I've introduced Donna Patters now. I think as much to speak, she is the volunteer initiative program coordinator. Donna, welcome. And thank you for those nice comments, Karen. Thank you. It can't be overstated. And Jim, thank you. Donna, she, you're on. Okay. Okay. Yeah, I'm having some internet connectivity issue. So I apologize for that. My name is Donna Patters and I have served as the volunteer initiative program coordinator for several years for the County. I would like to take this opportunity to introduce our new volunteer initiative program coordinator. Her name is Malia Yamashita. And I have worked with her for the past several months training her. She is amazing. And I have all the confidence in the world that this program will continue to thrive with her at the helm. So I'm super excited about that. Just a little background. 2020 was such a challenge for the volunteer initiative program and for all of us. This program continued to meet the volunteer needs of our community during all of the changes that we faced in 2020. While asking our volunteers to shelter in place, we adapted and we created remote volunteer opportunities. And then soon we were asked to place our volunteers as COVID screeners, contact tracers and phone center operators. Then we helped with the CZU lightning fire evacuations, resource recovery center, food distribution, temporary homeless shelters. And now we are helping with the mass vaccination clinics. Our volunteers are truly amazing people and I'm so blessed to be able to work with them. The volunteers that we will honor today and this is what's kind of cool about our community. The volunteers we will honor today represent not only the volunteer initiative program but the medical reserve core. And we also did work with CERT volunteers during this entire time. And it was as though we were one unit and that's what was really special about this community. As you recognize our award recipients this morning, I will read the name of the honoree and a member of the board will give us a brief overview of the honorees of volunteer service. Our first honoree is Nabila Arikat. Supervisor Koenig, we'll read the remarks. It will be as muted, there you go. Let's see, monitor your. There we go, thanks, yep. Thank you, Ms. Paters. Nabila Arikat is a VIP volunteer with the Homeless Persons Health Project. She's been volunteering for just over a year, coming in at least once a week. But when the pandemic started, she increased her volunteer time at HPHP. Nabila helped with the evacuation of the Pogonept area during the wildfires and provided outreach through joining the street medicine teams. She is currently the lead volunteer at our vaccine clinic on Thursdays and works with new volunteers, training them to be greeters, COVID screeners, and traffic controllers. Nabila is an important part of the VIP team, and we are lucky to have volunteers like her. Our next honoree is John Meisel. Supervisor Friend will read the remarks. Thank you, and first let me just acknowledge Ms. Delaney for your continued leadership, steadfast leadership on this, especially in the last year. I know that you and I've had a number of conversations about the remarkable work that your organization has done, and the volunteers have done over the last year, and as Donna said, it was a year unlike any other, but it was pretty remarkable then to see how many people stepped up and under your leadership. It's not surprising, I just wanted to acknowledge you. So for John Meisel, he has served as a volunteer with the Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Office search and rescue team since 2014. And he responds to search and rescue call-outs, regardless of the time of day or night as Sheriff Hart was noting. He was an absolutely integral part of the CZU fire response and worked with sheriff's deputies and the search and rescue team to create the evacuation plans that were implemented in the San Lorenzo Valley and Scotts Valley communities. This next part is very powerful. Additionally, John participated in searching for and locating an elderly missing person in a very remote area of the forest within the CZU Lightning Complex fire evacuation zone. So John, obviously we owe you a great debt of gratitude, but you're also a crucial member of the search and rescue team and we thank you for your dedication to our wonderful community. Donna? Our next honorees, we have a husband and wife team and the next honorees are Nancy Newby and Brian Gustafson. Supervisor Coonerty, we'll read through your remarks. Thank you so much. And I don't think any of us are ever gonna forget the way the volunteers poured out to help the victims of fire, even though it's the midst of pandemic. And then when we've had these volunteers providing really essential services on everything from vaccines and testing to basic services to people when they need it the most, it's been an extraordinary year to see our community rise up and help each other. So today I'm here to talk about Nancy Newby and Brian Gustafson. They're dedicated volunteers at the Santa Cruz County Animal Shelter. This husband and wife team assisted staff during COVID-19 pandemic by setting up pet food pantry to provide free pet food for those who couldn't afford it. They hosted the pet food pantry and even picked up and delivered pet supplies and food to those in need. During the CZU Lightning Complex fire and its immediate aftermath, the Santa Cruz County Animal Shelter cared for over 500 evacuated animals. Although Nancy and Brian were evacuated from their own home in the Santa Cruz Mountains, that did not stop them from volunteering. Despite being displaced, they're at the shelter volunteering 10 plus hours a day for 13 days straight. Nancy and Brian cared for the evacuated dogs, helped organize donated supplies and provided great support to shelter staff during this difficult time. Additionally, Nancy runs the shelters Instagram account and has grown the department social media presence which has helped shelter connect with the community and promote their mission. Nancy and Brian regularly take the dogs out on spot, shelter pets on the town, trips where they both train and mentor new volunteers through the volunteer program. Nancy serves as a board member for the Santa Cruz County Animal Shelter Foundation Board and has organized fundraising events that have raised thousands of dollars for the shelter. Nancy Newby and Brian Gustafson are dedicated volunteers and the Santa Cruz County Animal Shelter. We thank them for their hard work and commitment to our community. Our next honoree is Mike Conant, Supervisor Caput, we'll read remarks. Thank you. Mike Conant is a retired seniors volunteer, program volunteer. He assisted during the CSU lightning complex fires with evacuations. He volunteered every day at the fire evacuation shelters and later became a volunteer liaison. As a liaison, Mike trained new volunteers at the temporary homeless shelter with his patients and detail oriented nature. He helped make the shelters a welcoming and organized during a time of uncertainty and chaos. I think we all saw that during the fire season and I was amazed at the evacuation sites, how the volunteers had food areas and handing out clothing. They were setting up sites. They were taking care of pets, making sure everything was organized. It was very chaotic. Mike has been a wonderful volunteer for our community and we thank him for all of his hard work over the past year. Thanks a lot, Mike. Our next honoree is Eugene Leinman, Supervisor Conant, we'll read the remarks. Thanks Donna. Eugene Leinman is a dedicated volunteer at the Parks and Recreation Department. In March of 2020, Eugene was working for the Parks Department as a part time Parks Service Officer, but his assigned duties ceased due to COVID-19 restrictions. However, he was determined to continue helping his community as a VIP volunteer, and over the past year, provided immense support to Santa Cruz County residents. Eugene volunteered over 40 hours a week doing a wide variety of tasks, such as driving shelter-in-place hotel residents to doctor's appointments, picking up their medications, and transporting them to other essential appointments. He also delivered food to shelters and to unhoused individuals living on the streets. We would like to thank Eugene for his commitment to the community and looking after the needs of others during the pandemic. Our next honorees are a group of volunteers called the Quail Hollow Trail Crew. These people are so dear to my heart. I board my horse at Quail Hollow Ranch, so I have an opportunity to talk to them, so I was so grateful to see that they were nominated. Anyway, Supervisor McPherson will read the remarks. Yeah, it's personal, doesn't it? It does. The Quail Hollow Trail Crew volunteers through the Parks Department at Quail Hollow Ranch regularly maintain the parks hiking trails. And during the pandemic, their volunteer work became essential for the health and wellbeing of our community. As we sheltered in place, we were encouraged to exercise outside. The number of visitors at the ranch increased, and with more visitors maintaining safe walking and equestrian trails became a high priority. This group brought their own tools and personal protective equipment to maintain the trails in the park throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Thanks to their dedication, the community was able to continue to utilize the park throughout the year, and it is a special, special place, like many of our parks. We would like to personally thank also Al Cooter, Tim Jolly, John Hudson, Lee Summers, Tom Davy, Jim Bond, Larry Cooprey, your dedication and love of the parks and everything that you do at Quail Hollow is safe and inviting place for visitors. We thank you very much for keeping this special, special place on our park system up and running and for many people to visit. Thank you very much. Our next honoree is Mary Sekulow. Supervisor Zach Friend will read the remarks. Good again. So Mary Sekulow is a VIP volunteer who stepped up early in the pandemic to become a contact tracer. As I think you know, it takes a great deal of patience and persistence to do contact tracing and Mary volunteered more than 600 hours reaching out to those in our community that have been affected by COVID. And Mary, I just want you to know that it wasn't a foregone conclusion that our community would have the success that we had and it took everybody contributing, but people like you had an outsized role in this. So thank you ever so much. People are alive because of work of great volunteers like you. We're grateful that you're willing to take on this role and we truly do thank you for your dedication and hard work. Thank you. Our final honoree is Seth Suresh. Supervisor Coonerty will read the remarks. Thank you. Seth Suresh is a medical reserve volunteer that has been a driving force on the technical side of the contract tracing program since it's early in the pandemic. He has been dedicated to making sure that all the contract tracers are trained on using CalConnect program and has followed up functionality issues as they arose. Seth is not afraid to speak up in statewide meetings and demand improvements to the way things are done. Thank you, Seth, for your determination and willingness to advocate for the technical needs of the contact tracing program. Thank you. This concludes the formal presentation of awards. Thank you all for your commitment to our community. Thank you supervisors for being a part of this celebration and celebrating our community. Thank you, Donna. And thank you to the volunteer center, Sheriff Hart, for everything that you do. As this is a virtual meeting, we will not be able to have a reception as we normally do to honor these volunteers. But I wanna reiterate my thanks, my deep, deep thanks on behalf of the Board of Supervisors for everything that all of you and each of you have done for our community. We have mentioned a few, believe me, as was mentioned, there are hundreds, really thousands of people that took the accurate step to make life more comfortable and some very, very, the most trying circumstances, the combination of COVID, the fires. We've never seen anything like it and Lord help us if we ever see it again. But it's so varied and it's spread out. It's health and human services, it's animal services. It's the sheriff's office being involved in the search and rescue as you've heard is just a number of volunteer efforts that make people feel better under some very trying circumstances. And Mr. Laney, I don't know if you wanna, thank you for your years and years of service. I can't remember how many years since you've been a brand of volunteer center. It's been many, many, but thank you. And if you'd just like make some brief closing remarks, we'd appreciate that. Thank you, Chair McPherson and all supervisors and all our partners at the county. I would just encourage people, if you are a volunteer, thank you for what you do. And remember that we at the Volunteer Center are here every day to make it easier and more fun to volunteer. If you're one of our county partners or one of our nonprofit or business partners who are thinking about ways to volunteer, know that, see VolunteerCenter.org, know that we're here to make it easier and more fun to volunteer. If you're one of the folks who, as you're coming out of shelter in place, are looking for something meaningful to do and looking for a great way to connect, I wanna replying people that besides repairing our social fabric, people who volunteer are healthier, they're happier, they live longer because it feels good to live in the world where you see the glass half full. And through volunteering, through actually doing good every day, you get a sense that the world isn't broken. You get a sense that we live in a generous, creative, hopeful place. So if you'd love to volunteer, we have 300 opportunities on our website right now and we are here every day to welcome new folks to the happy world of volunteering. So thank you all. If you give a phone number that they might call them, maybe that would be the best way. Yeah, if you'd like to call us, our number in Watsonville is 722-6708. Our number in Santa Cruz is 427-5070. Our website is scvolunteercenter.org or scvolunteernow.org and we are happy to get you matched with the perfect volunteer opportunity. Okay, thank you again for everything. I don't know if any supervisor had a brief closing remark. I think we've made our statements, but I think we'll move on to item number seven, somewhat related in essence because it is, again, this is the presentation of graduates of the Santa Cruz County Leadership Training Program known as LEAP, Learn, Engage, Apply, and Perform for 2019 and 2020 as outlined in the memorandum of the County Administrative Officer. I'd like to make a few statements, but then particularly thank Melody Sorino of the Deputy CAO for really playing the leadership role in the county and Mr. Clausius. I don't know if you had any brief statements before I might make a few brief comments or Melody might want to say something as well. We'd just like to thank the board for your support of our employees in bringing this program online with the last few years. And I'd like to also reiterate thanks to Melody Sorino for heading up the program and also to all the participants. I really do appreciate all of our employees who took the part in this very rigorous management training program. So thank you to all the participants. I really do appreciate it. I know the board does as well. Yeah, thank you, Mr. Clausius. And this is a step above and beyond the regular duties of the employees of the County of Santa Cruz. They put in extra efforts to make the county system and network just work that much better. And this past year has really reinforced the new challenges that continue to arise for public service. And that being an effective leader means that you need to be able to respond to those challenges with intelligence, strategy and a series of skills and expertise that help build strong teams and increase the organizational effectiveness. I think we have a very well-organized and effective county team here. In fiscal year 2017-18, the board of supervisors made a three-year commitment to invest in our workforce. Under the leadership of County Administrative Officer Carlos Palacios, the county launched its Leadership Academy known as LEED, which I said stands for Learn, Engage, Apply and Perform. We partnered with the California Association of Counties, State Association of Counties, who we heard their executive director earlier to deliver the course content. And the objective is to train individuals who have the potential to lead and manage the organizational and cultural changes that would improve our customer experience and advance our operational excellence to our thousands of citizens in Santa Cruz County. By working with the same cohort that met monthly, participants were aided in forming new habits that were reinforced through each class and cross-departmental collaboration. And I've never seen it in my eight years plus now the cross-department collaboration being imposed as well as it has been and it's very welcome for I know for our County residents. The Academy of Students learned new skills, engaged others by sharing what they learned, applied them with their work environments and reflected with others on what the efforts were successful and which were not. Participants in the LEED program also learned their senior executive credential from the CSAC Institute. The second and third cohorts of the LEED Academy have completed the program and we are honoring them today through a short video. I just want to add the names of two students who completed the program after the video was made. Renee Inlow from the Agricultural Commissioner's Office and Sherry Thomas from the Assessor-Recorder Department. Thank you for participating in the program and now we will see a short video of our LEED program. Thank you. Do we have a sound? All right, it's not playing with sound on the board chamber, so I'll put it on my computer. Okay. I might want to mention this is Graham Canowski who we heard from earlier today. He's the Executive Director of the California State Association of Counties. He's going to make a few comments, I believe. Mr. Chair, I can make a comment while we're waiting and getting my second look. So I just want to take a moment and congratulate all the graduates. When we were hiring our new CAO, what is it, three or four years ago, Supervisor Friend and I drove around the state to different counties that we heard were well managed or doing things in interesting ways. And we found out that our county does a lot of things really well and many counties look to us. But one of the things we weren't doing was looking at how we work towards outcomes and break down silos and invest in our workforce. And we both agreed that we thought we could do a lot better. And, you know, in looking and when we hired CAO Palacios, he's really embraced that and run with it in his entire team. And I think this is the first step that we're seeing where that investment's paying off and we now have a generation of leaders who are ready to work, to do better services, more innovative services and most importantly, collaborate across departments in order to get better outcomes for our community. And so I just want to acknowledge the work that people put in and part of the broader vision that's really strong. It's going to benefit us for many years to come. Everybody said we have a sound or is a video? Is it, are we close? We're close, just one moment, sorry. I think this is worth waiting for. So thank you for the patience everyone. We don't have sound, still don't have sound. ISD is here to support, just one moment. Yeah. Okay, and we should be back now. Let me share. Yeah, everyone. Thank you for your patience. We, I'm not hearing it yet. We started from the, can anybody hear this? I'm not getting the sound. We're going to switch to another feed. Melody will be hearing from her screen. So we're going to be, okay, we're going to start from the beginning, so to speak. Oh, I'm Kenelos, Executive Director of the California State Association of Counties. I'm pleased to recognize the individuals that earned their county executive credential in 2020. The CSEC Institute has been educating county leaders for 13 years and it's never been stronger. The Institute remains the national model for policy and leadership development of county leaders. You are essential to our ongoing success and we appreciate your patience, flexibility, and support over the last 10 months as we navigated through COVID-19 and we will follow our classes online. Since its inception, the Institute has had more than 950 leaders who have earned their credential and thousands more in the classes. Congratulations on joining this distinguished group of county leaders. On behalf of the CSEC and the California Counties Foundation, we thank you for your commitment to public service and your investment in yourself as a leader. You congratulate each of you on receiving your CSEC Institute Executive Credential. Your work has been inspiring amid the many challenges we have faced this past year with COVID-19 and the wildfires. I want to thank you for your diligence and commitment. We wish we had been able to present these accolades to you, the person as we have in the past year, but it doesn't change how appreciative we are of your commitment to public service and the residents of Santa Cruz County. We sincerely thank you for your extra efforts. Ladies, Melody, I don't know if you wanted to say, I just want to say thank you again and to thank you for each of the participants in the county. It really provides us the opportunity to provide services throughout the county more efficiently and effectively. And without your extra effort, we wouldn't be able to do it as well as we do today. So thank you very much. I don't know, Melody, if I'd like to just have you say hello and just say, I want to thank you for your effort, spearheading this team that went through this. Is she shy? I don't know what she did. And thank you very much. It was a very unusual year, of course, to run the Academy this year, but I have to say the team really stepped up and they even helped coordinate amongst themselves for some extra work to make sure that they were really getting the full benefits of the LEAP program. We're very appreciative of the board's support of this program. And we think that it has certainly paid off in dividends as you have evidenced this year. Thanks very much. Thank you, Melody, for everything in your leadership of this. Now we will go into a schedule item for 1045. We're right on time for that. That is item number 14, a presentation from the Health Services Agency Public Health Division on the current economic research of COVID-19 and inequality in Santa Cruz County COVID-19 equity efforts provided by Teresa Diller-Renducci, PhD at Mimi Hall, our director of health services in the county as outlined in the memorandum of the director of health services. Well, I promote these parts. The presenters, Chair, I would like to note that there are no public speakers to item 6.1 or item seven. Thank you, thank you. Good morning. Are you able to hear me? Yes, thank you. Okay, great. And I'm going to try to share my screen. Thank you for bearing with me. All right, Chair McPherson, would you please let me know if you're able to see the slideshow? We can see it and we can hear you as well. Thank you. Okay, great. Thank you. Good morning, everybody. Senator McPherson has said I'm Mimi Hall, director of Santa Cruz County Health Services Agency. And this morning, I'm pleased to be joining Professor Teresa Diller-Renducci. Professor Diller-Renducci is a labor economist and a nationally recognized expert in labor. She's a member of the UCSC research faculty and she also serves as a director for the short center of economic policy analysis and the new school for social research in New York. Professor Diller-Renducci has been sharing information and recent research on the economic impacts and inequalities caused by COVID. And I'm pleased to also provide after her presentation some local information on our local efforts to address the inequities of COVID. So with that being said, I will go ahead and turn it over to Professor Diller-Renducci. Hello, everyone. I am very happy to be here. And I want to say on the onset that I would not be here if it wasn't for my brother, David Gelarducci, who has inspired me by his passion for public health and for equity in this county, all of the life, all the time he's been here, but also been appalled at the unequal effects of the pandemic on the community and sees the root cause as coming from an underinvestment in public health. So my comments are really an introduction to Mimi Hall's presentation to you all as you look forward to helping mitigate the inequality of this pandemic and all the other catastrophes that will happen that we can't predict. But I'm here to tell you about a bright spot. In my profession and the economics profession, we actually have a lot of research that is going to help us, that will prepare us for the future. So the next slide, and this is important, then the next slide, I'll show you mainly pictures. What I'm showing you here is what economists, the President Biden, the Council of Economic Advisors are putting the fact they're putting front and center, that this pandemic of course devastated many lives, but some people gained quite a bit from this pandemic. The economic benefits from the run up in the stock market from the monopolization of Amazon and Facebook and Google and the big, big firms that happened because people couldn't shop in their local communities has been so enormous that I'm showing you a picture here of just the people who kept their jobs did very well, the people who lost their jobs did poorly, but I could show you another 10 graphs of how wealth inequality has ballooned. So this event made the inequality that we've been seeing in the last decade much worse. And we're going to emerge from this pandemic with foundations brimming with money, with people who give money to local efforts, really having more money than they ever expected. We're seeing national policy moving in that direction to kind of redistribute it without killing growth, but that is the fundamental overarching story of this economic recovery is that it's been very unequal. And the letter that we use to describe it is K-shaped. Some people in the upper part of the K, many people on the bottom part of the K. Mimi, go ahead. Again, this is a story about inequality, but between men and women. The recession hit hard. The public health crisis hit women and mothers and caregivers much harder than the rest of us. And so we need to prepare an infrastructure so that care work is not the first to go. We will never know, and lots of research will happen, what happened to women who had to take care of their children during this time when schools were shut down. It may actually bring up the importance of funded childcare. The next slide. The other place that we are doing research, the economists are working with the scientists is the appalling reversal of mortality, of longevity among the population. Every single racial group lost years of life because of this pandemic and all the excess deaths that came about, even if it wasn't caused by COVID. But one of the most disturbing aspects is that the gap between blacks have got worse in this pandemic and the Latino advantage, the famed paradox that even though Latinos have low incomes, the morbidity and the mortality was a little bit better than native-born whites. But that advantage has been completely erased. So that really tees up what Mimi's going to talk about is the inequality of public health access by our Latino residents in this county. So that really tees that up. The next slide. Really good research. It has been done really big advances this year on the inequality of neighborhoods and the effect on school quality. The pandemic made all the school children stay home, but well-resourced parents and neighborhoods were able to replace what the school at in-person school provided and it made the inequality between resource parents and neighborhoods and un-resourced parents even worse. And this is the kind of inequality that lasts a long time. We're going to have to really build our infrastructure for our human capital losses. The next slide. Here is, I want to lift up the work of Rob Farley. He's in the economics department at UCSC. He's a really important local resource and I'm trying to get him really involved in the community so you guys can help me. But he has the best database in an economics that's like really cool. They have a really good database on small and local businesses. He won't go to any chains. He really supports small and local businesses. His research shows that businesses owned by Asians and Hispanics and African-Americans were really hurt worse, much worse than white-owned businesses. So I'm looking forward to a plan to make sure that the chains don't take over the county. He's important. This is really, the effect of the ownership of the public health facilities is also really important. If a hospital is bought by a private equity group, there is evidence to show that the quality of care will fall and there's lots of pathways to that. But mainly it's a pathway to make sure it's profitable for those private equity investors. There's also new research to show that that also is true for nursing homes. If a nursing home is bought by private equity that's for-profit on steroids, you're going to have actually an increase in mortality. The hospitals and nursing homes are a key aspect of our public health and it turns out who owns them really matters in terms of outcome. The next slide. Here is a bright spot. The economic policies that were put into place that gave out those stimulus checks that were just wild, $2,000 total to people under a certain amount of money, that actually closed the wealth gap by helping people not go into debt. Another bright spot is that limiting evictions as the public health officers know did reduce the spread of the disease. So that was a good hunch by the public health officials and the economists came in behind that policy and evaluated and said, yes, that really did help. The next slide. I did some research and I'm going to, David really bothers me on this so I'm going to do what he says. I'm going to keep track of what other communities are going to do. Everyone answers to somebody and it's Dr. David Gelenducci I answer to. Is that there are many, many initiatives and these are mainly states and big cities that are going to look forward and look how to mitigate the inequality that was caused by the last pandemic and the last recession. And then I don't see a lot of creativity here but let's wait to see what we can do about the next public health crisis we can't quite describe. What I wanted to highlight here is that there are philanthropic organizations around the San Jose, Santa Clara area that is pouring money into these issues. And I think some of that could spill over to this county. So I have some links here about those philanthropies and this would be a good time to have discussions with them. I know there's an exciting work done by the public health by David, by the scientists to do some wastewater testing to find some leading indicators of disease and try to mitigate it before it explodes in the community. Those are the kinds of local creative things that might be possible and now there might be money for it from the federal government and also from these philanthropies. And I'll stop there Mimi and hand it over to you. Thank you, Professor Gelenducci and thank you for teeing up really the broad landscape of how this is so important for our entire community and our nation to pay attention to. While I am going to talk specifically about what we've done in terms of health services agency and addressing the public health impacts and how we've done that through an equity lens, the work that you and your colleagues do helps inform the bigger picture outside of the epidemiological data that we have because as we all know, we cannot solve a public health problem by working through only local public health jurisdictions alone. We need the entire community, all of government philanthropy and our big institutions to really make a change. So thank you for your time today. I appreciate your being here and that we have a connection with your brother our deputy health officer, Dr. Gelenducci. So first off, I just wanted to give a brief overview of how we have spent our dollars to ensure that number one, we have sufficient public health infrastructure to address, understand, surveil, monitor and control disease and in this case, it's COVID-19. I see that as one of the three legs of a three-legged stool. The other leg is community support, ensuring that we've got sufficient dollars for key community partners who can help us either outreach to or support communities most impacted by COVID. And the third leg is ensuring that we have a stable safety net of access to care. The lens of equity is a lens that goes over all of these three legs and but without the three legs of the stool or only focusing on one leg, we won't be able to properly do our jobs from a public health perspective. So in 2020, our health department received coronavirus relief funds as a portion of the county's overall coronavirus relief act funds. And we're fortunate enough to have the County Board of Supervisors, your board, approved $10.3 million towards the health services agency public health expenditures. The large amount of these expenditures went to, similar to a pot of funding called epidemiology and in lab capacity funding, went to testing, investigation, data infrastructure, equipment for our partners, really shoring up the public health infrastructure to ensure that we had the tools, the data and the staffing that we needed to ensure response to COVID. What we also did was we wanted to make sure that significant dollars went to support our community partners who had connections with our communities most impacted by COVID. So $1.1 million of the original 2020 CRF funds as well as 25% of our original Epian lab capacity funds went for those purposes to address equity. I will add that outside of that $1.1 million, we allocated with your board's approval $1.8 million in economic support specifically for uninsured and underinsured families through Santa Cruz community ventures who were impacted by positive COVID in the household. So in the future investments in the beginning of 2021, there were a number of different funds made available for counties and also for local health jurisdictions. So our County, as you may recall, received over $50 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds for the next four years. And 6.4 million of that has been approved or has been recommended to your board to be slated for public health and health services efforts. 5.2 million of those dollars are slated for essential health services that must exist for that safety net throughout that timeframe of that four year timeframe. But $1.1 million is another effort to reach out to community partners who will help us reach the communities and the populations most impacted by COVID every step through vaccination and recovery. So this is just a snapshot of how we're spending a new set of epidemiology and lab capacity prevention funds. These are called ELC expansion funds. And the reason they're called expansion funds is they expand upon the original $2.8 million that we received in 2020. So those dollars, the original dollars were used to quickly get new lab equipment, testing equipment, training, contact tracers, all of those things that we needed at the height of the surge or I should say surges during the pandemic. But over the next three years, we have a lot of work to do to sustain our response to COVID through enhancing public health infrastructure, making sure that we have the data and the technological systems to ensure proper reporting and good data to plan our efforts so that our interventions for the community and also for the public health response are data informed. There's also an area where we'll continue funding for community engagement. So for these $11 million that are meant primarily for laboratory capacity, we know that we cannot properly continue to sustain our COVID response without making sure that we also invest in continued community engagement. So overall, when you look at the total snapshot of funds that we've had beginning in 2020 and going through the next four years, it seems like a lot of money, but I really wish that the federal government and the state were able to invest even more because when you spread it out over the up to four years that these dollars are intended for, we're still struggling to make sure that we, there's still scarce dollars for what we need. One of the things that we wanted to ensure is that any funding that we got from any source, regardless of whether it was Epian Lab capacity funding or the Health Resources Service Administration FEMA or the ARP that we made equity investments because we know looking at our local data that without those equity investments, we will not be able to get to the heart of COVID. So over time, we have done these equity investments and what we've done is we've used the epidemiological data to show us who's most impacted by COVID, who's most impacted by cases and where and which populations are also most impacted by hospitalizations and death. And the data was not surprising. It was very, very clear that our Latinx communities and communities of color were more severely impacted by COVID every way that you looked at it, whether it was case rates, test positivity, hospitalizations and or deaths regardless of age. And so we knew throughout the entire pandemic that if we use that data to inform not only our broad efforts, but our week by week response efforts in terms of testing, contact tracing and now vaccinations that we would keep Santa Cruz County as safe as possible. So this graph that you see here is a vaccine equity metric graph. On the left-hand side, so these colors blue are community represent the quartile of zip codes across California that have the lowest, the least healthy conditions. And as you go up to darker green, the darkest green is California's quartile of zip codes across California that have communities with the most healthy conditions. And across California, the graph on your left shows that across California, here are the rates of vaccination from your least healthy communities to your most healthy community conditions. And there are very, very well-spaced gaps across California between these zip codes. On the right side, you look at Santa Cruz County. And you can see that in Santa Cruz County, our vaccination efforts from the very beginning have worked to keep those gaps between communities of different healthy living conditions, very, very small. And many times these gaps were created by barriers that already existed before the pandemic that made it very difficult to roll out vaccine to the communities who might be most impacted, both by the burden of disease, but also the impacts of everything else that goes along with COVID. And what we have done is we've been very successful in even though we had rather small gaps in practically closing the gap across all of our different health equities of codes. So how did we do this? One of the ways is that as many of you may be familiar, vaccine comes through a number of different ways, but about a little less than half of the vaccine that has been distributed so far for Santa Cruz County residents has come directly to Santa Cruz County Public Health. And so when you look at this chart, you will see that on the far right-hand side, vaccines administered by Santa Cruz County Public Health, 61% of our vaccines have been purposefully distributed to South County. There are also other pockets of populations that we have done. I call them micro-targeting our vaccination through weekly micro-targeted planning. But what we have done is we've used data to look at the areas in our County most impacted by COVID. And then we have directed our vaccination efforts in that way. When you look at the column to the left of vaccines administered by Public Health, this is all vaccines provided in Santa Cruz County by all providers. And you can see that it's about, not exactly, but about evenly split in thirds throughout the different areas of the County. If it were not for Santa Cruz County Public Health focusing our efforts by giving 61% of our vaccinations to the areas in our County most impacted by COVID, we would not have the kind of spread of vaccination in terms of somewhat equitable spread across the three areas of the County. So this chart right here is, it shows the relationship between community conditions and vaccination coverage. So when you look at the midpoint, zero, that's the neutral line that you're looking at, the neutral vertical line. The blue, when you see blue to the right of that line, that means that there are higher vaccination rates in zip codes with less healthy community conditions. When you see the dark blue line to the left, that means that zip codes with healthier community conditions have higher vaccination rates. And the way you address a disease properly and impactfully is to go where it's impacting communities the most. So you can see that in Santa Cruz County, we have our blue line significantly to the right of the midline. And that means that we're doing a really good job with higher vaccination rates in our less healthy communities. And that means a lot in terms of the overall impacts of COVID. So what has been the result of focusing on equity from the very, very beginning of the pandemic and making not only monetary investments in the communities, but also investments in our epidemiological and lab capacity so that we can focus on getting the right data and the right responses to the communities that need it the most? It's been clear that from the beginning of the pandemic, we have been ahead of the pack in California in terms of testing, tracing, outreach, and vaccination efforts. For the first three months of vaccinations before there were, now vaccinations are widespread at commercial pharmacies, many, many different ways and individual providers, but for a long time, there are only a few ways to distribute vaccine and local health jurisdictions and multi-county entities were two of the ways. For all of that time period, maybe the first three months of vaccinations, Santa Cruz County ranked top 10 in all of California's counties in terms of county vaccination rates. And we also ranked top 10 in all of the equity measures, meaning we were addressing vaccinations in our most impacted communities. So we have continued to make these data-driven decisions across equity metrics, whether it was the very beginning of the pandemic and understanding where to focus our efforts or now as we look towards vaccination. One of the things that I wanted to acknowledge our staff for is that we have weekly meetings with Blue Shield, which is the third-party administrator for the state in distributing vaccine. And they have let us know, so we have about 7,000 permanent farm worker, agricultural workers that live year-round in the county. There are many more that are temporary workers, but Blue Shield let us know that we are amongst the top counties in terms of vaccinating farm workers and agricultural workers early. And we have nearly all 7,000 of our permanent farm workers vaccinated at this point. A couple of weeks ago, we were up to 5,000 of the 7,000. So they gave our staff kudos for that work and I wanted to make sure that your board and the public understood that when we do our work in this manner, we're protecting the entire community by protecting those who are most likely to be impacted. Yeah, I may have said this before in one of my board updates, but Martin Luther King, Jr. has said injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. And I think about communicable disease in the same way. With COVID, disease anywhere is a threat to COVID disease everywhere. And unless we are able to address disease in using local demographic information of who is most impacted and how and address not only the disease aspect, but also the conditions that create the negative impacts being affected by disease, we're not going to win this war against COVID. So we have necessarily and purposely focused on the data so that we can understand where these disparities exist and use all of our efforts, both on a daily basis and an overall planning for the future basis to ensure that our communities are protected. So thank you for your time. And I want to acknowledge also everything that the board has done as well as our entire community and other county departments, we've all worked together to make sure that outside of the public health response, our community has the resources that it needs to support our community members through this time. And there's lots more needed. And I hope today has been informative and enlightening for you. Thank you for that very informative, enlightening and welcome report. I want to thank our health service department for this report. That's very important that we track our health services and outcomes to ensure that we're meeting the needs of the underrepresented communities. I think it's very important of those top 10 to see how the vaccinations that have been administered to the underrepresented communities that I think were probably the most highly populated county in the state in that top 10. I don't know, there might be Napa or somebody else is really close to us, but I just want to thank the health services department. This has been so difficult for everyone. The rules change, you're in, you're out, you can have this percentage, you can have that percentage. It's something like unlike we've ever seen before. And to make sure that we really do reach out to our underrepresented communities is highly important and critical. So I want to thank Mr. Noducci as well as you, Ms. Hall, for this report. The response has, this response to COVID has really presented new territory for all of us. And I really appreciate that we haven't lost sight of the impact of the response on folks all across the economic spectrum. It's very, very critical. And I'd welcome any comments from other board members as well. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'll briefly speak. Thank you, Professor Gilarducci for those very enlightening comments. I won't hold your brother against you in this. And also let me say thank you also, Director Hall. As I've said before to Ms. Hall as well as Dr. Newell and also to your brother, Professor, that these outcomes were not predetermined. There was work that was done locally and the state and nationally to prioritize certain things that fundamentally kept people alive. But I think what we're looking at now is what's the part two to this? Has this allowed for an honest conversation about how inequities led to disparate outcomes both on the health side and the economic side and how can we fundamentally shift that moving forward? While it's definitely harder to do things just at a local level, I think that we clearly have at least partners at the state and national level to do this. But I think that to the degree that you'd be willing to stay engaged with us on these conversations is important as we talk about investments in things that people don't always look at purely from a health standpoint, including housing and some of the other investments that the county does. Because as somebody who represents along with my colleague, Supervisor Caput areas of the South County where it's not uncommon to have over 15 people living in a home, it's also not uncommon. It's also understandable then why you would have outbreaks within some of these homes. And these aren't health-related. While they become a health-related issue, the underlying issue that was associated with it were economic and social inequities that are historic and investments that haven't been made by local, state and national governments to address it. So I'm glad that we're having these discussions. I just hope that we use this opportunity to have more than discussions and actually effectuate change in a way that, and it's gonna take a really long time. I mean, I'm not, I don't have illusions about that, but it won't. But I think we can set the stage of nothing else so that the people that are sitting in our seats next are faced with a fundamentally different set of circumstances. And I think that we have a very good opportunity to do it now. And we have a lot of local talent here, including yourself. So I appreciate your presentation. As always, Ms. Hall, I appreciate yours as well. And look at us as partners in trying to move those issues forward. Yes, and look to me as a partner as well. Supervisor Connick. Thank you, Chair. And thank you, Director Hall and Professor Gilarducci for the fabulous presentation. It really is amazing in one of the success stories coming out of this pandemic, just how we've distributed the vaccine in a way that really prioritizes equity and the huge percentage of our farm workers that have received a vaccine already and will soon. So thank you for that. To Professor Gilarducci's point about the K-shaped economic recovery, I also wanted to just mention housing a little bit as my colleague's supervisor friend did and point out that connection between housing and health. Again, seeing 15 people to a house is largely what led to the spread of COVID more in those populations. And also one of the outcomes that we've seen from the pandemic, the ability for people to work remotely is essentially we are now Palo Alto by the sea. And the housing market locally, if I don't know how many of you've been paying attention but it is going berserk. We'll easily see a 10% increase in home prices this year, if not closer to 15%. The only thing, only thing close to being affordable, it's still under a million dollars are some of the condos that were built 20, 30 years ago. Places, for example, around Diamond Street and a lot of the housing stock in my own district and live oak. So it's going to be extremely important for this board to create new housing opportunities to reform land use, so that affordable housing can be created because look, any single family home with the yard now is gonna be over a million dollars in this county. I don't know if you want to comment on the effect of housing costs on people and continuing to divide the wealth gap that Professor Gilard, you chief. Yeah, there is a lot of research. I'll send it to you. Affordability index has become an important issue for public health. This is new research, but I think you have the intuition right there. I'll forward you some studies. Great, thank you so much. That's all my comments. Thank you. Thank you, Professor Caput. You're immune. Yeah, thanks a lot, baby. And yeah, I want to thank you for all the hard work you're doing in South County and reaching out to people, especially farm workers and families down here. We have a lot of undocumented and they've been treated very well and they've been getting their vaccinations also. And part of that is trust on their part that the county is giving them the services and not trying to round them up or whatever because they don't have documentation. The way you're doing the paperwork is very difficult keeping track of who's been getting vaccines and who hasn't, but you've been doing a great job on that. And then yeah, the job loss down here in South County has been greater than other parts. And a lot of that has to do with the mothers that are staying home with their children that can't be going to school. And so anyway, I hope everything starts to rebound very soon. And I think all of us are hoping that. But again, thank you for the report and thank you for everything you're doing. And that goes for Teresa also. Thank you. Thank you, Roger. Yeah, thank you, Mr. Chair. And thank you for that informative presentation. It's always important that we talk about the ways in which our systems are working and the ways in which our systems are failing to address the inequities that we're seeing so prevalent across the world and in the United States and California and Santa Cruz specifically. I think the board has tried over my time on the board to make significant investments in public health that were unprecedented among most counties in California to especially around low income moms and their babies around childcare. We've tried to do things we can against an affordable housing arena. And then during COVID, we've done runner protections, small business protections and funds for undocumented, as was said, the reality is where it's fighting in a very difficult system. But I think with some targeted investment as we're talking about doing with apprenticeship programs, specific supports through the Small Business Development Center for Women and Minority Owned Businesses expanded broadband to reduce the digital divide. I think we can make some progress. And hopefully at our scale, we serve as a good place to model and test programs because we have a significant enough population to test these programs, but we're small enough that people can work cooperatively as we have through COVID and other pandemics to address these issues and we can align institutions to get better results. And so thank you for the presentation. It's always important to talk about these issues and we'll continue our efforts to move them forward. Thank you. Yeah, Ken here was saying about the, what our health team and led by maybe all our human services department as well throughout the county and our administrative staff. And I'll say pat on the back of the board of supervisors too to receive these recommendations from our professionals that are heading these departments and implementing them. And it's really paid dividends, healthy dividends literally for our community. And no matter what your economic structure is or what it might be, it's really paid off huge dividends. I just wanna say how much I appreciate the communication and the teamwork. We meet weekly about this as a county board with our health and human services departments and our sheriff's department is very much included in this as well. What the team effort that's gone for come forth is we're paying, it's paying literally dividends for a healthy community. And I wanna thank each and every one of you who's participated in that effort. Do we have any input from the public? Yes, we have one speaker. Thank you. These are five, your microphone is available. A couple more have joined us as well. Quite a report that doesn't meet with the reality of what I'm reading. The Supreme Court states vaccines are unavoidably unsafe. Vaccines are unavoidably unsafe. And that's when they put in place the 1986 law that exempted vaccine manufacturers from liability. I wanna quote from children's health defense.org, an article, 18 reasons why we'll be getting a COVID vaccine by Christian Elliott. Vaccine makers are immune from liability. The only industry in the world that bears no liability for injuries or death, resulting from their products are vaccine makers. They are allowed to create a COVID shot, one size fits all product, with no testing on subpopulations, people with preexisting or health conditions. And yet they are unwilling to accept any responsibility for any adverse events or death that products cause. How are you tracking the adverse results with their vaccine adverse effects reporting system in this county from the shots that are being given? Farm workers are already poisoned by pesticides and endangered, I know I used to teach in Watsonville. This is, you talk about an honest conversation, let's have Dr. Thomas Cowan do a presentation to your board on his research. Monica McGuire, your microphone is available. Thank you, yes. So I find it terribly odd that this presentation is only partly acknowledged many topics. I have five, I hope to have time to speak on. Number one is the harm to Latinos without commenting on the farm worker families being among the most harmed via collateral damages. Of course they were told they could not work, they are not allowed to live fully in long-term housing. They are given the dregs of so much and yes, it's nice to accommodate them in some ways, but not by experimenting on them excessively by giving them greater numbers of vaccinations and other experiments as we've been observing. The farm worker families are in terrible straits and it's evident to anyone who wants to go and see and talk with the amazing people helping their Dr. Ann Lopez has so much to say on how hard this whole year has been because of this county's choices to pretend that we have an issue with a 0.009% death rate. 75% of the counties in this country have had zero or virtually zero like our death rate and that has not been accounted for and all the inequity of the county taking money while small businesses were forced into failing is insane, but we must bring up the beautiful cartoon of the two mice where one asks if the other is claiming and taking the shot and mouse two says, I'm gonna wait and see how the human trials turn out because we are all in a human trial at this point and you forcing those vaccinations in South County, I hope makes us a few of you think twice in the middle of the night as you wake up and know that you are testing this on everyone you have recommended it to. This is so upsetting in so many ways. There's no way to address everything else because you cut us off. There are no speakers to this item. We will close that presentation and thank you again for the presentations. We will move, I'm gonna move right ahead to try to get to, I think we can get to most of the remaining items very quickly. We'll go to item number eight on the agenda. It's a public hearing to consider approval and concept of an ordinance adding chapter 1232 to Santa Cruz County Code regarding regulations for limited density owner-built rural dwellings that adopt a resolution accepting CEQA notice of exemption determination scheduled the ordinance for a second reading and final adoption on May 11th, 2021 and take related actions as outlined in the memorandum of the planning director. We have a resolution and ordinance adding chapter 1232 regulations for limited density owner-built rural dwellings and recording notice template. Excuse me if I look, I think it's Kathy, director, I think David Carlson, our resource planner and Pyle Levine assistant planning director are going to present on this, is that correct? That's correct. Mr. Carlson, I think yes. This is David Carlson. I'll make a brief presentation here. I am joined by the assistant planning director, Pyle Levine and the building official, Martin Heaney. So I will do a screen share here. Okay, okay, can everybody see that screen? Yes. Thanks. Okay, so the CCU Lightning Complex fire in August, 2020 resulted in the loss of many dwellings and outbuildings in the rural areas of the county, the community of last chance within the burn area approached the county with the idea of a pilot program to implement the limited density owner-built rural dwellings regulations in the county. This type of regulation allows certain non-traditional methods of construction and allows construction to conform to standards that are more relaxed than the standard building code. The last chance community is very remote, lacks electric utility services and sustained the total loss of many homes that provided affordable shelter to the residents of the community. After the fire, the board directed the planning department to determine whether this is a feasible and useful approach to rebuilding in this area while facilitating the legal replacement of fire destroyed structures. Last November, a report to the board of supervisors addressed programs and changes to assist replacing burned homes that were built without permits. The board directed staff to implement a legacy older structures program within the CZU burn area to confer legal non-conforming status for sites documented to have been developed prior to 1986. The board also directed the office of response, recovery and resiliency to research a fire area improvement reconstruction program to facilitate rebuilding in areas with common obstacles to rebuilding on the individual parcels. And finally, the board approved the development of the limited density owner-built rural dwellings ordinance, also known as the K code as a pilot project in the last chance area. The K code was originally developed in the 1970s as appendix K of the building code at that time to accommodate homesteaders and the back to the land movement. Adoption of a K code by the county is optional and the county may adopt local amendments to respond to local conditions. It is intended to provide minimum requirements for low-cost owner-built structures in remote mountainous locations in mild climates where access to conventional construction materials and contractors is difficult while ensuring that reasonable health and safety standards are met. The K code is intended as a response to local conditions in our case and in our case, the K code is being considered as a way to help fire victims rebuild and recover. The K code is an alternative building code that would be added to title 12 of the county code which contains the county's building regulations. It would not authorize alternatives to these other parts of the county code shown in the slide including the fire code or the sewage disposal or water supply code requirements. The last chance area is in the coastal zone entirely which means a coastal development permit would be required to rebuild a structure destroyed in the fire if the original structure was not built with permits for structures that were originally built with permits. There is an exemption from a CDP for rebuilding after a natural disaster. This project was initiated by the last chance community and planning staff appreciate, very much appreciates the research and work they put into an early draft of an ordinance that they submitted to the county. The community proposal and K codes adopted in other communities are all based on state law and are similar in terms of their structure and content. However, there are some differences between the residents proposal and the staff proposal before the board today. And those were discussed at a meeting with the community on March 9th of 2021. And those issues will be highlighted as I go through the next several slides. This slide shows the parcel boundaries in the last chance area. The light blue outlined parcels are privately owned and according to county damage assessment records had at least one structure often more destroyed in the fire. The dark blue lines are local creeks with Scott Creek drainage located to the right of the last chance area and Waddell Creek drainage to the left. The darker green shaded parcels are owned by state parks. We learned at the community meeting that there may be some additional parcels with fire destroyed structures not indicated on this map. And the county can work with those parcel owners to verify the information and update the map accordingly for the purposes of qualifying for rebuilding under this ordinance. A limited density rural dwelling means a structure with one or more rooms intended for living and sleeping. And that's it. Owner built means what it says, but also means the owner can hire a contractor. Under state law, the definition also includes a prohibition on sale lease or rent for one year. And that was included in the residence proposal. Staff is recommending that prohibition on sale lease or rent to be extended to three years to create a greater commitment to the owner build concept and coincide with the proposed length of the pilot program. And this is also within the mainstream of adopted K codes by other jurisdictions. The definition of rural is the key definition for where these regulations would apply. The residence proposal defined rural as off grid parcels in the entire CZU fire burn area. In accordance with the board's direction last November, staff is recommending the adoption of a K code as a pilot project with the definition of rural for the purposes of this ordinance limited to those parcels in the last chance area that are off grid and had structures burned in the fire. The state law provides that the county can require a deed recordation, including information regarding the materials, methods of construction, alternative facilities or other factors. The residence proposal did not include this provision, but county staff is recommending including it for full disclosure that the structure and facilities on a particular parcel have been constructed under an alternative code and may not conform entirely to all requirements in the California building code and has received fewer building inspections that would normally be required. The recorded document would also include the prohibition on sale lease or rent for three years and an indemnification and liability waiver. The state law contains a list of basic information needed for the application for a permit under the K code and a description of the type of plans that are required. County staff envisions developing a simplified list based on our standard list of required information for these applications under the K code for structures of complex design or unusual conditions. We could also require additional information from a professional engineer or architect to support the design and how it would meet the basic intent of the building code. In addition to the list of required information the county would require pre-clarances from environmental health and the fire agency to ensure the application is viable and can meet the sewage disposal, water supply and fire safety regulations. And also we'd require pre-clarance for geologic hazards. State law provides for inspections or a waiver of inspections for certain types of structures. The residents proposal did provide for one inspection. However, for dwellings, county staff is recommending a minimum of four inspections to verify the major components of the structure, including the foundation, the underfloor, the frame and any electrical plumbing or mechanical systems and a final inspection. For comparison, normally a new dwelling would require seven or eight inspections or more. State law does not contain specific requirements for these building systems, except that if fireplaces, heating and cooking appliances and gas plumbing are installed in these structures they must be installed and vented in accordance with the current mechanical and plumbing codes. Some other water supply, same with water supply and wastewater plumbing and any electrical wiring and equipment. The residents proposal and county staff agree that a source of room heating is required. This could mean passive or active solar or wood heat. County staff is recommending that if the heat source uses non-renewable energy such as propane then the structure does need to be insulated in accordance with the energy code, which requires energy calculations for the structure just like a structure built under the standard building code. There is no requirement that a K code structure be electrified. The residents proposal includes a provision that generators shall be enclosed in a sound reduction enclosure. However, county staff is recommending specifically that generator use be limited to emergency backup power but not as a sole source of power. Generators are not allowed as permanent source of power anywhere in the county, mainly because of the fire hazard. The residents proposal and county staff agree that bathing and washing facilities should be required. Also an approved individual sewage disposal system is required. At this point in time the county does not have the authority to approve alternatives that are not provided for in our local sewage disposal ordinance such as the use of composting toilets without a septic system, for example. So in general, the K code represents a balancing act for the county, specifically the building official. It contains some seemingly contradictory language in that it states K code structures need not fully comply with the building code but the building code is the basis for approval. What this means is the focus will be on sound structural condition, which is defined in the ordinance and safe and sanitary conditions for these structures. Some other considerations are highlighted on this slide but in general the intent of the regulations is to provide for ingenuity and preferences of the builder and alternatives to the specifications prescribed in the building regulations in chapter 12 to 12.10 of the county code to the extent that a reasonable degree of health and safety and sound structural condition is provided by those alternatives. And finally, the staff recommendation is that the board conduct a public hearing to consider adding chapter 12.32 to the Santa Cruz County code regarding regulations for limited density owner built rural dwellings and close the public hearing. Adopt the attached resolution finding proposed amendments are exempt from further environmental review under the California Environmental Quality Act, directing staff to file the sequo notice of exemption and making findings regarding changes and modifications to provisions of the state housing law based on local conditions, approving concept, the ordinance adding County code chapter 12.32 schedule the ordinance for second reading and final adoption on May 11th, 2021 and direct the planning directors to submit a copy of the local amendments to the state housing law and a copy of the adopted resolution containing the associated findings to the California Building Standards Commission. And that concludes my presentation and we're available for any questions or clarifications. Thank you, Mr. Carlson. And also to your associates, Kyle Levine and Martin Keeney. I think Dr. Marilyn Underwood, Director of Environmental Health was very much active in coming up with these recommendations. Here before I go to the public, the supervisor Coonerty, do you have some comments? This is your district, I believe? Yeah, so first of all, thank you, Mr. Chair. I wanna take a moment and thank the planning staff for moving forward with these recommendations and for working with the community and for the community participating in drafting these recommendations. I think it does create a path for people to rebuild their homes. Given the impacts or the issues around some of the state environmental health laws as well as some of the state fire codes, it's not a panacea and it will be a challenge going forward but I think to the extent that we are adjusting the regulations that are within our control, I think this is a good step and a pilot to see what we can do to help. I did have a question for Mr. Carlson that came from the community around ADUs. I know ADUs are permitted under state law. I don't know how that interacts with a K code. Could you give us a opinion or overview? Yes, those would be permitted. Those are covered by another section of the County Code, Chapter 12 of the County Code. So we decided that we didn't need to include those in this addition to Chapter 12, the building regulations because all the regulations for ADUs are in Chapter 13, the zoning regulations. If this doesn't preclude the development of an ADU on one of these parcels, as long as you can meet the requirements, all the ADU requirements in Chapter 13, you could build an ADU under the K code also. Okay, great, that's helpful to know. Second question I have and last question I have for right now is around this generator question. I know there's a tension between, as you said, the fire safety issues and as well as noise and air pollution issues and residence needs for a stable energy source. How, given the advances we're seeing in energy storage, how are we building those advances and those opportunities into this code? I'll take a shot at that. And then if Marty Heaney, the building official wants to chime in, please feel free. But so an off-grid solar energy system would typically have a battery backup to it. And then a backup to those batteries would be a generator. And that would be allowed as an emergency backup generator. So typically we would envision these off-grid systems to be a set of solar panels charging a battery and those batteries would kick in when needed. And then if that period of lack of solar power lasts for a certain amount of time in the batteries train then you could have a generator as a backup emergency source of power in that situation. So we're not, they're not prohibited outright but they would have to be part of a, they would have to be a backup to a part of a system that is a solar panel's battery generator. Perfect, thank you very much. Any other comments from board members? Supervisor Cronig. Thank you, Chair. I think this is a great proposal to try to do what we can as Supervisor Coonerty said, certainly there will still be plenty of obstacles for people to overcome in rebuilding, the coastal development permit, trying to get a septic system and of course the four inspections we're still requiring being among them. My biggest question is what constitutes success or failure? We're only rolling this program out in the last chance area. Under what circumstances would staff recommend that we roll it out to other areas in the county beyond last chance route? Well, I think that's one of the purposes of the pilot program is to see what happens because we haven't done this before in the county. It has been done in other counties and our understanding is there hasn't been any major issues with it. The only issue, major issue that I'm aware of in other county, in another county was in Mendocino County where some of these structures, some of these proposals for structures under this code were coming in as very large structures up to like 10,000 square feet. And so they decided to put a cap, I think in Mendocino County they implemented a 2,000 square foot cap to address that issue. But other than that, we haven't heard of any major issues. It is operative in Butte County, which is this area of the Paradise Fire and our understanding there hasn't been too much uptake projects utilizing the K code. But again, we haven't heard of any major problems in terms of the plans or the building inspections. Okay, do you want to add anything? Yes, you asked specifically about what are the measures of success and what we would be looking for is to see what kinds of structures are built as a result of the K code being in place. Are we seeing modest structures that are safe and structurally sound and yet were more economical for people to build or just in general had lower barriers to constructing? So we'll look at what comes through in those three years and what the end product is. Okay, thank you. That helps me understand. Okay, very well. Any other questions from members of the board? Members of the public, is there anyone that wants? I have Raymond Kenzencio. Would like to speak to this item. Hi board supervisors, Ray Cancino from Community Bridges. As you may know, Community Bridges has been actively engaged in the long-term recovery group and helping a lot of these families think about rebuilding and do want to just share how much this type of program in this board thinking will help a lot of members maintain their ability to stay here. The barriers to construction are no easy feat and we don't control all of those requirements. And so, seeing the partnership and the leadership that has come from Supervisor Coonerty's office to also working within the planning department really shows the communities its investment in them to try to maintain the roots here. And so, as a member that continues to work with a lot of these families that are struggling to rebuild through Mountain Community Resource Center and through our other partnerships, it's really nice to see this move forward. And we hope that other small communities that have also been impacted like last chance in the Santa Cruz Mountains will also reap the ability and benefits of potentially doing it for themselves as well. So thank you. Thank you, Mr. Cicero. Is there anyone else from the public who would like to address us? I'd like for a smart answer. Would like to address the board as well. Hello, I'm just not sure that the public comment I left will be read. So I just wanted to state that I appreciate the effort to take on this resolution and as a lifelong resident of last chance, I'd like to also ask that you consider extending this pilot period from three years to say seven. I personally would love to take advantage of it, but I'm under too much of debt from my previous home to start within that period of time. And I feel that there's probably others in the same vote as me. So please consider extending the pilot period. Thank you. Is there anyone else from the public? There are no other speakers to this item. Okay, I just want to thank the whole planning department team and Supervisor Coonerty in particular for putting this together to meet the needs of the folks in this isolated area. It's going to be very interesting to see how this program goes because it might be really applied in other parts of the county as well. But thank you for your dedicated effort and to see how it might best fit as we go into this effort. So thank you very much for everybody who's participated. I'd entertain a motion. I'll close the public hearing and then entertain a motion for group. Yeah, this is Ryan. Yeah, let me just, I just want to say to Mr. Martinez's comment, we want him back to rebuild his home in the last chance community. It being a pilot, we will have an opportunity to extend the deadlines, adjust the program, do what we can as we gather more information. And so it's not gonna come and go after three years. There will be an opportunity just to see where we are and extend it and try to meet people where they are when they need to rebuild. But with that, I will move the recommended actions. Move by Supervisor Koenig. Second. Second by Supervisor Koenig. Please call the roll. Supervisor Koenig. Aye. Friend. Koenig. Aye. Caput. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Thank you, motion passes unanimously. Thank you. I'm gonna try to keep moving along. We'll see how far we can go as just before the noon hour, but let's see what we can do before we go to our closed session. We have item number nine, a public hearing to consider selection of activities for submittal of the Community Development Block Grant COVID-19 or CDGCV application to the state of California, adopt resolution authorizes staff to apply for the CDBG funds and related actions as outlined in the memorandum of the planning director. We have a resolution CDBGCV, CDBGCV grant sheet and proposal received. I believe that Susan Eisei from the planning department will be presenting this item. This public hearing. Yes, good morning, Chair and Supervisors. Porcilla Wilson from our department will be presenting this item for us. And we also have Robert Ratner and our director, Maloy, available if there are questions. Hello, sorry, there was a bit of a delay to have me here. So this is Porcilla Wilson and I will be sharing my presentation. Are you guys able to see my presentation here? Can anybody hear me? Yes, it's still not showing on screen. Oh, it's not showing, okay. I'm sure it's showing now. There we go, there we go. Good morning. Sorry, takes a little second here to move everybody around. Good morning, Porcilla Wilson with the Housing Division. I will be presenting on the Community Development Block Grant or CDBG and CARES Act funding opportunity. Our agenda today will briefly outline the grant information regarding this notice of funding availability, provide some details on eligibility criteria, note the proposals received and recommendations from staff. This is a unique notice of funding availability or NOFA issued by the California Department of Housing and Community Development that combines CDBG and CARES Act federal funds. This is a non-competitive NOFA and 2.16 million has been reserved for the county. Of that amount, 13% can be used for grant funds to administer the grant. Agency proposed activities must address COVID-19 pandemic and also meet the CDBG requirements. Applications are due on May 7th. The county's application can include up to four activities, totally no more than 2.16 million. Eligible activities may include public services to respond to COVID-19 impacts. Rental assistance or CDBG calls and subsistence programs have been disallowed due to the emergency rental assistance program that is currently being administered by the state for the Santa Cruz County residents. This will avoid potential for duplication of benefits. Public facility improvements to increase capacity for healthcare facilities related to COVID-19. Housing facilities for persons experiencing homelessness impacted by COVID-19 or economic development such as business assistance to help retain employees or help businesses restart after COVID-19 related shutdowns or other eligible activities. All CDBG activities must address a national objective. This is predominantly meant through a benefit to low income households, especially true for public service activities. The CDBG CV recommends the prioritization of activities that will address homelessness, equity and persons hardest fit by the pandemic. The county and its partners must work on a plan to address disproportionate impacts to communities of color and will be required to submit quarterly reports on how that was being addressed. Staff held an informational remote meeting on March 9th, 11th for prospective applicants. Five proposals were received as noted on this slide. Staff is recommending three of the five to be approved for funding. Although the county could include four proposals, the amount of funding needed by project room key extension proposal would not allow sufficient funding for a fourth activity. The three selected proposals address priorities identified and would be serving unmet needs in the community affected by COVID-19. The two proposals that are not recommended due because of the limited funds and number of activities allowed for the more priorities of the NOFA were not addressed sufficiently. Staff recommends that your board hold a public hearing to consider the select proposals received for possible inclusion in the county's application for funds from the state community development block grant, CDBG CV notice of funding availability. Adopt a resolution authorizing staff to apply for $2,157,727 CDBG CV funds for the three public service proposals, COVID-19 project room key extension and transition, North Coast COVID-19 support services, Live Oak school-based COVID-19 support services, and finally authorize the planning director to sign grant application forms, CDBG CV grant agreements with the state and enter into funding agreements with the agencies to implement the proposed activities. This concludes staff's presentation and we are available for any questions you may have. I'd just like to mention that I'd like to see we're able to fund some additional project room pieces. We have been able to house some vulnerable people with this funding, but we need to know the support from the state that's continuing to definitely be done, but I'd like to take this step to see how we can address this point. Are there any comments from the board members? Yes, Mr. Chair, I have a brief comment. Thank you, Ms. Wilson for the presentation. I do appreciate it and as you say for your work. I was a little bit surprised to not see any South County options show up on the list. And so I did have a question just in general about outreach. I know that you had said that there was an outreach meeting that was held and there were five actual applicants. Given that equity is a large part of this, disadvantage status is large, which by the way, the Live Oak school district in the area in Davenport that's being addressed meet those criteria. There's no question that the South County would fit into all that criteria. Do you have a sense as to why there weren't any South County based programs specifically that were upon? Mr. Sam, did you want to answer that? Yes, I can give some response. So we did actually hold two meetings. So we made a presentation to the Housing Advisory Commission on this funding opportunity, which was well attended. We had, I think, nearly 30 people, including members of the public, as well as commissioners attend. And then we held a separate outreach meeting, which was also well attended by many of the major nonprofit social service providers around the county. And these proposals that came in came in from nonprofits that serve the entire county and many of them have their main offices in Watsonville. And these were the proposals that they decided to submit. So how many of those actually serve a county what population they're not specific to one area. The two that we selected do happen to target specific areas of the county. And that was the choice of the applicants that submitted those proposals. That was where they proposed and felt that they saw a need that needed to be addressed. And we felt that the three that we are recommending for approval were the strongest of the five proposals that we received. So we did attempt to do outreach in a, you know, county-wide manner. We also had a legal notice in the paper. We had the information on our website. So we believe that the word did get out throughout all the nonprofit entities that typically submit these types of proposals. And, you know, we got the proposals that we got. So I think we may ask our applicants for reasons why they didn't design any program as specific to South County. If any of them are listening in, they may want to chime in on that. I appreciate that. So then as a follow-up to that, obviously both the Meals on Wheels and the Food Bank do have a pretty significant South County presence. There was a mention in the staff report and briefly in the presentation right now that they didn't meet the criteria. Was their follow-up done with an opportunity for those two applicants to be able to remedy that information upon their submission? I just want to see how this process worked. I mean, if we just deemed that they weren't able to show the subpopulist that would qualify as your first CDBG, were they given an opportunity to come back with that information? Or just how does that work on a follow-up process? Yes, we did reach out to all five of the applicants for additional information on all of their proposals. And the three that we are recommending were the most responsive to that follow-up outreach and did provide the additional data that we requested in a timeframe that we needed to meet the deadline for submitting the staff report. The Food Bank in particular was the one that was least able to provide the data that we requested. Meals on Wheels was doing a little better and did provide some of the follow-up data that we required with the Food Bank, a couple of the criteria we really needed to know and would need to know in order to submit their proposal through the state grants application, were some data points such as how many low-income clients do they serve and they let us know that they do not screen their clients for low-income status, they just serve whoever shows up, which we understand that approach, but for CDBG, we do actually have to submit evidence to the state and they would have to submit evidence to the state of how they determine their clients' low-income eligibility and they were not able to do that. They also were not able to tell us how many clients they were proposing to serve with the dollars they were requesting and those are two really critical data points and we did reach out to them several times and they were not able to provide any response on those two questions. So that was kind of a big shortcoming of their proposal. Meals on Wheels was a little closer. Their proposal was, I would say, more complete, but we had to really look at which were the highest priority needs and how much funding each proposal needed and we felt that the roomcape proposal was really a very critical and very urgent need and they really needed at least the amount that we're recommending in order to make that program viable. So that's how we landed on that recommendation. I appreciate it. I think I have a better understanding of the process. I mean, it's, at least on the Meals on Wheels component then it just seems like almost a judgment call at the end based on the remaining money that was left as opposed to necessarily something programmatic and it's tough, but I understand why the rationale is the way it is. So thank you, Ms. Ease. I thank you all so much, Wilson, for the presentation. Thank you. Supervisor Caput, did you have a comment? Yes, thanks, Bruce. Yeah, I had the same concerns for South County as was mentioned by Supervisor Friend. Meals on Wheels and the Food Bank are a great asset to South County. They were heavily impacted like the whole county is. And I guess what was the reasoning behind leaving out the Food Bank and Meals on Wheels? Are you assuming that they have other funding from somewhere else? It came down to why it couldn't have been apportioned. They couldn't have been a part of it and got some of the money. Yes, so a couple of things. So number one, this particular funding opportunity limits as to submitting no more than four proposed activities. So we would not be able to recommend all five in any case. Secondly, we did have some concerns about whether or not other federal funding sources might be available for the food programs such as FEMA or some of the other relief bills that have come out. And we did ask the applicants for data on that and we did not really receive complete responses to that question. So again, we could potentially include a fourth activity. We would have to decide whether or not it would be the Food Bank or the Meals on Wheels. Based on the information we received, again, we did not get complete data from the Food Bank in order to submit the application information that's required. So we felt that we couldn't recommend their proposal. It may be that they could make some efforts to get in better shape to apply for the next CDBG round that comes out maybe next year. But for this particular one, we were on a very short timeline and they did not respond in a timely manner to our questions and they were not able to provide the data that we needed. So we really could not recommend their proposal at this time. Meals on Wheels, like I said, was a little bit closer and we could potentially carve off some money out of the room key proposal. We do have Dr. Ratner available who can address questions about how much funding he would need to make his program viable. So I can ask him to weigh in on that question if you would like. Okay, I guess the biggest concern I have is of course with the pandemic, people are more isolated than they've ever been. And then you have programs like Meals on Wheels is sometimes along with the mailman is the only actual personal touch where people have contact during the time we've gone through. And also the food bank, the same thing is true. People can go and get food and they can go even if they're undocumented and they can get some food for their families. So what I'm getting at is we had a long presentation on equity and all that. And it seems like we're not reaching out as much as we possibly can in the people that are more isolated now than they've ever been. And I guess when we vote on this we have to go with the priorities and we can't change how some of the money might be able to take something from somewhere and give Rob Peter to pay Paul. Well, you could present something that could be definitive though, I think. And well, maybe you have all the information in front of you. I don't, but how it would be otherwise divided. I don't know if Mr. Ratner wanted to make a comment at all if it's not necessary. Mr. Ratner? Sir, I'm happy to be included in the conversation and these are really difficult choices before the board. Our proposal from Housing for Health would allow us to extend our project room key programs up to 90 days for 115, which is a little bit less than half of the hotel rooms that we currently have leased. We anticipate that FEMA funding, unless there's a change at the federal level will end September 30th. And our proposal included a much higher amount originally. So any amount that we take off of that proposal would mean either reduction in the number of hotels, stays we can extend for guests as we're working to help people get into long-term housing or reducing the amount of time we're able to keep people in. So there are trade-offs. I will say that the project room key program as many of you know includes locations in Watsonville and in the city of Santa Cruz and it is affecting people across the county. And it does also include meals for folks. And the target population includes people 65 and older and people with chronic health conditions who are experiencing homelessness. So really, I think the trade-offs are, at least as I understand them, how much money does the board want to direct to meals for seniors to have difficulty accessing meals on their own versus homeless seniors and homeless individuals with chronic health conditions to help reduce the risk that they're gonna return to homelessness. So they're difficult trade-offs for sure. I think we can implement the board's direction. It just increases the risk, I think, for us as a community that will have more challenges getting people into permanent housing, which is a risk generally because of the context we're all working in the housing market. But just wanted to present those trade-offs to you, Hope. Yeah, very complicated. Just a quick follow-up, how much, let's say, I'm just hypothetically grabbing a number. If you took 100,000 and put it towards meals on wheels or you took 100,000 and put it towards the food bank, would that be a drastic rise in the risk of everything else you were talking about? We could make it 50,000, we could make it 150,000 or something like that out of the 2.1 million. Yeah, I think my calculations indicate that for every $100,000 that you would reduce the allocation, we would see if we were trying to extend the room key for 90 days, we'd see a reduction in about five units, five to 10 units of housing. So the more you reduce the allocation, the more we would see the reduction of those opportunities. That's really the trade-off. I also wanna add that we couldn't fund all five activities. We're limited to four activities. So you couldn't split, you couldn't add meals on wheels and the food bank. You would have to disallow one of the other activities. Yes, I would just like to add further there that again, we did not receive complete information from the food bank. So it was not clear to us that their proposal would pass threshold with this particular funding opportunity. The other thing I would note is that regarding the meals on wheels, they requested about 575,000. They did not give us any alternative lower budget requests for the program. So I would say generally with CDBG, a significant portion of the funding goes to program delivery and admin. So I would think $100,000 would not really be a viable program. And what I would recommend is if you wanted to fund the meals on wheels as a fourth proposal that you would split off approximately the amount they're requesting or something close to it. So I would say something into the 350 to 575,000 range for the program to be viable. Now, obviously that would be a significant reduction to the room key proposal, which would be significant. Okay, that's a good point. Oh, excuse me, Mr. Rodner, did you want to? Yeah, just one other fact I should have mentioned earlier in the context of meals for seniors. I'm sure all the board members are aware of the great plates delivered program. And unfortunately that that program has been getting months at a time extension. So that program is continuing through May 7th and the federal government and the states might continue that. But we don't know, they've been giving notice within a few days of the determination of the extension. So that is a potential resource to help seniors who need this kind of support, but we don't know for how long that will be extended. Thank you. Supervisor Cohen. Yeah, thank you, Chair. I just want to make sure I heard you correctly, Dr. Ratner, so this funding would for the room key program would fund 115 beds for additional 90 days. So that would take us from an end date of September 30th to December 30th, is that correct? That's correct. Okay. And then I noted the word transition in there. How much flexibility do we have with that? You know, could we use those funds to fund some other type of housing if it was determined that that was the best type of transition? Are there any limitations there? I think we would have some limitations in terms of what we submitted our proposal to the state and we could ask for some amendments. I'll defer to my colleagues in planning about how flexible the state has been. One thing that we did consider in our proposal given the upcoming project home key funding opportunity is that these funds could help us be much more competitive in a project home key proposal for one of these sites or another location. So part of why we're submitting this proposal to the board is for that reason, to prepare us to be more competitive for that project home key funding. Got it. So if the situation on the ground should be between now and September 30th, we could always submit an amendment to the grant. And I assume that would be required to be able to go after the key funds too. Is that right? Yeah, I'll let Suzanne chime in on the home key funds. I think the proposed use that we have here would allow us to cover what they call operating cost for the sites we're currently using. So if we combine that with the home key application, I don't think we would need to amend agreement. If we use the funds for another location that's not in our initial proposal, I think we would need to notify the state and get their approval. Okay, thanks for that clarification. And then I just wanted to make one comment about the Live Oak School-Based COVID-19 Support Services. I had an opportunity to talk to Santa Cruz Health Center about this program. And it's actually really inspiring and pretty cutting end as far as creating a health outreach officer in some of our low, for our low income communities in Live Oak. It's gonna be working through the cradle to career program and really creating health teams within some of the schools so that both the health outreach worker can really get to know students and work with all their teachers and other people in their lives who know those students to be able to address issues like COVID related depression early. And I think it's really gonna be a great investment in our kids and will have longterm benefits for our community. And I hope that we can roll it out to other parts of the county in the future. Thank you. Thank you. Any other comments from the board? Do we have any comments from the public? Yes, I have one. Two speakers, Raymond Consino and also Lisa Berkowitz. Raymond Consino, your microphone is unmuted. Thank you, Board of Supervisors. Today you have an opportunity to practice a strategic value of equity in your decision-making. Ooh, now you changed my, yeah. As we all know, the Valleys Without Actions does not move us forward just as using hopes and prayers without policy change. I commend the county's movement towards equity and its inclusion in its founding strategic documents as why I'm here to request your consideration for Meals on Wheels second meal project with the CDBGC, a CV funding that is being allocated today. Not only are seniors predefined as eligible for CDBG funds allowing less administrative burden and management, but are also the hardest hit by COVID-19, which included over 92% of all county deaths and one in five COVID-19 contractions. The opportunity to use CDBG funds to impact the largest impacted demographics is clearly missing. And we hope that you would consider the funding to ensure those 450 unincorporated seniors have a second meal and helping to ensure all seniors under Meals on Wheels are no longer at nutritional risk if they participate in Meals on Wheels. Without this funding or other funding being allocated to serve seniors will ultimately be a disservice and will result in the need to divest and reduce services. Any funding amount will help to ensure the second meal program to continue. As a reminder, Meals on Wheels and Great Plates participants cannot be duplicated and 16% have indicated wanting to join Meals on Wheels after the closure of Great Plates. It's unfortunate to be categorized as unresponsive to any unincorporated from staff as no such record exists on our end. And we look forward to clarifying and providing any and all data points that are needed as we pride ourselves on such professionalism. So thank you for your time and consideration. You have one more? Yes, Lisa Berkowitz. Yes, hi, good afternoon, Board of Supervisors. Lisa Berkowitz, Community Bridges, Meals on Wheels. By May of 2020, we had seen an 86% increase in the average daily number of seniors we were serving. COVID-19's impact has been felt most significantly by seniors and those served by Meals on Wheels are among the most vulnerable. The demographics of the new seniors being served from the unincorporated areas face significant challenges and they show even more of it being a challenged population. 73% are living at or below the poverty level, 89% are at nutrition risk, 55% live alone and 60% are disabled. When we started receiving phone calls from these vulnerable seniors, we decided we had to do something about it. So under normal circumstances, low-income seniors face a lack of access to already very nutritious foods and during COVID, the situation became dire. Now in response, we developed a nutrient-dense, five-day breakfast pack of ready-to-eat foods to be delivered to all seniors receiving lunch meal. We've heard over and over again from the seniors what a difference the breakfast pack has made. The seniors we serve, restriction access prepared to prepared food by low-income seniors still represents a major roadblock to good nutrition. And we know discontinuing the breakfast meals will mean an overall average reduction in nutrient contribution to the daily reference intakes of 68%. I know there were a lot of questions posed regarding the seniors who would be recipient of these meals and I would be happy to answer those. I wanted to make sure I stayed under the two-minute limit. Thank you. Thank you for everything, meals and meals done for so many years for this county. Well, any other comments from the public? Yes, caller 8442, your microphone is available. Okay, they lowered their hand but did not unmute themselves. So I believe they may not intend to speak. Is there anyone else? There are no other speakers to this item. Okay, I will close the public hearing and bring it back to the board. Yeah, if I can make, can we make an amendment to it? You can propose that, yes. Yeah, okay, I propose that we give 100,000 to Meals on Wheels and add them to the four. I'll add them to the three others and I don't know how we take that money away from the other three. I'm concerned because it's not one of the five or the four, is it? It's what they're allowed to have four but not five. Yes, but is Meals on Wheels one of the four now? No, I don't believe they are, are they? No, they're not. Yes, it is, yes it is. Yeah, I'm confused if they are there, so. Mr. Chair, they're one of the applicants, they're not one of the recommended funding. Yes, I mean, they're limited to four, so are they one of the four that have been recommended? Let me put it that way. No, so we're gonna have to change, I don't know, this makes it difficult if we're limited to four and then also if you're gonna give them one, and I, we all want to have more for everyone. Sure. But if we take 100,000 or give them 100,000 or who are we gonna take it from? We have to be specific, I think, if we're gonna make this action, take this action. If somebody has an idea on that, better than mine. Well, yeah, I mean, I don't know, I appreciate your attempt at a motion, but I think we have to be more specific of how we can do it. Yes, if I could suggest, I believe the motion could work if you took $100,000 from the homeless project, which is getting the largest amount and just reallocate it to the meals on wheels. And Dr. Ratner mentioned that there will be an impact in slightly fewer units available, but certainly that is doable and we can work with that. Okay. I'll make that part of the amendment to the motion. Well, Mr. Chair, may I ask just a point of order? I mean, obviously there isn't an actual motion on the floor yet, but to Ms. Yousai, you had made a request, you said that if we were going to make a modification, you wanted it to be as close to the original allocation request as possible. This obviously is not that. Can you just provide us an understanding of why a partial allocation that they had requested about 600,000 or why I'd say 100,000 of Supervisor Capitas recommending would not work? Can I answer that, Supervisor Friend? Ms. Yousai was concerned about the administrative overhead and the ability to run the program. But as I heard Mr. Cansino speak, he said any amount would be workable. That's the way I heard his comments. And so I know Suzanne Yousai was worried that if we didn't provide enough money, there wouldn't be enough administrative capability to do that. But as I heard Mr. Cansino, who is the director of community bridges and oversees the Meals on Wheels, he said specifically any amount would be able to be used. So I think it would work. All right, thank you, Mr. Plosius. And this is what I'll do. Mr. Chair, I will move the recommended actions with an amendment to reduce the room key allocation by $100,000 and allocate that $100,000 to the Meals on Wheels program. Second. Second, okay. Supervisor Koenig, any other discussion? So please call the roll. Supervisor Friend. All right. Supervisor Koenig. All right. Coonerty. All right. Caput. All right. McPherson. All right. Thank you, motion passes unanimously. Okay, we're gonna go on for some time. I think that items like 10 and 11 or 11 and 12, we're gonna take, excuse me, 10 and 11 will take some. Let me just, I think we can do, items number 10 and 11 quickly. And then did you, what was the pleasure of the board? You wanna take those two items up and get them done and then go into closed session? Or do you wanna just go through the regular agenda and then go into closed session? If we go into the regular agenda full, it's gonna be another hour, I think. Any pleasure? I'd say let's do 10 and 11 if they look like they're not gonna take too long and then go to closed session. Is that okay with everybody else? Okay, we'll do that way. We'll go to item number 10. This is a public, that's agreed by all the board members as I take it. About public hearings, you consider proposed 2021-22 benefit assessment service charge reports for various county service areas and adopt resolution confirming the benefit assessment service charges report as outlined in the memorandum of the Deputy CEO Director of Public Works, Matt Machado. Resolution 2021-22, CSA service charge reports, attachment A-2021-22, CSA rate sheet, Mr. Machado. Are you gonna, do you have any comments at all? Yep, thank you, I'll be brief. Thank you, Chair and Supervisors. So that I'm before you as a public hearing to approve the fiscal year 21-22 benefit assessment service charge rates in order to complete this benefit assessment service charge process for the listed 38 CSAs. It is necessary for the board to open the public hearing, take testimony and consider objections or protests, if any, to the reports. And at the conclusion of the public hearing, adopt the attached resolution confirming the reports. I will add that of the 38 listed CSAs, most have no proposed change with a handful that propose a 1.7% CPI increase. Subsequent to the proposed action of the day, this assessment would be sent to the assessor to be put on the tax roll. The recommended action before you today is to conduct a public hearing to hear objections or protests, if any, to the proposed 21-22 benefit assessment service charge reports for the various county service areas, then close the public hearing and following the public hearing, adopt the resolution confirming the benefit assessment service charge reports for various county service areas and I can answer any questions that you may have. Thank you. Any questions from the board? Members of the board? We have any questions from the public? I have no speakers for this item. Okay, I will close the public hearing and entertain a motion. Move the recommended action. Second. Please call the roll. Supervisor Koenig. Aye. Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. Caput. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Thank you, motion passes unanimously. We're welcome to go to item number 11, a public hearing to consider vacating a portion of Spring Valley Road abutting assessor parcel numbers 046-111-14, 046-032-09 and 046-111-115, adopt resolution vacating portion of the Spring Valley Road and take related actions as outlined in the memorandum of understanding from the deputy CEO, Director of Public Works, a resolution to vacate a portion of Spring Valley Road, exhibit A, Spring Valley Road, I think it's vacation. Vacation, yeah, vacate it, whatever, let it go. Mr. Machado, any comments on this? It's pretty straightforward. Thank you, Chair. I would like to upgrade Ms. Kimberly Finley to give a brief report on this item. Hope there she is. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Good afternoon, Chair and members of the Board. I have a short presentation, so hold on one moment, please. Chair, can you please confirm if you can see my screen? Yes, well, just see you. Don't see anything on the screen yet. Let me try sharing. How about now? Very well, you got it. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Good afternoon, Chair and members of the Board. My name is Kimberly Finley, I'm the Chief Rural Property Agent with the Department of Public Works. DPW has received an application to vacate a portion of Spring Valley Road, abutting assessor's parcels number 046-111-14, 046-111-15, and 046-03209. This portion of the road terminates in a dead end and the property surrounding the road is held by two property owners who are co-applicants in this matter and have requested this vacation proceeding. The DPW road section has been consulted and have determined that the road, as described, is unnecessary for present or prospective public use. DPW road section supports vacation of this portion, Spring Valley Road. A request for a vacation of a public street is controlled by Streets and Highway Code 8300. This code section requires posting of the property and a public hearing. The clerk of the board has advertised the public hearing as required by the Streets and Highway Code 8322. The real property section has posted notices as required by California Streets and Highway Code 8323. On March 23rd, 2021, your board approved the scheduling of a public hearing today on April 27th, 2021. At this hearing, the board of supervisors shall hear evidence offered by persons interested. If the board finds from all of the evidence submitted that the road described as unnecessary for present or prospective public use, then the board may adopt a resolution vacating the road. At this time, the Department of Public Works recommends that the board take the following actions. Conduct a public hearing to consider public comments related to the proposed vacation of a portion of Spring Valley Road. Adopt the resolution to vacate a portion of Spring Valley Road and reserve an easement for public utilities. And authorize the clerk of the board to record a certified copy of the resolution as required by California Streets and Highway Code 8325. Thank you, and I'm available for any questions. Thank you. Any comments from the board? We're straight forward. Do we have any comments from the public? I have no speakers to this item. Okay, I'll close the public hearing and return it to the board for action. Yes, Mr. Chair, since this is my district, I'll say that generally speaking, we're very cautious about vacating any sort of public road or right-of-way. This is a very unique area and the circumstances definitely do warrant it in this case. And so I am supportive of the staff recommendation and I'd like to move the recommended actions. I'll second. I move by cabinet. We can call the roll. Supervisor Koenig. I think I officially closed the public hearing. Let me do that and then go ahead, please. Supervisor Koenig. Hi. Friend. Hi. Coonerty. Hi. Caput. Hi. McPherson. Hi. Thank you. Motion passes unanimously. Okay, we will now recess into closed session. We have three items. Is there anything that's reportable? No, Chair. There's nothing reportable today. Okay, I'm going to get a sense of what the board wants to do. It's just after 12.30, we'll go into closed session. Do you want to wait until 1.30 to come back for two items number, what, 12 and 13? I think that's what we'll do. We'll recess the closed session and come back for the open session. I think we should be able to make that by 1.30. Do you think so, Mr. Palacios, Mr. Heath? Yes, I think so, Chair, as long as we move into directly into closed session. Okay. Is that all right with the board members any objection to go directly to the, and you have a different way to get there. So please we'll recess to closed session and we're scheduled to return at 1.30 to take up items number 12 and 13. Okay? I think we can call the meeting back to order. The, it's just after 1.30, April 27th, 2021 meeting of the Board of Supervisors will reconvene to take up, please call the roll. Supervisor Koenig? Here. Friend? Here. Coonerty? Does not appear, Coonerty has rejoined us. Caput? Here, I see him. McPherson? Here. Thank you. You have a quorum, but we are still waiting for Supervisor Coonerty. Okay. I'll announce the first item that we are going to address is item number 12 on the agenda, on the regular agenda. See you soon back up. Consider an update of the Santa Cruz County Performance Measurement Initiative and direct the County Administrative Office to integrate future reports with biannual operational plan updates as outlined in the memorandum of the County Administrative Officer. We have attachment A that community impact measures. And I think Mr. Palacios is going to introduce this, but Kevin, or excuse me, Sven Stafford, Kimberly Peterson and Sarah Fletcher may be addressing us on this as well. Or is it Nicole? Yes, Chairman McPherson, member of the board. I'll be introducing Nicole Colburn, our Assistant County Administrative Officer. Introduce very briefly our presentation. Good afternoon, Chairman McPherson. Sven Stafford is a Principal Administrative Analyst in our office. He's been working on managing the County's Performance Measurement Initiative and he's joined today by staff from some of the departments that have been working on the dashboards that are going to be highlighted this afternoon. So I will let Sven and staff present to you. Afternoon board, Sven Stafford from the County Administrative Office. I'm here to give you a brief update on our Performance Measurement Initiative. So the agenda for today, we'll do a little refresh on the purpose of performance measurement. And then we'll do a brief overview of how the initiative integrates with the strategic plan and talk about our community impact. And then we'll spend the majority of the time talking about how performance measurement integrates across the operational plan and talk about program impact. And there we'll have two brief presentations from Sarah Fletcher from probation on AB 109 Services and then Kimberly Peterson from Human Services to talk about our CalFresh Services. And so on the top of our Performance Measurement page we have the phrase Insights Insight Change and that's the real purpose behind performance measurement is to allow staff and the board and the public to ask better questions of county programs and thereby drive the change that will make those programs better. During the pilot phase of the Performance Measurement we've created 26 strategic plan indicators and aligned those across a variety of county partners and put those publicly on our data share website which we'll show in a minute. We've created six data dashboards highlighting county programs and then we've also been able to train over 200 county staff and principles of performance measurement. And so the strategic plan works at the community level. The board established in 2018 a vision, mission values and 24 goals for the county in order to measure our progress towards achieving that vision and mission. The board gave input on 26 community impact measures that can serve as a proxy for the types of changes we wanna see in the community. And so over the past year we've worked to align those impact measures with our eight core conditions of wellbeing and then also create a dashboard on data share Santa Cruz County. And so I'll switch to that really quick to show you. So on data share, we have our county strategic plan page. It's got our five main focus areas and then an additional community profile page. If we go in, for example, to the dynamic economy section we can see the indicators held in data share including median household income, people over 25 with a bachelor's degree, people living below the poverty level. If we click into one of these measures, for example, we can see all sorts of great information such as overall, why are we tracking this? How do we compare to other California counties? How do we compare to other US counties and then trend data on how the overall trend is progressing? For a lot of these you're also able to view them by subgroup including in this case age, gender and race ethnicity for the age one that's highlighted. You can see the big disparity in our sort of transition age youth population, youth who are 18 to 24. What's also nice about data share is that it gives us an opportunity to link to a lot of other useful resources including our local community resources where we have links to the community assessment project, promising practices, data resources and then other funding opportunities for grants and things that our partners and we can use to try to bring more resources to the community. And so the community impact measures really work at the global level, at the population level and ask what results we want for all county residents. On the program side, we still care about the same measures but it's a more limited scope. And so the programs here are accountable for the outcomes of the people that they serve, their clients, which here are a subset of the community. And as I mentioned, we've been providing training to staff over 200 staff and the principles of performance measurement. And for this we've been utilizing results based accountability, which really focuses on dedicating more time to measuring what's important. So results based accountability provides a consistent measurement framework for both internal and external reporting. It asks four basic questions. How much are we doing? How well did we do it? A new sort of equity based question on did we make a difference? And then is anyone better off? And again, this framework is developed specifically for government programs has been used for many years by human and health services and our probation departments and applies across a wide range of programs that the county operates. And so to give you a little better idea of how this works in practice, we're gonna show you two dashboards that were developed and recently released to the public. And so we're gonna start with our, this is our performance measurement page and we're gonna start with the probation intervention and treatment program and Sarah Fletcher. Good afternoon chair and members of the board. I'm Sarah Fletcher, the adult division director of the probation department. Probations dashboard before you looks at a subset of the probation population. AB 109 prison realignment shifted some individuals with prison sentences for non-serious, non-violent and non-sex offenses as defined per statute to county jail as well as shifting other individuals convicted for those same types of felonies but sentenced to citizen due to an exclusionary factor back to their community for local supervision following the completion of their sentence. A program objective is shared safety and reintegration of clients through skills, jobs, meaningful relationships and more. Of course, we're tracking the recidivism rate but that is just one aspect of our work. Though commonly used recidivism can be an overly simplistic and misleading binary measure essential measuring failures, which is more a reflective of system practices and procedures practices, which often have a more negative impacts on persons and communities of color. While focusing on positive outcomes provides a more comprehensive picture of behavior change and wellbeing. Below we have highlighted five services offered to AB 109 client. Based on their needs, which speak more to that behavior change and wellbeing. Today I'll demonstrate one of these and encourage everyone to check them all out at a later time. Courage to change, thinking, behavior and identity are the most strongly predictive factors of client's ability to successfully reintegrate. The Volunteer Center operates this program in the community and at the Probation Service Center. There are two main outcome measures you see here. Cognitive and behavioral improvement and improved problem solving and self-control. Basic components, which can significantly impact other positive outcomes, individual pro-social development and community wellbeing. The dashboard shows us first how we are doing on the most important measures. On the second page, we can see output measures such as client hours of instruction and the distribution of work over time. All of the dashboards follow the same template and are updated through December 2020. Data for the first quarter of 2021 will be coming soon. Probation has also developed internal dashboards for its entire spectrum of AB 109 services and uses the data to adjust services and targets based on performance and need. Thank you for your time and now I will pass it to Kimberly Peterson from Human Services. Thank you, Sarah. Good afternoon, members of the board. I'm Kimberly Peterson, Director for the Employment and Benefit Services Division within the Human Services Department. We administer the public assistance programs such as MediCal, CalFresh, Cache Aid and Employment Programs. The Human Services Department has released this dashboard on CalFresh and the role it plays in helping county residents meet their basic food needs. For those that don't know, CalFresh is California's Nutrition Assistance Program, sometimes referred to as SNAP and formerly known as food stamps. On our main dashboard, you can see that CalFresh provides between one and 1.2 million meals per month by clicking on the information box around food insecurity. We have linked our local data to a National Food and Security Index. And here we can see that South County residents face a higher rate of food insecurity. Going back to the county dashboard, we can dig into this disparate need a little bit deeper. Starting off, we can see the greater participation of CalFresh in South County. And similar to national and state trends, youth and people of color make up a disproportionate percentage of clients compared with the county population as a whole. For example, we can see that county youth make up around 35% of beneficiaries, although they only make up 20% of the population. And then you can also see the breakdown of participation by ethnicity. Going to the next section, CalFresh is an invaluable benefit, but it itself is not able to address the underlying causes of these disparities. Those staff within the program work extremely hard to ensure that everyone who qualifies for the benefit is able to receive it. You can see on the chart here that applications are almost always processed on time, ensuring that residents get access to benefits as soon as possible. Additionally, you can see that our benefit representatives, most of whom are bilingual, are processing over 1,000 applications per month with a peak of over 2,300 applications processed last April in 2020. Finally, we also have included a benefit page for people who want to learn more about CalFresh or apply for benefits. The application and information pages are also available in Spanish. I would also like to take a moment to note that May is actually CalFresh Awareness Month. It's a time when we elevate the importance of CalFresh to the local community and economy. Food insecurity and hunger has many negative developmental impacts to children and physical and emotional health impacts to people of all ages. CalFresh can help reduce these risks. In trying to ensure all eligible county residents can access CalFresh, we don't work alone. We collaborate with Second Harvest Food Bank and other community-based organizations throughout the county to educate residents and remove barriers that discourage eligible individuals, families and seniors from accessing CalFresh benefits. We will continue to work towards improving access to reduce hunger. And I have to note that people can call, click or come in to apply for benefits. Thank you for this opportunity to share the dashboard with you and for allowing me to speak on CalFresh and the community. And I'll turn it back to Sven. All right, thank you, Sarah. Thank you, Kimberly. So during 2020, data was more present than ever before in county life. In COVID-19, we had really incredible work from our epidemiology team at HSA, including Robert Gomez and Mikaela Katen, who made sure that COVID-19 dashboard continues to provide really great information. In terms of the fires, there was mapping and data-driven decisions facilitated by our collaboration with County Fire, our GIS team, including Matt Price and Paul Garcia, and then all of our great staff in environmental health planning and DPW. And we're continuing to work with all those departments to bring more of that data to the public. We're also in collaboration with HSA gonna be in the next two weeks bringing a new dashboard online on drug medical substance use disorder services that we're excited about. And so before I end, I'd like to thank a couple other people from ISD Information Services, Alan Silviano, Darlene, Jan and Tom for their great support from Human Services, Sharon Clinton and George Malikowski from Health Services, Sarah Goitia, Michelle, Jan and Adriana, and then from probation, Diane Colcasi, all of them have put in an incredible amount of work to making these dashboards go live. And with that, the recommended actions are simply to accept and file the report and then direct the CAO to integrate future reports on performance measurement into the operational plan by annual update. And then there is a data share Santa Cruz County training on May 10th that's open to the public from three to four that people can find on eventbrite.com and search for data share Santa Cruz County. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Appreciate that report. Any questions from the board? So chair, I don't have a question. I have a comment. Thank you, Mr. Stafford. I'd also thank you for everybody that just presented Ms. Peterson and Ms. Fletcher. Maybe a little bit of a data nerd on this, but this is really exciting. I actually looked at that and just really enjoyed how easy it was, how transparent it was and what I could do with it. So I hope we can really get this information out to the community so it doesn't just sit in this kind of venue here. But this is exactly what I had envisioned and I know Supervisor Coonerty had been pushing for this as well. When we were first talking about the creation of such a thing, I feel like you've really sort of hit it on this first example collection here. And I'm looking forward to it as it continues along. So appreciation to the work of all the county staff on this and that transparency. And I absolutely am going to be going in and doing a deep dive because I think it's really, really useful. And also I'd like I said, I appreciate the transparency and the accountability associated with having this. So thank you all. Yeah, I would recognize that Supervisor Coonerty joined us immediately after the roll call. So he's here to comment Supervisor Coonerty. Yeah, yeah. First of all, I just want to thank the team. I like the, again, the interdisciplinary approach and you all have taken this much farther than I think any of us imagined you would. It's certainly this time. A couple of small comments is one is the integration between the operational plan and the data share site is a little bit clunky and it'd be nice if they were a little more integrated and you could sort of understand how these trends are driving the operational plan and vice versa. So that's first piece. The second piece is building this and tracking it is an amazing first step. And again, I think you're ahead of where we expected but I want to start thinking about how you operationalize this information. So crime is going up and opioid deaths are going down. How are we going to adjust policies to respond to that? So what do we do with this information and how do we build it into budgets, but which is important, but also sort of more flexible operational strategies that we may be able to employ between budget hearings or mid-year analysis and that sort of thing. And so those are my two comments. But again, I'm very appreciative to the whole team who's put this together and I'm excited about where it's going to end up taking us and improving lives. Thank you, Supervisor Caput. You have any comments? No, I just say thank you for the report and thanks, I'm ready to vote when it's ready. Okay, Supervisor Koenig. Yeah, I just also wanted to express my thanks for having fun here exploring DataShare SCC. There is an impressive amount of data here once you kind of get into the search and see all everything that's available there. So I will put the training on my calendar as well. And I know at least someone from my office would love to attend. And I will look forward to continuing to track this project. Great work. I'd like to comment too that county can now report on our collective impact or have data-based so-called evidence-based policy decisions both internally within the county structure and with our community-based organization partners. And I think it's a good time to point out how valuable some of these community organizations are to our operations and our provision of health and human services to our county residents. Very impressive. Yeah, there was a lot of data that went through there. It's gonna be good to digest it more thoroughly. But thank you for this report. This is really impressive. I'm really excited about the county's strategic and operations plan that we started to put together not too many years ago. And that's thanks to the initiation of our CEO, Carlos Blasio, Stu and the whole team. He really gives us a good idea and gives the public knowledge of what we're doing, what are our targets and how well we're doing for the most part. I mean, we have some ambitious goals and that's what we should have. And I'm really glad to see this come together. As I said, this, the term evidence-based policy, it really is paying off and you can show how it's really being successful here. So thank each and every one of you. Anybody else on the board have a comment? Is there any comment from the public? I have no speakers to this item. Okay, I'll entertain a motion. I'll move the recommended actions. Okay, second. Second by Coonerty, let's call a roll. Supervisor Koenig. Aye. Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. Caput. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Motion passes unanimously. Thank you. We'll go to our final item of the day, number 13, to consider adopting an ordinance amending subdivision A of section 2.02, 060 of the Santa Cruz County Code relating to the compensation of the Board of Supervisors and schedule the ordinance for final adoption on May 11th, 2021, as outlined in the memorandum of Supervisor Friend and Supervisor Caput. We have an ordinance for the Board of Supervisors, salary 2021. Supervisor or Chair, I'll go ahead and introduce the item and then I'll turn it over to Supervisor Caput. Appreciate the Board's consideration of this item. Historically, the Board of Supervisors were tied to judges as far as salary went and then those two became disconnected during an earlier recession that we had. Supervisor Caput and I truly believe that this is the most transparent way for compensation of the Board to be addressed. In fact, a number of other counties across the state do connect their salaries into the judges and we also felt that it made sense to be on the lower end of the scale of where those other counties do that connection. What we're proposing is a percentage that doesn't provide any change in our current compensation. It's the 60, in the low 60% of judges, which is what we currently earn, a number of other counties, Santa Clara is at 100% moderate and a number of other places are in higher percentages, but we wanted to have a fixed percentage that would provide a very transparent benchmark for the community to understand how our salaries or our greater compensation is calculated and done and also a benchmark that's done with other communities. And it turns out really a way that this Board had done it historically until about 20 years ago. So we thought it was important to restore that level of transparency and accountability on the compensation process, which is why we're bringing this forward to you today. Supervisor Caput. Thank you. I do want to thank the Board when we got hit with the COVID-19. We along with the department heads took a 10% furlough cut in pay. I want to thank everybody for doing that. It showed leadership by example. I guess in government, in order to make things transparent and make things clear to people, people like to see checks and balances. Almost everything in government from state, county, cities and federal government has a check and balance. And to have an external base mark to tying this to the state legislature basically and also the state government, the Senate and the Assembly, they vote on the judicial amount of compensation. And then basically when we look at ethics that we've all required to look at, it says certain occasions arise where something is legal that you're doing but the perception is not as clear to the public. So the recommendation is always go with the perception rather than the strict legality. So in this case, the perception to some people is as self-dealing that when we vote on our own pay raise without an external guideline that it is self-dealing. But that's just the perception. And I think we're gonna clear that up. I think we can clear that up. If you have a- And just to clarify a clarification, this still requires a public vote every time, irrespective of the connection to this transparent venture part. That doesn't take that away, but it's still, it's just a much more clear and transparent way of how people can understand that the compensation occurs. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Right, and it doesn't preclude, it does not preclude us from taking future cuts if we need to because of budget constraints as we did in the current four years. Yes, sir. Any other comments from board members? Mr. President? I just wanna thank my colleagues for bringing this forward. I do particularly like the fact that it allows us to benchmark against other counties and communities and demonstrate to the public what it is that we're being compensated relative to other areas and to be accountable for that. Thank you. Good, good enough. Any other board member comment? Is there any comment from the public? There are no public speakers for this item, Chair. Okay, Intercain in motion. I'll make a motion to approve. I'll second. Second, then moved in second. Please call the roll. Supervisor Koenig. Aye. Friend? Aye. Coonerty? Aye. Cabot? Aye. McPherson? Aye. Thank you, motion passes unanimously. Okay, that concludes the business of the day, April 27th, 2021. Our next meeting of the County Board of Supervisors will be at 9 a.m. on May 11th, 2021. Thank you everyone and have a nice rest of the day. Please adjourn.